With support from Vulcan Inc, a Paul Allen company, Getting Smart conducted a series of expert interviews with education and philanthropy leaders, and led a design workshop, to identify and vet impact investment strategies in U.S. K-12 education. This resulting report outlines opportunities where organizations can participate in making significant shifts in the American education landscape, ultimately improving student outcomes.
Through our research and interviews, approximately four dozen impact opportunities were identified in the following 10 categories and are described within the report:
1. Microschool, big impact.We’ve seen how microschools could, in most cities, accelerate the transition to next-gen learning. That’s why we were so excited to see AltSchool highlighted in a video on CBS News This Morning.
… 4. Mind the gap.Closing the Achievement at Three Virtual Academies, is a new report from K12 that highlights the progress of Texas Virtual Academy (leaders in Course Access in the Lone Star State), Arizona Virtual Academy, and Georgia Cyber Academy in creating opportunities for low-income students.
What work will look like in 2025 — from fastcompany.com by Gwen Moran The experts weigh in on the future of work a decade from now.
Excerpt (emphasis):
Seismic Shift In Jobs
The jobs picture either delivers on technology’s promise or plunges us into a dystopian future. The same interconnected technology that will change how goods and services are delivered will “hollow out” a number of skilled jobs, Brynjolfsson says. Clerical work, bookkeeping, basic paralegal work, and even some types of reporting will be increasingly automated, contracting the number of jobs available and causing a drop in wages. And while more technology might create new and different types of jobs, so far we’ve seen more job loss than creation in these areas, he says.
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Who wins? Specialists, the creative class, and people who have jobs that require emotional intelligence like salespeople, coaches, customer-service specialists, and people who create everything from writing and art to new products, platforms and services, Brynjolfsson says. Jobs in health care, personal services, and other areas that are tough to automate will also remain in demand, as will trade skills and science, technology and mathematics (STEM) skills, says Mark J. Schmit, PhD, executive director of the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia.
However, this winner/loser scenario predicts a widening wealth gap, Schmit says. Workers will need to engage in lifelong education to remain on top of how job and career trends are shifting to remain viable in an ever-changing workplace, he says.
From DSC: Tell me this…do today’s standardized tests produce these “specialists, the creative class, and people who have jobs that require emotional intelligence like salespeople, coaches, customer-service specialists, and people who create everything from writing and art to new products, platforms and services?”
Nope…I don’t think so either.
Given that…what changes do we need to make in order to better prepare our kids for the future they will inherit? For the skills and mindsets that they will need?
Even as education spending is projected to inch up two percent this year to reach $67.8 billion worldwide, the way in which school districts, colleges and universities are spending that money is evolving to reflect the growing digital nature of teaching and learning, according to Gartner. In a new report, “Top 10 Strategic Technologies Impacting Education in 2015,” the business IT consulting firm ranked 10 innovations and tech trends that it believes the education CIO should plan for in 2015.
Many of the technologies aren’t emerging from within education itself, said Gartner Vice President Jan-Martin Lowendahl. They’re being “driven by major forces such as digital business and the consumerization and industrialization of IT.”
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1. Adaptive Learning
2. Adaptive Digital Textbooks
3. CRM
4. Big Data
5. and 6. Sourcing Strategies and ‘Exostructure’
7. Open ‘Microcredentials’
8. Digital Assessment
9. Mobile
10. Social Learning
The best piece of classroom technology available still is, and always will be, a teacher with a love of learning. The way forward with technology in our future schools is remembering that it is a tool to augment the powerful human connections that are so much of a part of great teaching and effective learning. Global Digital Citizenship can help us make this happen.
Let’s Dream Brighter
Imagine future schools in which students are totally engaged in a class, totally immersed in working together to solve real world problems. Imagine that they are self-driven and that they are coming up with amazing ideas on the spot. Imagine that they are concerned with each other’s well-being as part of a team and that their concerns reache far beyond the classroom to others all over the globe. Even further, they may interact daily with those people.
While this may describe a vision of the future schools we are envisioning, you might be surprised that some of these things are already happening!
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1. Will they even be called ‘schools’ in the future?
2. What would problem solving look like in the future?
3. What would information look like in the future?
4. What would creativity look like in the future?
5. What would media look like in the future?
6. What would collaboration look like in the future?
7. What would citizenship look like in the future?
8. What does assessment look like in the future?
What is on the five-year horizon for higher education institutions? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and educational change steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 56 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition, in partnership with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). The NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in learning communities across the globe. With more than 13 years of research and publications, it can be regarded as the world’s longest-running exploration of emerging technology trends and uptake in education.
What should an undergraduate chemistry major know by the time she graduates? How can one tell if she knows it? And how can chemistry instruction be improved to ensure that more students meet those expectations?
Such deceptively simple questions—for chemistry and every other discipline—have become an important focus of higher education leaders, accrediting agencies, and government. Yet many universities have struggled to develop robust processes for assessing student learning. Even when a central administration makes a serious effort to develop such a process, faculty participation is often pro forma.
The University of Pittsburgh is an exception. At Pitt, faculty across 350 programs are deeply engaged in a systematic approach to assessing student learning outcomes, which has led to measurable results and significant changes.
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“Making Assessment Work: Lessons from the University of Pittsburgh” delves into some of the specific practices Pitt undertook and documents the change in the university’s culture. No system is perfect, but this case study shows Pitt’s decentralized approach, targeted at the level of coherent programs of study, coupled with strong and supportive leadership, led Pitt’s faculty to make assessment an important driver of program improvement.
On a programming note, this is the first in a new series of case studies on educational transformation from Ithaka S+R. Every few weeks, we will release a new report on innovative approaches that institutions have taken to improve student outcomes and control costs. Covering issues such as online education, learning analytics, and university governance, the case studies document the ways that change happens in higher education.
…the most important factor in the development of Pitt’s culture of assessment was its decentralized, yet accountable, approach. University leaders established a timeline and general framework for assessment, offered feedback, designated degree and certificate programs as the units of assessment, and, most significantly, left the details to faculty responsible for those programs. This combination of broad oversight and localized management has fostered a sense of ownership among faculty, who have made assessment an important driver of program improvement.
How can games unlock a rich world of learning? This is the big question at the heart of the growing games and learning movement that’s gaining momentum in education. The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning [PDF] explains key ideas in game-based learning, pedagogy, implementation, and assessment. This guide makes sense of the available research and provides suggestions for practical use.
The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning started as a series of blog posts written by Jordan Shapiro with support from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the Games and Learning Publishing Council. We’ve brought together what we felt would be the most relevant highlights of Jordan’s reporting to create a dynamic, in-depth guide that answers many of the most pressing questions that educators, parents, and life-long learners have raised around using digital games for learning. While we had educators in mind when developing this guide, any lifelong learner can use it to develop a sense of how to navigate the games space in an informed and meaningful way.
These are some of the links I saved from the webinar, which were shared by participants. This was an excellent session and I learned about several new resources I’m anxious to try with my own students in digital storytelling projects!
Creative storytelling with Storehouse — from blogs.elon.edu by Analise Godfrey (Storehouse was created by former Apple User Experience Evangelist, Mark Kawano)
Theia Introducing a new and exciting world view, Theia smart glasses naturally integrate augmented reality together with your reality using unique technology and seamless design.
The platforms that businesses most commonly use to communicate with both colleagues and clients — phone, email, face-to-face meetings and video chat — are typically only used one at a time. If it’s just a quick chat, you pick up the phone, if you need to send a document you send an email. But is there a way to make multimedia collaboration more seamless through a single platform? We recently wrote about Talko, which aims to make voice calls more like emails. Now a similar service, Blrt, is offering both real-time and anytime sharing of documents, with integrated drawing and voice commenting tools.
30 Ways Google Glass Works in Classrooms [#Infographic] — from edtechmagazine.com by D. Frank Smith From allowing student to connect virtually with peers and teachers to helping identify learning difficulties, the wearable tech has clear potential as an aid.
Regardless of whether you agree with their criteria or the general practice of creating rankings, their newest initiative is undoubtedly an impressive leveraging of Big Data, applying complex algorithms to LinkedIn’s vast database of 313 million users to derive interesting conclusions for both students and those marketing higher education.
Microsoft is rebranding it’s unified communication platform Microsoft Lync. Microsoft plans to retool their approach to unified communications, and launch under the name “Skype for Business” in 2015. Microsoft originally acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.
The Redmond, WA based software giant made significant strides into the Unified Communications space, offering a cost-competitive unified communications platform which included Telephony, Chat, Collaboration and Video Conferencing all from the desktop, laptop or tablet.
Over recent years, many great drawing and painting apps have become available for tablets and smart phones. Here’s our pick of the most comprehensive packages on the market.
While it seems likely that most will use PhotoMath to sidestep actual learning, PhotoMath includes a “Steps” button that cleverly walks you through the steps from the original equation to the final answer.
Addendum on 11/2014 — some music-related apps from the November 2014 edition of The Journal:
The question we now need to ask is: Will there be a divide between learning that continues to rely on traditional learning spaces, compared to learning that takes place largely outside the walls of the traditional classroom? Moreover, if there is such a divide, will it be delineated by its cost effectiveness, its conceptual differences, or its pedagogical impact?
Many agree that technology has a role to play in this shift in pedagogical emphasis. Students now bring their own devices into the traditional learning environment, creating their own personal networks and learning environments. They are intimately familiar with the functionality of their devices, knowing how to use them to connect to, create and organise content. They are adept at connecting to their friends and peers too, but will they be willing to power share with their professors, take on greater autonomy and assume more responsibility to direct their own learning in the future?
Assessment and learning are inseparable in any good pedagogy. If the first does not fit the second, then we see a failure of that pedagogy. Far too often assessment fails to delve deeply enough, or fails to capture actual learning. If students are relying increasingly on digital technology to connect them with content, peers and tutors, and to facilitate new, distributed forms of learning, then we should endeavour to assess the learning they achieve in a relevant manner.
THREE EMERGING PEDAGOGICAL TRENDS
Underlying these developments are some common factors or trends:
1. A move to opening up learning, making it more accessible and flexible. The classroom is no longer the unique centre of learning, based on information delivery through a lecture.
2. An increased sharing of power between the professor and the learner. This is manifest as a changing professorial role, towards more support and negotiation over content and methods, and a focus on developing and supporting learner autonomy. On the student side, this can mean an emphasis on learners supporting each other through new social media, peer assessment, discussion groups, even online study groups but with guidance, support and feedback from content experts.
3. An increased use of technology not only to deliver teaching, but also to support and assist students and to provide new forms of student assessment.
It is important to emphasize that these are emerging pedagogical trends. More experimentation, evaluation, and research are needed to identify those that will have lasting value and a permanent effect on the system.
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Impact on Student Learning
Student learning is the other key component of an emerging pedagogy, with their success as the goal of all our efforts.
What new demands are student making in terms of how they want to be taught and assessed and what are your responses?
What new roles are students taking in their online or hybrid learning and how has this changed your teaching practice?
What new strategies for and areas of student support are being built into course structures to facilitate effective online learning?
A Rebirth of Liberty and Learning — from imprimis.hillsdale.edu by Larry Arnn, President, Hillsdale College, with thanks to Mr. Andy Thorburn for this resource
Excerpt:
At Hillsdale College students read a lot of old books, including Plato’s Republic. In the Republic they read the story of Gyges’ ring—a ring that makes the wearer of it invisible. One of Socrates’ interlocutors in the Republic, a young man named Glaucon, raises the question: Why would a man in possession of such a ring not use it to do and obtain whatever he wishes? Why would he not use the ring’s powers, for instance, to become a tyrant? In response, Socrates turns the discussion to another question: What is the right way for a man to live? What is just by nature and what is unjust?
These Socratic questions were once at the center or core of education, and they remain at the center or core of education at Hillsdale College. But in American education as a whole, these questions have been abandoned.
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Bereft of the kind of questions posed by Socrates in the Republic—or the kind of questions raised in the Bible, or in the plays of Shakespeare—modern education treats students chiefly as factors of production, as people to be trained for productive jobs. And although we all wish productive jobs for our children, as parents we know that they are not chiefly job seekers or factors of production. After all, how many of us, if we were given the choice of our children earning a lot of money and being bad, or struggling economically and being good, would choose the former?
From DSC, a portion of my thoughts back to Andy Thorburn on this were:
A great article, and highly relevant. It’s also timely, as the jury is starting to come in for me re: the Common Core. I’m not a big fan of it, because of how it was created and who developed it (few if any teachers were involved with creating it; I’ve been reading the postings from Anthony Cody for his research on these topics; example here), and the devastating impact it could have on students who are already struggling with school as it is.
Re: K-12 education: I’m disheartened to see what education has/is becoming — packing people into molds (by age) and not helping students identify and develop their passions, gifts, abilities. I’d like to see us provide students with more choice, and more control over their own learning. We’re all into lifelong learning now, so it seems to me that if someone enjoys learning, they will have a more enjoyable/productive lifetime.
Re: higher education: I think the issue we have these days is that the price of education has forced the situation upon students/families that we find ourselves in — i.e. that when you are paying $100K-$250+ for an education, a student these days can’t help but be concerned about what job they are going to get, what vocation they are going into, how they are going to pay off their debt (which as of 2013 averages ~$30,000 per student), etc. If the total price of an education were $10,000, one could take it easier on that front and pursue the type of education Larry Arnn discussed; which is a great education, by the way.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.
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Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.
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“We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”
We shouldn’t use the phrase “drop outs.” Instead we should use the phrase “pushed outs.” It’s like walking by someone drowning and yelling at them to get out of the water — but not throwing them a lifeline. If we used the phrase pushed outs instead of drop outs, people would better understand what’s going on.
Students are being pushed out. They’re disengaged.
From society’s standpoint, what’s better? To have an engaged student being able to pursue his/her passions, while staying out of trouble and actually enjoying learning — or — have a youth walking the streets for a time before ending up with criminal records and being locked away? This seems to be true for the individual’s standpoint as well.
Lastly, my hunch here is that the Common Core State Standards and the enormous push for standardized testing is hurting us here — not helping us. In fact, I’ll bet we will see a direct relationship between the amount we press these initiatives and the number of youth we push out of the system.
Let’s try some new strategies and experiments — at least to a small degree; what have we got to lose?
From one of my early coaches:
Always change a losing game.
Never change a winning game.
I am a big supporter of play for younger children– the benefits are cognitive as well as social and emotional. But this new push towards early academics and testing is taking away time for play.
…one study (in the linked item above) found that kids who waited to start formal schooling until age 7 (when many cultures consider kids to be more responsible, etc.) had the same reading ability at age 11 as kids who began reading at age 5, and the kids who started later had better attitudes about reading and better text comprehension..
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
This is a brief review of the relevant research evidence which overwhelmingly supports a later start to formal education. This evidence relates to the contribution of playful experiences to children’s development as learners, and the consequences of starting formal learning at the age of four to five years of age.
From DSC: First of all, here in the United States…I can’t help but think that the push for more “standardized testing” — as well as the Common Core being throttled at full-steam ahead — are like run-away trains (here’s but one example); that is, if you wanted to do so, they are very hard to stop. The unanswered question (at least for me) is, “Will they cause an enormous amount of damage when they have finally run their course?”
Secondly, as students get older, I think the word balance comes in to play here.
Lastly, this entire posting/topic makes me think of the janitor from my college days at Northwestern. Occasionally, if I was rushing too much to get to my next class, he used to yell to me, “Take it eeeassssyyy young man!”
If we don’t heed these words of wisdom, how will these run-away trains affect students’ learning experiences and their viewpoints on education/learning? Given the pace of change and the shrinking 1/2 lives of information….we need them to at least like learning; as they will have many years of needing to do so ahead of them.
Also see:
The importance of play
Dr. David Whitebread
University of Cambridge
With Marisol Basilio, Martina Kuvalja and Mohini Verma
A report on the value of children’s play with a series of policy recommendations
April 2012