The EdResearch for Action Overview Series summarizes the research on key topics to provide K-12 education decision makers and advocates with an evidence base to ground discussions about how to best serve students. Authors – leading experts from across the field of education research – are charged with highlighting key findings from research that provide concrete, strategic insight on persistent challenges sourced from district and state leaders.
Central Question
What evidence-based practices can schools and districts implement to identify and support students experiencing homelessness?
We need to be asking our students “How did you put your ideas into the world today?”.
To be human is to be entrepreneurial.
One of my favorite mom friends asks her young school-aged kids every day, “What did you make today?”
I love how subtly subversive this question is. Not, “How was school today?” “Were you good today?” or, “How’s [insert school subject] going?” But, “How did you put your ideas out into the world today?”
That simple question understands this fundamental truth: to be human is to create, to employ our imaginations and partake in forming the world we want to live in.
Microschools are not new. In fact, they are as old as learning itself.
Funding and operations can be difficult within a microschool model. Programs and other organizations can support planning, design and implementation.
Microschools are meeting strong market demand for more personalized, more contextualized and more relevant learning for every student. Programs like ASU Prep’s Microschool in a Box make it possible for more learners to become future-ready with access to affordable, relational microschool learning.
Nate McClennen
The Science of Classroom Design — from edutopia.org by Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill Our comprehensive, all-in, research-based look at the design of effective learning spaces.
Topics include:
Light
Ventilation and air quality
Complexity and color
Data walls
Nature, plants, and greenery
Representation
Students can experience representation in classrooms by seeing their own or peers’ artifacts on walls and in shared virtual spaces, or by being exposed to images and references that mirror their interests, passions, and backgrounds.
Unpacking 3 major trends in ed tech and for-profit education — from highereddive.com by Natalie Schwartz CEOs of major companies recently told investors how they fared in their most recent financial quarters, offering insight into the broader higher ed sector.
Education companies double down on degree programs …
These programs allow Coursera users to count open courses they complete on the platform toward credit for degree programs. Students can also be admitted to degree programs based on their performance in these courses,Maggioncalda said.
Coursera recently announced it had built several of these pathways to master’s degrees offered by Illinois Tech. Coursera users can now complete professional certificates offered on the website — including from Google, IBM and Meta — as credit toward these programs.
In its second annual 2023 “Study Trends Report,” McGraw Hill found that college students were feeling unprepared for their courses, but also that they have turned to generative AI and social media to study and would like more learning resources in a similar format.
The study, conducted by Morning Consult between July 18 and Aug. 11, 2023, surveyed 500 undergraduate college students and 200 college instructors. Some of the key findings include:
I suspect College Board may be trying to repent for its original sin: killing vocational education. Now known as career and technical education (CTE), America’s college-or-bust mentality has long relegated CTE to a shadowy corner of high school.
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But make no mistake: the College Board’s fingerprints are on the weapon that killed CTE. College Board launched Advanced Placement courses in 1955 with 500 students across 18 elite schools like Andover, Bronx Science, and Newton High School. The original idea was guiltless: more challenging curricula for gifted and talented students to accelerate the development of leaders and win the Cold War. But it soon became clear that AP’s primary purpose would be to give students a leg up in competitive college admissions; as early as 1960, Exeter worried about “a dangerous tendency to regard advanced placement teachers and students as an elite worthy of special praise.”
When College Board’s primary source of revenue (and profits) is AP courses and demand for AP is driven by a weighted GPA formula that discriminates against all other forms of education, any attempt to create a level playing field between career discovery and college is window dressing: CTE theater. College Board knows which side its bread is buttered on (hint: it’s in its name).
2U, USC Curtail Online Partnership — from insidehighered.com by Doug Lederman Southern California and the online program manager will part ways on master’s degrees that became a target of scrutiny because of their high price.
Which makes it fitting, perhaps, that Thursday 2U and USC announced that that they would largely wind down their 15-year partnership, which in the eyes of consumer advocates and some journalists had come to exemplify how involving companies intimately in the delivery of education could undermine, rather than expand, access and affordability to higher education.
Eighty-seven percent of states lack enough speech language pathologists to reach all the infants and toddlers in need. Eighty-two percent suffer from physical therapist shortages. And among the service coordinators who organize critical therapies for America’s youngest children, the turnover rate is a stunning 42 percent, according to information compiled by the IDEA Infant and Toddler Coordinators Association from a survey that had 45 state respondents. (The K-12 teacher turnover rate, by contrast, only reached a mere 10 percent during the pandemic.)
With all the attention recently to the teacher and child care worker shortages in communities across America, the sector facing the most severe crisis has received comparatively little notice from policy makers, the media or the general public: those providing critical early intervention therapies for children under age 3 with developmental delays.
9 Tips for Using AI for Learning (and Fun!) — from edutopia.org by Daniel Leonard; via Donna Norton on X/Twitter These innovative, AI-driven activities will help you engage students across grade levels and subject areas.
Here are nine AI-based lesson ideas to try across different grade levels and subject areas.
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Courtesy of Meta AI Research
A child’s drawing (left) and animations created with Animated Drawings.
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1. Bring Student Drawings to Life: Young kids love to sketch, and AI can animate their sketches—and introduce them to the power of the technology in the process.
HIGH SCHOOL
8. Speak With AI in a Foreign Language: When learning a new language, students might feel self-conscious about making mistakes and avoid practicing as much as they should.
Though not necessarily about education, also see:
How I Use AI for Productivity — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan In this Wonder Tools audio post I share a dozen of my favorite AI tools
From DSC: I like Jeremy’s mentioning the various tools that he used in making this audio post:
Adobe podcast for recording and removing background noise from the opening supplemental audio clip, and Adobe Mic check to gauge microphone positioning
From DSC: As I’ve long stated on the Learning from the Living [Class]Room vision, we are heading toward a new AI-empowered learning platform — where humans play a critically important role in making this new learning ecosystem work.
Along these lines, I ran into this site out on X/Twitter. We’ll see how this unfolds, but it will be an interesting space to watch.
From DSC: This future learning platform will also focus on developing skills and competencies. Along those lines, see:
Scale for Skills-First— from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain An ed-tech giant’s ambitious moves into digital credentialing and learner records.
A Digital Canvas for Skills
Instructure was a player in the skills and credentials space before its recent acquisition of Parchment, a digital transcript company. But that $800M move made many observers wonder if Instructure can develop digital records of skills that learners, colleges, and employers might actually use broadly.
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Ultimately, he says, the CLR approach will allow students to bring these various learning types into a coherent format for employers.
Instructure seeks a leadership role in working with other organizations to establish common standards for credentials and learner records, to help create consistency. The company collaborates closely with 1EdTech. And last month it helped launch the 1EdTech TrustEd Microcredential Coalition, which aims to increase quality and trust in digital credentials.
While federal law mandates public schools provide an appropriate education to students with disabilities, it’s often up to parents to enforce it.
Schwarten did what few people have the resources to do: she hired a lawyer and requested a due process hearing. It’s like a court case. And it’s intended to resolve disputes between families and schools over special education services.
It’s also a traumatic and adversarial process for families and schools that can rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and destroy relationships between parents and district employees. And even when families win, children don’t always get the public education they deserve.
But computer science lessons like the ones at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School are relatively rare. Despite calls from major employers and education leaders to expand K-12 computer science instruction in response to the workforce’s increasing reliance on digital technology, access to the subject remains low — particularly for Native American students.
Only 67 percent of Native American students attend a school that offers a computer science course, the lowest percentage of any demographic group, according to a new study from the nonprofit Code.org. A recent report from the Kapor Foundation and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, or AISES, takes a deep look at why Native students’ access to computer and technology courses in K-12 is so low, and examines the consequences.
Understanding the Disconnect
We often find ourselves in professional development sessions that starkly contrast with the interactive and student-centred learning environments we create. We sit as passive recipients rather than active participants, receiving generic content that seldom addresses our unique experiences or teaching challenges.
This common scenario highlights a significant gap in professional development: the failure to apply the principles of adult learning, or andragogy, which acknowledges that educators, like their students, benefit from a learning process that is personalised, engaging, and relevant.
The irony is palpable — while we foster environments of inquiry and engagement in our classrooms, our learning experiences often lack these elements.
The disconnect prompts a vital question: If we are to cultivate a culture of lifelong learning among our students, shouldn’t we also embody this within our professional growth? It’s time for the professional development of educators to reflect the principles we hold dear in our teaching practices.
Crosstown High is a learner-centered public charter school that engages students in meaningful, project-based work and authentic relationships that will prepare them to be self-directed, lifelong learners. We are located inside Crosstown Concourse, a landmark adaptive reuse development project in the heart of Memphis.
Have you ever read through a student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP) and felt unsure about what to focus on?
Every general education teacher will have students with IEPs in class at some point. That’s why knowing how to read and understand an IEP is so important. If you’re called on to attend an IEP meeting, you may even help create the IEP.
There are best practices for getting the most important information from an IEP. Here are five key things to be on the lookout for when you read an IEP and how they apply to your classroom.
From DSC: If you think teaching and learning is easy, you ought to try putting together a few IEPs and/or attend a few meetings where IEPs are being discussed and updated. Wow! You get a glimpse of how many needs are out there — and will better appreciate the scope/variety of the needs.
If you ever need to be humbled, attend an IEP meeting.
When families have concerns about their child, they may come to you, their child’s teacher, for support. They may have recently noticed a behavior that’s out of the ordinary for their child. Or they may have observed a pattern of behaviors over time.
Families may turn to you as they seek out answers. This is especially true if you’ve built a relationship of communication and partnership from the beginning of the school year. This foundation will help families feel more comfortable sharing their concerns with you. How can you make the conversation as supportive and productive as possible?
Students with sensory processing challenges have trouble managing everything their senses are taking in. At school, they often have to cope with sounds, smells, textures, and other sensations that get in the way of learning.
What classroom accommodations can help students with trouble processing sensory information? Here are some strategies.
If you’re short on ideas, here are a few things you might compliment them on:
Relationships and rapport with students:
Decision-making:
Clarity and delivery:
Classroom management and logistics:
Lesson planning:
Design:
So this is my ask of you as an administrator: Choose 10 teachers on your staff and make it a goal to give each of them one piece of specific, positive feedback this week. For some, you might only need to think about what you’ve noticed during your past observations of them. For others, you might need to arrange a short classroom visit — make sure the teacher knows ahead of time that you will ONLY be looking for things to compliment them on. Even better would be to ask them to choose a time when they’re doing something they think you’d like to see.
Artificial intelligence is disrupting higher education — from itweb.co.za by Rennie Naidoo; via GSV Traditional contact universities need to adapt faster and find creative ways of exploring and exploiting AI, or lose their dominant position.
Higher education professionals have a responsibility to shape AI as a force for good.
Introducing Canva’s biggest education launch — from canva.com We’re thrilled to unveil our biggest education product launch ever. Today, we’re introducing a whole new suite of products that turn Canva into the all-in-one classroom tool educators have been waiting for.
Also seeCanva for Education. Create and personalize lesson plans, infographics,
posters, video, and more. 100% free for
teachers and students at eligible schools.
ChatGPT and generative AI: 25 applications to support student engagement — from timeshighereducation.com by Seb Dianati and Suman Laudari In the fourth part of their series looking at 100 ways to use ChatGPT in higher education, Seb Dianati and Suman Laudari share 25 prompts for the AI tool to boost student engagement
There are two ways to use ChatGPT — from theneurondaily.com
Type to it.
Talk to it (new).
… Since then, we’ve looked to it for a variety of real-world business advice. For example, Prof Ethan Mollick posted a great guide using ChatGPT-4 with voice as a negotiation instructor.
In a similar fashion, you can consult ChatGPT with voice for feedback on:
Job interviews.
Team meetings.
Business presentations.
With a prompt, GPT-4 with voice does a pretty good job of acting as a negotiation simulator/instructor. It is not all the way there, but as someone who builds educational simulations, I can tell you this is already impressively far along towards an effective teaching tool.… pic.twitter.com/IphPHF95cL
Via The Rundown:Google is using AI to analyze the company’s Maps data and suggest adjustments to traffic light timing — aiming to cut driver waits, stops, and emissions.
The camera never lies. Except, of course, it does – and seemingly more often with each passing day.
In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels.
Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality.
Google’s latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people’s expressions in photographs.
Still using AI to help you mark a student’s work?
Mark a full class’s worth with one prompt.
Here’s the Whole Class Feedback Giant Prompt.
Comment & retweet & I’ll DM it to you.
Discover why thousands of teachers subscribe to the Sunday AI Educator ?https://t.co/ivpXYyWNzN
— Dan Fitzpatrick – The AI Educator (@theaieducatorX) October 22, 2023
Dr. Chris Dede, of Harvard University and Co-PI of the National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education, spoke about the differences between knowledge and wisdom in AI-human interactions in a keynote address at the 2022 Empowering Learners for the Age of AI conference. He drew a parallel between Star Trek: The Next Generation characters Data and Picard during complex problem-solving: While Data offers the knowledge and information, Captain Picard offers the wisdom and context from on a leadership mantle, and determines its relevance, timing, and application.
This “decreasing obstacles” framing turned out to be helpful in thinking about generative AI. When the time came, my answer to the panel question, “how would you summarize the impact generative AI is going to have on education?” was this:
“Generative AI greatly reduces the degree to which access to expertise is an obstacle to education.”
We haven’t even started to unpack the implications of this notion yet, but hopefully just naming it will give the conversation focus, give people something to disagree with, and help the conversation progress more quickly.
How to Make an AI-Generated Film — from heatherbcooper.substack.com by Heather Cooper Plus, Midjourney finally has a new upscale tool!
From DSC: I’m not excited about this, as I can’t help but wonder…how long before the militaries of the world introduce this into their warfare schemes and strategies?
