Innovative New Schools in Africa Succeeding Without Edtech for Students

The Bridge International Academy (BIA) came across my gaze this week in a feature article from Wired Magazine. Guest edited by Bill Gates, the issue highlights several of his philanthropic investments around the world. What strikes me about the model of BIA is the conspicuous lack of edtech in the hands of the students. In […]

Common Core Assessment 20x More Expensive? What Can Edtech Do?

The forthcoming Common Core (CC) Assessments are the next generation of standardized tests in the US, and will meet the testing frequency requirements of the most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act also known as No Child Left Behind unless congress should act to change this, which is most unlikely. Forty six […]

So Much Data Yet Still So Little Meaning

I had a mentor early in my career, also named Jack, who was a very well respected and well liked business owner. I worked at his company in the summers of my high school and college years as a delivery boy. Jack took me under his wing and would entertain my questions about the systems […]

The Challenge of Managing Student Data in the Cloud

Call it what you want; the digital revolution, the cloud migration, one-to-one. The move to pervasive use of computing as the medium for education is underway. Schools around the world have moved beyond teacher websites, and are empowering students to both access curriculum and create products to demonstrate their learning entirely in the digital medium. […]

Summer of Video

Is there a difference between watching Sal Khan on the internet and having him teach you face to face? According to Sal’s cousins there is. In his TED appearance, Sal reveals that his cousins told him they prefer his internet videos to his in-person tutoring. The reason they prefer their virtual cousin to the real […]

Why “Just How Small is the Atom” Has the Most Views on Ted-Ed..

..and why we should be concerned. Love. That’s what I felt when I first landed on TED’s new site for educators and students, Ted-Ed. From the hosts of the 18 minute talks that have inspired some of the most interesting lunchtime discussions in my classroom over the last few years, comes a site brimming with equally […]

Blended Learning, Merit Pay, and My Wife

I am ready to jump in. For fifteen years I have been employing educational technologies in my high school science classes to increase student engagement and improve student performance. I have documented increases in both of these with my most recent foray into Peer Instruction with clickers over the last three years. Before that I […]

Imagining Possibilities in Edtech: Formative Assessment

First, a primer: when a student takes a test or writes a paper at the end of a unit of study, if that test or paper is graded and used as a component of that student’s overall grade in the course, we call this summative assessment. When students take standardized tests, as they must do […]

Imagining Possibilities in Edtech: Lesson Content Delivery

This is the second in a series of posts I am writing about what the traditional classroom could look like in the near future with already available and nearly available edtech. The first postexplored lesson planning. By one edtech standard, my high school health teacher was well ahead of his time. He had videotapes of lectures […]

Independent EdTech Research – Untethered Mad Science

No one would deny that education research is difficult to do well. Humans don’t behave like frictionless carts in perfectly elastic collisions. The gold standard of a double-blind study with randomly assigned subjects is impossible to accomplish in a school setting. Education institutions would like to use data-rooted studies to effect positive change, but the […]

How Do We Measure the Value of EdTech?

For better or worse, NCLB has forced public schools to be data driven. School leaders think hard every time they make a purchase, condone a new course, or approve a field trip request. And it’s not just because their purchasing budgets have shrunk by 50% in each of the last three years. School boards, accreditation […]

The Alchemy of EdTech – Predicting Future Trends

Prognostication is an occult art usually left to wizards, be they charlatans or visionaries; Nostradamus or Kurzweil. In EdTech, however, there is a global cooperative engaged in predicting future trends on a yearly basis – and they’re pretty good at it. The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report is an annual view into trends in education […]

Data Dashboards Crash into Education – Will It Matter?

Soon may be sepia-toned memory the professional development days when groups of number-phobic teachers sit around a spreadsheet attempting to divine something about their practice from the non-existent causation patterns they conjure out of the data presented to them. The data dashboard, a tool that has been employed for twenty years by the business community […]

BYOT to school is going to happen – K12 is bracing for impact

I received a survey in my school email inbox today. The administration is considering changing the school cell phone policy and they want faculty input. The leadership recognizes that times are changing, and they are not alone. I carried out an anonymous survey in my five science classes last year to determine what percentage of […]

How families should be choosing a high school

Education is a social enterprise. So is the process of selecting a high school. Parents talk to their friends with school-aged children and seek their opinions. Sometimes this anecdotal reporting is insightful. I suspect, given how few parents spend time in their children’s high schools during the school day, that these exchanges are rife with […]

Blow Up Standardized Testing, Please. #EdTech #k12 #Education

Really.  There is an inferno of activity in the EdTech sector right now.  Many teams are attempting to use technology to address problems that have existed since the beginning of compulsory schooling.  A few of these teams are onto something.  Witness the use of online video to free up class time for more interactive student […]

Memory loss at the hands of the internet @NYT #EdTech #Education #k12

A series of psychology experiments conducted by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University and reported by the NYT suggest that we may be moving toward distributed memory. That is, knowing that information is accessible to us through the web at the press of a few imprints on our touch screen, we make pointers in our brains […]