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 […]
Power to the People – Free Interactive Textbooks are Coming
Stephen Wolfram, maker of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, challenges the world again; this time by collaborating to offer free online mathematics texts with interactive simulations to help students see math. Working in concert with Neeru Khosla’s free textbook initiative, ck12, Wolfram Alpha (WA) has made available free to everyone their […]
Ca Student Bill of Rights Act – Friend or Foe to Public Education?
This topic will probably get more action from me in coming months. This post will be a quick informational one to start a conversation so that I can get more information. The California Student Bill of Rights Initiative (link to .pdf of initiative text) seeks to allow students anywhere in California access to UC approved […]
Teaching Anger Management with Game-Based EdTech
This is just too cool to spoil with a long critical analysis. I came across this video and the corresponding brief project description while doing research on GameDesk (a SoCal-based research nonprofit) for an upcoming post on a study GameDesk did on Motion Math. It seems that the goal is to teach anger management to […]
Action Collabs and Rapid Fire Presentations at Big Ideas Fest 2011
It is almost six o’clock on Tuesday and I am sitting in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay at the Big Ideas Fest 2011. At the core of this unique conference is a product development process called an Action Collab. Think Startup Weekend with a focus on big ideas in education, […]
Frustrated with Search Results for Curricular Resources? Help is on the Way.
When was the last time you searched for a worksheet, test question bank, video clip, or an image for that lesson you were planning? Your answer: about two hours ago. Next question. How satisfying was that search? Your answer: not terribly. That is, unless you were searching for STEM resources and you were using Gooru. […]
Are You Sure You Want This? AUPs from Around the World
One out of every five times I boot up my clicker software — a process that takes nearly 120 seconds on my MacBook — the program crashes. Re-booting requires a full-system re-start. I desperately want to make the move to personal digital device dependence in my classes. Not only would a cloud-based solution be more […]
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 […]
Gooru: The Future of STEM Education Resources
The former head of Google India is drawing with a whiteboard marker on the glass cover of his white office desk. He is showing me the organizational structure of his STEM education resource, search, and curation portal called Gooru. Prasad Ram — Pram to his friends — started Gooru as a 20% time project while still at Google. Like the […]
Horizon Report for K12 – Meet Elroy Jetson
It is 2016. We are shadowing a fourteen year-old student in a suburb of a major metropolitan city. His name is Elroy. Elroy wakes up, gets dressed, eats breakfast, and brushes his teeth just like any teen would today. That’s when Elroy’s day diverges dramatically from that of anyone who attended school in 2011. Instead […]
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 […]
Imaginek12 is about to change your teaching career. What is it?
To understand this post anywhere outside of the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area requires some qualification. Despite the talk of a double-dip recession, despite the tenaciously high unemployment numbers, and despite Standard and Poor’s choice to move the U.S. credit rating one step closer to junk bond status, creativity and ingenuity are in full swing […]
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 […]
Beginning of end for ETS? Notes from the SF EduTech @Meetup #EdTech #k12
One thing is for sure. There will be no dearth of choices for adaptive learning math-in-the-box tools. This was my fourth SF EdTech Meetup, and included my 13th, 14th, and 15th encounters, respectively, with young, bright-eyed founders developing cloud-based learning environments for basic math instruction. Why wouldn’t they do this? Math instruction, at the lower […]
Science is dead. Data analysis is king. Creativity rules. @wiredscience #Edtech #Education
Two summers ago I had lunch with Professor Jonathan Osborne of Stanford University’s science education department. I was interested in finding a new research avenue for my classroom. Osborne’s work is in scientific literacy. I was looking for a research partner to carry out a study comparing future outcomes of students who had taken IB […]
Question Tank 