-
How AltSchool Blends Old Fashioned Learning with New Technology | EdSurge News
- how successful students can be when they learn in small, personalized communities that champion project-based learning, guided by educators who get a say in the technology they use
- 20 students between the ages of five and 10. He eschewed grade levels and standardized tests in favor of what he called a “micro-school” model with “learner-centered curriculum,” which focused on student “playlists” that tap into individual learning needs.
- community of students grouped in pre-K to 1st grade, 2nd to 5th grade, or 6th to 8th grade--becoming both mentees and mentors of their fellow students with each passing year
- three to four coveted years with their classroom teachers instead of one
- waldorf-style
- project-based learning and real-world lessons.
- Field trips are a weekly occurrence
- TECH STACK AND PD: Personalization for both students and teachers goes hand-in-hand
- Most classrooms consist of teachers and students. In AltSchool, you may find a third party—engineers.
- “Studying teachers, what they need, how it relates to the personalization--that’s the main focus of our engineers and user researchers. We study the hacks and workarounds that teachers use on paper and on a whiteboard, and work that into the platform.”
- Personalized Learning Plan, which shows students their assignments for each day and helps teachers keep track of and assess student’s learning.
- On my.altschool.com, students log in via their iPads or Chromebooks to see what teachers have assigned them for the day. Teachers will select a “Focus” project or activity-based assignment for the day and send it to students’ playlists, and once it’s completed and submitted by the students, teachers can label it as approved or ask the student to go back and make edits.
- To assess project-based learning, submissions typically require some sort of documentation, usually in the form of photos of projects taken by students.
- “Alt Video,” that allows teachers to film and later observe student performance
- space for teachers to send notes to parents about individual students
- a “classroom composition” tool where teachers can observe their student’s performances as a whole
- “learning targets” aligned to Common Core, Next Generation Science, and California state standards.
- AltSchool will open its platform to other districts and schools as a resource
-
-
Privacy Pitfalls as Education Apps Spread Haphazardly - NYTimes.com
-
In addition, some education privacy law scholars say that the direct-to-teacher marketing model circumvents federal privacy laws.
One federal law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, requires school districts to maintain the confidentiality of student records and to keep control of those records even if administrators outsource certain school functions to vendors.
Another federal law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, allows schools to act in place of parents in allowing online providers to collect personal details from children. But the Federal Trade Commission recommends that schools not delegate that decision to individual teachers.
- To help school administrators evaluate digital education services, the Department of Education recently issued best-practice recommendations for contracts. Last year, the Consortium for School Networking, an association for district technology professionals, introduced a free tool kit with data security questions for schools to ask their online service providers. And on Tuesday, a coalition of several dozen educational groups issued a set of principles for responsible use of student data.
-
-
Why Opting Out of Student Data Collection Isn’t the Solution | EdSurge News
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Diigo Bookmarks (weekly)
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Diigo Bookmarks (weekly)
-
How Intrinsic Schools is Breaking the Laws of School Innovation | EdSurge News
similar to alliance's newest model (with the 'commons') for high school
- personalized learning model
- Intrinsic’s “pods” are designed so students intuitively use different areas of the learning environment for teacher-led instruction, peer-to-peer learning and independent work.
- Pods serve 60 students and are staffed by three adults, two core subject teachers and a special education or assistant teacher.
- Each area of the pod is named and uses visible landmarks for easy student navigation.
- allows me to do small group instruction or one-on-one tutoring the majority of each day,”
- students rotate through each space during the 90-minute English block, Ashley and her co-teacher Bryan Podell never teach more than 15 students at a time.
- plan four or more literacy lessons, sometimes using different novels, that are tailored to the needs of each group
- piloting a mastery-based classroom where students are learning six different levels of math ranging from Algebra to Pre-Calculus, reflecting the diverse academic needs of their students
- The structure makes it difficult to revert back to the whole class approaches found in traditional classrooms.
- co-teachers 90 minutes of common planning time every day so teaching teams can thoughtfully design the flow of student activities across the different pod spaces
- Paradoxically, adopting more structures and systems in its second year resulted in more innovation, not less
- changing everything means changing nothing
- structure unlocked innovation. These initiatives lie in stark contrast to Intrinsic’s earlier innovation attempts where too much complexity meant defaulting back to traditional structures and approaches.
- beginning work on second-order innovations
- creating a “genius hour” to support more student choice and independence
- building mobile data tools that teachers can use while commuting on the bus
- strategically using adaptive software to further individualize learning
- school innovation tends to go down once students start showing up for class
- Intrinsic has a one-to-one Chromebook implementation and uses Hapara for course management and Securly for content filtering. Grade level teams choose online content but popular math software includes Think Through Math, ST Math, Khan Academy and IXL. ThinkCERCA, NoRedInk and Reading Plus are the primary literacy programs. Intrinsic builds custom data dashboards for its teachers using the Jasper programming language and pulls data from Illuminate Education, its student information system.
-
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Diigo Bookmarks (weekly)
-
3 Ways to use Google in Art & Art History Classes - from Jennifer Carey - EdTechTeacher
-
@DavidGeurin Blog: What if schools were more like Google and Starbucks?
-
Reaching Math Students One by One - NYTimes.com
- The American educational system, then, creates a permanent math underclass
- School of One, a method for math teachers to personalize instruction,
- Rose and Rush then left the city department and established New Classrooms Innovation Partners, a private nonprofit organization that now works with schools to use Teach to One, a program that evolved from School of One.
- classroom is the size of four rooms
- all four seventh-grade math teachers and some aides circulated, teaching 120 students as a team.
- students find their names on airport-style monitors outside the room, which tell them where to go
- monitors also tell the students which of several learning modalities they will use.
- some answered questions at a computer. A few feet away, others did work sheets in pairs. Five students sat at a table with a teacher, solving equations. At one end of the room, Reisman worked with 23 students on a multiday probability project.
- Centers - laptop, collaborative work, small group instruction.
- M.S. 88 is part of a broad evolution in teaching math, employing technology to provide students with a lesson personalized for each.
- first step, now widespread, was the digital lesson, usually a computer game or video
- Computers can also administer and grade math quizzes
- New Classrooms has a library of 12,000 lessons, some created by its staff, but most bought à la carte from companies like Pearson and IXL.
- a third are online, and the rest are taught live
- every math class ends with each student taking an online quiz that tests whether she has mastered today’s lesson
-
- How difficult is it to achieve this? Sounds like the ideal, the goal - at least in math.
- next step is the real innovation: the educational equivalent of an air traffic control system. Each student’s daily exit quiz is fed into an algorithm, which produces the next day’s schedule for each student and teacher.
- (Teachers get a preview, and can override the schedule.)
- If a student has mastered a skill, on to the next one. If not, she gets another day’s instruction, this time through a different modality. (The algorithm is aware of which modalities work best for her.) It’s an enormous departure from traditional teaching.
- we’ve had a lot of difficulty translating that model of what students know into actionable information. The information we give teachers is either too coarse or too fine. It’s either ‘Johnny can’t do math’ or ‘here are 186 characteristics on seven dimensions of proficiency’ and the teacher says ‘I can’t look at all that.’ The value proposition of School of One is: by telling you what the next instructional step is, we’ll help you thread between that.“
- Many brands of technology save teachers from spending time making up and grading tests. School of One also regroups students and matches them with the just-right lesson.
- timesaver overall? Not necessarily,
- collaboration School of One requires takes extra time, he said, but teachers can spend less time on rote work.
- $40,000 a year more than other math tech programs
- $100 per student
- valuated students using a comprehensive test called Measures of Academic Progress
- second year, however, School of One did much better
- progress statistically similar to the national average
- collective gains for the 15 schools were 47 percent higher than the national average.
- highest among the worst-off students
- gains may be in part due to the fact that these are schools that decided to put a lot of time and money into improving their math teaching
- sewing together various pieces of technology, something Mitchell called “Frankensteining.
- only School of One, he said, recommends the appropriate next lesson for each student and organizes the classroom accordingly
- Why should a school try an expensive, disruptive high-tech platform that’s still unproven? The answer is: in order to prove it.
-
-
Professionally Designed Templates to Use in Google Docs and Sheets
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)