Diigo Bookmarks (weekly)

• 3 Ways to use Google in Art & Art History Classes - from Jennifer Carey - EdTechTeacher

  tags: google art art history blogpost

• @DavidGeurin Blog: What if schools were more like Google and Starbucks?

  tags: blogpost google innovation

• Reaching Math Students One by One - NYTimes.com

  tags: blogpost math nytimes

  • 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.

• 50 Of The Best Google Chrome Extensions For Teachers

  tags: google chrome extensions blogpost

• Professionally Designed Templates to Use in Google Docs and Sheets

  tags: google docs google sheets templates google apps blogpost

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.