9 ways that sound affects our health, wellbeing and productivity. 9 Signs That Neuroscience Has Entered the Classroom. Digital Promise - Accelerating Innovation in Education. Pearson's Virtual School Operator Opening Physical High Schools. Blended Learning | News Pearson's Virtual School Operator Opening Physical High Schools By Dian Schaffhauser05/29/12 Education publishing and technology company Pearson will be opening physical versions of its virtual schools in five cities starting in August 2012. Connections Education, a business Pearson acquired in September 2011, has announced plans to create Nexus Academy charter schools in three cities in Ohio and two cities in Michigan, catering to grades 9 through 12. Up to now, Connections Ed has focused on providing virtual school options for traditional school districts and other education entities. The new schools will be tuition-free and open enrollment public high schools, limited to serving between 250 and 300 students.
Those who attend will be on either a morning or afternoon schedule. The focus will be on college preparation. Curriculum will come from Pearson as well as McGraw-Hill, the companies said in a statement. About the Author. David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence. Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed. Grad Engineering Programs Probe Intersection of Science, Art. When engineers seek solutions to a problem—such as how to build a bridge to traverse a river—they tend to draw upon designs that have worked in the past. It takes an artist to provide a "more creative approach," says Christie Lin, a graduate engineering student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By collaborating, engineers and artists can push the limits of what is already known about their respective fields, explains Lin, who studies nuclear engineering at MIT, where she is also part of the Art Scholars group.
Margaret Duff, a doctoral student at Arizona State University's Fulton School of Engineering, agrees with Lin. "Engineers tend to make very small, incremental improvements on things that have already been done, and they don't really allow their creativity to take full force," she says. "Artists can teach you to be more open to new things and to think about things in different ways. " [Learn about design M.B.A.' Some students see that connection early on. [Check out the U.S. The IB Career-related Certificate (IBCC) Life in the 21st Century places many demands on students. Enabling students to become self-confident, internationally minded learners must be integral to their education. The International Baccalaureate (IB) has developed a framework of international education incorporating the vision and educational principles of the IB into local programmes to address the needs of students engaged in career-related studies.
*This video will shortly be available in French and Spanish The IB Career-related Certificate (IBCC) increases access to an IB education and is specifically designed to provide a flexible learning framework that can be tailored by the school to meet the needs of students. What is the IB Career-related Certificate (IBCC)? The IBCC’s flexibility allows schools to meet the needs, backgrounds and contexts of students with each school creating its own distinct version of the IBCC. The IBCC framework is built around three interconnected elements: The IBCC enables students to: Building Sustainable ScienceCurriculum: The Role of Tech vs The Purpose of Education. Working in the field of digital media and learning, where the important role of new technologies in learning seems self-evident, the slow pace of change in mainstream education can feel frustrating.
Responding to this challenge, we give a lot of attention to thinking about ways to support and encourage teachers to make greater use of the opportunities presented by digital media, but perhaps we should spend more time considering how and why technologies come to be used, or not used, in the first place. Ambitious Goals for the Transformative Potential of Digital Media Enthusiasm for the use of digital media in education stems from a number of very different places. Whatever the reasons behind enthusiasm for using digital media in education, it can quickly turn to frustration at what can seem to be a distinct lack of progress in mainstream classrooms.
A Bolder Sociological Imagination is Needed Rewriting the Narratives of Technology and Education. When Will Blended Learning Be Mainstream? By Alan K. Rudi At the CUE conference this month, a questioner asked our Panel a simple question about blended learning – What is your prediction for when blended learning will be a mainstream application in education?
A simple question, but it does not have an easy answer. First, when we look at the rate of technology adoption (or the number of years a new technology takes to reach 50 percent or more of its targeted users), it is significantly faster today at 25 years than during the last century which averaged 60 years. And information technologies are faster than the average with the PC and cell phone at an adoption rate of about 15 years, and the Internet at about 10 years. Education technologies like Learning Management Systems, Simulation tools, Games, Online applications, videos, new blended models, etc., are all rapidly emerging now as critical tools demonstrating the ability to improve learning outcomes as quality continues to improve. The trend lines are accelerating. "Connected Learning"
Connected Learning: Designed to ‘mine the new social, digital domain’ SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Citing an ever-widening gap between in-school and out-of-school learning experiences, a team of researchers today introduced a model of learning -- ‘connected learning’ -- that taps into the rich new world of information, knowledge, and online collaboration available to youth and learners. The connected learning model, which is anchored in a large body of research on how youth are using social media, the internet and digital media to learn and develop expertise, also seeks to respond to deepening fears of a class-based “equity” gap in education that, without intervention, is likely to be accelerated by disproportionate access to technology and new forms of knowledge sharing. Interest-powered...Research has repeatedly shown that when a subject is personally interesting and relevant, learners achieve much higher-order learning outcomes. ...and the embrace of three key design principles: S.
Connected Learning Research Network. The Essence of Connected Learning. Leveling Up. Updates Support the n00bs: Community Design for Inclusivity A common topic of discussion among our team of Leveling Up researchers is how communities maintain different barriers to entry. Every community, be it an online forum for Worldwide Wrestling enthusiasts, One Direction fangirls, or Starcraft II players, has its own etiquette and sets of rules for entering the community and becoming a full participant. But for platforms that wish to continually attract a new and engaged user base, designers must think through how to minimize barriers to entry. In essence, lea The Powerful Combination of Interests and Peer Culture The connected learning model emphasizes the importance of peer culture and interests in fueling members’ participation and learning in the rich activities and opportunities these communities create.
Supports for Help and Feedback in Peer-Supported Communities Tracking “Interests” in Interest-Driven Learning Communities Why the interest in interests? A new year and a new book. Digital Badges for Learning. I'm excited to be here to celebrate the launch of the 2011 competition, and its potential to propel a quantum leap forward in education reform.
We're on the verge of harnessing education's power to unleash the full measure of human potential. I want to commend the MacArthur Foundation's thoughtful and forward-thinking approach to educational philanthropy. And, I applaud the collaborative partnership that makes possible this groundbreaking competition, now in its fourth year. The MacArthur Foundation and its partners – Mozilla and HASTAC, hosted by Duke University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute – are working together to provide venture capital for technology innovations that can dramatically improve educational access and quality, in America and around the globe. This year's efforts will expand the hub of digital media projects and products, and the record of success begun in 2007. This administration has a systemic, cradle-to-career vision for reform.
Digital Media and Learning Competition. Connected Learning Connected Learning is a set of principles designed to nurture the kind of students that can thrive in the 21st century. By the time today’s first graders graduate high school, there will be whole new industries we can’t even imagine today. Connected Learning fosters the adaptive, lifelong learners that can flourish in a world of rapid technological change. More... Project:Connect - Hack for a Better Web Hackathon to create a more equitable, social, and participatory internet. Badges Will Be Big. Email Share March 20, 2012 - by Tom Vander Ark 0 Email Share Earlier this month there was a flurry about badges.
“Who needs a university anymore?” I’m bullish about badges and job certification like Jobs for the Future Credentials that Work and just-in-time job training like the online program just launched by GeneralAssemb.ly . Audrey Watters reviewed the Badges for Lifelong Learning awards at DML12 earlier this month—a MacArthur funded celebration of informal learning. I get the Christensen’s non-consumption thesis and starting in the informal space, but my interest in badges remains in the heart of K-12 education and the Common Core State Standards.
We need a great Common Core-aligned merit badge system that motivates and recognizes achievement. Here’s my point—folks are treating badges as peripheral and I think they (and related achievement recognition systems) will be core to the shift to student-centered and competency-based learning. Badges will be big. For more, see: About The Author. Gaining Some Perspective on Badges for Lifelong Learning. I first read about the idea of Open Badges back in the middle of last year. It excited me. One thing I’ve always been interested in is how to shift the power dynamic within classrooms towards learners in a positive way. Changing (or at least providing additional) ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and understanding is one way to do that. Using Mozilla’s Open Badges infrastructure, any organization or community can issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners and users can then collect badges from different sources and display them across the web—on their resume, web site, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere.
(OpenBadges.org) In a previous post on DMLcentral I tried to reframe the debate around badges by showing that we do, in fact, have a problem with assessment -- and education more generally. Getting Practical (and Visual) The Importance of Context I have no doubt that badges, badly applied, are dangerous. Conclusion. THE END OF TEACHING by @agalorda. Khan Academy: Learning Habits vs. Content Delivery in STEM Education. Email Share March 20, 2012 - by Guest Author 0 Email Share Co-written by David Castillo and Peter McIntosh Most math education analyses in urban high school classrooms focus on delivery of content: What content to deliver, when to deliver it, how to explain it, what textbooks to use, how much home work to assign, and more. As reform efforts have shifted to technology and online learning, we are still asking questions about content delivery in a different context: How to automate it, individualize it, manage it remotely, and deliver it without killing trees.
Improving content delivery helped, but not enough Oakland Unity High School is a four-year (grades 9-12) public charter high school located in the tough urban neighborhood of East Oakland. In the summer of 2010, we conducted a diagnostic test with all incoming freshman to evaluate basic algebra and arithmetic skills. The number of students scoring below basic (approximately score of 40 percent) decreased from 77 percent to 28 percent. Khan Academy: Students Regain Confidence to Tackle Math Challenges. Co-written by David Castillo and Peter McIntosh Poor study habits result in a domino effect of poor confidence Many of our students at Oakland Unity High School in Oakland, Calif. lack confidence in their ability to solve a simple problem like the one show below. Combined with the poor study habits we discussed in our previous article, “Khan AcademyAcademy: LearningHabits vs.
Content Delivery,” students have declined in the habit of mental effort and perseverance. Several seconds of counting out a solution is just too much, and they take no responsibility for resolving this problem. However, their false sense of confidence triggers serious frustration and anger when they make repeated errors. This basic problem is very challenging for many of our students. A visual demonstration of how one student regained confidence The graph above records one student’s effort on a series of problems similar to the one above (number line). Why we need to bring creativity and technology back together across the curriculum | Teacher Network Blog | Guardian Professional. Last year Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google challenged the British education system. He said he was flabbergasted to learn that computer science isn't taught as standard in UK schools.
"Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made. That is just throwing away your great computer heritage. " Schmidt's point goes deeper than a critique of today's ICT teaching. He was highlighting the divisions between those who teach and learn humanities in Britain and everyone else in the science and engineering "camp". Schmidt encouraged UK educationalists to reunite art and science, something that Apple's founder Steve Jobs had advocated the benefits of many years earlier. This enforced separation between technical and creative teaching and learning is something I see a lot in schools. I might project images of children working in a 19th century mill on the walls for a lesson on the industrial revolution.
How Creativity Works': It's All In Your Imagination. iStockphoto.com What makes people creative? What gives some of us the ability to create work that captivates the eyes, minds and hearts of others? Jonah Lehrer, a writer specializing in neuroscience, addresses that question in his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Lehrer defines creativity broadly, considering everything from the invention of masking tape to breakthroughs in mathematics; from memorable ad campaigns to Shakespearean tragedies. He finds that the conditions that favor creativity — our brains, our times, our buildings, our cities — are equally broad. Lehrer joins NPR's Robert Siegel to talk about the creative process — where great ideas come from, how to foster them, and what to do when you inevitably get stuck. Interview Highlights On comparing Shakespeare with the inventor of masking tape "I think we absolutely can lump them all together.
"... On how Steve Jobs redesigned Pixar studios to maximize collaboration and creativity " ... "It's near midnight. WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson.