Content Items for My Graduate Education Classes. Much of this I write personally for my students to provide needed perspective on the state of Instructional Technology AND Contemporary Education. I'm currently teaching for Touro College (Integrating Technology for School Leaders) and New York Institute of Technology; I've taught for Fordham, Lehigh, and others in the past.
I’ve just started my first year as an edtech coach at Colegio Inglés. For two years, I worked as a language arts and history teacher in 8th grade. I’ve always been passionate about technology and education, so, to me, when opportunity came, it was only logical to take this new step and venture into the exciting world of technology integration from a coach’s perspective. In this short walk, I have gained a new perspective and made a few observations, which I’m excited to share with you in this post. They are not organized in any particular way.
As an edtech coach: 1. You get to reach out far more students … indirectly, that is.
When I was teaching ELA and history, I had a direct impact and influence over 46 students divided in two groups of 23 each. That was my magic number. However, as an edtech coach I get to reach out to about 390 students. The possibilities are more: possibilities for more projects, larger projects and ambitious goals. More can be achieved: You become like an orchestra director with the possibility of putting together a stunning performance. You may achieve amazing things on your own by directly influencing your students, but you will get farther if other edtech leaders accompany you on the journey. 2. Your efforts must be more focused.
Because you don’t have direct access to your students anymore, it becomes crucial that you find a way to have access to them. The way to do it is through the teachers you coach. Because you’re not exactly their teacher and you can’t just tell them what to do or what to teach, you have to earn the way into their brains and hearts so you can inspire them to get on board with the vision your school is undertaking. I’ve seen and noticed that the best way to achieve this is by inspiring them and showing them the results that they can harvest once they apply your suggestions. Providing concrete examples of projects, initiatives that they can adapt and implement in their teaching practice will help them envision what that could look like in their classrooms. 3. Your growth determines their growth.
According to John Maxwell, this is the leadership law of the lid: If you place a lid on your own professional growth you will be affecting not only yourself, but also your entire faculty. It is very rare that people will do more than you ask them to do and teachers will usually not go beyond the point their Edtech leaders are willing to go themselves. It is imperative that Edtech coaches therefore embrace a culture of expanding their PLNs — personal learning networks — and learning and undertaking risks for the sake of learning. Participating or organizing educational Twitter chats, becoming an active part of EdCamps, blogging and consulting cutting-edge edtech blogs are just a few examples of how you can ensure that you are on the right track for growth. ISTE has also published the NETS for coaches, a fantastic collection of standards specifically dedicated to edtech coaches.
Are you an edtech coach? What other aspects of our job would you add to this? Are you are a teacher reading this article? I just want to say you have a golden opportunity to make amazing things happen in your classroom. Never before had I realized the magnitude of the blessing it is to have a number of kids every day before you. Isaac Pineda is the technology integration specialist at Colegio Inglés, a private 1:1 school in Monterrey, Mexico. He is an Apple Distinguished Educator and an advocate for technology in education. He also works as a speaker and consultant providing professional development for teachers and administrators at schools in Mexico and overseas. Visit his website. Read his blog. Follow him on Twitter @Kairosedtech..."
Yesterday, the senate committee that has jurisdiction over federal education
programs listened to your voice and voted to include a dedicated digital
learning program to its version of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA). Your letters were a critical element in passing the Innovative
Technology Expands Children’s Horizons (I-TECH) program.
ISTE worked with Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)
to craft the I-TECH program, which would replace the Enhancing Education Through
Technology (EETT) program. The I-TECH program would fund digital learning
integration with a significant emphasis on professional development. In fact, 50
percent of funds allocated under I-TECH to school districts would be dedicated
to professional development for digital learning.
Passage of this program demonstrates strong support from both Republicans and
Democrats for digital learning, a rarity in an era when it is difficult to find
common ground on anything. This digital learning victory is just one step in a
very long process, which includes full Senate approval, passage of a House
version of ESEA, and a final version approved by both chambers and the
president.
Please continue to join ISTE in making your voice heard. Together we will
continue to lead the effort to include digital learning as a component in the
reauthorization of ESEA.
From EdSurge.... "Three Tips for Picking Personalized Learning Frameworks
You are a teacher, school leader, charter network or district administrator looking for guidance on how to design classrooms and schools for personalized learning. You’re not alone.
Teams of educators all over the country are launching new schools and redesigning existing ones, and they are eager to build on the early lessons of the pioneers who have been at it for a few years. This is great – if everyone treats designing and implementing personalized learning as an invention challenge, the state of knowledge and practice will move very slowly. In other words, not everyone has to start with a blank slate and create new designs from scratch. Learning from the failures and early wins of other teams and building on their lessons will help us move faster and with higher quality toward schools designed to meet the needs of every student, every day.
The good news: a number of frameworks that incorporate the wisdom of practice are available.
The complicating factors: you’ll probably need more than one, none are perfect and all were created by a person, team or organization with a specific point of view about what’s important and how to implement it.
Here are three tips for selecting frameworks to help your team get started:
1. What you do is more important than what you call it.
Don’t get hung up on the debates that think-tankers and funders like to engage in about what to call what you are doing. Is it personalized? Blended? Competency-based? Your team could burn a lot of productive time on abstract questions that won’t matter much in practice. Instead, develop some clarity about what you are trying to accomplish for students and the instructional approach you aim to implement. Then take a look at the content of the frameworks and determine which are relevant. Use the language and framing that make most sense for your context and your community.
2. Understand how the framework was developed (and by whom).
The most powerful frameworks are usually based on deep field observations and “sense-making” of what real people are doing across many situations and contexts. Did the developers work to understand the design and implementation choices of multiple teams and then identify general principles that help describe what’s going on across them? Did they work out their categories, guiding questions, and recommended steps in collaboration with professionals actually doing the work? The more the answer to these questions is “yes”, the more likely the framework will be of practical use to your team.
A few companies have frameworks you can review at a high level for free, and if you want more help you can contract for support services and products. For instance, Pearson’s 1:1 Learning Framework has some general categories and advice, but also recommends a variety of the company’s products and services to make it all come together. More entrepreneurial companies like Education Elements and 2Revolutions also have helpful frameworks. You can contract with them for help with design and implementation.
A number of nonprofit organizations have helpful tools that have grown out of their work with early implementers. They make them widely available in an effort to further their knowledge sharing missions. Organizations with such frameworks include Future Ready, the Christensen Institute, Competency Works, andThe Learning Accelerator. None of these tools are connected to product or service offerings, which means they don’t rely on buying anything to be useful, but it also means there’s usually little direct support standing ready to help you put them into practice.
At NewSchools, we use a personalized learning framework that grew out of the work of 16 school networks and a number of support organizations and funders (including some folks now at NewSchools). It was developed through multiple working sessions over the course of about a year and has since been vetted by many more schools. Our friends at the Next Generation Learning Challenges use it too. We like it because it was developed with practitioners and includes questions to help guide choices rather than prescriptive answers.
3. Mix, Match, and Adapt.
You might need one tool for the planning phase, another for framing up design choices, and perhaps another when you’re ready to implement. Just make sure to resolve any potential conflicts between them during your planning phase. And remember, the important thing is good guidance, coupled with the messy process of discussing and deciding, not following someone else’s recipe to the letter.
It’s been said that designing schools for personalized learning is like making beef stew – there are some basic ingredients and general steps, but plenty of room for experimentation and seasoning to taste..."
The Must-Attend Event for Education Technology Investors
Aaron Skonnard, chief executive of Pluralsight.Credit Pluralsight
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — To observe the major forces at play in the education technology sector, one needed only to stand near the marble fountain in the Phoenician Resort lobby this week.
That’s where hundreds of venture capitalists and executives attending an annual ed tech industry conference arranged — in full view of their rivals — to meet one another privately.
From coveted perches at cafe tables and couches in the plush hotel lobby, for instance, investors watched as Aaron Skonnard, chief executive of Pluralsight, an online skills training company for technology professionals, sat down with David Blake, chief executive of Degreed, a start-up that helps companies track, analyze and manage the skills development courses taken by their employees.
“Degreed has the best content-scoring algorithm for online courses,” said Michael Staton, a partner at Learn Capital, a venture capital firm that finances education start-ups, as he observed the tête-à-tête from across the room. Then Mr. Staton sighed. “I was hoping we’d invest in them,” he said, “before Pluralsight acquired them for $100 million.”
The annual ASU+GSV Summit conference here, an effort put on by Arizona State University and GSV Capital, an investment firm, started six years ago as a modest event in the desert where investors came to hear company presentations from about 50 education start-ups.
The conference has since become the central event for investors and companies scouting for the next big thing in education technology — a melting pot for executives from McGraw-Hill Education and Pearson, Google and Microsoft, Kapor Capital and the NewSchools Venture Fund, and start-up entrepreneurs.
This year about 270 companies are presenting, all represented by either their chief executives or founders. Among them are companies like Degreed, which developed in an ed tech accelerator financed by Kaplan, the test-preparation company. Degreed has attracted angel investors including Mark Cuban, the investor and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at GSV Advisors.
“It’s a place where it’s all senior people,” said Ms. Quazzo, one of the conference organizers. “So conversations can occur at a high level.”
With more than 2,000 attendees this year, the conference is an indication of the high political stakes involved in education and of the big money businesses hope to reap in the sector. The event also now serves as an important stop for policy makers seeking to broadcast their commitment to industry growth.
On Tuesday, for instance, Arne Duncan, the United States secretary of education, made an appearance here. He heartily endorsed data-driven technologies known as “personalized learning,” websites and apps that display different math problems or reading assignments to individual students, based on an analysis of their particular abilities.
The hope is that such individually tailored products will improve students’ learning, grades, test scores, graduation rates and, ultimately, employment prospects.
“We must make learning more personalized,” Mr. Duncan said.
As was typical in other years, dozens of companies at this year’s conference presented personalized or adaptive learning systems for students.
Despite the promise of such tailored lessons — and the fact that millions of students already use such products — few ed tech start-ups have conducted and published rigorous studies to demonstrate that their novel technologies aided learning more than established methods. One controlled study conducted by Kaplan found that showing videos to students — which the company had expected to be more engaging for learners than traditional methods — was less effective than providing students with traditional text-based problems to solve.
In an effort intended to address the paucity of ed tech outcomes data, two groups here, including Kaplan, discussed their coming efforts to study education technologies. They each said they wanted to help school administrators choose learning products with proven effectiveness.
Kaplan announced plans for a new ed tech accelerator intended to identify pressing educational problems and the products that might solve them.
“Every C.E.O. will tell you their product is great and it works,” said Maia Sharpley, Kaplan’s vice president for strategy and innovation. “Well, let’s test it and pilot it and have the data to show that it works or it doesn’t.”
Another new accelerator project, financed by USA Funds and the University of Virginia Curry School of Education, has just introduced a similar effort to identify and rigorously test promising ed tech products aimed at filling concrete needs for schools.
“Are there really companies willing to hold themselves up to that level of scrutiny and accountability?” said Bart Epstein, chief executive of the new company, called the Jefferson Education Accelerator. “They are out there. They are a minority. And we want to hold them up as examples of companies doing it right.”
In its short history, the ASU+GSV conference has also acquired a reputation as the meet-cute spot for ed tech investors and executives seeking to develop relationships with start-ups that could lead to acquisitions.
Last year, for instance, Mr. Skonnard, the chief executive of Pluralsight, the professional technology course provider, had a 15-minute meeting in the Phoenician lobby with the founder of Smarterer, a skills assessment and scoring start-up.
“As we were leaving, I said to my C.F.O., ‘This is a company we need to talk more to,’ ” Mr. Skonnard recalled during a chat with a reporter in the industry-thronged lobby. “Ten months later,” he said, “we completed the acquisition” of Smarterer for $75 million.
When asked whether Pluralsight now planned to acquire Degreed, the company whose founder he was seen meeting with earlier this week, Mr. Skonnard was enigmatic.
One of the most important impacts resulting from Education's adoption of technology: Personalized Learning
From ASCD's Smart Brief / Student-centered
Learning
Report highlights ways to create student-centered
schools Blended
learning and competency-based education can support personalized learning, but
such a shift will require changes in systems, according to a recent report.
Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K-12
Online Learning and co-author of the report, offers insight into the findings
and a road map for personalization. KQED.org/Mind/Shift blog (3/25)
Middle school pilots personalized learning A
Wisconsin middle school is transitioning to a personalized-learning model,
starting with its fifth-grade class. Teachers provide students with a daily list
of learning tasks, and students choose when and how to do them. Teachers also
give more direct instruction to those who need it and allow those who have
mastered topics to move ahead. Daily Citizen (Beaver Dam, Wis.) (2/28)
"Gifted students — especially those who are low-income — aren’t getting the focus they need
States aren’t doing enough to support gifted students, especially those from low-income families — that’s the message that the Virginia-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation sent Tuesday with the release of report cards on state policies for academically talented children.
No state received an A. There were plenty of D’s and a few F’s.
No state received an A. There were plenty of D’s and a few F’s.
“Equal Talents, Unequal Opportunities: A Report Card on State Support for Academically Talented Low-Income Students” by Jack Kent Cooke Foundation
But more important than the letter grades are some of the underlying data. (State policy report cards are a favorite tool among education-related organizations, and the mission and agenda of whatever group is doing the grading invariably affects the letter grades that are given.)
For example, nearly half of states do not audit, monitor or report on gifted and talented programs, according to foundation’s report..."Read the full article at its source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/31/gifted-students-especially-those-who-are-low-income-need-more-attention-report-argues/
