למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

that seems obvious right? It’s better to have something tailored to your needs rather than one size fits all?

Students in Personalized Learning Programs Feel Less Positive About School Than Students in Other Schools

students in personalized learning programs are statistically less likely to report enjoying and feeling comfortable in school; feeling engaged in and enjoying schoolwork

For bringing the startup model to schools.

Despite charging about $30,000 for tuition, AltSchool’s losses are piling up as it spends at a pace of about $40 million per year.

"Closing any school is painful," AltSchool founder and CEO Max Ventilla said in an interview. "But ultimately the path for the company to be sustainable and impactful is to provide the platform we're developing to schools we don't directly operate."

Ventilla expressed frustration that AltSchool, which previously received criticism for focusing its attention on private schools serving mostly wealthy families, is now taking flak for choosing to prioritize efforts to serve a broader universe of more diverse students in the public-school sector.

For outside schools, the company charges about $150 to $500 annually per student for its technology, depending on the size of the institution. AltSchool said it currently has hundreds of students at partner schools and will soon have more than a thousand. Its tools help teachers dole out assignments, keep tabs on a students’ work and make adjustments based on performance.

that the growth in computer-based delivery of education will accelerate swiftly until, by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.

Are we on track?

"There are very real policy considerations and constraints," Levin says, that will impede that prediction from coming true.

But it is that "content" (a.k.a. knowledge) that students must master in order to apply it to hands-on projects. There is no need to sacrifice the rigor of content. Only its delivery and assessment must be changed to move from Carnegie units and seat time to competency-based learning.

Adios Ed Tech. Hola something else.

educational technology is not becoming more human; it is making the human a technology

The software “learns” from the students and adapts the content to each student. End result? Better learning gains, less time spent on irrelevant content, less time spent on reviewing content that the student already knows, reduced costs, tutor support when needed, and so on.

robs learners of the development of the key attributes needed for continual learning – metacognitive, goal setting, and self-regulation – because it makes those decisions on behalf of the learner.

What we need to do today is create adaptive learners rather than adaptive learning. Our software should develop those attributes of learners that are required to function with ambiguity and complexity.

It is here, in analytics and data use in education, that far more attention and awareness is needed than is currently evident. Algorithms will subsume most of our educational practices as they will embody certain pedagogies, support roles, and even faculty practices. Quite simply, the shape of tomorrow’s university is now actively being coded into analytics models. I’m generally fine with this as a concept, but quite nervous about this as an action.

much like Silicon Valley has redefined business, GSV aims to redefine growth investing.

ASU is pretty clearly set up as a factory of credentialing, and any lip-service to educational excellence, particularly in the undergraduate sphere, is exactly that.

The Must-Attend Event for Education Technology Investors

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.

Well the term "personalized learning" doesn’t have an exact definition. In general, the idea is that people progress at a different rate. If you’re ahead of what’s being taught in the class, that’s not good, you get bored. If you’re behind, then they’re using terms and concepts that create a general impression of "Hey, I’m not good at this."

And the idea of personalized learning is you always know yourself where you are on a topic, that you have the sense of what the tasks are, how much there’s left to do to achieve certain levels. So there is more personal agency.

The concept of “personalized” learning shared by Gates and many of the edtech entrepreneurs listening to him at this conference, is of a mechanical process that is done to the students. Learning that is organized and programmed for them, with no input from the child, other than the data collected based on responses to tasks on the screen. Everything is about “performance”.

I would suggest that if the answer to this question is not something compelling, we should encourage our young people to stay home and surf the internet, travel, sleep or read a good book.

Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.

Two overlapping groups of educators seem particularly enamored of PLI (מינוח של קון – Personalized Learning Inc.): (1) those who are awed by anything emitted by the private sector, including books about leadership whose examples are drawn from Fortune 500 companies and filled with declarations about the need to “leverage strategic cultures for transformational disruption”; and (2) those who experience excitement that borders on sexual arousal from anything involving technology – even though much of what falls under the heading “ed tech” is, to put it charitably, of scant educational value.

Rebirth of the Teaching Machine through the Seduction of Data Analytics: This Time It's Personal

Adaptive learning systems (the new teaching machines) do not build more resilient, creative, entrepreneurial or empathetic citizens through their individualized, linear and mechanical software algorithms. Nor do they balance the desire for greater choice, in all its manifest forms, with the equity needed for a society to flourish. Computer adaptive learning systems are reductionist and primarily attend to those things that can be easily digitized and tested (math, science and reading). They fail to recognize that high quality learning environments are deeply relational, humanistic, creative, socially constructed, active and inquiry-oriented.

Adaptive learning systems still promote the notion of the isolated individual, in front of a technology platform, being delivered concrete and sequential content for mastery. However, the re-branding is that of personalization (individual), flexible and customized (technology platform) delivering 21st century competencies (content).

"Personalized learning" is a marketing term, however. A more accurate term of art would be "technology-assisted differentiated instruction."

Personalized learning, it turns out, is really about grappling with this overarching problem: educating the real people – not a generalization of students – who are coming into the classroom.

For all the hype surrounding so-called "personalized learning," plenty of skeptics worry that it could do more harm than good – especially within the context of larger trends in academia. They worry that, among other things, personalized learning products will be used not to improve student learning, but as cheaper and "good enough" replacements for faculty labor.

In order to get good results from personalized learning products, ECC [מוסד שבו הם ביקרו] needs experienced faculty who believe in what they are doing and have had some professional development in how to teach. Even great software is not magic. If you want magic in the classroom, you need a great teacher.

Bottom line: Personalized learning is not a product you can buy. It is a strategy that good teachers can implement. Without good teachers and good strategy, even a great product designed for personalized learning applications has limited value and, in the worst case, can actually do more harm than good.

I have seen no evidence to suggest that personalized learning technologies improve outcomes significantly without good teachers at the helm, and plenty of evidence suggesting that they don’t.

It’s a good drill and kill tool.

Few educators debate the merits of personalized learning. The proliferation of low-cost laptops and tablets married with services provided by Google, Apple and Microsoft have given teachers the tools to track the individual progress of students and customize lesson plans.

Instead of colorful characters tromping through mazes or fighting villains by solving math problems—’90s kids will remember games like “Math Blaster”—students interact with personalized learning software in much the same way they might interact with an old-school paper workbook. Only instead of ripping out pages and turning them in, they check boxes and type answers into software that corrects and tracks their progress, allowing teachers to quickly see that, say, little Johnny understood the concept of long division, but consistently got questions about remainders wrong.

Not only do students perform better on tests, but they gain the skills and confidence to learn anything they want. And this journey is just beginning. The technology and teaching will rapidly improve every year you're in school.

Personalized education does not mean kids just doing what they want. In fact, quite the opposite