למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

How America Is Breaking Public Education

The first and largest problem is that every educational program we've had in place since 2002 — the first year that No Child Left Behind took effect — prioritizes student performance on standardized tests above all else. Test performance is now tied to both school funding, and the evaluation of teachers and administrators.

הדף הזה מכיל הנחיות, צעד אחר צעד, עבור המנחה, הכוללות:

• מה להגיד בכל שלב של התהליך
• על מה להקליק
• לאלו שאלות ותפיסות מוטעות יש לצפות
• כמה זמן יש להקדיש לכל נקודה
• מתי להנחות את הלומדים ללמוד ללא עזרת המחשב

You'd need the freedom to decide what to teach, how to teach it, how to evaluate and assess your students, and how to structure your classroom and curriculum.

Until we abandon the failed education model we've adopted since the start of the 21st century, public education will continue to be broken. As long as we insist on telling teachers what to teach and how to teach it, we'll continue to fail our children.

There was such an innocence to the Internet back then. ... It was all exploration and figuring stuff out and finding cool websites that we could bookmark in our browser. ....

the Web was a fun, interesting, pretty fascinating place to be back then.

I still believe that the Web can still be a great place for connection and learning, but I’m less convinced that that will happen through Facebook or Twitter or other algorithmically driven sites that are programming our behaviors and beliefs in ways that subvert the potentials that we aspired to back in the Nineties. It may be time to turn all of that off and find community in other spaces.

The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.

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

The feature, called the “discussion forum recommended grade,” will use computer algorithms to analyze students’ posts in class discussion forums.

John Whitmer, learning analytics and research director at Blackboard, said that instructors want to use discussion forums to judge students’ participation, but that doing so is time-consuming and difficult since the forums were designed for discussion rather than assessment. These discussion forums are often underused by students, said Whitmer, since there is often little incentive for students to engage.

The specific metrics that they’re using seem antithetical to the kind of writing that most teachers want students to do in discussion pages online. What teachers usually want people to do is to respond to other people’s ideas and to have arguments in an informal way. What this does is encourage pretentious prose.

Heaven forbid we discuss something with students and don't grade it. I mean, what's the point of that?

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.

Students sit at desks wearing electronic headbands that report EEG data back to a teacher’s dashboard, and that information purports to measure students’ attention levels. The video’s narrator explains: “School administrators can use big data analysis to determine when students are better able to concentrate.”

This will enable us to use artificial intelligence on what will be the world’s largest database to improve our algorithms for things like attention and emotion detection.

Focus 1 aims to break the traditional classroom mold, and helps schools use the most advanced technology available to conveniently reach their goals of improving the teaching and learning experience.