A Nuanced Look at Blended Learning
This is the type of story that helps us understand what a different notion of school, made possible in part by technology, looks like — warts and all.
Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation
Blended learning offers a second chance
Blended learning offers a second chance
—
Photos: Additional images of Performance Learning Centers (PLCs) in Hampton and Richmond, Virginia.
All A-Twitter about Education
Improving our schools in 140 characters or less
Improving our schools in 140 characters or less
School of One: Thoughts on Expansion (Part II)
With national media attention, promising — though very preliminary — initial results, and strong public/private support, School of One, though just a few years old, is already being hailed as a national model to expand. But, before talking expansion, we should really understand the actual program model.
My Visit to School of One (Part I)
Yesterday morning, I took the long “F” train ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn’s David A. Boody Intermediate School (IS 228), one of New York City’s three School of One pilot schools. I walked away impressed — as most do from a tour like this. But, I also realized that in many discussions, we’re having the wrong conversation about what we could learn from pilots like School of One.
Khan Academy: Not Overhyped, Just Missing a Key Ingredient – Excellent Live Teachers
Rick Hess was right to question the simplistic hyping of Khan Academy’s online video lectures. But we think he’s only got it half-right: it’s less a matter of OVER-hyping than MIS-hyping the true potential of what Khan is doing
Virtual Schoolteacher
Online education works for teachers and students
Online education works for teachers and students
Teachers Swap Recipes
Educators use web sites and social networks to share lesson plans
Educators use web sites and social networks to share lesson plans
The Digital Divide and the Knowledge Deficit
Are we letting our digital obsessions distract us from obligations to teach knowledge?
Why Schools of One Are Our Future
Too Simple to Fail, a new book from Oxford University Press, is a review of thirty years of research into how children learn. The author, R. Barker Bausell, a biostatistician in the School of Nursing at the University of Maryland, has come to the conclusion that classroom instruction is hopelessly obsolete, and that the answer to the deficiencies of our educational system is the tutorial model.
Three Things the NY Times Article on Florida Virtual School Missed
The recent New York Times article, “In Florida, Virtual Classrooms with No Teachers,” takes us to Miami, where schools are using a blended learning approach. There’s a lot to discuss here, including the fact that the implementation has been rocky — most notably because several of the schools made no effort to tell either students or parents that they wouldn’t be in traditional classrooms. But as we’ve seen in the past with the Times, the article is framed by an assumption that the traditional classroom is best.
Lessons for Online Learning
Charter schools’ successes and mistakes have a lot to teach virtual educators
Charter schools’ successes and mistakes have a lot to teach virtual educators
Lights, Camera, Action!
Using video recordings to evaluate teachers
Using video recordings to evaluate teachers
Texas Tackles the Data Problem
New system will give teachers information they can use
New system will give teachers information they can use
Austan Who?
The headline in the Washington Post was “Austan Goolsbee: triathlete, improv comedian, economist.” Given the state of the economy, Obama’s new Chairman of the Council on Economic Advisers might need the improv comedian talents more than anything. But what might not show up in the quick list of resume references is an interesting story Goolsbee and Jonathan Guryan (both professors of economics at the U. of Chicago) penned for Education Next in 2006: World Wide Wonder? Measuring the (non-)impact of Internet subsidies to public schools
Mathews on Saving Schools
In his commentary on my book, Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, Jay Mathews doubts that he will find any time soon “something of the new electronic era that significantly increases achievement in reading and writing for all kids.”
An Apple Campus
There is an interesting development at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Parents have been informed that every student must use an Apple MacBook in his and her work.
Bye-Bye Blackboards
Interactive and expensive, whiteboards come to the classroom
Interactive and expensive, whiteboards come to the classroom
What We Can Learn from Utah’s Open High
In Utah, around 7 percent of the students are now going to charter schools, creating financial conflicts of interest between district and charter schools, as both sides are trying to persuade the state legislature that they need more of the dwindling pot of state dollars. Into this mix has walked the Open High School of Utah, a charter school that is offering a virtual education that is based almost entirely on curricular materials available free-of-cost from open sources.
High School 2.0
Can Philadelphia’s School of the Future live up to its name?
Can Philadelphia’s School of the Future live up to its name?
Tennis Players Choose Virtual Schooling
Video: Three of America’s top junior tennis players (Mallory Burdette, Sloane Stephens, and Jarmere Jenkins) talk with Education Next about attending a virtual high school.
Data Dreams Can Come True
States applying for Race to the Top grants receive points for building statewide longitudinal data systems and using that data to improve instruction. But how might that achievement data be used, and what other data could supplement it? Chester Finn’s “what next?” column in the most recent issue of Ed Next imagines the ways that [...]
