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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31212
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 - 8:42 pm: | 
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Children learning to read later do catch up
Posted by Michael Keany / School Leadership 2.0
December 18, 2012
 This is hugely important. It means that a lot of time is wasted trying to force children to do what they're not ready to do. Children can learn lots without reading, and sometimes the ability to read may slow or frustrate some kinds of learning. Through massive data collection from online learning adventures, artificial intelligence can predict what a student should be learning at every stage, and it may shift some kinds of learning by one or more years depending on the particular student. No teacher can do that because of lock-step, one-size-fits-all, classroom instruction.
Finding out whether the later reading achievement of children differs depending on when they learn to read is methodologically difficult. However, a new article in Early Childhood Research Quarterly shows that by age 10, children who had learned to read at seven had caught up with those learning to read at five. Later starters had no long-term disadvantages. The article presents the results of two New Zealand studies, one employing three pairs of longitudinal samples and the other cross-sectional, spanning the first six years of school, for students with a reading instruction age of five versus seven years. Analyses accounted for receptive vocabulary, reported parental income and education, school/community affluence, classroom teaching, home literacy environment, reading self-concept, and age.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31205
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 17, 2012 - 9:56 pm: |
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Online Education Thriving in India’s Small Cities
Julia Lawrence / Education News
Dec 17, 2012
The adoption of online education might be slow in the United States, but in India online education providers are thriving. Courses delivered over the internet provide an unparalleled solution to the problem – common in India – of bringing academics to parts of the country too destitute or too remote to support a high-quality, well-funded university.
That the solution is working can be judged from the fact that the largest growth in online education is taking place in smaller cities and more rural parts of the country. According to providers, in the past year alone, the number of people who take advantage of online courses has more than doubled. MeritNation.com, one of the largest providers competing in the increasingly crowded online education marketplace, reports 90,000 new users joining every month.
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The demand isn’t limited to older students. Although the majority of interest is from those in the higher grades or even in college, parents are increasingly encouraging kids from lower grades to enroll in online courses as well.
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India is kicking our butts. Why? Because of the vested interests of 3 million teachers.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31196
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, December 16, 2012 - 9:29 pm: |
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Digital Textbook Experiment Hits a $2 Million Snag
Julia Lawrence / Education News
Dec 14, 2012
Fairfax County, Virginia schools will be purchasing traditional textbooks for their students after a short trial with web-based mathematics texts hit a snag.
The district chose to proceed with the web-based books for math after an abbreviated pilot program that employed the digital texts for social studies proved to be a success. However, shortly after deploying math e-textbooks, parents complained that some students lacked access to a computer outside of school — something required for the use of digital texts.
Parents also raised concerns with the books necessitating the purchase of an expensive broadband internet package. In addition, students were having issues with usability of the new texts, saying they were difficult to understand and confusing.
Compatibility issues also plagued the texts; sometimes they wouldn’t work with some of the most popular digital gadgets like Apple’s iPhone and iPad tablet.
Being hit by Sandy last month created additional problems. Students who lived for days without electricity were unable to complete homework assignments or to keep up with their studies. To avoid similar problems going forward, some parents ended up spending up to $100 to purchase a hard copy of the book for their kids.
While addressing the problem at a school board meeting earlier this week, district administrators said that schools facing difficulties should feel free to purchase hard copies for use in class and at home. In total, equipping each student with a copy will cost the district roughly $2 million.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31189
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, December 16, 2012 - 8:05 pm: |
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Race to the Top takes Middletown by surprise
Plans for new technologies, staff, training
Pauline Liu / Middletown (NY) Times Herald-Record
12/12/12
Some middle and high school students in the Middletown School District wore big smiles on Tuesday. It wasn't just because Middletown had just won $20 million in grants in the federal Race to the Top district competition, which was reason enough. For them, part of the thrill was that part of the award will be used to buy 5,000 tablets like iPads for their own instructional use.
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Spending plans
Uses for $20 million include:
• Introduce a two-year kindergarten program to assist new students in the district who are not "kindergarten-ready."
• One-to-one technology initiative. Students in grades six to 12 will receive tablets like iPads for classroom use. District officials want to buy about 5,000 tablets their students.
• Use of software to study each student's individual learning style in order to teach them more effectively.
• Syracuse University Project Advance. The district plans to offer 26 credits worth of college level courses through Syracuse University to qualified juniors and seniors by next September. Students who receive free or discounted lunch can take the classes for free.
• Creation of software that will simulate a year in the life of a teacher or school administrator by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. The district plans to make the simulators available for free to anyone who is interested.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31174
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, December 13, 2012 - 9:50 pm: |
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Illness closes Galway schools
By Scott Waldman / Albany (NY) Times Union
December 13, 2012
GALWAY — The Galway school district is taking the unusual step of closing every district school because of a outbreak of illness.
The district is closed because of viral type symptoms including headaches, fever and vomiting, according to its website.
Students and employees should not come in except those who are "thoroughly cleaning and sanitizing the building in an effort to help keep everyone healthy."
All after-school and evening classes are canceled as well.
In real 21st century schools, students wouldn't have to miss a step in their educations. They could continue learning online at their own pace regardless of how sick their peers were.
Moreover, epidemics like this would likely be far less frequent since bringing all children together everyday would be completely unnecessary. Public schools cause a lot of disease and lost productivity. Creating 21st century schools is not just about excellence in education, it's about health and safety -- you know ... what every administrator and school board member says comes first. It doesn't, but that's what they say.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31170
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - 9:39 pm: |
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Questions Surround Software that Adapts to Students
By carefully logging students’ every action online, a company called Knewton says, it can personalize questions and lessons to help people learn faster. Skeptics say that’s not proven.
By Tom Simonite / MIT Technology Review
Nov 26, 2012
Notice, that it's a private-sector company doing the work to provide our children with a 21st century education. Better learning at much lower costs. Public school teachers simply don't have the qualifications and skills needed to transform education.
Although the intricacies of human psychology may never be fully explained, Internet companies seem to have some parts of it figured out. By tracking millions of users, Google, Facebook, and the gaming company Zynga have learned how to position every “I agree” button, text box, and virtual cow to entice people to click.
A company called Knewton, in New York City, is now trying to use similar techniques in service of an arguably more laudable goal—helping students learn faster.
The startup, founded in 2008, offers courses like SAT preparation and remedial math that are mostly aimed at people about to start or return to college. They are offered online by schools including Arizona State University. Last November, Knewton signed a deal to use its technology in digital classes being produced by the educational giant Pearson.
“When a student takes a course powered by Knewton, we are continuously evaluating their performance, what others have done with that material before, and what [they] know,” says David Kuntz, VP of research at Knewton. He is a veteran of the education business who pioneered the introduction of computer algorithms to the design of standardized tests, like the LSAT.
Knewton calls its approach “adaptive learning,” and tracking which questions a student gets right or wrong is just the starting point. Knewton, which has raised $54 million in investments, says its software also monitors how long students take to answer a question and whether they revisit it, and even draws clues from a student’s mouse movements. “We know if they are waving their mouse around trying to decide between option A and C,” says Kuntz.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31166
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - 8:20 pm: |
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City Fails in Bid For School Funds
By LISA FLEISHER / WALL STREET JOURNAL
Dec 11, 2012
New York City fell short of winning $40 million on Tuesday through the federal Race to the Top grant program after losing crucial points for failing to provide budget, timeline and personnel information.
You bet it didn't provide timeline information. NY and its City love to milk the feds for as much as they can without providing substantive change. To win RTTT money in the last round, the state doubled the charter school cap. Yet, the number of charters schools in the state is practically unchanged, contrary to federal expectations. Of course, there will be no repercussions. Fortunately, the feds seem to be onto the game.
Reviewers gave the city's plan to personalize student learning high marks on its merits, with one describing the application as "an outstanding comprehensive and coherent reform vision."
But they repeatedly docked points for missing information about when the city would implement the ideas and who would be responsible for the changes.
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As part of the application, the city proposed transforming 70 of its more than 1,600 district schools by shifting to online courses, creating "personalized learning plans" for each student and allowing students to learn at their own pace.
Look at that! NY finally wants to shift to online courses. That means at least another generation of students will graduate in our anachronistic public school system.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31131
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, December 08, 2012 - 10:22 am: |
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They Know What You're Shopping For
'You're looking at the premium package, right?' Companies today are increasingly tying people's real-life identities to their online browsing habits.
By JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES and JEREMY SINGER-VINE / WALL STREET JOURNAL with a few comments
Dec. 7, 2012
Students need to be taught that they are being watched, generally to their economic and personal detriment.
What kind of business thinks it's ethical to pass on personal information about its customers? It is the loss of ethics in business that contributes to growing government powers to watch and monitor everything.
It would be easy to stop the gathering of private information. When government doesn't want you to have the right to express your opinions, if it can't outright stop you from speaking, it says, "Sure, you can speak, but you need a $1 million liability policy to pay for damages that may be inflicted by others who hear what you have to save, even if the acts that cause the damages are criminal. No insurance, no right to speak."
Make businesses that hold private information pay confiscatory insurance rates for doing so. If they pass on the information to subsidiaries, partners or the home office, make them pay even more. If they pass it on to outsiders, make them pay even more. If politicians won't outlaw unethical practices, the least they can do is to make the prohibitively expensive.
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The widening ability to associate people's real-life identities with their browsing habits marks a privacy milestone, further blurring the already unclear border between our public and private lives. In pursuit of ever more precise and valuable information about potential customers, tracking companies are redefining what it means to be anonymous.
Consider Dataium LLC, the company that can track car shoppers like Mr. Morar. Dataium said that shoppers' Web browsing is still anonymous, even though it can be tied to their names. The reason: Dataium does not give dealers click-by-click details of people's Web surfing history but rather an analysis of their interests.
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In separate research, the Journal examined what happens when people logged in to roughly 70 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user's real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies. One major dating site passed along a person's self-reported sexual orientation and drug-use habits to advertising companies.
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Three Years of WSJ Privacy Insights
The Wall Street Journal is conducting a long-running investigation into the profound transformation of personal privacy in America.
Selected findings:
Two students are outed as gay—provoking a crisis within their families—by a Facebook privacy loophole . (10/12/12)
Suspicious spouses are taking investigations into their own hands as snooping technologies become cheaper and easier to use. (10/6/12)
Americans' license plates are now being tracked not only by the government, but also by repo men who hope to profit from the information. (10/2/12)
Google bypassed the privacy settings on millions of Web browsers on Apple iPhones and computers— tracking the online activities of people who intended that kind of monitoring to be blocked. (2/17/12)
The government follows the movements of thousands of Americans a year by secretly monitoring their cellphone records . (9/9/11)
iPhone and Android apps secretly shared data about their users, a Journal investigation found. (12/10/10)
Top apps on Facebook transmit personal identifying details to tracking companies, a Journal investigation found. (10/18/10)
One of the fastest growing online businesses is that of spying on Americans as they browse the Web. (6/30/10)
Plus, the global surveillance bazaar , a secretive phone-tracking "stingray" and RapLeaf's clever way of figuring out Web surfers' real names .
See full privacy coverage
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Ashkan Soltani contributed to this article.
A version of this article appeared December 7, 2012, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: They Know What You're Shopping For.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31097
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, December 02, 2012 - 10:03 pm: |
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Study: Technology in Schools Lags Use of Tech at Home
Julia Lawrence / Education News
Nov 29, 2012
Attention, parents — it appears that you’re on the cutting edge of technology. At least when compared to K-12 schools. A recent study once again points to a disconnect between the role technology plays in the lives of students inside and outside of class. Although more than a third of middle-schoolers now report using smart [...]
Attention, parents — it appears that you’re on the cutting edge of technology. At least when compared to K-12 schools.
A recent study once again points to a disconnect between the role technology plays in the lives of students inside and outside of class. Although more than a third of middle-schoolers now report using smart phones when doing homework, the number of schools that use them to aid traditional instruction continues to lag substantially.
The use gap is especially disheartening of light of the finding that students in schools that use gadgets like smartphones in class report more interest in subjects like science, technology and mathematics. With the ongoing shortage of STEM professionals in the United States, this kind of interest is something that schools should be doing their best to encourage – they should be embracing the use of technology during lesson time rather than discouraging it.
The data comes from a national survey commissioned by the Verizon Foundation and performed by TRU. The results show that more than two thirds of students polled are not allowed to use tablets to learn while in school, and even fewer schools – less than 12% – allow the use of smartphones for this purpose.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31060
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, November 25, 2012 - 8:18 pm: |
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Students who missed class after Sandy now have online option
by Rachel Cromidas, Gotham Schools
Nov 20, 2012
To help students whose homes and schools were damaged in Hurricane Sandy make up for the days of learning time they lost, the Department of Education is expanding its online course offerings to them.
Most schools have returned to working order since Sandy left dozens of them flooded or without power, and attendance is slowly rising. But department officials say they are concerned that students who missed many days of school, or continue to miss school because their home situations prevent them from getting to school, will fall behind.
The solution they’ve devised is to expand online courses that some schools are already offering to more students. The courses will be open to most students whose homes or schools were affected by the hurricane, and will count for credit towards graduation. The opportunity has the potential to reach students who otherwise might not be able to make up classwork they have missed during the school day. But it requires internet access, which many still lack.
“The goal is to help kids get as much instruction as possible,” said department spokeswoman Connie Pankratz. “We were able to build this up really quickly beause we had this platform already existing.”
She said the specific program offerings and the cost to the department will be determined by the demand of the students who end up enrolling, and thousands are eligible. But the cost is not likely to be high because the organizations that created the software are allowing the department to use them for free.
The courses will be available to students in grades six through 12, in core subject areas and electives, such as English, economics, calculus, world history and Spanish. To enroll, students must first fill out an online form detailing which courses they would like to continue taking online from among the courses they have been taking in school.
The courses have already been developed through the department’s iZone and iLearn programs, which have spearheaded the creation of online courses and other digital learning tools, and meet state requirements. They will be taught by about 60 iZone teachers who have regular course-loads during the school day and will be paid per session for their extra work. Those teachers will also hold weekly office hours for students via the phone or video conferencing platforms, officials said.
About 200 schools already belong to the iZone and use some of its tools, and the department hopes to further bolster its online learning offerings with Race to the Top funds, if it wins the district-level competition that it entered this month.
Officials suggested that displaced students who don’t have internet access at home should go to local libraries to sign on. Library officials said that library branches around the city will welcome students.
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