Education, MOOCs, Learning

Tweets about #MOOC OR #education OR #learning

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Teachers, Training, How to Get Better

Getting Better at Getting Better: ".... In one area above all, the failure to improve is especially egregious: education. Schools are, on the whole, little better than they were three decades ago; test scores have barely budged since the famous “A Nation at Risk” report came out, in the early nineteen-eighties. This isn’t for lack of trying, exactly. We now spend far more per pupil than we once did. We’ve shrunk class sizes, implemented national standards, and amped up testing. We’ve increased competition by allowing charter schools. And some schools have made it a little easier to remove ineffective teachers. None of these changes have made much of a difference. All sorts of factors, of course, shape educational performance. For one thing, the United States has more poor kids relative to other developed countries, and poor kids do worse on tests, on average, all over the world. Schools can’t make up for that gap entirely. But there is one crucial factor in how kids fare that schools do control; namely, the quality of their teachers. Unfortunately, as two new books, Elizabeth Green’s “Building a Better Teacher” (Norton) and Dana Goldstein’s “The Teacher Wars” (Doubleday), point out, teacher training in most of the United States has usually been an afterthought. Most new teachers enter the classroom with a limited set of pedagogical skills, since they get little experience beforehand, and most education courses don’t say much about how you run a class. Then teachers get little ongoing, sustained training to help them improve. If American teachers—unlike athletes or manufacturing workers—haven’t got much better over the past three decades, it’s largely because their training hasn’t, either...." (read more at the link above)

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Gamification and Education (video)

What is Gamification? -

Gamification and game-base learning can make coursework exciting! To learn more, contact ITG@brown.edu Published on Nov 24, 2014

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Disruptive Teaching Technologies, Recognising Innovative Credentials (video)

Disruptive Teaching Technologies - Recognising innovative credentials -
Higher Education Forum / September 30th 2014:
Massive open online courses and personalized learning systems offer the promise of low overhead and democratized education. However, are these alternative degrees given the same weight in the eyes of employers? Will high-skill jobs always require a traditional credential? Have these new teaching technologies really disrupted the traditional education model? Published on Oct 20, 2014

Anant Agarwal
Chief executive, edX

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Google Drive for Education, Free 21st Century Backpack for Students

Google for Education: Announcing Drive for Education: The 21st century backpack for students: "Drive for Education will be available to all Google Apps for Education customers at no charge and will include: Unlimited storage: No more worrying about how much space you have left or about which user needs more gigabytes. Drive for Education supports individual files up to 5TB in size and will be available in coming weeks. Vault: Google Apps Vault, our solution for search and discovery for compliance needs, will be coming free to all Apps for Education users by the end of the year. Enhanced Auditing: Reporting and auditing tools and an Audit API easily let you see the activity of a file, are also on the way." (read more at link above)

Google announces Drive for Education: free, unlimited storage & more security | VentureBeat | Education | by Harrison Weber: "Google touts that “30 million students and educators” are currently using Google Apps for Education — out of the 190 million people using Google Drive globally. And Google clearly intends to lure in new education-centric users with today’s announcement."

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Learning, Education and the Internet: Rebecca Eynon | Oxford Internet Institute (Webcast)

Research Presentations 2013: Rebecca Eynon | Oxford Internet Institute - Webcasts:
Date - 08 November 2013
Speakers: Rebecca Eynon
Description: Rebecca Eynon summarises key areas of her research at the OII

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Common Core Standards, Education, Things Students Should Know

What’s actually in the Common Core? - Everything you need to know about the Common Core - Vox: "The Common Core is a list of things students should know and know how to do at each grade level in math and language arts. The language arts standards include expectations for writing, speaking, and reading both fiction and nonfiction. Many of the standards show up over and over at every grade level: writing age-appropriate opinion pieces that back up arguments with evidence, for one. ..."

more info: http://www.corestandards.org/

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Chromebooks and Education

Chromebooks and education: A perfect match | ZDNet: "What makes Chromebooks attractive to the Education market? There are many features and factors that make Chromebooks especially attractive to teachers and students:

Price; Security; Light weight and small form factor; Instant On; Ease of use; Web only applications; Personalization; Use of peripherals (mice, keyboards, monitors, SD cards, USB devices); Wireless networking; Large number of quality applications; Multimedia capability; Video conferencing; Management applications . . ." (read more at link above)

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Education as the Civil Rights Issue of the 21st Century

RealClearMarkets - Education: The Civil Rights Issue of the 21st Century: " . . . Every special interest group claims to be battling on the grounds of civil rights, but none can make as strong of a case as the parents whose children are required to attend a failing school. These parents and their children have been discriminated against. Opponents of school choice have essentially declared minorities and those below the poverty line as unqualified to make decisions regarding their child's education. It is just astounding when you think about it. And it is this reason alone that allows many to declare school choice as the biggest U.S. civil rights issue of the 21st century. . . ."

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Amazon, The Kindle, Education

Amazon: 5 bold predictions for 2014 | Internet & Media - CNET News: "2. The Kindle, your tutor
Thanks to Mayday, your Kindle Fire can tell you how to change the brightness of your tablet or how to order an e-book. So why couldn't it also teach your kids math? If Amazon's acquisition of TenMarks is any indication, the company may be looking to delve into education. TenMarks creates math practice programs and is a teaching tool. When Amazon purchased it in October, it said TenMarks would develop new education apps for Kindle tablets. It's not a huge stretch to see a potential marriage of TenMarks' education resources and the Mayday service -- perhaps a premium option that allows for tutors to help with math equations via one-sided video tutelage ... Couple that with Amazon's newly released free-time features on a tablet designed for penny-pinching parents, and Amazon makes the Kindle the ideal children's tablet."

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Education, Google, Chromebooks

As Chromebooks catch on, 2014 promises more models | Mobile - CNET News: " . . . How popular are they? Well, Chromebooks, such as the Acer C270 and Samsung offering, seem to be ensconced almost permanently at the top of Amazon's bestselling laptop list. And a report from the NPD Group last month showed the Google Chrome-based laptops grabbed about one-fifth of sales in commercial laptop channels -- which the report says is largely shipments to educational institutions -- in a 12-month period, up from virtually nothing the year before. All of the above is spurring the world's largest PC maker, HP, to put more emphasis on Google's Chrome OS. HP now sells both a 14-inch Chromebook and an 11-inch model. One reason for their popularity is price. They're typically priced between $200 and $300. In addition, some organizations, like those in education, only need Google services such as Google Docs and Google Drive, according to NPD. . ." (read more at link above)

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Amazon, Education, 2014

Amazon: 5 bold predictions for 2014 | Internet & Media - CNET News: "2. The Kindle, your tutor
Thanks to Mayday, your Kindle Fire can tell you how to change the brightness of your tablet or how to order an e-book. So why couldn't it also teach your kids math? If Amazon's acquisition of TenMarks is any indication, the company may be looking to delve into education. TenMarks creates math practice programs and is a teaching tool. When Amazon purchased it in October, it said TenMarks would develop new education apps for Kindle tablets. It's not a huge stretch to see a potential marriage of TenMarks' education resources and the Mayday service -- perhaps a premium option that allows for tutors to help with math equations via one-sided video tutelage?
Crazy? Perhaps. But just crazy enough for Amazon? Certainly. Couple that with Amazon's newly released free-time features on a tablet designed for penny-pinching parents, and Amazon makes the Kindle the ideal children's tablet."

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Tablets with Google Play for Education

Introducing Tablets with Google Play for Education 
Published on Nov 13, 2013
Schools in Hillsborough, New Jersey were among the first to try out Nexus 7 tablets with Google Play for Education. See the difference it made for students, teachers, and administrators. Learn more at http://google.com/edu/tablets

"Google Play for Education is basically Google Play, but curated specifically for kids by teachers, with apps sorted by age and genre. So, for example, users can find math-based applications that are appropriate for their kindergartener, who wants to learn more maths. It also contains educational videos and classic books for the classroom. The special edition Google Play will ship to schools on the Nexus 7 from today, while the 10″ ASUS Transformer Pad and the 8″ HP Slate 8 Pro will be added early in 2014. Tablet pricing starts at $229, with management costing $30 per device." (source: The Next Web)

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Schooling-Education Gap

Schooling does NOT equal Education -- ever hear of "credentialed" but "uneducated"? That's how you get high school graduates in the US who can't read! --

The Gap Between Schooling and Education: (NY Times) - "The world has made dramatic gains in getting children — even very, very poor children — into school. But are they learning? The discomfiting conclusion from Lant Pritchett, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is, in many cases, no. . . . “Good governments do schooling, but nearly all bad governments do it, too,” Mr. Pritchett writes. But that does not mean that all that schooling has translated into much education, he says. For instance, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, less than half of surveyed children in fifth grade could read a story intended for second graders. About one in six students in fifth grade recognized letters but could not read words. What can schools and countries do to make sure students are learning while they are in school? What are the consequences of this schooling-education gap? . . . "(read more at link above)

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Amazon, TenMarks, Education

Amazon continues its move into education --

Amazon.com to Acquire TenMarks - WSJ.com: ". . . ."I've used TenMarks for the past two years at Grand View with fourth and fifth grade students to help a diverse group of students achieve in math and take ownership of their own learning," said Sujata Bhatt, founder of the Incubator School and a National Board Certified teacher who spent 11 years at Grand View Boulevard Elementary in Los Angeles Unified School District. "As we launch the Incubator School this year, we focus on technology that truly activates learning and self-starting. TenMarks's products are designed to enable both students and teachers to be in the driver's seat by seeing where they're successful and where they need to revisit. TenMarks is an important part of our math plan this year." TenMarks offers personalized online math instruction and practice in a clear, manageable format for K-12 students complete with helpful hints, video lessons, and real-time results. TenMarks's products are designed to help students be individually motivated, engaged and nurtured. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Google Enterprise Cloud in the Classroom

Going Google in schools --

Google's Enterprise Cloud - Cloud Computing - Software as a: Google says that 22% of U.S. school districts are using Chromebooks and points to its 99.9% uptime service-level agreement, SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 Type II audit and remote mobile device management, among other features important to IT...

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Book Discussion on Why Teach?

Book Discussion on Why Teach? - C-SPAN Video Library: "Mark Edmundson talked about his book, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, in which he argues that college should be more than just a place to get high-priced career training and should instead focus on teaching students how to think. He spoke at the University of Virginia Bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia." (video at link above)

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Sports, Education, Schools

Have Sports Teams Brought Down America's Schools? : The New Yorker:  . . .Polish kids now outscore American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Wroclaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind. Sports, Ripley writes, were “the core culture of Gettysburg High.” In Wroclaw, by contrast, if kids wanted to play soccer or basketball after school they had to organize the games themselves. Teachers didn’t double as coaches and the principal certainly never came out to cheer. Thus, “there was no confusion about what school was for—or what mattered to the kids’ life chances.”. . . .

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Who Will Prosper in the New World of Education

Who Will Prosper in the New World - NYTimes.com: "Within five years we will are likely to have the world’s best education, or close to it, online and free. But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work. Those who are motivated to use online resources will do much, much better in the generations to come. It’s already the case that the best students from India are at the top in many Coursera classes, putting America’s arguably less motivated bright young people to shame. “Free” doesn’t really help you if you don’t make an effort." (more at link above)

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Dismal picture of US economic recovery, education

UCLA Anderson Forecast paints dismal picture of economic recovery - latimes.com: ". . . the country's education system isn't adequately developing the workforce of the future, he said. "Regrettably we reward teachers if their students can regurgitate the information on standardized tests," he wrote. Future workers will need creative and analytical thinking skills for 21st century jobs, he said. Though GDP growth has been lackluster since the recession ended, the sustained housing recovery is expected to boost GDP over the next couple of years and further bring down the unemployment rate, Leamer said. Economists predict the U.S. jobless rate will fall to 6.9% by the end of 2014 and edge down to 6.4% by the end of 2015. GDP growth is expected to average 1.9% this year, 2.9% in 2014 and 3% in 2015."

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