Author Archive

SPED rules for virtual schools

Feds Say Virtual Schools Need to Follow Special Ed Rules

By Dian Schaffhauser 08/25/16

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/08/25/feds-say-virtual-schools-need-to-follow-special-ed-rules.aspx

Dear Colleague” letter issued to virtual schools by the U.S. Department of Education. The agency isn’t creating or imposing “new legal requirements,” is intended to help state education agencies and districts meet their existing obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

feedback at virtualschools@ed.gov.

The letter is available on the Education Department website here.

over-achieving students ignored

Age-Based, Grade-Level System Ignores Huge Numbers of Over-Achieving Students

By Dian Schaffhauser 08/23/16

https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/08/23/age-based-grade-level-system-ignores-huge-numbers-of-over-achieving-students.aspx

How Can So Many Students Be Invisible? Large Percentages of American Students Perform Above Grade Level,” produced in the Institute of Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, examined data sets from five sources: the Common Core-based Smarter Balanced assessments in Wisconsin and California, Florida’s standards assessments, the Northwest Evaluation Association’s (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

between 15 percent and 45 percent of students enter elementary classrooms each fall learning above grade level. The result is that they’re not challenged enough in school, and teacher time and school resources are wasted in trying to teach them stuff they already know.

The entire report is available on the institute’s website. http://education.jhu.edu/edpolicy/commentary/PerformAboveGradeLevel

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more on gifted students in this IMS blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gifted

Pokemon Go for or against it

New assignment this fall in Minnesota schools: deal with ‘Pokémon Go’

Education Solvejg Wastvedt · ·
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/08/26/pokemon-go-school-concerns
The company accepts requests for removals via its support website
1. School administrator John Wetter took on an odd assignment over summer break at the request of one of his principals: Track down any PokéStops or gyms lurking on Hopkins school grounds. He asked game developer Niantic Labs to remove it from the game.
So far the game has only been blocked at sites such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
2. Some educators are embracing the interest in “Pokémon Go” as a potential teaching tool. “Any time something becomes a big pop culture sensation, as a teacher I try to just kind of ride the coattails,”
At St. Paul’s Washington Technology Magnet School, educator Eric Gunderson made a spinoff of “Pokémon Go” that students can play on their district-issued iPads. He created it using an augmented reality app called Aurasma. He printed pictures of eggs on sheets of paper. Get the printed egg in view of the iPad’s camera, and an animated animal appears onscreen, a knockoff Pokémon.
The Minnesota Department of Education said it hasn’t gotten inquiries from school districts concerned about “Pokémon Go.” A spokesperson for the Osseo Area School District noted that students face many distractions. “Our leaders are very skilled in dealing with whatever the distraction of the day is,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

gradecraft is lms plus gaming

An LMS to Support ‘Gameful’ Learning

Seeking to bring the qualities of well-designed games to pedagogical assessment, the University of Michigan created a learning management system that uses gaming elements such as competition, badges and unlocks to provide students with a personalized pathway through their courses.

By David Raths 08/24/16

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/08/24/an-lms-to-support-gameful-learning.aspx

UM School of Information and School of Education

a new type of learning management system called GradeCraft. GradeCraft borrows game elements such as badges and unlocks to govern students’ progress through a course. With unlocks, for example, you have to complete a task before moving to the next level.

Written in Ruby on Rails and hosted on Amazon Web Services, GradeCraft was created by a small team of students and faculty with additional software support from Ann Arbor-based developer Alfa Jango. Their work received support from UM’s Office of Digital Education and Innovation and the Office of the Provost. GradeCraft can work as a stand-alone platform or in conjunction with a traditional LMS via the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) protocol.

Here is how it works: Instructors create a course shell within GradeCraft (similar to the process with any LMS). Students use a tool called the “Grade Predictor” to plan a personalized pathway through the course, making predictions about both what they will do and how they will perform. When assignments are graded, predictions turn into progress; students are then nudged to revisit their semester plan, reassessing what work is available and how well they need to do to succeed overall. Students are able to independently choose an assessment pathway that matches their interests within the framework of learning objectives for the course.

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more on LMS in this blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=gaming

more on gaming in this blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=lms

more on badges in this blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=badges

Snapchat vs. Instagram

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more on Snapchat in this IMS blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=snapchat

more on Instagram in this IMS blog

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=instagram

surveying social media use on campus

Montana State University Library Social Media Survey: http://www.lib.montana.edu/social-media-survey/

A Survey of K-12 Educators on Social Networking and Content

http://www.edweb.net/fimages/op/K12Survey.pdf

SEAL Canada; https://www.cais.ca/uploaded/Professional_Development/socialmediasurveydraft3.pdf

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Reach of leading social media and networking sites used by teenagers and young adults in the United States as of February 2016

http://www.statista.com/statistics/199242/social-media-and-networking-sites-used-by-us-teenagers/

Study Finds 77% of College Students Use Snapchat Daily, Feb 24, 2014: http://mashable.com/2014/02/24/snapchat-study-college-students/#HMZ348OWhGqJ

Student Panel Survey: Social Media Executive Summary

posted on

https://www.nacs.org/research/insightsintostudentbehavior/tabid/4856/ArticleID/374/Student-Panel-Survey-Social-Media-Executive-Summary.aspx

The Evolution of Social Media Use Among College Students

Feb 19 2014
March 2, 2016 By Carl Straumsheim

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/02/study-explores-impact-social-media-texting-email-use

While some faculty members are hesitant to contact students on whichever social media platform is in vogue, others have explored texting as an alternative to email.

The paper, which is being presented at next month’s Information and Telecommunications Education and Research Association conference, also recommends colleges should consider using texting and social media platforms to reach students. However, the findings still suggest email can be an effective method of communication.

How Millennials use and control social media, Published

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Social Media Usage Trends Among Higher Education Faculty ;
2011-social-media-report
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K-12 Teachers in America Remain Reluctant to Integrate Social Media in the Classroom, Finds University of Phoenix Teacher Survey http://www.phoenix.edu/news/releases/2016/08/k-12-teachers-remain-reluctant-social-media.html

 

Smart Future: Knowledge Trends that will Change the World

As you may be aware that TERI is a global think-tank knowledge driven organisation working in the field of Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development. TERI is organising it’s one of the flagship event ICDL 2016 from

13 to 16 December, 2016 at India Habitat Center, Lodhi Road, New Delhi. The theme of the conference is “Smart Future: Knowledge Trends that will Change the World”. (URL: http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/)

 

As we understand that in the current scenario all enterprises are heading towards Digital Transformation, which derives business value for an effective decision making process. To be a part of this transformation strategy, all stakeholders at various levels should be aware of certain pertinent components, which are mentioned below. This conference is a unique platform to brainstorm and network with leading speakers and digital luminaries. Some of the major thrust areas to be covered are:

 

  1. Innovation and Knowledge Management
  2. Big Data and Analytics
  3. Social Media and Analytics
  4. Internet of Things (IoT)

 

To get yourself and your team to engage in one of these issues, we would request you to kindly share your skills, expertise and experiences with audiences in this thought provoking and stimulating interactive platform of ICDL 2016.

 

For your reference and further information about this event, please refer to 1. Brochure http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/pdf/Brochure.pdf

  1. Background paper

http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl/pdf/ICDL_BackgroundPaper/

 

Do write back to us for further queries, if any.

For further Information Contact:

Mr V V S Parihar

ICDL 2016 Secretariat

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) India Habitat Centre Complex, Lodhi Road, New Delhi-110003, India

Tel: +91 11 24682100 or 41504900

Fax: 24682144 Email: ICDL2016@teri.res.in, vijayvsp@teri.res.in

Website: http://www.teriin.org/events/icdl

Zygmunt Bauman Social media are a trap

Zygmunt Bauman: “Social media are a trap.”The Polish-born sociologist is skeptical about the possibilities for political change

Since developing his theory of liquid modernity in the late 1990s – which describes our age as one in which “all agreements are temporary, fleeting, and valid only until further notice” – he has become a leading figure in the field of sociology.
Q. You are skeptical of the way people protest through social media, of so-called “armchair activism,” and say that the internet is dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the social networks are the new opium of the people?
A. The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.

students privacy and social media

http://wpri.com/2015/11/14/bill-seeks-to-shield-students-social-media-info/

The proposed social media privacy law, scheduled to be considered by the state Senate Wednesday, bars any institution from asking or requiring an applicant or enrolled student to disclose a user name or password for a personal social media account.

Under the bill, a student could also not be prevented from participating in extracurricular activities if they refuse to disclose social media accounts or provide a list of contacts associated with those accounts.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy

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