New Classrooms, a nonprofit geared toward personalizing education in schools, is expanding its “Teach to One: Math” model to 13,000 students at 40 schools in 10 states and the District of Columbia
According to New Classrooms, Teach to One (TTO) modernizes the predominant, century-old model of one teacher to 25 or more students teaching from one textbook to a personalized learning experience for every student
To learn more about New Classrooms and its TTO model, visit the company’s website.
Are there any other platforms like Zaption that you recommend?
For K12 users, we recommend you look at EDpuzzle or Nearpod. Both allow you to quickly create high-quality interactive content. For Higher Ed, we encourage you to look at HapYak or H5P – an open source interactive media platform. Finally, Vizia offers another simple but effective option for users of any kind.
Zaption is shutting down. Thankfully, educators have alternatives
For those looking to replace Zaption, Vizia is a viable alternative for creating interactive video content.
While badging and digital credentialing are gaining acceptance in the business world and, to some extent, higher education, K-12 educators — and even students — are slower to see the value.
That’s when the MacArthur Foundation highlighted the winning projects of its Badges for Lifelong Learning competition at the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Chicago. The competition, co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, had attracted nearly 100 competitors a year earlier. The winners shared $2 million worth of development grants.
Evidence of Lifelong Learning
A digital badge or credential is a validation, via technology, that a person has earned an accomplishment, learned a skill or gained command of specific content. Typically, it is an interactive image posted on a web page and connected to a certain body of information that communicates the badge earner’s competency.
Credly is a company that offers off-the-shelf credentialing and badging for organizations, companies and educational institutions. One of its projects, BadgeStack, which has since been renamed BadgeOS, was a winner in the 2013 MacArthur competition. Virtually any individual or organization can use its platform to determine criteria for digital credentials and then award them, often taking advantage of an open-source tool like WordPress. The credential recipient can then use the BadgeOS platform to manage the use of the credential, choosing to display badges on social media profiles or uploading achievements to a digital resume, for instance.
Finkelstein and others see, with the persistently growing interest in competency-based education (CBE), that badging is a way to assess and document competency.
There are obstacles, though, to universal acceptance of digital credentialing. For one, not every community, company or organization sees a badge as something of value.
When a player earns points for his or her success in a game, those points have no value outside of the environment in which the game is played. For points, badges, credentials — however you want to define them — to be perceived as evidence of competency, they have to have portability and be viewed with value outside of their own environment.
In the research project led by Ph.D. candidate Gabriel Culbertson, 48 students were recruited to play two versions of the game. In one group, students were connected via a chat interface with another player who could, if they wanted, offer advice on how to play. The second group played a version of the game in which they were definitely required to collaborate on quests.
The research group found the students in the second so-called “high-interdependence” group spent more time communicating and, as a consequence, learned more words.
The research then expanded to a larger group of 186 Reddit users who were learning Japanese. After reviewing gameplay logs, interviews and Reddit posts, they found that those who spent the most time engaged in the game learned more new words and phrases.
The Cornell research team presented its research results at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in May in San Jose, CA.
Cast for Education is an app that works on Chrome OS, macOS and Windows. The app is launching in a public beta today and is available as a free download. The difference between Cast and other screen sharing solutions is network-independence.
I recent post from LITA listserv is seeking an input on libraries maintaining BYOD-friendly in some corner in the building:
From: Eng-Ziskin, Susanna M Sent: Monday, May 23, 2016 4:05 PM To: ‘lita-l@lists.ala.org’ <lita-l@lists.ala.org> Subject: Tablet technology & instruction survey
Does your library have an iPad/tablet cart, or a dedicated classroom with mobile devices? Have you been teaching library research sessions using iPads or tablets? We invite you to participate in a study that aims to take a look at how tablets are used in library instruction, and the experiences of those who administer and maintain them. We’re hoping to learn about the experiences of others who also use mobile devices for instruction, as our own have been mixed.
Participation is voluntary and this survey is anonymous. Participants must be at least 18 years of age. If you complete the survey your consent to participate will be assumed. The survey will be available until 7/1/2016.
Last year, MC 218 was supposed to be remodeled. My suggestion to bring MC 218 to the modern standards of a library, as per LITA’s survey, was completely ignored as reported to SCSU library director:
Want to be smarter? Heredity is not the barrier you might think it is, says University of Michigan social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, PhD. After analyzing decades of intelligence research, Nisbett maintains that past studies give too much credit to heritability’s role in intelligence. Culture, social class and education, he argues, matter more, and explain racial gaps in IQ.
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What’s The Difference Between Children’s Books In China And The U.S.?
psychologist Cecilia Cheung, a professor at University of California Riverside.
Cheung notes that children in China consistently score higher on academic tests compared to children in the U.S. and Mexico. But she says more research is needed to determine how much of that is due to the storybooks or even to the larger differences in cultural values that the books reflect. Other completely unrelated factors, such as different teaching techniques could be at work.
In the meantime, Cheung says her study suggests all three cultures might have something to learn from each other.
For instance American parents might want to take a cue from Chinese storybooks and supplement their children’s reading with more tales that promote a view of intelligence as changeable.
After all, says Cheung, if you think intelligence is gained through effort, then when you’re confronted with a challenge or even an outright failure, “you just put more effort into it. You try to learn from the experience and you think about different ways of approaching the problem rather than saying, ‘No, I’m just not smart and I’m just going to give up right away.'”