for the past 21 years its organizer, the Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit known as NewSchools Venture Fund, has also put millions of dollars into novel schools in public districts
Charter schools operate with public funding, and sometimes philanthropic support, but are managed by an outside organization that is independent from local district oversight. In California, they are run by nonprofit organizations with self-elected boards. (For-profit charters are outlawed.)
Their supporters and operators—who make up the vast majority of the 1,300-plus attendees at this year’s Summit—say the model offers the flexibility needed to introduce, test and adopt new curriculum, tools and pedagogical approaches that could better serve students, particularly in low-income and minority communities.
Rocketship Education was an early showcase for blended learning, where students rotate between working on computers and in small groups with teachers. Summit Public Schools, a network of charters that now claims a nationwide footprint, promotes project-based learning assisted by an online learning platform.
But charters have also attracted an increasingly vocal opposition, who charge them with funneling students, teachers and funds from traditional district schools. Aside from raising teacher salaries, a sticking point in the recent California teachers’ strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland has been stopping the growth of charter schools.
Detractors can point to fully-virtual charters, run by for-profit companies, that have been fined for misleading claims and graduating students at rates far below those at traditional schools. At the same time, research suggests that students attending charter schools in urban regions outperform their peers in traditional school settings.
While the first decade of this century saw double-digit percentage increase in the number of such schools, it has almost entirely plateaued (at 1 percent growth) in the 2017-2018 school year, according to data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
My note: this is the first step toward the conclusion of my dissertation: the CIO in education must wear three hats: computer geek, educator and administrator.
Since edtech varies from district to district and state to state, it’s unlikely that an IT candidate will be up-to-speed on the current system in use. Alabama solves this problem by offering the Alabama Chief Technology Officer certification program.
It is critical for those in K-12 IT leadership to understand the unique customer service needs of the education industry. When technology doesn’t work, it throws a wrench into an entire day of learning. Educators need a fast fix and responsive service. Effective tech leaders will delegate by teaming up with tech-savvy teachers who can serve as school tech leaders. This strategy allows for an on-site tech expert to step in to put out fires before the tech expert arrives.
Former teachers can also make strong chief technology officers because they understand both tech and education. This allows them to build trust with the staff, which is a critical component to launching new technology initiatives.
Mental health of college students and Lee’s new book: “Delivering College Mental Health”
Join Bryan Alexander and Lee Keyes, executive director, Counseling Center at the University of Alabama, and author of Delivering Effective College Mental Health Services for an engaging live discussion on the future of mental health in higher education.
Bryan plans to ask Lee about unfolding trends in college student mental health and his thoughts around the rise in anxiety and stress. We will explore how universities are changing their approaches to student mental health and what roles technology may play in harming or helping psychological well-being.
What questions or thoughts do you have? Join and take part in the discussion!
Lee about “Mobile First” – like First Aid. Often by text and email. after Bryan asked how Adjuncts can deal with such situations, if
Counseling Centers need those additions.
Mobile First apps.
most crisis situations are a form of panic. if addressed quickly, one can prevent growing and turning into a major episode.
mindfulness can be different for the different type of issues of students.
libraries as the campus community center.
can be done on
conflation of immaturity and irresponsibility with stress and panic. Latter might be expressed in a way it is immature, but one has to meet them where they are, not judgement and denial, which will make it worse. Tough love will not help. Upholding classroom expectations and rules, but can be supportive at the same time. When pressed by time
Daniel Stanford De Paul. Cohort fundamentals of good teaching. instead of “fail safely”
We hear that smartphones can be addictive, that screen time can hurt learning, but can’t these minicomputers also teach kids about responsibility and put educational apps at their tiny fingertips?
safety
Common Sense Media, a nonprofit focused on kids and technology, says rather than considering the age of a child, focus on maturity. Some questions to consider are:
Are they responsible with their belongings?
Will they follow rules around phone use?
Would having easy access to friends benefit them for social reasons?
And do kids need to be in touch for safety reasons? If so, will an old-fashioned flip phone (like the one Sydney never charged) do the trick?
While Pew Research from 2015 puts adult smartphone ownership in the U.S. at 72 percent, there’s some debate about smartphone ownership among children. The average age for a child to get their first smartphone is currently 10.3 years according to the recent Influence Central report, Kids & Tech: The Evolution of Today’s Digital Natives.
An average of 65 percent of children aged between 8 and 11 have their own smartphone in the U.K. according to a survey by Internet Matters. That survey also found that the majority of parents would like a minimum age for smartphone ownership in the U.K. to be set at age 10.
However, some kids are using smartphones from a very young age. One study by the American Academy of Pediatrics that focused on children in an urban, low-income, minority community suggested that almost all children (96.6 percent) use mobile devices and that 75 percent have their own mobile device by the age of four.
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peer reviewed
Lauricella, A., Wartella, E., & Rideout, V. (2015). Young children’s screen time: The complex role of parent and child factors. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 36, 11–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2014.12.001
Rikuya Hosokawa, & Toshiki Katsura. (2018). Association between mobile technology use and child adjustment in early elementary school age. PLoS ONE, 13(7), e0199959. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199959
Percentage of moms whose children used device by age 2.(THE DATA PAGE)(Statistical data). (2011). Editor & Publisher, 144(10).
PERCENTAGE OF MOMS WHOSE CHILDREN USED DEVICE BY AGE 2
Gen Y moms Gen X moms
Laptop 34% 29%
Cell Phone 34% 26%
Smart Phone 33% 20%
Digital Camera 30% 18%
iPod 34% 13%
Videogame System 13% 8%
Hand-held gaming device 13% 10%
Source: Frank N. Magid & Associates, Inc./Metacafe
The study, “The Potential for Game-based Learning to Improve Outcomes for Nontraditional Students,” is based on research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and includes insights from a survey of 1,700 students, 11 in-person focus groups and interviews with teachers and school leaders. Educators said games could be especially helpful in several areas: auto-assessing whether students can apply what they’ve learned, building employment competencies and improving study skills.
Definition: Muzzy Lane characterizes them as learners who meet two of the following criteria: – returning to school after pausing their education,
– balancing education with work and family responsibilities,
– lower-income,
– English as a second language learners, or
– the first members of their families to attend college.
Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.
We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.
It is time to break up Facebook.
America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances.
More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable.
Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective.
From our earliest days, Mark used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility.
Facebook’s monopoly is also visible in its usage statistics.About 70 percent of American adults use social media, and a vast majority are on Facebook products. Over two-thirds use the core site, a third use Instagram, and a fifth use WhatsApp. By contrast, fewer than a third report using Pinterest, LinkedIn or Snapchat. What started out as lighthearted entertainment has become the primary way that people of all ages communicate online.
The F.T.C.’s biggest mistake was to allow Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2012, the newer platforms were nipping at Facebook’s heels because they had been built for the smartphone, where Facebook was still struggling to gain traction. Mark responded by buying them, and the F.T.C. approved.
The News Feed algorithm reportedly prioritized videos created through Facebook over videos from competitors, like YouTube and Vimeo. In 2012, Twitter introduced a video network called Vine that featured six-second videos. That same day, Facebook blocked Vine from hosting a tool that let its users search for their Facebook friends while on the new network.The decision hobbled Vine, which shut down four years later.
unlike Vine, Snapchat wasn’t interfacing with the Facebook ecosystem; there was no obvious way to handicap the company or shut it out. So Facebook simply copied it. (opyright law does not extend to the abstract concept itself.)
As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle).
The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Facebook seeps into every corner of our lives to capture as much of our attention and data as possible and, without any alternative, we make the trade.
Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms.
Mark used to insist that Facebook was just a “social utility,” a neutral platform for people to communicate what they wished. Now he recognizes that Facebook is both a platform and a publisher and that it is inevitably making decisions about values. The company’s own lawyers have argued in court that Facebook is a publisher and thus entitled to First Amendment protection.
As if Facebook’s opaque algorithms weren’t enough, last year we learned that Facebook executives had permanently deleted their own messages from the platform, erasing them from the inboxes of recipients; the justification was corporate security concerns.
Mark may never have a boss, but he needs to have some check on his power. The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.
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We Don’t Need Social Media
The push to regulate or break up Facebook ignores the fact that its services do more harm than good
Hughes joins a growing chorus of former Silicon Valley unicorn riders who’ve recently had second thoughts about the utility or benefit of the surveillance-attention economy their products and platforms have helped create. He is also not the first to suggest that government might need to step in to clean up the mess they made
Nick Srnicek, author of the book Platform Capitalismand a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, wrotelast month, “[I]t’s competition — not size — that demands more data, more attention, more engagement and more profits at all costs
Mystery Skype comes in. The origins of the game are unclear, but after the idea started to spread, Microsoft asked a group of six teachers to write an online guide to the game.
In addition to teaching students geography with context, Mohan believes the game can help them develop skills such as critical thinking, leadership and collaboration.
It also gives them a chance to meet people around the world — albeit only those who have access to the right technology.
Launched in 2000 as a project of the OECD, the PISA is administered every three years to nationally representative samples of students in each OECD country and in a growing number of partner countries and subnational units such as Shanghai. The 74 education systems that participated in the latest PISA study, conducted during 2009, represented more than 85% of the global economy and included virtually all of the United States’ major trading partners, making it a particularly useful source of information on U.S. students’ relative standing.
The United States’ historical advantage in terms of educational attainment has long since eroded, however. U.S. high-school graduation rates peaked in 1970 at roughly 80% and have declined slightly since, a trend often masked in official statistics by the growing number of students receiving alternative credentials, such as a General Educational Development (GED) certificate.
in many respects the U.S. higher education system remains the envy of the world. Despite recent concerns about rapidly increasing costs, declining degree completion rates, and the quality of instruction available to undergraduate students, U.S. universities continue to dominate world rankings of research productivity. The 2011 Academic Rankings of World Universities, an annual publication of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, placed eight U.S. universities within the global top 10, 17 within the top 20, and 151 within the top 500. A 2008 RAND study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense found that 63% of the world’s most highly cited academic papers in science and technology were produced by researchers based in the United States. Moreover, the United States remains the top destination for graduate students studying outside of their own countries, attracting 19% of all foreign students in 2008. This rate is nine percentage points higher than the rate of the closest U.S. competitor, the United Kingdom.
Abel, H. (1959). Polytechnische Bildung und Berufserziehung in internationaler Sicht. International Review of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft / Revue Internationale de l’Education, 5(4), 369–382. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01417254
Peterson, P., Woessmann, L., Hanushek, E., & Lastra-Anadon, C. (2011). Are U.S students ready to compete? The latest on each state’s international standing.(feature). Education Next, 11(4), 50–59.
At one time it was left to teachers and administrators to decide exactiy what level of math proficiency should be expected of students. But, increasingly, states, and the federal government itself, have established proficiency levels that students are asked to reach. A national proficiency standard was set by the board that governs the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and generally known as the nation’s report card.
a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA. The crosswalk is made possible by the fact that representative (but separate) samples of the high-school graduating Class of 2011 took the NAEP and PISA math and reading examinations. NAEP tests were taken in 2007 when the Class of 2011 was in 8th grade and PISA tested 15-year-olds in 2009, most of whom are members of the Class of 2011. Given that NAEP identified 32 percent of U.S. 8th-grade students as proficient in math, the PISA equivalent is estimated by calculating the minimum score reached by the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students participating in the 2009 PISA test. (See methodological sidebar for further details.)
++++++++++ dissertations ++++++++++++++
CAO perspectives: The role of general education objectives in career and technical programs in the United States and Europe
by Schanker, Jennifer Ballard, Ed.D., National-Louis University, 2011, 162; 3459884
My Note: synchronous vs asynchronous; Adobe Connect vs Zoom. Also Flipgrid for asynchronous videochats.
From: EDUCAUSE Listserv <BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> on behalf of Celine Greene <celine.greene@JHU.EDU> Reply-To: EDUCAUSE Listserv <BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 2:38 PM To: EDUCAUSE Listserv <BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Subject: [BLEND-ONLINE] Advice for Synchronous Online Classes Using Zoom Meetings?
Our school is transitioning from using Adobe Connect to using Zoom Meetings for synchronous online class sessions, of which most of our online courses schedule at least a few times each term. So after years of “controlling the user experience” with the Adobe Connect layouts and relying primarily on text chat, we are heading in the direction of screen sharing with the enhanced social and community-building experience of video “taking over” chat. Some people are very excited about this move, given the popularity and ease-of-use of the Zoom platforms. Other people are a little more wary – especially when it comes to large (e.g., 40 to 200+ students) classes.
Please share your thoughts and experiences on what faculty and students should be aware of when using Zoom Meetings (not the webinar) for a synchronous class session. Here’s some of the things I was curious about…
Do you have a set of “instructions” or recommendations for students — e.g. so they see the chat as it happens?
Are there any best practices in terms of meetings set-up that you recommend for your faculty? (Mute participants upon entry, always show meeting control bar, etc.)
Have there been some scenarios that have been fantastic or some that have been horrible for using Zoom?
Is there a class size where the number of participants starts negatively impacting the learning opportunity? (i.e., I realize Breakout rooms are an option but also not appropriate for all situations, such as having a guest speaker come in to have an interactive Q & A or having a software demonstration.)
Are there any major “fails” you’ve learned from or, alternately, success stories?
Are your students required to have Zoom accounts?
Do you have a method for tracking attendance?
…
Thanks for your input! – celine Celine Greene Instructional Technologist Center for Teaching and Learning, JHSPH http://ctl.jhsph.edu
