On the way to Personalized Learning 3.0, we may well need to “pass through” Personalized Learning 1.0. But we mustn’t tarry! Educational automation is not an interesting goal! The vision of a personalized “bicycle for the mind” for each and every child must drive us to "informate" – to create Personalized Learning 3.0 environments!!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/19/15
Without question, children need to develop reading fluency. Commonsensically, having kids read lots and lots should help in developing such fluency. Well, the data from U.S. classrooms on methods such as “Sustained Silent Reading” and its cousin, “Drop Everything and Read” are equivocal, that’s not stopping the Taiwanese. In 3 short years, 10 percent of its 2,700 elementary schools have adopted the “Modeled Sustained Silent Reading” Program! The data be hanged! Commonsense is winning in Taiwan.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/13/15
On 28 October 2014, the W3C approved a standard version of HTML5, a programming language for the web. For K-12 at least, HTML5 is totally disruptive – in a GOOD way! Educational app developers can now write highly interactive apps that will run on virtually all end-user-oriented, computing devices, i.e., on all the crazy computers that kids bring into their BYOD classrooms. Finally, BYOD makes good sense; finally, teachers can FULLY exploit the affordances of the kids’ BYOD computing devices!! HTML5 is nothing short of a sea change in educational software.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 10/05/15
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development just released a detailed study of the use of computers in the classrooms in 70 countries. It was no surprise that he study did not find improvement in student achievement due to computer use. It was a surprise, though, that OECD Director Andreas Schleicher named what he saw as the root cause of that failure!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 09/21/15
School districts and the federal government are addressing the “mobility gap” between students who have 24/7 broadband access and those who don’t.
- By Christopher Piehler
- 09/21/15
Charter schools, vouchers and now venture capital! Uber is the model: Squeeze out cost relentlessly, use software and everything will be wonderful! Where do teachers fit into this model?
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 09/08/15
CCSS and NGSS are driving curricula and pedagogical change. Coding those new curricular materials, imbued with the best research, in HTML5 will enable those materials to run on virtually every BYOD computing device in the classroom. You read that right: every computing device!
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 08/31/15
Over the past 20 years, boosters of several new technologies have promised to “revolutionize education.” In this week’s post, we review the various predictions about laptops, interactive whiteboards, iPads and Chromebooks. Ah, techies and their penchant for hyperbole....
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 08/17/15
There has always been a chasm between what educational researchers do in their labs and what educational practitioners do in their classrooms. There is no well-defined path for taking an idea from research and putting it into practice. In this week’s post, we discuss the different paths across the chasm that Logo (the programming language) and the graphing calculator took.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 07/28/15
While educational start-ups are securing record amounts of investment, the percentage of computer science majors going into start-ups of any kind is actually quite small. In this week’s blog post, we argue that fixing the student loan problem would unleash innovation that would boggle the imagination.
- By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway
- 07/21/15