The Superintendent’s panel at EdNet this week featured a discussion about education reform that was like a cold bucket of water to the face. The Supers were teaching us about inertia, the tendency of objects to maintain their current state. As Newton himself put it: The vis insita, or innate…
Student Information Systems (SIS) and Data Warehouses (DWS) are the bedrock enterprise software systems in K12 school districts. The K12 Decision Support Systems Market Report is now available. The 118 page report is based on a survey of over 300 district level IT Directors. ARRA Accountability Market Intelligence Given the…
Doug Stein of Memespark has some commentary to share on ARRA and innovation. By Guest Blogger Doug Stein I don’t know if you saw this article. It details how one district is spending the ARRA education stimulus money: Most of the 6.5 million will be spent to keep teachers in…
Serendipitously the New York Times published a front page article yesterday about “The Story of Stuff”, a short movie about man’s impact on the environment. It makes the point I was after in Sunday’s post about the power of story-line in instructional materials. The movie has gone viral globally (7…
If you don’t think story-line matters in instructional materials just look at the pie fight over evolution in Texas. At its root this is a battle over which story we use to make sense of how we got here. Advocates on both sides will be unhappy with this characterization –…
One of the fundamental shifts No Child Left Behind (NCLB) caused in Special Education was accountability for teaching reading, math, science, and social studies. Traditionally many Special Ed classrooms focused on life skills – the functional skills students with intellectual disabilities need to live as independently as they can. Academics…
What impact will the economic stimulus have on educational materials and technology? A front page New York Times article yesterday left no doubt that education will be a significant part of the legislation. The Times reports that the total education allocation could be as much as $75-$95* billion a year…
In my post about Barack Obama’s focus on early childhood education I noted that the gap between low performers and high performers gets much more difficult to bridge as students get older. Obama’s early learning proposals are pragmatic because they aim to close the achievement gap when it is easiest…
Barack Obama is proposing significant new investments in early childhood education. More attention has been focused on his drive to recruit an army of new teachers but I believe the early childhood focus is equally important. Why? As students age the gap between low performers and even average performers gets…
Information is expanding exponentially. Applying database concepts to your information diet can mean the difference between overload and sanity, chaos and productivity. Database fluency is mandatory in a digital world. Students and teachers should be practicing and refining this skill so that today’s learners can make the most of the…