Here’s what caught our eye this week and we think you might find interesting…

Academic Redshirting– Joanne Jacobs

Three Trends that Will Shape the Future of Curriculum– Mind/Shift

The Benefits of Failure–EDWeek

Here’s what caught our eye this week and we think you might find interesting…

How Machine-Based Tutoring Will Disrupt Human Tutors–Disrupting Class

Loose Canons–Core Knowledge Blog

Not Everyone Is Jumping on the Banned Wagon–The Innovative Educator

How Much Does Blended Learning Cost?–the Journal

E-Textbooks, What’s the Rush?–Linking and Thinking on Education

One of the key ideas identified in our study with the Girard and Pollinate Foundations, was the idea of the coverage teaching model versus the performance teaching model. In the coverage model a student is presented with material that addresses the objectives. However, there is often a lack of precisely identified outcomes designed to demonstrate a student’s true mastery of the objectives and a truly coherent structure (goal) to the course. Movies and lectures provide valuable content, yet the high-level thinking that is necessary in a competitive global environment is largely ignored. In a similar fashion, role-playing, debates, and projects while offering more promise, often miss their intended mark. This typical planning, while well intentioned, rarely achieves meaningful success in student performance.

In contrast, the performance model focuses on identifying specific evidence of mastery. These specific outcomes are carefully chosen to demonstrate the student’s understanding of the major concepts. Once identified, the outcomes are clearly described in great detail and the means of measurement are constructed. The emphasis is upon the overall course connection rather than individual assignments. To ensure the necessary level of mastery, student assignments are designed to address these major outcomes. With clearly identified expectations, the instructor receives powerful information regarding a student’s achievement. The data created by the student, in these meaningful activities, establishes compelling evidence as to the best course of actions. When this data is combined with specific strategies to aid a student in improving their performance, a powerful systematic learning model is created.

While many of the tools used are the same in both methods, there are two key components lacking in the coverage model. The first is the ability to meaningfully apply data to shape learning outcomes. The second are clearly defined outcomes. These outcomes are necessary to develop the the data necessary for designing the best, next step for a particular student. The coverage model can often be described as an express train with no stops between destinations. Lacking an opportunity for the student to understand the material and improve their mastery.

If the term mastery seems familiar it should. Programs that exhibit the greatest success focus upon mastery. Holding students accountable to outcomes that are well documented provides a clear goal for the students, in addition to the instructor. This presumes that a student’s performance is used to prescribe a specific course of action when the desired goal is not met. Mastery, not the school year dictates a student’s progression.

Despite its unassumingly simple nature, mastery poses a major problem for most learning programs. Mastery simply doesn’t lend itself to the current educational model. School day schedules, support programs, and the necessary time for teacher planning often provide significant barriers to mastery of objectives. By their very nature, these barriers steer most instruction toward the coverage model.

A tool that many exceptional programs have found successful is Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design provides an easy to implement system for course design. Through its clear identification of big ideas and essential questions it provides a potent framework for the identification of desired outcomes. These outcomes are addressed through the thoughtful creation of supporting activities. Such activities are constructed to achieve not only the specific lesson objectives but also the course objectives. This framework lends itself to differentiation and a personalized learning experience.

Constructing a course based upon Understanding by Design should not be taken lightly. The time commitment and the effort required to design activities that clearly aid learners in achieving a specific learning outcome are significant. Expect to spend 30-50 hours on each course. However, any short term pain is well worth the effort. The time invested up-front in designing a course in this manner will provide significant dividends in course management and learner feedback. In addition it will help you implement the next tool in our discussion of Revolutionizing Education.

Today, I begin with with Sal Khan and his journey to reinvent education. I had the opportunity to visit with Sal, prior to his keynote speech last week, at the 2011 CCSA conference in San Diego. It was great to share ideas with and ask question of someone helping to radically impact education. During our conversation, we spoke about the disruption the Khan Academy has presented to traditional education. Sal began with a decidedly low-tech approach to teaching and posted his lessons to Youtube. Since 2004, he has created more than 2,100 videos that receive millions of views each year.

I was able to record a ten minute selection of our conversation. Listen to Sal explain the Khan Academy and his vision for the future of education.

• Sal Khan-Khan Academy (MP3 Audio File)

As always we look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments. You can find us on Twitter (@darylljohnson or @sroner) and Facebook (EDBuzz).

Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was awarded the Hart Vision Elected Official of the Year Award. Mayor Villaraigosa has been a passionate advocate of the charter school movement. He oversees the Partnership for LA Schools, which runs ten of the lowest-performing schools in the district and is seeing improvement in test scores. Mayor Villaraigosa challenged charter schools to not only build new schools, but to take on the lowest performing schools and turn them around. In addition, he urged the charter school movement to hold itself to a higher standard of performance and shut failing charter schools down. By taking on the lowest performing schools, turning them around, and holding charter schools to the highest standards, Mayor Villaraigosa insisted that charter schools can destroy the myth that they are cherry-picking the best students.

Sal Khan of the Kahn Academy delivered a powerful keynote address that showcased the power of disruptive technology. His Kahn Academy is very reminiscent of what Clayton Christensen speaks of in his book Disrupting Class. From humble beginnings tutoring his niece, Sal has been noticed by Microsoft, Google, and Bill Gates as an educational innovator. In highlighting the future of his non-profit Kahn Academy, Sal pulled back the curtain on what has become an increasingly hot topic, inverting or flipping the traditional teaching model. By making the lecture content available for the student to access outside of class, the teacher is allowed to focus on the critical learning moments in class and once again truly teach.

Much attention has been focused on tracking student learning and providing meaningful data for both teachers and students. Despite the detractors that feel it discourages innovative learning, it is a vital step in truly personalizing a students learning. Several vendors provided a look at how schools can improve this process. Both Illuminate and Scantron show-cased platforms to help this task become easier and more efficient.

The march for schools to more fully integrate cloud resources was readily apparent. CloudConnect, sponsored by the San Diego County Office of Education, is a browser-based platform that incorporates virtual learning environments, single-log-ins, data storage, and curriculum offerings for both schools and individual teachers. It leverages the mobility of cloud resources to provide a dynamic and 24-7 learning option. EduTone is another vendor that provides software-as-a-service and bills itself as connecting all the dots. They provide a single-sign-on gateway for their customers and have leveraged the power of the Google App Marketplace. In addition, they have a marketplace of services that can be added to their customers menu of options. This provides a slick and cost-effective environment for schools looking to save on their IT budgets.

Finally, it was great to meet so many of you that are engaged in making education better. The conversations and ideas that were shared will fuel my own work for quite a while. As always, feel free to share your comments and I look forward to hearing about your experiences.

Today we finished optimizing our site for use on most popular mobile devices. While traditional browser users will not notice a difference, mobile users will receive a streamlined site that still contains all of the key features. As mentioned earlier, this is an overdue design move. We believe this will provide a better experience for our users that prefer to visit EDBuzz on their favorite mobile device and help us move into the future.

Take a minute to check out the experience and let us know what you think, both good and bad. We’re anxious to get your feedback and suggestions. If you like what we’re doing feel free to friend us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter (Shawn/Daryll).

According to Hack College, which broke the story, the 7cubed team skipped class and challenged themselves to create seven apps in seven days. Quick Cite took about eight hours to write and is the first app to be released. More are expected to be released in the future.

The 7cubed team acknowledges that the app isn’t perfect and would like to find time to schedule future revisions. It seems the catch is that it is apparently difficult to schedule the time for them to all skip class. The ability to effectively transfer citations between styles was mentioned as one area to improve. Another challenge may be the issue of bar codes only coming into use in the 1970′s. This may hamper the app’s effectiveness with older books.

As a real-life exercise, the 7cubed team has come up with a remarkably effective app in a short amount of time. Hopefully this will encourage other students and faculty members to develop more useful apps in the near future.

The goal of this category is to provide school administrator’s with easier access to school-focused applications. This new offering is aimed at helping solve some of the unique issues faced by education institutions. These include lack of financial resources, security for a customer-base that is under 18, and the ability to access current technology. Google’s new education category is designed to offer cutting edge collaboration tools.

Here’s a quick video explaining the category:

With the creation of the Education category, Google has highlighted two significant benefits for schools.

1. Access to cutting-edge tools
2. Easy Integration

With more schools embracing Google-driven, cloud-based platforms, integration becomes a breeze. GrockIT, Aviary, LearnBoost, BrainPop, and others have lined up to provide innovative tools for teachers and students. For schools usng Gmail for student and faculty accounts, adding these applications makes real sense.

Shawn and I have been working with our IT department to provide a more robust Google apps implementation for our school. We will share more of our experiences along the way, please share yours.

Napa New Tech: School of the Future is Here, Tina Barseghian

Pay Attention, T4 – Jordan School District

Math Class Doesn’t Have to Suck, The Innovative Educator

Wikipedia Turns 10: Are we Banning or Boosting?, Doug Johnson