With Costs Rising Faster Than Tuition, Can Textbooks Last Long? Standing in line at the bookstore and praying your college textbooks won't break the bank is sadly not a rare occurrence. The College Board estimates that the yearly books-and-supplies costs for the average student at a four-year public college is a whopping $1,168. Mark J. Perry, a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute, has created this chart to show us just how much the cost of textbooks has increased in the last three decades. As it turns out, since 1978, textbook prices have risen by 812 percent. More: 8 Ways to Keep Your Student Loan Debt From Crushing You This is not good news, we know. Startups like Boundless offer free educational resources online to help students get around the textbook bubble. According to their website, they create textbooks "by finding the best content from open educational libraries, government resources, and other free learning sites." Regardless of where the money goes, Mark J. Jenny is the Education Editor at TakePart.
Are iPads and Other Classroom Gadgets Really Helping Kids Learn? For the last six years, the buzz about educational technology has grown deafening. Schools across the nation are scrambling to figure out just how a new generation of technology—software and devices both in the marketplace and still to be developed—might better educate kids. The experiments are far-reaching. Other schools, including a rapidly expanding chain of charter schools that serve low-income children, are employing what they call a “blended learning” model. At another chain of charter high schools, kids sit in what resembles a call center, receive videotaped lectures and interactive lessons on a monitor, and get pulled into smaller, teacher-led groups to get a particular lesson refreshed or reinforced. The purpose of at least some of this new technology is to make education—a sprawling, complicated enterprise—more streamlined, targeted and efficient. Many teachers are embracing ed tech—blackboards and worksheets seem so last century. “Is it a bubble?”
Why Teaching Digital Citizenship Doesn’t Work « Looking Up Spend time with children and you learn that lists of rules don’t work well. Kids are too smart and love to find loopholes. No matter how long you spend crafting a list that covers all scenarios a 5-year-old will bite someone and point out that you didn’t say he couldn’t. A better approach is positive general principles. Tell students what you want them to do. My favorite model is the four Tribes agreements that are displayed prominently in my class and discussed and practiced every day: Attentive Listening- Pay close attention to what others are saying. These agreements cover most situations, describe behavior in positive terms and support the development of critical thinking skills. This approach works better than long lists of rules, and so I’m confused by the common approach to encouraging good Digital Citizenship. Digital Citizenship is often promoted by listing the many things students cannot or should not do. Students may not Like this: Like Loading... Related April 13, 2015 June 2, 2013
The 5 Most Overhyped Trends in Education « Looking Up For your perusal, a completely subjective list of five things happening right now in education that are getting lots of notice, energy and resources but don’t deserve it, and why I think we need to reconsider our collective love affair with them: 1. Flipping The Class: What is it? “…a form of blended Learning which encompasses any use of Internet technology to leverage the learning in a classroom, so a teacher can spend more time interacting with students instead of lecturing. This is most commonly being done using teacher created videos that students view outside of class time. What’s The Problem? The problems with flipping are well explained in “The Flip: End of a Love Affair“. The short form is: What is it? What’s the problem? I’ve written before about the problems with BYOD. It’s inequitable. 3. What is it? The consistent message at ECOO12, from top thinkers and all corners, is that when considering using devices in education, pedagogy must come first. 4) 1 to 1: What is it? What is it?
Why I Gave Up Flipped Instruction A little over a year ago I wrote a post about the flipped classroom, why I loved it, and how I used it. I have to admit, the flip wasn’t the same economic and political entity then that it is now. And in some ways, I think that matters. Here’s the thing. When I recently re-read the post, I didn’t disagree with anything I’d said. Yet my brief love affair with the flip has ended. When I wrote that post, I imagined the flip as a stepping stone to a fully realized inquiry/PBL classroom. What is the flip? The flipped classroom essentially reverses traditional teaching. When I first encountered the flip, it seemed like a viable way to help deal with the large and sometimes burdensome amount of content included in my senior Biology & Chemistry curricula. My flipped experiments I first encountered the flip in a blog post. My students loved the idea of trying something that very few other students were doing. We began to shift What was my role? The flip faded away The flip is gone for good No.
The Trouble With Online College First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed. Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for broadening access to education.
Given Tablets But No Teachers, Ethiopian Kids Teach Themselves With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens. The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs. Early observations are encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week. The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.
Minnesota bans Coursera: State takes bold stand against free education. Screenshot / Coursera UPDATE, Oct. 19, 7:07 p.m.: Common sense has indeed prevailed! Minnesota has decided to stop enforcing an outdated law that had led to Coursera telling the state's residents they weren't allowed to take its free online classes. For more, see my follow-up post here. Original post: Honorable mentions go to New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber’s online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers’ groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the state has decided to crack down on free education, notifying California-based startup Coursera that it is not allowed to offer its online courses to the state’s residents. A policy analyst for the state’s Office of Higher Education told The Chronicle that Minnesota is simply enforcing a longstanding state law requiring colleges to get the government’s permission to offer instruction within its borders.