"After conducting automated analyses of what students do from moment to moment as they learn to write computer programs, Stanford University researchers were able to predict — with surprising accuracy — the students’ final grades. What makes the feat more remarkable is that the projections were based on learning patterns identified from the students’ work early in the course."
Despite the name, this is pretty amazing. "Personalized learning — customized to different student’s interests and levels — has long been an elusive goal of education. Now, however, technology-enabled approaches like AltSchool’s make personalized learning possible at a whole new scale. Yet education has changed very little, fundamentally, in decades. Can a ‘full-stack‘ approach really change things? This episode of the a16z Podcast with AltSchool founder and CEO Max Ventilla and a16z General Partner Lars Dalgaard addresses some of the common myths and misconceptions around tech and education — and shares their hopes for a better platform to engage teachers, students, parents, and entire communities. And not just in San Francisco."
Just what it sounds like.
More edu than tech, but very interesting. A different way of addressing behavior.
"Evaluation of k-12 teachers in the United States involves intense political and philosophical debates. Data on teacher professional development (PD) practices is only just emerging in digital form, as PD management for k-12 moves to online platforms, and teachers are rated on numerically-scaled rubrics. Education leaders hope to identify generalizable factors in PD practices, previous experience, training, and institutional support that predict teachers’ improvement. But first we mustdetermine the viability of currently available data for predicting teachers’ ratings."
More tech than edu; this stands out because the visualization in out of this world and to me it feels like a new type of lesson.
"What do personal computers, cell phones, and digital cameras have in common? They all started on the fringes. Then they hit a tipping point and, suddenly, they were everywhere. This past year, I believe “open curriculum” - or curriculum that is free and adaptable - hit a similar tipping point in K-12 education. For the first time, more school districts chose an open curriculum over work developed by traditional publishers, like Pearson."
Create interactive online lessons
Maker spaces in education - it's currently just for the privileged. Can it expand?
A video game created by a neurologist to treat ADHD... but will ADHD kids play video games? haha
A collection of apps for visualising probability and statistics concepts and experiments, from [this site] (http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/).
"Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what’s next for the world: the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years, and how we can navigate them." I learned about this from a great a16z, Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future.
What's the big deal pushing every kid to code? Is it really necessary? The author argues a firm "yes". He points to the incredible changes in since the early 90s and extrapolates out a decade or two. It is the value tech brings that causes tech skills to be usefull, so I guess the argument is that the value will only increase as the tech gets more impressive. "Already, those who code earn twice as much as those who can't. This is creating an extremely unequal society. Nowhere is this more clear than in San Francisco, where the attraction of monumental technology investment coupled with limited land mass and a social resistance to change has given us a real world glimpse at our possible dystopian future: A world where the technical elite live in close quarters with thousands of formerly middle class citizens forced into abject poverty and homelessness." Lest you think this guy is a tech douchebag, he seems to work hard fighting homelessness in the Bay Area.
The author talks about self-teaching, but the work is applicable outside of that.
"How do you teach 5th graders about Software Engineering concepts without getting too deep into any particular language? This is a question I’d been asking myself a few weeks in advance of attending a local school’s STEM fair... challenging problems like movement and rotation as well as object collisions are over-simplified. This leaves children with the wrong impression of programming — that there’s a set of commands out there and you just have to put them in the right order. To me, it’s the difference between Scripting and Engineering.
I ended up “writing” a computer program, where the “computer” was the entire classroom with the students being my 1s and 0s. My hope was to have them understand Conditions (“If this then do that otherwise do something else”) while understanding the Assumptions I had made, and then importantly — predict Exceptions (when an assumption would fail,) and how we could fix them."
"Futurists and human resource executives say that our work lives will consist of doing several long-term projects or tasks at once... When Jean-Philippe Michel, an Ottawa-based career coach, works with secondary school students, he doesn’t use the word profession. Neither does he focus on helping his young clients figure out what they want to be when they grow up—at least not directly. For him, there's really no such thing as deciding on a profession to grow up into. Rather than encouraging each person to choose a profession, say, architect or engineer, he works backwards from the skills that each student wants to acquire. So instead of saying, 'I want to be a doctor', he’ll aim to get students to talk about a goal, in this case 'using empathy in a medical setting'." The questions this brings up for me are: As the job market moves further from the industrial model of shifts and bells, how long till schools catch up? What educational models are best suited for the future of work? How do we stop fighting the last war?
A NIPS workshop - "The goal of this workshop is to foster discussion and spur research between machine learning experts and researchers in education fields that can solve fundamental problems in education."