Education Reading List
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October 30, 2015
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Highlights from this week's edtech news!
Cheers,
Your plucky Startup Digest Education curators
Deborah, Vicky, & Aurelio
Friendly reminder: If you find EDU news that is eminently share-worthy, tip us off by submitting the link here. Tweet with us @StartupDigestED.
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Valerie Strauss
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The Washington Post
Reports have consistently shown that access to technology alone has no measureable impact on student achievement. Why?
1. Technology cannot replace the teacher, instead it should free teachers to focus on things that technology cannot do 2. Technology should be tools for student creation 3. Technology's potential cannot be fully realized until we see it as a transformative tool for better, richer education, not just test scores 4. Technology does not just improve upon existing curriculum, it opens up a whole new world of knowledge and skills 5. Don't teach teachers the technology — teach them how technology as a whole can affect education
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Will Oremus
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Slate
Students are now able to log onto a computer and have an adaptive curriculum presented to them based on what answers they get "right" or "wrong" as they move through the curriculum. However, to what extent this is good for students, is debatable. Do they focus on the right outcomes?
"Adaptive software might prove effective at training children to pass standardized tests. But it won’t teach them the underlying skills that they’ll need to tackle complex, real-world problems. And it won’t prepare them for a future in which rote jobs are increasingly automated."
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Chris Nyren
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Educelerate
Currently, there is a rush to "gamify" education. Current direct-to-consumer sales channels include mobile app stores and browser based game subscriptions. However, there is no proof yet that it even works. The Apple App Store, for example, may promise access to millions of school-based users, but limitations like ineffective search and discovery and Apple taking a 30% cut limit potential pay-off.
The recommendation here is to rethink the straight-to-consumer app model and instead look into bootstrapped district sales, focusing on the adult learner, and having browser based games.
The exception to this? East Asia.
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Eric Westervelt
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NPR
Fast, early interventions have the potential to dramatically improve a students' chances of finishing a course, and therefore finishing their degree program. Big data that takes information like student engagement online, participation in forums, time spent logged-in, etc. are being used to build early warning systems that allow professors to identify the students who need these early interventions. To at least one student profiled in this story, it made all the difference.
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LA Johnson
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NPR
The University of People is a non-profit, online, accredited university created to meet the needs of refugees, survivors of natural disasters, undocumented immigrants. While it is in its infancy, it is worth watching, as few MOOCs, though touting access to education for all, have supports specifically targeting the most disadvantaged students.
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Marilyn Rhames
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Education Post
According to a recent Education Post poll, 63% of white parents said that it is "very important" for their children to go to college but only 34% agreed that it was important for other people's children to attend college. Furthermore, because a school's budget depends on the number of students it enrolls, there is real fear when a new school opens its doors down the street that schools will lose students to their "competition". And then there's the phenomenon of teachers and school leaders enrolling their children in schools other than the ones they teach in. So, whose children are we really talking about again?
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Edsurge
1. Do your homework before anything else 2. Get in touch with previous graduates 3. Put some effort on your video. Every word matters 4. Why do you have the right team? 5. Be straightforward with your answers 6. Turn in your application as early as possible 7. Be an expert on your product, but be flexible to changes 8. Show, don't tell--data is more convincing than adjectives 9. Consider waiting before applying if you don't have supporting data 10. Not accepted? Try again!
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