Listening to this froom the point of the initial question, the first portion as it relates to private industry has gone unanswered. The personalizing to this point is really a commentary about individualized learning to achieve subject mastery. So, in my estimation the discussion hasn’t spoken to private industry and only flirted with personalized learning to the degree that one thinks of personalized learning as similar to individualized learning.

As Mr. Hughes mentioned, the private companies have the capability to invest in these technologies, whether it is investing in people resources, capital or collaboration opportunities. He mentioned his company’s ability to stimulate creativity while scaling by tapping into the expertise of business and educational professionals. The private companies have the ability to test the market to help determine what works best for personalizing learning for students.

I don’t know if private companies are focused on encouraging innovation in education. There was a bit of discussion about how there needs to be policy changes (because they are a bit behind), and specifically it was mentioned the ideas of skills mastery, rather than focusing on “seat time”. I struggle with the how to personalize learning and assess students, in real time, as suggested here. We use Cengage’s MindTap, for both online English courses and in-class courses, and I think there is that immediate response to some items, but I still am searching for how to accomplish this with writing assignments.

I would describe his view as using/leveraging technology to allow individuals to work at their pace to achieve content mastery and to identify individual needs to group students to allow teacher/expert intervention at appropriate points to help those students achieve mastery whether they are behind or further ahead. These interventions, are the place where personalized takes place. I think the values are on students achieving content mastery, making the content scale- able to achieve cost efficiencies, an assumption is that interventions can only be performed by interaction with a content expert, that these solutions can be scale-able.

I would describe Mr. Hughes’ description of personalized learning as one with no limitations or boundaries. The assumptions are the student can learn at their own pace in a virtual space whereby they are not competing to stay ahead with their classmates. They will receive feedback and assessments with interventions designed for them.

His view is centered around the idea that educators would be able to identify the appropriate level at which students would be (regardless of age), and place them in that area. My question here is that it seems to be a lack of thought about the differences in discipline—how this would be carried out with Math for example would be very different than English. In regard to the “personalized” vs. “personal” the key factor to me seems to be ignoring the role of the student to his/her learning.

I thought a couple of her better comments were around the idea of changing the federal role from one of compliance to innovator. I will need to let that concept simmer a bit to see if it really makes sense but right off, I think that may be a better role. Some of her ideas in this were related back to I3, Race to the Top and research grant results needing to be publicly available.

Ms. Weiss mentioned several things the Dept. of Ed. is doing (or in some cases, should be doing). She mentioned the idea of having the “bully pulpit”. An important consideration is the idea of having a convening role—-that the Dept. of Ed. can bring folks together to come up with policies regarding how teaching and learning will look moving forward. I read the question before I listened to this section, and I initially thought, perhaps the best thing to do is to talk to the people who are doing the research, who are in the trenches, etc. She did mention providing individual school grants, which I think would be particularly effective to produce good results.

I heard Ms. Weiss speak about initiatives that will help enable students and their families to utilize technology for coursework and communication with the school and teachers. That was the first I heard about the partnership with Comcast to provide a low-cost option for broadband for low-income families. The issue is, do they have the technology at home to use the internet? We assume every household has a cell phone (with a data plan) and computer.

Mr. Popovic’s statement appeared to imply that the education field lacked sufficient data to help with his data-driven “fractions” game. He assumed that teachers needed a mechanism to model math concepts and that students could only be engaged by the characteristics of the games. Other mechanisms were not as engaging according to him.

Yes, I remember this article and Popovic’s argument was after this article came out so there may be a connection.

Ms. Zolt mentions the common core standards related to students need to have close reading skills, ability to communicate (written/spoken), and critical thinking skills. She mentions getting away from using technology just for drill/practice and using technology to help students collaborate is essential—but it must be purposefully used.

I think this is on track when she discusses problem based and authentic learning. I think these are instructional design crossing-over to instructional strategies and cross referenced to technologies that can be used to deliver various aspects of the learning in a more meaningful way. These types are by their nature collaborative and purposeful as she describes. I think it interesting that there is a feeling of need to collaborate with other kids in other countries to improve learning. Do I think it is cool? Yes. Necessary? Probably not. It is often funny to me how as we get access to more information, and we have a history of transferring knowledge (education) that goes back thousands of years that every old idea must have somehow been wrong. Yet, somehow civilization has progressed to this point with those old ideas. I digressed, but funny to me.

I am not sure if I can provide a scale of who I agree with the most —→ least.
I can find points that I agree with in each of the participant’s points.
For example, I completely agree with Ms. Zolt regarding the importance of writing. I believe that writing is the only way for us to really demonstrate understanding at the critical level of any subject. I understand, too, the issues with assessing writing fairly, effectively, and timely. In many ways this is a huge issue right now at my institution with some even arguing that writing is not really necessary for students’ future success, and it is not something that they will have to do in their careers.
I also agree with Hughes’s to some extent and his ideas about seat time vs. mastery of skills. However, my concern here has to do with the point that in some disciplines, the learning does take place over a period of time, and it is not really based on learning the information and moving on. I am thinking specifically about skills like analysis, evaluation, and other aspects of critical thinking that are fostered by use over time.
I completely understood the points about students feeling like time was wasted in high school. My daughter graduated in 2017 and was very frustrated with high school because of the lack of challenge and the feeling of wasted time (she is in college and doing well!).

I caught the point that Finland uses very minimal technology integration into education. I would be interested to know more about this.