EDU 807 - Week 6 - Education Technology: Revolutionizing Personalized Learning & Student Assessment Group 3
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While the video is lengthy -- and I recognize that sections can become a bit tedious -- I have tried to mark segments that I think are particularly useful for discussion. Please try to listen to the entire session, and attend closely to the segments that are marked.
What are private companies doing to encourage innovation in the education area, and what are you finding works best, in terms of personalizing learning and assessing students?
I couldn’t think of anything worse that this phrase “individualized learning” The most damaging statement is that the curriculum is being served up to them? Where is the opportunity for discussion, interaction and the emotional side of learning? We are social beings and this strips students of every opportunity to be social. This is also an extremely divisive idea: putting students who are “failing” maths who are 15 years with 8 year olds. How humiliating for the poor student. This is ability tracking at its worse!!!! The students are not failing math- the system is failing the students, I really could go on and on about this…
If “individualized learning” was so effective then why isn’t this DET program designed in this way? Instead, based in research, this DET program has been designed to include face to face interactions, same learning goals but different avenues for us to achieve them and a lot of collaboration!
…but I think I am seeing the term differently than you are. I see you going at a much faster and higher quality rate than myself and a few others. Whether that is due to your availability for study time, or intellect, or previous experience, or self-driven motivation, the DET program works for you and they are flexible enough to work with others even if it means more personalized instruction for us/them.
Individualized learning, to me means work at a pace that works for the person….if they are self motivated enough to be productive. Many students in K12 have not learned the discipline of working on their own.
Students I think are ok, if they are studying with different ages but in a virtual environment where they have no idea of the ages of the other kids. My kids will play online games with kids from 8-60 years old and respect them all the same and judge their ability from their performance. The avatars they use and the names they use hide all the details of age and sex.
… how would you describe Mr. Hughes’ description of “personalized learning?”
What are the values and assumptions embedded in his description of personalized learning?
Think about Coiro’s argument… in this case, is “personalized” learning the same as or different from “personal” learning?
Why is it always acceptable to boast about being at math? Belittle-ring and trivializing math learning is a huge problem worldwide and it is the norm to boast how bad you are at math. This is just unacceptable. The problem lies with current practices and how this breeds the false notion of that some people are math people and some are not.
Math is a rudimentary subject and is found in most every part of life. The are many different forms of math. In old retail days we were taught how to give back someones change by starting with the cost and adding to it from the cash and change drawer until it equaled the amount of the original bill that was used for the purchase. That is a form of math that is efficient and is not considered to be intellectual math. There are hundreds of ways to use math and measurement and geometry in construction that they never teach in a classroom. It is more of a “Effective or Efficient Math”. It is math that is fast and extremely accurate but usable by many in the trade. Some of it is a visual math or a type of counting or uses a tool that is not a calculator but provides an exact answer regardless of the technique. I think classrooms might need to acknowledge these different forms of math and their uses to remove the stigma of being or not being a math person.
What is the Department of Education doing to expand the adoption of technology and education, and how can the Federal Government encourage new models of personalized learning and student assessment?
I cannot say the old assessment model Pisa adopted is the end all be all of success of an education system. In Dec 2017 OECD released a new framework called Global Competencies which reflect more of what we want our students to learn. https://www.oecd.org/education/Global-competency-for-an-inclusive-world.pdf
It will be interesting to see how nations fare under this new model. I know I have not dealt with the prompt but these little side comments have me distracted!
I think it is great that we are still flexible enough to change the tests. It shows, we may move slow but we do try to find new ways to measure and provide accountability in a fair way. We just don’t have a good historical record of trying to account for the all aspects of society.
What do you see as the opportunities for scalability, and then also, what are the risks and
barriers to scaling up innovative local projects?
I love the idea that a lot of data can be collected from students on a digital environment to be analyzed and inform teaching and learning for the future. It can provide comprehensive (big data) feedback (or as Ron Ritchhart calls it feedforward) to curriculum designers of what effective online learning environments look like.
The risks include the loss of personal interactions and the affective side of learning.
The most difficult data to collect is probably the most important, internalized feelings and motivation. You can provide all the surveys or interviews you want but teens will be teens. They are at an age where confidence to tell all is not a possibility. Most teens have so many things going on internally that even they don’t know how they feel and if they did it would change with the wind. Someone like the teacher that spends hours a day with them is probably the best resource for gathering that information. …but that is a manual and time intensive task.
… Ms. Weiss describes a number of initiatives that the DoE is engaged in to help lessen the effects of the digital divide. here, unpack the words that she uses and share your thinking on what she means by: access, equity, innovation, partnerships, or other key terms you heard in her description.
Given Mr. Popovic’s contention that we could look at “education as a data-driven science” and that games hold the potential for a “self-adaptive way of
game discovering,” what ideas and assumptions are evident in his description?
What does this approach assume about teachers and teaching? About students and learning?
what are the key elements of a digital learning environment that fosters personalized learning?
Given Ms. Zolt’s ideas on “personalized learning and
assessment” what are her core values and assumptions? How does her perspective align with/differ from the other speakers, especially Hughes and Popovic?
What are the policy barriers that you currently see, either at the state or the Federal level? And then, what are the policy recommendations that you think would help enable some of the innovations that’s we’re talking about?
As mentioned by the panelists, the states and federal decisions makers seem unable to reach a concensus about what education is. Performance vs mastery as one panelist stated. Our kids are graduating without some of the basics which become problematic as they enter college or the workforce. I think if schools are developed in a way which mirrors those that are performing well with financling, technology, and supportive teachers some of these barriers can be overcome.
… one last time…
Based on the policy ideas each panelist shared — and the language that they used to describe those policies (24/7, personalized, etc), what is your current thinking about assessment and educational technology?
Who do you agree with the most? The least? Why?
At this point, I encourage you to keep listening, but you do not have to write any additional responses to the video… unless, of course, one or more of the questions strike you as particularly relevant and interesting.
There is one particularly interesting comment from Ms. Weiss about technology use in Finland, which will likely be of interest to those of you who are K-12 educators.
There is a lot of interesting things that Finland does and doesn’t do with their education systems including their higher-ed. My son has a friend that even moved there to go to college for free (in certain degrees).
To piggy back off my earlier comment, its seems pretty simple to mirror the schools that are working well and institute those programs and best practices in schools where there are issues. The outcome may not be apples to apples but there certainly should be some improvements over time. Its pretty amazing with all the educational tools, the internet, and too many devices to name that our kids learning experiences arent consistently improving.
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