LFA's Education Week blog, Transforming Learning, will explore how to transform public education to support student achievement for lifelong success in the global community.
21st Century Skills
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Much has already been written about the inaugural Digital Learning Day yesterday, which included a full day of virtual visits to schools across the country making good use of digital media to engage high schools students and address a variety of learning needs and styles and a Town Hall meeting that featured U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, among other high profile policymakers and education leaders.
As someone who has advocated for effective and appropriate use of technology to support teaching and learning, I found much about yesterday’s event to appreciate. For sure, the ideas expressed aren’t new or revolutionary, and Arne Duncan and ...
Today is Digital Learning Day, designated to celebrate the innovative use of digital technology in classrooms across the country. A key element of the celebration is to inspire a national conversation, one that can support educators and officials as they incorporate digital technology into individual school buildings and classrooms. Digital Learning Day is an initiative of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Center for Secondary School Digital Learning and Policy. The success of this initiative relies heavily on continued implementation efforts over the next five to ten years. ...
Tomorrow is the inaugural Digital Learning Day, a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology. New technologies are the future of learning, and it is inspiring to see how some teachers and schools are transforming the educational experience.
While celebrating these accomplishments, we must not forget that there are still a number of children who lack access to the promise that digital learning offers. Often, these children are also disadvantaged by virtue of their socioeconomic status.
Nick Pandolfo’s recent piece for The Hechinger Report really drives this point home. He highlights Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, a school that (according to the article) shares a homework lab with two others at Chicago’s DuSable High School campus – 24 computers for nearly a thousand students. Many of the school’s students (93% of whom receive free or reduced price lunch) cannot afford computers at home, and they do not have much access to them at school. Pandolfo writes that “Bronzeville Scholastic students born into a digital era struggle with basic skills, such as saving work to a flash drive and ...
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library. Materials are added at the rate of 10,000 per day and the Copyright Office has a card catalogue with more than45 million card entries. It contains 838 miles of bookshelves and holds a collection of more than 147 million items. The Library is open to the public and its resources are available on-site in Washington D.C to anyone older than 16 with government issued identification. The American Memory Project – an effort to digitalize a large portion of the Library’s collection – has more than 9 million items available electronically, for free, to anyone with access to the internet. ...
When it comes to high stakes testing, of any kind, its purpose should always be questioned. What is the value-add of a high school exit exam? Should it test students’ basic skills? College and career readiness? Do today’s tests do either?
A few weeks ago, a school board member in Florida took a version of the state’s 10th grade high school test, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Students must pass this test to graduate, and they have five opportunities to do so. The school board member averaged a D on the reading section, noting that: “In our system, that would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.” This individual has two masters’ degrees and a successful professional career. He admits that while the material tested wasn’t fresh in his mind, he also didn’t use it in his work, thereby making him wonder how relevant it really was for the average student’s success after leaving school. ...
Recently I was looking through old paper files in the Learning First Alliance (LFA) office and happened upon a successful grant application that LFA had received some years ago to gather, record, and disseminate the knowledge, skills, and approaches successful school districts use to ensure their students achieve to their highest abilities. The project resulted in a publication called Beyond Islands of Excellence that, indeed did chronicle what goes into an effective public school system and profiled districts whose students had benefited from their wise, effective leadership. I was struck by how much the scope of work described in the successful grant application articulated the concepts and big ideas that LFA organizations and their leaders still work diligently to implement today. ...
We often speak of the importance of teaching students 21st century skills, especially what the Partnership for 21st Century Skills calls “the 4 Cs” – creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking. But what does that actually look like?
Ask Bijal Damani. At the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum, this business teacher from India told me about a course-long project she uses to improve the 21st century skills of grade 11-12 students and to prepare them for the real-life challenges that they may face once they enter university and the job market.
In this project (which is also a competition), 120 students divide themselves into teams of ten. Each team then comes up with an innovative product that solves a problem to make the world better (so while something like chocolate flavored cigarettes is “innovative,” it wouldn’t count here).
Once the students decide on a product, they have to come up with a marketing plan for it. That plan must include a newspaper advertisement, a magazine advertisement, a radio jingle and a TV advertisement. They have to determine the price of their product. And they have to create a website for ...
Hong Kong has one of the world’s richest economies. It also has a high level of income disparity between the rich and the poor – according to the Gini coefficient, higher than that of the United States [and we have been hearing a lot about the disparity of wealth in our country lately]. As a result, it faces one of the same challenges we do in educating students – a gap between the haves and the have-nots.
This week I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum, which celebrates teachers and schools that effectively use technology. There I met Andy Li, a teacher at Hong Kong’s Salesian School, which is a Catholic school run with government funding.*
The school's goal is to give young, lower-class students an equal chance to learn. And according to Li, one big aspect of that is technology. While rich children in Hong Kong have iPads, Androids and any other technology that they may want, many of his school’s students (age six to twelve) do not have personal computers at home. And in ...
According to a recent report on science education in California, more than half of elementary school principals do NOT believe it is likely that a student receives high-quality science instruction at his or her school.
If anything, I would expect principals to be optimistic about the strength of their schools, so this finding really drives home longstanding concerns about the state of elementary science education.
And it makes sense when one looks at teacher responses to the survey. Forty percent of elementary teachers reported spending less than 60 minutes a week on science instruction. Thirteen percent reported spending less than 30 minutes a week on it.
These findings come as not only California stakeholders but the President, governors across the nation and the business community are all stressing the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education to our nation’s economy and future competitiveness.
If everyone recognizes the importance of it, why isn’t science education better?
The survey offers some explanations around a general theme: The conditions to support high-quality elementary science instruction are rarely in place. Elementary teachers are unprepared to ...
I may be able to afford my connection costs, but staying plugged-in is not cheap; a comparison of Comcast and Verizon shows prices between $69.99 and $100.00 a month, before taxes, for varying internet and cable packages. For low-income families, prioritizing access comes after purchasing food, making loan payments, buying clothes and filling up the car with gas. Yet in the digital age, it’s becoming evident that children without basic technological skills will be at a disadvantage in the workforce and society. ...
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