Thursday, June 19, 2014

MOOCS, White Whales, Google Hangouts, etc.

Creative Commons Photo by Steve Snodgrass

AOL Chief’s White Whale Finally Slips His Grasp
As a graduate of the Google school of dreaming big — when he worked there, Mr. Armstrong helped expand a sales force that clobbered much of the rest of the media economy — Mr. Armstrong is nothing if not a true believer. Even though Patch is being dismantled or perhaps sold off to various partners, he still believes that he had the right product in the right space, and that he just ran out of runway.

Even when test scores go up, some cognitive abilities don’t
In a study of nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public school system, the researchers found that some schools have successfully raised their students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). However, those schools had almost no effect on students’ performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems.

Who Says Math Has to Be Boring?
Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering or math, known collectively as STEM, according to a survey of more than a million students who take the ACT test. The number of students who want to pursue engineering or computer science jobs is actually falling, precipitously, at just the moment when the need for those workers is soaring.

3 Reasons Why the School Principal Needs to Tweet
Trust me, any school leader that's afraid to make waves and try something new will not like this idea. Not at all. But any school leader that cares for their students and recognizes that the world students are growing up in is vastly different from the one she grew up in, recognizes that the education system needs a facelift and she has the power to make it happen. Now, she has the ability to tell the world how great her school is.

Harding Google Hangouts
After meeting two other Iowa teacher-librarians on Twitter, Shannon McClintock Miller of Van Meter and Sandi Ellis of Dallas-Center Grimes, Harding PK-4 teacher-librarian Sarah Staudt was inspired to use Google Hangouts. Ellis and Staudt devised an educational, technological way to celebrate Picture Book Month in November.



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