Engagement is driven when students know how to apply what they know. Have you seen the 2016 Gallup Student Poll? According to Gallup, the Student Poll will track for 10 years the hope, engagement, and well-being of public school students in grades 5 through 12 across the United States. But what do these measurements really tell…
Read More“Write the following on the blackboard 100 times: Schools don’t want technology Schools want curriculum Schools don’t want technology Schools want curriculum Etc.” From THE Journal, In K-12, the New, New Thing is the Old Old Thing: Currriculum by Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway Okay, we have certainly gotten past the premise that technology…
Read MoreWe consistently ask the teachers and administrators at our Ascend Math partner schools to tell us how to make Ascend better so we can help students have more success. This has resulted in important improvements including adding interactivity to all video lessons, new conceptual lessons and virtual explorations, plus the dashboards for school, teacher, class…
Read MoreEducation Week just released a highly informative article summarizing what has been learned from a decade of federally funded research into math instruction. I enjoyed reviewing these findings again. The research has been very advantageous. At Ascend Education, we developed 80 new math lessons over the past two years taking advantage of these findings bringing…
Read MoreLast week, the New York Times ran an article on Kahoot, an online quiz system from Norway being played in some schools. The article is well worth reading for its smart discussion of “engagement” and “gamification.” These are two subjects near and dear to my heart. The article, by NY Times reporter Natasha Singer, also…
Read MoreIn past articles I’ve written “Interactive engagement, not entertainment, is at the core of a computer game’s ability to motivate. Finding ways to make math more interactive and more engaging is the key to making math software better as well.” When students play a game they expect to face a struggle of some kind at…
Read MoreNo two students are exactly alike. In a perfect world, we would treat each as an individual, but it’s not a perfect world. Most often, one teacher must guide twenty or more young people to find the path to success and understanding. For many of us that’s okay. Since, with the teacher’s guidance, we often…
Read MoreI was recently asked for a good source on differentiated instruction. I replied that ASCD put out some exceptional publications. You can find them at: http://www.ascd.org/professional-development/differentiated-instruction-campaign.aspx My concern with differentiated instruction has always been classroom management, simply put one teacher trying to see to the needs of numerous students. When each of these students has…
Read MoreThere has been a lot of discussion lately regarding Personalized Learning. What is Personalized Learning? Is it really any different from Individualized Learning? Some people think so. I read an interesting article on the subject of “personalized learning.” For today’s students … “The approach, called personalized learning, differs from the traditional classroom their parents probably experienced,…
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