What Is It About Anonymous Apps That Kids Love?

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You’d think with all the bad press anonymous apps like Yik Yak, Secret, Ask.fm, and Whisper get, we’d have heard the last of them, right?

Yet last week I learned of another a new anonymous app, this one called Unseen. Co-founder Michael Schramm (who, by the way, has been quoted saying, “I hate anonymous apps, I think they’re garbage”) was unabashedly enthusiastic about his new startup when we spoke.

“It’s important that apps like this exist,” claims Schramm, “because privacy is a human right.” The anonymity and privacy that apps like Unseen provide, argues Schramm, encourages users (in the case of Unseen, users are primarily college students) to have open and transparent “conversations” (Unseen is a photo-sharing app), sometimes surrounding sensitive issues and events. Take recent events in Ferguson, for example. College kids were “seen” on Unseen posting images, making controversial statements, and (mostly) asking one another questions, in an effort to understand events as they transpired.

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Adaptive Learning: Are We There Yet?

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For more than a decade, K-12 educators have been hearing about the potential of adaptive learning, an approach to instruction and remediation that uses technology and accumulated data to provide customized program adjustments based on an individual student’s level of demonstrated mastery.

But interest in adaptive learning has been heating up in the last couple of years, thanks to new attention from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, new partnerships among education publishers and adaptive platform providers, and a growing list of product vendors. Along with that increasing interest and expanding vendor landscape has come a fair bit of confusion about exactly what the term “adaptive learning” means. In conversation, it’s almost synonymous with “personalized learning,” but in practice, these are different concepts, and K-12 districts investigating systems that promise to deliver adaptive learning should understand that difference.

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STEM Contest Transforms Players into Creators

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The Surprising Uses of Games Controllers

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Games controllers can end up in the strangest places. Just this week, the US Navy announced it had approved a laser weapon to be deployed on an amphibious vessel serving in the Persian Gulf. The weapon is essentially the kind of death ray that science fiction has been promising for decades. And, as the demonstration showed, this space age weapon is guided by something every self-respecting 14-year-old is familiar with: a controller just like those used to play video games.

They used to be such simple devices. A single control stick and a few buttons were all a gamer needed to blast aliens or score a winning goal on the primitive, pioneering games consoles.

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Meshing GBL With PBL: Can It Work?

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Meshing GBL With PBL: Can It Work?

Project-based learning has essential components that make it unique to other models of instruction, such as public audience, voice and choice, driving questions, and teaching and assessing 21st-century skills. PBL requires that all of these components be present in a truly great “main-course project.”

Similarly, game-based learning has elements that make it unique, even in its many implementation methods. GBL can look like gamification, where game elements such as quests and incentives are used to make the unit of instruction into a game of sorts. GBL can also look like using games for instructional purposes, such as the popular Minecraft or even Angry Birds, to support student learning. Many educators may wonder how they can leverage GBL practices within a PBL project and combine them to form a powerful learning experience. It is possible, but only with careful combination and intentional implementation.

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Mobile Apps Still Collect Information On Kids

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Mobile Apps Still Collect Information On Kids

Worried that toy stores, fast food chains, and other retailers are tracking your kids online this holiday season? A landmark 2013 law aimed at protecting the privacy of America’s youngest mobile consumers hasn’t stopped app developers from collecting vast amounts of data, including a person’s location and even recordings of their voice, according to privacy researchers and consumer advocates.

Whether mobile app developers seek parental consent first — as required by law — or pass the information on to advertisers isn’t entirely clear. But if you prefer to stay anonymous, your options are limited: Wade through each mobile app’s privacy policies to make sure you are OK with the terms, or stick the phone on “airplane mode” to shut off the wireless connection and risk losing functionality.

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The Top 10 Reasons to Switch to Serious Games

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The Top 10 Reasons to Switch to Serious Games

If you are in Learning and Development and considering using serious games, this infographic will give you all the arguments you need to get buy-in from stakeholders.

1. They are Engaging


2. They are a Safe Environment


3. They work according to the Laws Of Learning


4. They are Re-Usable


5. Roll specialist knowledge out to a Wider Audience


6. They are Cost Effective


7. You can Capture Data


8. They are Expected


9. They complement other Forms Of Learning


10. They Work

Check out this infographic by TOTEM Learning on The Top 10 Reasons to Switch to Serious Games

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Do Schools Kill Creativity?

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Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

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The Future of Education is Learning by Exploring

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The Future of Education is Learning by Exploring

Creating generation of curious and innovative minds…

Sometime back, I was chatting with my friend about importance of information written in books.

I was arguing about dropping the importance of traditional schooling and start learning by self exploring. But most of times we hear that it’s better to study hard and build strong knowledge base.

She said, “Why to waste time on wondering about concepts when knowledge already exists in books?”. I was advocating the point of sparking curiosity in kids even before their introduction to book chapters, if they feel about learning that concept they will figure out ways to learn. Its more about passion of learning vs. setting syllabus for them.

Watch this video from Sugata Mitra and his new experiments in self-teaching

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What is Citizenship in the Digital Age?

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What is Citizenship in the Digital Age?

By now it’s become clear: For all its wonders, the digital age has also introduced its fair share of challenges. From social media and cyberbullying to cybercrime, internet addiction and online privacy concerns, today’s students face a wide range of difficult issues that previous generations never had to think about.

As a result, teachers, school leaders and parents are called on to add a whole new idea to our curricula: digital citizenship.

Check out this infographic on Citizenship in the Digital Age

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The Next Big Thing in Personalization: The Student

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The Next Big Thing in Personalization: The Student

Let me be the first to call it: 2014 marked the “crossing of the chasm” in which a growing majority is joining the innovators and early adopters to incorporate analytics-based personalization into their digital learning solutions. Knewton, CCKF, Smart Sparrow, and New Classrooms, among others, are developing algorithms that dynamically map students’ progressive mastery of a subject domain and recommend optimal pathways and learning modalities for learning. Publishers are using these “personalization services” to add a dynamically adaptive approach to digital learning. Knewton, through its backend personalization infrastructure, boasts over 7 billion “recommendations served.” Read More

Check out this Education Gets Personal infographic from CompassLearning

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Technology Scores

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Originally posted on paulehenderson:

I find moving quickly exhilarating. Especially on water.

I have been fortunate as a teacher, examiner and inspector to be able to travel to various schools in different countries.

I delight in children’s desire for learning, for exploration and for answers, whether in upriver Borneo (moving quickly on water) or rural India. I find education fascinating, filled with beauty, transformation and extraordinary people.

Blue skies delight me, too.

One blue-sky day, however, still touches me with anger.

I had been teaching English at a school for nearly 2 years. A small staff, less than 35. Just over 400 students with an age range of 12 to 18.

It was a good school, nationally ranked in the top 10 performers.

It was non-selective. It did not single out kids because they had done well at primary school or they came from a certain background.

It did, however, stream students when they…

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