A recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Students, Computers and Learning, questions the value of using computers in education. The report is illuminating and important, but some articles and blog posts covering the report, such as Time to close the laptops - and improve learning, get the key findings wrong. A closer look reveals why. The OECD report compares PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores between countries with different levels of computer use.
Read MoreThe Evergreen team will present several times at the iNACOL Blended and Online Learning Symposium in Orlando next week, and we hope you'll be able to join us for one or more sessions. The 2015 annual Keeping Pace report will be released at the Symposium. Evergreen researchers will present findings at 9:45am on Monday, November 9, and then we will have a discussion about report findings, the general state of digital learning, and some important myths and realities at 2:05pm.
Read MoreToday we and the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation released the final set of case studies in the series Proof Points: Blended Learning Success in School Districts, which examines blended learning efforts in traditional school districts, and the correlated improved student outcomes. Regular readers may recall that we originally released six profiles in April, and another three in June.
Read MoreAmong the common misconceptions in education is that students are comfortable with technology, and therefore implementing blended learning doesn’t require helping students make the transition. For example, a 90 second Google search returned this quote about students and technology: “Many students have grown up around technology and feel comfortable with it. Don't be embarrassed that they may know more about technology than you do. Welcome opportunities to learn from them.”
Read MoreAn earlier post reviewed the recently published District Guide to Blended Learning Measurement from The Learning Accelerator, and promised a follow-up post regarding the distinction that the guide makes between research and evaluation. This distinction is important, for reasons explained by Richard Culata and Katrina Stevens of the US Department of Education:
Read MoreThe Learning Accelerator has just released its District Guide to Blended Learning Measurement, which provides a useful framework to districts thinking about how to determine whether their digital learning efforts are yielding results. Educators and blended learning advocates are increasingly stressing the fact that technology should be implemented only with clear educational goals in mind, and that these goals should be well-defined and measurable. In most cases, the technology should not be considered until educational goals are established. Schools that put technology first all too often find themselves with tablets in search of a problem to solve.
Read MoreThe headline is attention-grabbing: How High Schoolers Spent Their Summer: Online, Taking More Courses. But the article is disappointing because it has no data; instead it consists of a series of anecdotes about New York-area students taking massive open online courses (MOOCs) in order to bolster their college applications—and often not completing them. Stories such as the one about the student taking online courses while traveling with his family around Italy are mildly interesting but would have been more noteworthy five or ten years ago than they are today.
Read MoreThis blog post was co-written with my former Evergreen colleague, Stacy Hawthorne of Hawthorne Education. The previous blog post (The J curve describes why the transition to blended teaching is hard) generated some conversations about what schools that are implementing blended learning can do to help teachers with the transition. A participant at the Idaho conference that spurred my thinking on this topic raised a similar point when she tweeted “Teachers who engage are the key! How to do this with online options is the question.”
Read More