Bill Gates: future of education is data

Bill Gates at SXSWedu: The future of education is data - GeekWire: "“I think this is a special time for technology in education,” he began. But then he immediately cautioned, perhaps in light of some less-than-successful early Gates-funded initiatives (such as small high schools within high schools), “we try not to be naïve about how complex it’s going to be.”. . . . Jessie Woolley-Wilson, head ofDreamBox Learning, said its adaptive web platform currently used for elementary math personalizes instruction by not just tracking which problems are solved, but how they are solved. It isn’t, she said, that teachers don’t have a lot of data now. “They don’t have data that’s easy, that’s relevant, and that’s easy to metabolize.” Similarly, Iwan Streichenberger, CEO of the Gates-spun-out non-profit inBloom (formerly called theShared Learning Collaborative), cited one Massachusetts school district pilot-testing inBloom’s web-based warehouse for storing and connecting all of its student data, and then making sense of how to apply the data to instruction. The district, Streichenberger said, has been using 20 different testing engines, meaning it had 20 different data sources and 20 different log-in accounts to manage. As to intelligently using all the disparate data? “There are probably as many reports as people.” Gates’ keynote, with its undercurrent of data, was a fitting end to a SXSWedu conference where both the promise, and fears about misuse, of education data permeated discussions among the approximately 5,000 attendees. (So much so, that the audience of one sessionwas polled on which three words to ban the panelists from using, with the winners clearly “disrupt,” “personalize” and “data.”) . . . . "

Google debuts Lenovo ThinkPad x131e, the first Chromebook just for schools | ZDNet: "The first Google Chromebook to be specifically aimed at school children, the Lenovo Thinkpad X131e Chromebook, has been launched in the US. The ruggedised $459 (£295) device is designed to handle the rigours of school life and will be exclusively available to the education market. . . . "


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