Amazon, TenMarks, Education

Amazon continues its move into education --

Amazon.com to Acquire TenMarks - WSJ.com: ". . . ."I've used TenMarks for the past two years at Grand View with fourth and fifth grade students to help a diverse group of students achieve in math and take ownership of their own learning," said Sujata Bhatt, founder of the Incubator School and a National Board Certified teacher who spent 11 years at Grand View Boulevard Elementary in Los Angeles Unified School District. "As we launch the Incubator School this year, we focus on technology that truly activates learning and self-starting. TenMarks's products are designed to enable both students and teachers to be in the driver's seat by seeing where they're successful and where they need to revisit. TenMarks is an important part of our math plan this year." TenMarks offers personalized online math instruction and practice in a clear, manageable format for K-12 students complete with helpful hints, video lessons, and real-time results. TenMarks's products are designed to help students be individually motivated, engaged and nurtured. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Colleges Soak Poor US Students, Funnel Aid to Rich

Financial aid for only rich kids?

Colleges Soak Poor U.S. Students While Funneling Aid to Rich - Bloomberg: "U.S. colleges such as Boston University are using financial aid to lure rich students while shortchanging the poor, forcing those most in need to take on heavy debt, a report found. Almost two-thirds of private institutions require students from families making $30,000 or less annually to pay more than $15,000 a year, according to the report released today by the Washington-based New America Foundation. . . ."

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Google Enterprise Cloud in the Classroom

Going Google in schools --

Google's Enterprise Cloud - Cloud Computing - Software as a: Google says that 22% of U.S. school districts are using Chromebooks and points to its 99.9% uptime service-level agreement, SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 Type II audit and remote mobile device management, among other features important to IT...

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Pearson App, Interactive Textbooks

Pearson’s New App Makes Print Textbooks Interactive | Digital Book World: "Print textbook pages come to life with today’s launch of Pearson BouncePages. Now available on any mobile app store, this free app allows parents, teachers, and students to instantly launch interactive instructional content directly from a textbook page. The app was developed in collaboration with Layar, the global leader in mobile augmented reality and interactive print. . . ." (more at link above)

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American adults, low (and declining) reading proficiency

American adults have low (and declining) reading proficiency - latimes.com: ". . . .“It's long been known that America's school kids haven't measured well compared with international peers,” the Associated Press wrote in a survey of the study. “Now, there's a new twist: Adults don't either.” And it appears students who leave high school without certain basic skills are not learning those skills later in adult education or job training programs. . . ." (read more at link above)

Americans: semi-illiterate, ignorant, but exceptional?

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Book Discussion on Why Teach?

Book Discussion on Why Teach? - C-SPAN Video Library: "Mark Edmundson talked about his book, Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, in which he argues that college should be more than just a place to get high-priced career training and should instead focus on teaching students how to think. He spoke at the University of Virginia Bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia." (video at link above)

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Report Card on MOOCs (video)

An early report card on MOOCs - WSJ.com: "If the MOOC movement were in college, it would be time for a freshman report card. The assessment: great potential, but still in need of remedial work. MOOCs, or massive open online courses, went mainstream last year, heralded as the next great technological disruption in education. The big idea is that putting lecture videos and interactive course work on the Web will make it possible for top-notch university education to reach more students and allow for different styles of learning. Already, MOOCs have shown they can attract students in huge numbers. The largest provider, Coursera, has drawn five million, and nonprofit provider edX more than 1.3 million. And while the majority are still based in the U.S., their learners come from all over the globe: Among edX's students, 9% came from Africa and 12% from India. . . ."

Read more:
MOOCs Will Change the University Business Model - The Experts - WSJ

There Is No Business Model for MOOCs Yet - The Experts - WSJ

An early report card on MOOCs - WSJ.com

Jury’s Still Out on the MOOC Model - The Experts - WSJ

MOOCs Are Easy Targets, but Don’t Count Them Out - The Experts - WSJ

Online Courses Are a Double-Edged Sword - The Experts - WSJ

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College still valuable?

10 surprising economic trends that rule the world - Quartz: "If you want a good job, go to college. This has been a maxim of American life since the 1980s, when the “college premium”—the extra income boost from going to college—truly soared into the stratosphere. But an interesting thing has happened in the last decade and a half – the college premium has stagnated. College is still valuable, but by at least one measure, it’s not getting more valuable each year. Perhaps that’s why American college enrollment declined last year. Expect that to put a damper on skyrocketing college tuition and soaring student loans."

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Google joins Open edX platform

We are joining the Open edX platform: "A year ago, we released Course Builder, an experimental platform for online education at scale. Since then, individuals have created courses on everything from game theory to philanthropy, offered to curious people around the world. Universities and non-profit organizations have used the platform to experiment with MOOCs, while maintaining direct relationships with their participants. Google has published a number of courses including Introduction to Web Accessibility which opens for registration today.  This platform is helping to deliver on our goal of making education more accessible through technology, and enabling educators to easily teach at scale on top of cloud platform services. Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform.  We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses. . . ." (read more at link above)

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The Real Reason College Costs so Much

The Real Reason College Costs so Much | Wall Street Oasis: " "Nor is the president addressing what Mr. Vedder believes is a fundamental problem: too many kids going to college. "Thirty-percent of the adult population has college degrees," he notes. "The Department of Labor tells us that only 20% or so of jobs require college degrees. We have 115,520 janitors in the United States with bachelor's degrees or more. Why are we encouraging more kids to go to college?"""

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Teaching Emotional Intelligence

Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught? - NYTimes.com: "...For children, Brackett notes, school is an emotional caldron: a constant stream of academic and social challenges that can generate feelings ranging from loneliness to euphoria. Educators and parents have long assumed that a child’s ability to cope with such stresses is either innate — a matter of temperament — or else acquired “along the way,” in the rough and tumble of ordinary interaction. But in practice, Brackett says, many children never develop those crucial skills. “It’s like saying that a child doesn’t need to study English because she talks with her parents at home,” Brackett told me last spring. “Emotional skills are the same. A teacher might say, ‘Calm down!’ — but how exactly do you calm down when you’re feeling anxious? Where do you learn the skills to manage those feelings?”..." (read more at link above)

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Sports, Education, Schools

Have Sports Teams Brought Down America's Schools? : The New Yorker:  . . .Polish kids now outscore American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Wroclaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind. Sports, Ripley writes, were “the core culture of Gettysburg High.” In Wroclaw, by contrast, if kids wanted to play soccer or basketball after school they had to organize the games themselves. Teachers didn’t double as coaches and the principal certainly never came out to cheer. Thus, “there was no confusion about what school was for—or what mattered to the kids’ life chances.”. . . .

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Supersizing American Colleges, federal student loans

The Supersizing of American Colleges: accelerating tuition and other higher education costs, expanding budgets that fund more and more programs and facilities -- all incentivized by federal student loans . . .

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