http://www.ednetinsight.com en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Central by Imulus (http://imulus.com) info@ednetinsight.com http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/a-matter-of-balance.html Several news stories this week offer some ideas to ponder. The Tampa Bay Times reports on problems associated with Florida's writing assessment. The Florida Writing Assessment is used in grades 4, 8, and 10 to measure students' proficiency in writing responses to assigned topics within a designated testing period. It's seen minor variations from year to year in terms of student prompts and grading protocols. This year, the state returned to using two raters to score each piece of student writing and instructed scorers to grade more strictly, with an eye to punctuation, grammar and the quality of word choice and relevance. The result: only 27% of fourth-graders statewide earned a score of 4 or better, compared to last year's 81%. Similar drops in score were seen among 8th and 10th graders. ]]> Friday, May 18, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/a-matter-of-balance.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/working-on-content.html Lot's happening with content. The Council of the Great City Schools and Student Achievement Partners, whose founders led the writing of the Common Core English/language arts standards, sponsored the first in a series of workshops for teachers and literacy specialists from across the country. Recognizing that in many classrooms the existing store of textbooks will continue to be the major instructional resource, the goal of the workshop was to develop a set of materials that teachers can use in conjunction with their basal textbooks to better address the Common Core's emphasis on text-dependent analysis and interpretation. Students will be expected to understand and analyze a variety of texts and teachers will need to help them read text more closely. ]]> Friday, May 11, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/working-on-content.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/waiver-responses-and-do-standards-matter.html The Department of Education has completed its initial review of the 27 waiver applications it received in the second round of the ESEA flexibility program. Letters have gone out to states detailing the Department's concerns and asking for clarification and improvements. Each requesting state faced at least some criticism, though Maryland came out well ahead of the rest of the pack. The Department liked Maryland's plans for transitioning to college- and career-ready standards, intervening in struggling schools, and its work on teacher evaluation. It wanted more details on how Maryland will validate the measures it's using in the teacher evaluation system. This will be a challenge for many states, as the teacher evaluations systems are new and there aren't that many ready-made measurement tools. ]]> Friday, May 04, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/waiver-responses-and-do-standards-matter.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/speak-up-results-and-more-cc-assessment-news.html I just want to point you to some news of interest this week. Project Tomorrow held its first Congressional Briefing on results from the Speak Up 2011 survey. This session focused on findings related to students and parents. The related report, "Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey - K-12 Students and Parents Connect the Dots with Digital Learning" is now available on the Project Tomorrow website. This first report focuses on how today's students are personalizing their own learning, and how their parents are supporting this effort. That personalization centers around three student desires: including how students seek out resources that are digitally-rich, untethered and socially-based. The report share the unfiltered views of K-12 students and parents on these key trends and documents their aspirations for fully leveraging the technologies supporting these trends to transform their learning lives. There's also a summary infographic. ]]> Friday, April 27, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/speak-up-results-and-more-cc-assessment-news.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/assessment-items-and-cte-reauthorization.html In a story that is the equivalent of beneath the fold in today's electronic version of the newsletter, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium selected CTB/McGraw-Hill to develop items for the new Common Core Assessments. The job involved developing nearly 10,000 test items that will be used in the pilot test of the Smarter Balanced assessment system in early 2013. A separate contract solicitation will be issued for item and performance task development for the field test of the assessment system in spring 2014. The test items will include a variety of innovative formats, performance elements and rich technological enhancements. All items will be subjected to rigorous review and research. The contract announcement marks a new stage in the consortium's progress. Test items are concrete and move the SBAC assessment one step closer to being "real." ]]> Friday, April 20, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/assessment-items-and-cte-reauthorization.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/tablets-and-metatags.html Many interesting announcements this week. More Android-based tablets are reaching the market, including one built for education from Intel. I've not carefully tracked announcements of Android-based tablets, but it's clear that more tablets are appearing from a wide variety of manufacturers, especially at the low end. Google is widely rumored (by no less than the Wall Street Journal, among others) to be readying a tablet launch. Expected sometime in May, at a price between $200 and $250 (or possibly as low as $199), the 7-inch, Android 4.0 tablet is likely to be manufactured by Asus. Today's issue includes an announcement from Ematic about its latest Android-powered tablet: the 7-inch eGlide Prism. The Prism is 9mm thick and weighs only 0.6 pounds. It comes with built-in Wi-Fi compatibility, 8GB of flash memory plus 5GB of cloud storage, features a front facing camera, built-in speaker, a MicroSD Memory Card port and runs on the Android 4.0 OS. Retail price is $216. Other recent announcements include Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2, a 7-in Toshiba Excite, Acer's Iconia Tab and several new Indian tablets. These are consumer devices, many aimed at the Kindle Fire, but the price points are becoming very attractive. For one perspective on this read Frank Catalano's recent post (http://www.geekwire.com/2012/googles-rumored-tablet-hurt-kindle-fire/) on GeekWire. ]]> Friday, April 13, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/tablets-and-metatags.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/changes.html There was good news for more than just the three winners of the March 30 Mega Millions drawing this week. The frenzy of lottery ticket purchases that the $656 million jackpot fueled resulted in big tax gains for a number of states. And in those states where lottery proceeds support education, schools were the big winner. In Illinois, the past nine weeks of Illinois Lottery sales generated $31.5 million for the state's Common Schools Fund. The story was similar in Georgia, where lottery officials said that ticket sales generated $25.2 million in profits for education. Georgia Lottery profits go toward the state's HOPE Scholarship and Pre-K programs. And three states - Illinois, Kansas and Maryland - will also benefit from the income tax that the big winners will have to pay, though that money does not benefit education directly. ]]> Friday, April 06, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/changes.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/fy-2013-budget-cycle-begins.html Yesterday (March 29) the House of Representatives passed its FY2013 Budget Bill. 228 Republicans voted for the bill. 181 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted against. The budget, crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-WI), caps non-defense discretionary spending at $1.028 trillion, $19 billion below the levels set by the Budget Control Act of last August. The bill cancels the automatic across the board spending cuts put in place under the Budget Control Act, known as sequestration, that are scheduled to kick in on Jan 2, 2013. The House Budget Bill now goes to the Senate where it is likely to fail, since the Democratic leadership there announced that they would they officially establish their own spending level of $1.047 trillion, reflecting the caps agreed upon in the Budget Control Act. Does any of this sound familiar? I've already seen several references to a government shutdown. ]]> Friday, March 30, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/fy-2013-budget-cycle-begins.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/league-of-innovative-schools.html This really is a TGIF week! Maybe it felt so hectic because all of us here in Chicago have been pulled to get outside and enjoy this absolutely incredible stretch of weather that has left us with many of our trees in full leaf and the daffodils are nodding away. It's been hard some days to stay at a desk. Last week I made the decision to stop including in the e-mail News Alert version all the announcements of contests and grant programs that have been flooding in. Last week alone there were seven. I will be posting them on the News Alert website and they will be searchable in the database. Of course there will be exceptions and one crossed my desk this week from EPS, School Specialty's Literacy and Intervention division. Read on.... ]]> Friday, March 23, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/league-of-innovative-schools.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/the-metlife-survey-of-the-american-teacher.html The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Teachers, Parents and the Economy, the 28th in the annual series, examines the views of teachers, parents and students about the teaching profession, parent and community engagement, and effects of the economy on teaching and learning in schools. The survey explores how teachers, parents and schools are working together to promote student learning and healthy development in the context of reduced budgets, reallocation of resources, and continued attention to improving teaching and learning. These surveys are always interesting and their long history allows for comparisons over the years. The good news this year is that parent and community engagement with schools has increased. There are concerns, however, around teacher satisfaction. It seems that the stress of the economic downturn is taking its toll. Today, over one-third of teachers (34%) say that they do not feel their job is secure, compared to just 8% of teachers who felt that way in 2006. ]]> Friday, March 16, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/the-metlife-survey-of-the-american-teacher.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/d-c--meetings-focus-on-technology--policy.html I am just back from Washington, D.C., where both CoSN and SIIA hosted events this week. CoSN's annual conference, Reimagining Learning, was as always jam-packed with sessions and activities. CoSN's core constituency of district-level technology leaders was out in strength to celebrate CoSN's 20th anniversary and plan for the new environment that is being shaped by participatory applications, mobility and the transition to digital resources. The conference breakouts featured many sessions focused on aspects of mobility - BYOD programs, iPod/iPad implementations, wireless and infrastructure considerations - which seemed to me to be one of the hottest topics. I am always impressed by the energy and dedication of these school technology leaders who in addition to their technology expertise, are increasing being engaged in district discussions around the Common Core Standards, digital instructional resources and of course the welter of challenges associated with getting schools systems ready for the 2014-15 launch of the Common Core assessments. ]]> Friday, March 09, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/d-c--meetings-focus-on-technology--policy.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/some-thoughts-on-assessment.html An extraordinary number caught my attention as I was entering this week's news headlines. A national survey indicates that K-5 educators spend, on average, nearly an entire instructional month (20 days) or 157 hours focused on assessment of reading skills. That number comes from a survey of 7600 K-12 educators that Lexia learning conducted at the end of 2011. Educators reported that their students spent, on average, eight entire instructional days each year taking reading tests. Teachers spent nearly triple the amount of time scoring the tests, entering test data into student information systems, and organizing and analyzing the test data. ]]> Friday, March 02, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/some-thoughts-on-assessment.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/common-core-state-standards-under-attack.html Just when you thought it was settled, we seem to be seeing an uptick in opposition to the Common Core State Standards. Some of this has been fueled by a recent report from the Brookings Institution, the 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education. Author Tom Loveless covers a lot of ground in the report, but a lot of attention has focused on his contention that the CCSS will do little to improve student achievement. He bases that conclusion on an analysis of NAEP scores from 2003 to 2009 which finds no correlation between the quality of states' standards and NAEP test score gains during that period. Common or not, all the states had standards in place in 2003. ]]> Friday, February 24, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/common-core-state-standards-under-attack.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/more-on-assessment.html Two interesting reports focused on assessments came to my attention this week. ETS released an especially timely report on state pre-K assessment policies that examines the ways state-funded pre-K program across the country use assessments. At the other end of the spectrum, NWEA and Grunwald Associates released a report that looks at K-12 assessment from the varied perspectives of parents, teachers and district administrators. But first I want to point to a story in today's featured section. Maybe it's the frustrated history teacher in me, but I was delighted to learn that National History Day was awarded the 2011 National Humanities Medal, marking the first time that a K-12 education program received the prestigious award. The citation for National History Day was for being "a program that inspires in American students a passion for history." It does this by making history come to life, engaging students in an immediate, hands-on approach that involves them in rigorous historical research, careful analysis and interpretation of results. Students present their conclusions in a variety of ways ranging from formal papers to dramatizations and documentaries. More than more than half a million students participate in NHD projects each year. What I find so hopeful in all this is summed up in a comment made by author and journalist Cokie Roberts, a member of the NHD Honorary Cabinet. "History not only teaches students about the stories of our past, but is vital to creating a generation of young people who can apply these lessons to the future." ]]> Friday, February 17, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/more-on-assessment.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/first-esea-waivers-announced.html The President announced the first ten states to win ESEA flexibility this week. More on that in a minute. T.H.E. Journal and ISTE are seeking nominations for the 2012 Sylvia Charp Award for District Innovation in Technology. The Charp Award is presented annually to recognize the best district-wide technology program in the country. The winning entry is chosen on the basis of consistent district commitment to excellence and overall success of the program. Many of you are in districts on a regular basis. This is a great opportunity to recognize the great work you are seeing by encouraging a partner or a customer who is realizing significant success from an ongoing and innovative technology program to enter the competition. Find details at http://thejournal.com/Pages/Sylvia-Charp-Award.aspx. The Software & Information Industry Association has opened the Vision K-20 Survey. SIIA Education Division member organizations developed the Vision K-20 initiative as a guide for educational institutions to implement technology district- and campus-wide. The survey gives K-20 educational institutions the opportunity to evaluate their current technology use and measure their progress against the Vision's benchmarks. Encourage your school partners to participate in SIIA's 2012 Vision K-20 Survey at www.siia.net/visionK20. ]]> Friday, February 10, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/first-esea-waivers-announced.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/technology-readiness-tool.html The two Race to the Top Assessment Consortia - SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) - jointly awarded a contract to Pearson for the development of a new Technology Readiness Tool to support states assessing their readiness for online testing. The tool will allow local schools to capture and report key readiness indicators, including: number and type of computers; local network and bandwidth infrastructure; and local staff resources and other information needed to evaluate overall technology readiness for the coming transition to online assessment. ]]> Friday, February 03, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/technology-readiness-tool.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/teacher-access-to-technology.html Where did January go? You'll see that there are lots of headlines this week, many coming out of announcements made at the Florida Educational Technology Conference. I didn't make it to FETC this year, though I've been at more of the shows 32 annual events than I care to admit. I have not had the chance to talk to anyone who did attend, but the show's 500 or so exhibitors were enough to keep anyone busy. This would be a good week to be sure you click though to the News Alert web site. When there is so much news, I only feature one headline from a company. Multiple releases from the same company, stories I typically post in the Announcements section and some releases about product updates are posted at the web site, so you will want to check to be sure you don't miss anything. Inside, a few thoughts on the latest survey from PBS LearningMedia about teachers and technology and the continuing stir around teacher evaluation. ]]> Friday, January 27, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/teacher-access-to-technology.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/rttt-for-district--apple-s-ibooks-textbooks.html It looks like one of the next things to anticipate at the federal level will be the roll out of Race to the Top redesigned for districts. In an interview with Education Week, Secretary Duncan indicated that the bulk of the $500 million RTTT appropriation in the FY 2012 budget would go directly to districts. Details, such as the focus of the program or what the districts would be required to do, remain to be worked out. While many districts are likely to find the opportunity to compete for RTTT funding attractive, it might prove of particular interest to districts in states that decided not to participate in RTTT at all. Of course, it could be that districts that have had some experience in planning for their particular roles in the earlier statewide application process will have an edge in this new competition. It is also possible, depending on how stringent the requirements that districts will be expected to meet are, that a number of LEAs decide it's just too much work to apply or to doubt their ability to actually deliver on proposed plans. ]]> Friday, January 20, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/rttt-for-district--apple-s-ibooks-textbooks.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/house-reauthorization-bills--other-resources.html On Jan 6, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), Chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, released the final two pieces of House's ESEA reauthorization package. These last two bills are a Republican effort, finalized and released after talks with Democrats on the Committee broke down. Two major studies related to teacher evaluation have also been released, one from the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project and the second from the National Bureau of Economic Research study on the long-term effects of high value-added teachers. Education Week released the 16th edition of it's annual Quality Counts report, focused on the nation's international standing in education, and lessons to be drawn from high-performing countries. And more information is also surfacing about states' implementation of the Common Core State Standards. ]]> Friday, January 13, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/house-reauthorization-bills--other-resources.html http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/a-calm-2012-.html Happy New Year everyone! It's hard to believe that we are already a week into 2012. It is possible that the first part of this year will be relatively calm, with the school finishing out the 2011-12 school year without too much more disruption. There was a flurry of activity in Washington at the end of the year. Congress passed an omnibus appropriations bill that finalized the FY 2012 federal budget. The Department of Education also announced its Round III Race to the Top awards, along with Promise Neighborhoods grants and the 23 highest rated projects in the 2011 Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund competition secured their required private funding, qualifying them to receive their i3 grants. Much of ED's energy in 2012 will be devoted to monitoring the progress of the various RTTT grantees, applying pressure where needed and help where requested and managing the ongoing NCLB waivers process. ]]> Friday, January 06, 2012 http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/from-the-editor/a-calm-2012-.html