High-tech schools of the future end up looking a lot like schools of the past, writes Larry Cuban in Regression to the Mean, Part 1 and Part 2. His examples are a public middle school in New York City, called the Downtown School in a study, and School of the Future, a public high school in Philadelphia. The first had funding from technology entrepreneurs, the second from Microsoft. Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism  describes the New York

technology to monitor students’ feelings is sparking privacy concerns, reports Benjamin Herold on Education Week. No kidding. All school year, Kaylee Carrell has been watching online math videos using a free software platform called Algebra Nation. What the Florida 8th grader didn’t know: The software was also watching her. As part of her nightly homework, Carrell might start a video, watch an instructor explain a concept, rewind to review, press pause when she was ready to s

In 2005, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) promised to deliver rugged $100 laptops to poor children around the world, linking them to the world’s knowledge. The New York Times welcomed The Laptop That Will Save the World. What happened? Adi Robertson explains in a fascinating story in The Verge. The non-profit would “make literally hundreds of millions of these machines available to children around the world,” MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte promised. “And it’s not just $

Fortnite Mobile, a trendy free game, is distracting students and overloading schools’ wifi, reports Patricia Hernandez on Kotaku. Students play compulsively, then share the results on social media, says teacher Nick Fisher. “When you mix in the fact that you have to Snapchat every ‘dub’ (win) you get or Snapchat your friends losing it merges two of the biggest distractions in school . . . I would say Snapchat is a bigger issue than games. But Fortnite marries the two of them

Education technology can be a waste of teachers’ and students’ time, argue two teachers in a new book, Screen Schooled. Joe Clement and Matt Miles, social studies teachers at a Virginia high school, tell a story about a teacher who spent six hours creating a PowerPoint presentation with old political cartoons, writes Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews. Students pulled laptops off a cart so they could follow and comment on the lesson online. . . . another history teacher .

Tech-savvy teachers are building their brands and forging relationships with edtech companies, reports Natasha Singer in the New York Times, which worries that “teacher influencers” will sell out for technology, T-shirts and maybe free travel to a convention. Kayla Delzer, a third-grade teacher in North Dakota, uses Twitter, Instagram and Seesaw, “a student portfolio platform where teachers and parents may view and comment on a child’s schoolwork,” reports the Times. She also

Public support for charter schools has fallen among Democrats and Republicans, but opposition to school vouchers and tax-credit-funded scholarships also has declined, reports the 2017 EdNext Poll on School Reform. The “sharp drop” in support for charters “could reflect the waning influence of the Obama administration,” Ed Next concludes.  Once a charter supporter, Hillary Clinton said in her campaign that charters “don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids or, if they do, they don

AltSchools, which charge parents $30,000 a year, are experimenting with using technology to personalize learning. #AltSchool #personalizedlearning #technology

#technology

In How Google Took Over the Classroom, a front-page New York Times story, Natasha Singer “implies something deeply sinister is occurring in our public schools,” writes Richard Lee Colvin on The Grade. “A nearly ubiquitous, enormously powerful company had staged a secret coup and is changing education in profound and, apparently, harmful ways,” the May 13 story suggests. “Earnest but naïve educators are being unknowingly drafted to participate in the behemoth’s onslaught.” Col