Fire, meet gasoline:
- Ben Herold reports, “Teachers’ Union Faces Backlash Over Publication on Personalized Learning,” but be sure to check the comments on the original article for the 🔥🔥🔥
- Cory Doctorow sensationalizes the solid Rhode Island ACLU report on student privacy in their 1:1 programs (confounding the right to spy with the presumption of spying) and the BoingBoing bulletin board goes 🔥🔥🔥
- Richard Colvin pens a reaction to the New York Times’ Google in K-12 coverage and twitter goes 🔥🔥🔥
Fire, Meet Gasoline by emo-nerd on DeviantArt
Otherwise, here’s what caught my eye this week – news, tools, and reports about education, public policy, technology, and innovation – including a little bit about why. No endorsements; no sponsored content; no apologies for my eclectic tastes.
Strong opinions may be weakly held.
A Thinking Person’s Guide to EdTech News (2017 Week 24 Edition)
Problems with the New York Times’ Google takeover story | Phi Delta Kappan →
Richard Colvin writes: "Singer apparently visited lots of schools. But it seems her singular focus on technology blurred her vision of the larger context in which schools operate." Maybe, maybe not. On the other hand, Colvin may not have a terrific grasp of the larger context in which big tech operates (including in education).
Tagged on: June 18, 2017
Miss. Dept of Education fires testing firm after exams wrongly scored | The Dispatch →
The state Board of Education revoked a contract with NCS Pearson in closed session Friday, after the Pearson PLC unit told officials it used the wrong table to score U.S. history exams for students on track to graduate this spring. Students who did poorly got overly high scores, while those who did better didn't get enough credit.
Tagged on: June 18, 2017
Hack attacks highlight vulnerability of Florida schools to cyber crooks | Miami Herald →
Two months before the U.S. presidential election, international hackers slipped into the computer systems of at least four Florida school district networks in the hopes of stealing the personal data of hundreds of thousands of students.
Tagged on: June 18, 2017
Cory Doctorow writes: "A majority of the Rhode Island school districts with "1-1" programs where each student is issued a laptop have a blanket policy of spying on the students and everything they do on their laptops, during, before and after school hours, on or off school premises, without any evidence (or even suspicion ) of wrongdoing."
Tagged on: June 18, 2017
You Can’t Open the Microsoft Surface Laptop Without Literally Destroying It | Motherboard →
Bad for consumers & environment: iFixit, which provides repair tools and manuals for popular gadgets like the iPhone and PlayStation, has handed the Surface Laptop a score of 0 out of 10 in terms of user repairability, stating definitively that the laptop "is not meant to be opened or repaired; you can't get inside without inflicting a lot of damage."
Tagged on: June 17, 2017
The Girl Scouts are adding a cybersecurity badge | CNN Tech →
The cybersecurity badge will launch in partnership with security firm Palo Alto Networks. The new badges will become available to participants in kindergarten through 12th grade over the next two years.
Tagged on: June 17, 2017
Despite a hefty investment, online charter schools have produced dismal results on almost all academic metrics, according to state and district data. On average, less than half of their students graduate on time. At one cyber school, nearly a third of students dropped out last school year
Tagged on: June 17, 2017
This special issue contains 16 empirical studies that address different aspects of the implementation of OER.
Tagged on: June 16, 2017
Whither Moodle? | e-Literate →
We don’t want to cause too much alarm for open source advocates and for the Moodle community, as there is no risk in the near term for the installed base to reduce to unhealthy levels. But these data seem to show a big change to the world’s largest LMS market position by a dramatic slowdown in new implementations. The question is where Moodle is going for higher education LMS usage.
Tagged on: June 16, 2017
Protecting Student Privacy | U.S. Department of Education →
PTAC and the Office of the Chief Privacy Officer (OCPO) are excited to announce the launch of the new Student Privacy Website! This new website replaces both the legacy PTAC and the Family Policy Compliance Office’s (FPCO) sites, and further represents a reorganization of the offices at OCPO into the Student Privacy Protection and Assistance Division, or SPPAD.
Tagged on: June 16, 2017
The Cleveland school district has recovered $215,000 from its $8 million technology rebate failures, the school board announced today. The money from E-Rate Central, a Westbury, N.Y., consultant the district hired to help it navigate the complicated E-Rate federal technology reimbursement process, is just a fraction of the money lost.
Tagged on: June 15, 2017
Woodman has one of the slowest internet connections of any school in Montana, a mere 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth to go around.... A connection that slow tests more than teachers' patience. It dictates the terms of classroom instruction.
Tagged on: June 15, 2017
Mattel's CEO Thinks Internet-Connected Toys Are the Future | Bloomberg Technology →
Mattel Inc.’s Margo Georgiadis, recruited from Google earlier this year, is shaking up the 72-year-old company by cutting its dividend and investing the money in entertainment and internet-connected toys.
Tagged on: June 15, 2017
How Miami-Dade Schools Made Thousands Of Fights Disappear | WLRN →
In 2015-16, Miami-Dade County Public Schools reported a total of 311 fights to the state. The year before that, it reported more than 5,000. The difference isn’t a dramatic turnaround in student behavior at the district’s most troubled schools, but a reporting change that keeps the vast majority of fights out of state records.
Tagged on: June 15, 2017
Online school sues Ohio board after vote on $60M repayment | WPTA →
As anticipated, one of the nation's largest online charter schools is suing Ohio's State Board of Education over its vote to have the school repay $60 million that was disputed because of a lack of justifying documentation.
Tagged on: June 15, 2017
What's Wrong With Letting Tech Run Our Schools | Bloomberg →
Silicon Valley tech moguls are conducting an enormous experiment on the nation’s children. We should not be so trusting that they’ll get it right.
Tagged on: June 14, 2017
Students sat in cubicles using computers. It wasn’t popular. | The Hechinger Report →
An Arizona-born charter school known for its call-center-like appearance has run into trouble as it attempted to expand to other states.
Tagged on: June 14, 2017
While many Kansas school districts experienced technical problems with this past spring’s state assessment testing, members of the Kansas State Board of Education on Tuesday unanimously voted to renew the contract with the University of Kansas for the annual summative tests.
Tagged on: June 14, 2017
Teachers' Union Faces Backlash Over Publication on Personalized Learning | Education Week →
"Well, this is something to watch."
Tagged on: June 14, 2017
A Complete Guide To Switching From HTTP To HTTPS | Smashing Magazine →
HTTPS is a must for every website nowadays: Users are looking for the padlock when providing their details; Chrome and Firefox explicitly mark websites that provide forms on pages without HTTPS as being non-secure; it is an SEO ranking factor; and it has a serious impact on privacy in general. Additionally, there is now more than one option to get an HTTPS certificate for free, so switching to HTTPS is only a matter of will.
Tagged on: June 13, 2017
About a month ago, Hewlett Foundation’s open educational resources grantees gathered in Canada to reflect on progress in the OER field and how equity plays a role. Coming out of the conference, we asked education program officer TJ Bliss what trends he’s keeping an eye on in the OER space.
Tagged on: June 13, 2017
Pandoc - a universal document converter →
If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc is free software, released under the GPL.
Tagged on: June 13, 2017
The future of education is plain text | Simply Statistics →
Jeff Leek writes "I think that the future of education is in plain text documents (not just for data science) and that the future of data storage is in simple csvs for all but the most complicated data sets."
Tagged on: June 13, 2017
Why doctors hate electronic records — and what could change that | San Francisco Chronicle →
The health care industrial complex has spent billions of dollars and untold amounts of time trying to make medical records as flexible, invisible and unobtrusive as possible for patients and clinicians alike....But after nearly two decades of concerted innovation, amid a push to do away with paper records, many physicians say they’re still hamstrung by issues that have dogged them for years. We’ve replaced the medical chart with a patchwork of systems that impose on doctors’ precious time and have yet to deliver clear improvements.
Tagged on: June 13, 2017
Internet provider seeks injunction after losing Roanoke school contract | The Roanoke Times →
An internet service provider is asking a judge to block construction of a broadband network for the Roanoke public schools, arguing the contract was improperly awarded and puts unnecessary costs on taxpayers. At issue: E-rate self-provisioning.
Tagged on: June 13, 2017
Tech chief Scott Smith uses new role to keep innovating in North Carolina district | EdScoop →
On school cybersecurity: “For typical, business-world IT professionals, that's just the forefront of what they do. For education technology people, it's kind of been an afterthought. Now it's coming to the forefront and...we really have to address this.”
Tagged on: June 13, 2017
Promises and pitfalls of online education | Brookings Institution →
Online courses have expanded rapidly and have the potential to extend further the educational opportunities of many students, particularly those least well-served by traditional educational institutions. However, in their current design, online courses are difficult, especially for the students who are least prepared.
Tagged on: June 12, 2017
Inspecting Algorithms for Bias | MIT Technology Review →
Courts, banks, and other institutions are using automated data analysis systems to make decisions about your life. Let’s not leave it up to the algorithm makers to decide whether they’re doing it appropriately.
Tagged on: June 12, 2017
Chinese exam authorities use facial recognition, drones to catch cheats | Reuters →
Exam centres this year have deployed metal detectors, facial and fingerprint recognition technology, cellphone-signal blockers, wireless detectors and even drones in their fight to root out cheating.
Tagged on: June 12, 2017
Facebook testing features to let users teach online courses | Inside HigherEd →
New Facebook features intended for developers could, if expanded, turn the social networking site into an online learning platform.
Tagged on: June 12, 2017
Schools Tap Secret Spectrum to Beam Free Internet to Students | Wired →
This ambitious project relies on a little-known public resource — a slice of electromagnetic spectrum the federal government long ago set aside for schools — called the Educational Broadband Service (EBS). Some internet-access advocates say EBS is underutilized at best, and wasted at worst, because loose regulatory oversight by the FCC has allowed most of the spectrum to fall into the hands of commercial internet companies.
Tagged on: June 12, 2017
Pennsylvania senator wants failing students out of cyber charter schools | The Morning Call →
The bill, proposed by Sen. David Argall, R-Schuylkill, would require students who are consistently underperforming in a cyber charter school to return to a brick-and-mortar school.
Tagged on: June 12, 2017
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