Technology in Education
A Better Blend
A Better Blend: A Vision for Boosting Student Outcomes with Digital Learning
Blended learning that combines digital instruction with live, accountable teachers holds unique promise to improve student outcomes dramatically. This brief explains how schools can use blended learning to encourage improvements in digital instruction, transform teaching into a highly paid, opportunity-rich career that extends the reach of excellent teachers to all students and teaching peers, and improve student learning at large scale. We call this a “better blend”: combining high-quality digital learning and excellent teaching.
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Improving Conditions & Careers
Improving Conditions & Careers: How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession
This white paper, written in collaboration with Getting Smart and Digital Learning Now!, is the seventh installment of the DLN Smart Series. The paper, executive summary, and accompanying infographic explain how blended learning can help create better teaching conditions and expanded career opportunities for teachers. By eliminating the traditional one-teacher-one-classroom model, blended learning environments allow for more teacher collaboration and more meaningful professional development. Enhanced student data systems improve efficiency, providing more time for personalized learning. Through the use of high-quality education technology, schools can extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, while at the same time professionalizing the teaching career. The paper also addresses how to remove the policy barriers to blended-learning innovations, and notes that “Core to this is a belief that technology does not replace a teacher, but rather it empowers teachers and enhances their work.”
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Interventions and Catalysts in Markets for Education Technology
Interventions and Catalysts in Markets for Education Technology: Roles of City-Based Funders
City-based funders focused on education are eager to invest in technology-based initiatives to address education’s most complex problems. However, many funders are struggling to figure out how to most effectively and expeditiously realize technology’s potential in schools. This white paper—published by the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust)— identifies and catalogs the core components of education technology markets that city-based funders might support, and how they might support them. Interviews with funders and education technology experts yielded thoughtful observations about options for city-based funders in two categories: intervening directly in education technology markets to fund creators or users of cutting-edge technologies, and catalyzing activity or funding, to educate the field or create conditions favorable to the creators and users of education technology.
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Scaling a Successful Pilot to Expand Blended Learning Options Citywide
Scaling a Successful Pilot to Expand Blended Learning Options Citywide
City-based organizations are playing pioneering roles in the development and implementation of blended learning initiatives. As more of these initiatives demonstrate early successes, their leaders and backers are turning their thoughts to replicating and scaling their efforts to improve student outcomes across their cities. This white paper—published by the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust)—examines four approaches to scaling a successful blended learning initiative: expanding blended learning to additional schools and classrooms; developing systems and talent for scale; advocating for policies that support expansion of high-quality blended learning initiatives; and amplifying the voices of educators in efforts to influence policy and practice.
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School Leadership Briefing Interviews
School Leadership Briefing Interviews
Public Impact Co-director Bryan C. Hassel talks about extending the reach of excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget, in an Opportunity Culture–listen to his interview in the May issue of School Leadership Briefing. For information on using digital instruction to help extend the reach of excellent teachers, listen to his February 2012 talk, Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction.
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Quakertown Community School District
Quakertown Community School District: An Approach to Blended Learning That Focuses on District Leadership, Staffing, and Cost-Effectiveness (Part of All4Ed’s Digital Learning Series)
This case study from Public Impact and the Alliance for Excellent Education profiles Quakertown Community School District’s K-12 blended learning program. This interactive study, which includes video clips and a written profile, highlights the district leadership’s role in designing and implementing blended learning, and also details the district’s approach to staffing and budget to maximize the model’s impact. This case study is part of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Digital Learning Series, which will continue to highlight innovations in digital learning across the nation. Read the press release to learn more.
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Blended Learning in Charter Schools: Reimagining Traditional Models
Blended Learning in Charter Schools: Reimagining Traditional Models
This webinar, hosted by the National Charter School Resource Center, explores blended learning in charter schools, and explains how online and traditional teaching methods can be combined to improve student performance while making schools more efficient. Heather Staker of the Innosight Institute presents a variety of blended learning models, examining classrooms arrangements, schedules, student-teacher ratios, and the impact on school budgets. Lucy Steiner of Public Impact explains how blended learning, which is a key component of Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative, can help excellent teachers reach more students, for more pay – within available budgets and without increasing class sizes.
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Infographic
Extending the Reach of Excellent Teachers – Infographic
Why does every child need consistent access to excellent teachers, and how can we, today, extend the reach of the excellent teachers our nation already has? Public Impact teamed up with designers at Column Five to develop this infographic with the answers. It illustrates four of the more than 20 “reach extension” models that use job redesign and technology to put excellent teachers in charge of every student’s learning. It also highlights the role of extending these teachers’ reach in building an “Opportunity Culture” in which excellent teachers, other educators, and students can excel. See the full inforgraphic here.
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Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction
Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction
In Fordham’s new book Education Reform for the Digital Era, Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel’s opening chapter proposes that “digital education needs excellent teachers and that a first-rate teaching profession needs digital education.” In the digital future, teacher effectiveness will matter even more than it does today. While the roles of teachers and other adults will change dramatically, what will increasingly differentiate outcomes for schools, states, and nations is how well responsible adults carry out the more complex instructional tasks. At the same time, technology has enormous transformative potential to extend the reach of excellent teachers to vastly more students, to help teaching attract and retain the best, and to boost the effectiveness of average teachers. To realize that promise, though, the nation needs new staffing models, significant policy changes, and a stronger dose of political will to change. Read the chapter here, and watch Bryan Hassel on a webcast of the release event here. The authors also penned a related commentary that appears here.
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How digital learning can (and must) help excellent teachers reach more children
How Digital Learning Can (and must) Help Excellent Teachers Reach More Children
In this blog post for the Innosight Institute (now the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation), Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel argue that “schools – and nations – that excel in the digital age will be those that use digital tools both to make teaching more manageable for the average teacher, and to give massively more students access to excellent teachers.” While digital learning can help solid teachers become more effective, one of its greatest promises is to enable top teachers – those whose students already achieve well over a year’s worth of growth – to educate more students by freeing up their time, allowing them to teach students who are not physically present, and capturing their teaching prowess by recording videos or helping develop smart learning software.
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Model Summaries
Models to Reach Every Student With Excellent Teachers
In the schoolhouse, nothing matters more to students’ learning than their teachers. But only about one of every four U.S. classrooms has an “excellent teacher”—one who produces enough learning progress to close achievement gaps quickly and help all students leap ahead to higher-order learning. What can schools do, now, to reach many more students with excellent teachers year after year and help all teachers improve and contribute to excellence? Schools can “extend the reach” of the top 25 percent of U.S. teachers to more students. This report, based on the information that appears here on the OpportunityCulture.org website, provides brief descriptions of more than 20 school models that extend excellent teachers’ reach by using job redesign, technology, or both. By making the right changes, schools can provide all teachers with career advancement opportunities, and promote collaboration, development, and excellence for every professional. Ten detailed models further explain how changes in teaching roles, time use, and technology can allow teachers who achieve the best student outcomes to reach more students and help peer teachers produce excellent results, too.
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Models for Extending the Reach of Excellent Teachers
Models for Extending the Reach of Excellent Teachers
Public Impact has posted brief descriptions of more than 20 school models that put excellent teachers in charge of more children’s learning. The models describe how schools can adjust teaching roles and use technology to reach every child with excellent teachers—the 20 to 25 percent who make well over a year of progress each year on average with their students. Public Impact will add examples and detail, including job descriptions, evaluation rubrics and financial considerations. All will be available for free on OpportunityCulture.org. Models were made possible by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, and the Colorado Legacy Foundation.
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Encouraging Social Innovation Through Capital: Using Technology to Address Barriers
Encouraging Social Innovation Through Capital: Using Technology to Address Barriers
This report, co-authored by Bryan Hassel for Bellwether Education Partners, examines how technology can optimize the flow of investment capital to drive innovation in public education. As described by Bellwether: “Through an in-depth examination of investing and giving tools and platforms, and interviews with more than two dozen stakeholders, we discovered that there are indeed ways we can better leverage technology to increase and align funding for education innovations. By strengthening content, connecting technology efforts with existing face-to-face networks, and streamlining transactions, we can help create a more rational, evidence-based culture in public education that can effectively attract capital, steer it toward the best ideas and approaches, and ultimately improve student achievement and school productivity.” This is the final paper in the Bellwether Education Partners’ series Innovation for the Public Good: A Case Study of US Education, produced with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
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The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning
The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning
Blended learning is poised to transform American education by personalizing student learning – uniting the highest-quality online content with highly-effective educators in “live” instruction and supervisory roles. This white paper from Innosight Institute (now the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation), the Charter School Growth Fund, and Public Impact defines six models of blended learning, provides vivid examples of blended learning in action, and discusses both the technology and policies needed to realize the promise of blended learning. The white paper highlights the importance of creating policy environments that grant innovative educators autonomy, enabling them to design and implement models based on affordable quality and personalization. In these policy environments, the focus of regulation must not be on input-focused rules, but on accountability for outcomes.
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Demystifying Special Education in Virtual Charter Schools
Demystifying Special Education in Virtual Charter Schools
This report, by Lauren Morando Rhim and Julie Kowal, describes how educating students with disabilities in virtual charter schools entails not only molding state charter school laws to fit a specialized type of charter school, but also adapting federal and state special education guidelines aimed at providing special education in traditional brick and mortar settings. This special report, funded by the USDOE National Initiatives Grant of the Charter Schools Program and administered by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, is a supplement to a series of special education primers, Primers on Special Education in Charter Schools, created to inform state officials, authorizers and charter school operators about special education in the charter sector.
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How Can Virtual Schools Be a Vibrant Part of Meeting the Choice Provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act?
How Can Virtual Schools Be a Vibrant Part of Meeting the Choice Provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act?
This paper by Bryan C. Hassel and Michelle Godard Terrell was prepared for the No Child Left Behind Leadership Summit—Increasing Options Through e-Learning in July 2004. It outlines different models for how districts and states could use virtual schools to meet the choice provisions of NCLB. The paper explores a range of challenges districts and states face in using virtual schools for this purpose and proposes solutions.
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Literacy Learning on the Net: An Exploratory Study
Literacy Learning on the Net: An Exploratory Study
This paper, published by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, explores how some schools and teachers are using the Internet in exemplary ways to teach reading and writing across the curriculum.
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