Tag: edtech

A Look at the Future of School

Why Do People Turn to Online Schooling in the First Place?

The pandemic ushered in the age of so many students needing virtual education overnight, but the need for online schooling goes back much further than that. It’s easy to try to put everything into a tidy container called the global pandemic, but there’s more to the story. COVID hasn’t been the primary motivator for parents and students. The future of school must adapt.

By The Numbers: In Person Education is Lacking

Here are some shocking statistics for you – as of March 2021, a whopping 168 million students globally do not have access to in-person learning.

Studies have shown repeatedly that bullying keeps students wary of going back to a physical environment. Nearly 1 in 4 students experience bullying at in person school.

60% of Americans are saying that traditional schooling is failing the students of today. We can do better.

Online Schooling Has Been Tried Before: Here’s What’s Missing

It’s time for a skillset shift of focus in education. With the world’s knowledge at anyone’s fingertips with Google, Siri, and smartphones, education can no longer be focused on rote memorization and repetition. The skills of the next generation are clear: it’s time to focus on analytical thinking and innovation, active learning and learning strategies and creativity. It’s now a cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning.

Deeper learning occurs when there is a goal of mastery instead of just trying to ace a test. If a student puts in just enough effort to get their desired grade, how does that prepare them for success in all the areas of their life? Instead, it’s time to focus on learning how to actually learn.

Additional benefits of online learning done right include greater flexibility, improved memory, enhanced performance, and a better use of time, as online learning often takes 40-60% less time as compared to traditional in-person education counterparts. Online learning is adaptable and has mentorship components that benefit the students for a lifelong journey.

Today’s Generation Wants an Online Platform That Matches the Times

More and more, the youngest generation turns to Discord. I’ve often wondered why so many online components of school technology focus on out of date, out of touch tech, when there are much better alternatives that students are embracing while gaming and socializing with friends.

Discord isn’t just a replacement for another messaging app – what gravitates Gen Z (and others) to it is its sense of community. You can start a server on the most niche interests, and know that you are not alone. This is especially true during the pandemic which has been crushingly isolating for us all.

Bringing it All Together

All in all, school can – and must – improve. We may be wandering into an uncertain future, but education does not need to take a back seat. It’s time to innovate – embracing culture, community, and technology and a more immerse online experience.

For more information on how education can and must adapt to the virtual world and the future of school, see the infographic below:

January 4, 2022
How to Give Yourself a Free College Education Online

Important as education is for the modern workforce, the formal system that provides and certifies educational attainment is broken. Costs have gotten away from the benefits of a formal college degree. Students face college costs today that is 3 times higher than they were less than 20 years ago. Housing and food insecurity are rampant among college students, causing 20% to lose weight and 17% to go homeless. After sacrificing so much time and welfare for a college degree, 73% of college graduates end up in a job unrelated to their degree. What is the point of asking so much from students only to give them so little in return?

It’s no surprise that more people want alternatives to the current system. Of the youngest generation of American adults, less than half believe degrees are necessary for success. Companies as famous as Tesla are coming around to agreeing with them. People of all ages believe education is shifting more towards autodidacticism or a self-taught model. People who were self-taught in whole or part have made important contributions to society in the past. Melanie Klein gave us children’s psychology without ever attending college. Steve Jobs gave us Apple without so much as a year of a college education. Should people choose to take their education into their own hands today, they will be in good company.

Educating Yourself is More of a Possibility Now than Ever

The truth is that self-education is at your fingertips in a way it never was in the past. The internet makes it possible to access innumerable educational resources without spending a penny. Finding a college-level education online is easier than you think.

Where should self-learners seek out resources? Ironically, some of the most expensive universities to obtain a degree from offer the widest selection of free courses on their website. MIT, Harvard, and UC Berkeley all have a large catalogue of courses to choose from. For those who don’t wish to search individual college websites yourself, aggregate sites like College Cliffs or Coursera curate the best courses by subject for their users.

Stepping away from formal universities entirely, expert-made courses are abundant at Khan Academy, Udemy, and TEDEd, and free online resources like PDF Drive and Z library to download books. Another great place to educate yourself is free online courses like MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses. Canvas is an example of a MOOC, as is LinkedIn Learning. The latter is especially useful because it allows users who complete courses to upload their success to their LinkedIn profiles where potential employers can see it. For those who don’t fare well in traditional classroom environments, SkillShare and Codecademy teach via interaction and project competition. In the vast landscape that is the internet, there is an educational resource for anyone.

Young adults aren’t the only ones taking advantage of these offerings 78% of people worldwide believe they need more training in “soft skills,” and the internet seeks to provide it. For working adults wanting to keep up with company upgrades, 42% of Americans use free online resources to retrain for work.

Source: CollegeCliffs

July 8, 2021
DreamBox CEO: Adding Technology To Learning Is Not Martyring Your Kids

“We’ve got to be intentional about subjecting ourselves to the scrutiny of third-party evaluators to make sure that parents and teachers don’t think they’re martyring their kids just by adding technology to their learning experience,” says DreamBox Learning CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson. “A Harvard study that we published proved that it was efficacious. If kids used DreamBox for just five lessons a week, that’s less than one hour, they could get a 60 percent increase in their learning.”

Jessie Woolley-Wilson, CEO of DreamBox Learning, discusses how DreamBox is now used by one out of every ten schools because it is proven to enhance learning:

There’s An Acceleration In Schools Going 100% Online

We have a goal to unlock the learning potential in every child regardless of what zip code they’re in. We think the way to do that is to personalize the learning experience so that it’s engaging, it’s effective, and it’s highly personalized. We developed an intelligent adaptive learning engine that was pioneered in 2006 to actually track how kids are thinking. It matches the curriculum to exactly where they were so it would never be too difficult or too easy. It would always be engaging and kids would struggle productively and learn and master skills.

We really didn’t know what to expect (related to schools closing), we just knew we had to embrace change. Schools were asked to change and parents were asked to change and we changed too. So we opened up our platform for free through the end of the school year just to make sure that parents and teachers didn’t have to worry about mathematics. We saw over two million kids join the platform in less than six weeks. That’s great growth but it also means it strained the organization. When you grow that fast i like to say you get stretch marks, so we’re managing through our stretch marks. That means that we have a lot more students and a lot more volume to manage in a much smaller piece of time.

We thought we would get some relief as schools would go back to school in live classrooms. What we’re finding now in the last couple weeks is that there’s an acceleration in the the number of schools and districts that have decided to remain in a distance 100 percent online learning mode.

Teachers Cannot Be Replaced By Technology

The (technology gap) is a big concern and challenge and I would say an opportunity for everyone involved in blended learning. At DreamBox, we never believed and don’t believe that teachers can be replaced by technology. We have developed a technology that was designed to complement the live instruction, to complement the art and the magic that happens in a live classroom. We think that there are things that technology can do better. Technology can understand what each individual child is doing moment by moment and then can tee up predictive insights to a teacher so that they know what they can do and how they can change their live instruction.

Over the time of COVID, we think that the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown larger because there are some kids that are permanently disconnected. They don’t have access to broadband and they don’t have devices. We need coordinated strategy, national, state, and local strategy, to make sure that these disconnected kids are connected and they can leverage innovative learning technologies that complement what they get in the classroom.

Adding Technology To Learning Is Not Martyring Your Kids

One of the adaptations that we actually made during the time of COVID was we added a capability in the platform that will allow teachers to send notes to kids. I don’t think that all technologies are the same. There’s no monolithic online learning experience. Many kids are not experiencing a positive online learning experience. We’re thrilled that at DreamBox, our kids are engaged. They think they’re playing a game but they’re actually engaged in rigorous meaningful deep thinking mathematics. That’s why they love it and that’s why parents trust it.

We saw exponential growth in the number of parents who actually signed up for DreamBox as well. Parents need relief. Children need engaged reliable learning experiences. I think it’s incumbent upon companies like DreamBox to open themselves up to the scrutiny of third-party evaluators. A Harvard study that we published proved that it was efficacious. If kids used DreamBox for just five lessons a week, that’s less than one hour, they could get a 60 percent increase in their learning.

On the other side, in terms of student privacy, Common Sense Media has given us their highest rating. These are hard goals but we’ve got to be intentional about subjecting ourselves to the scrutiny of third-party evaluators to make sure that parents and teachers don’t think they’re martyring their kids just by adding technology to their learning experience.

DreamBox CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson: Adding Technology To Learning Is Not Martyring Your Kids

August 13, 2020