NYC Innovation Zone Tests Customized Digital Learning

Catherine Mitchell teaches an Advanced Placement English class at the East Bronx Academy for the Future, in New York City. The school is part of the city schools' Innovation Zone initiative, which is trying different teaching and learning methods to see what works best.
—Emile Wamsteker for Education Week

The iZone is trying new and different ways for educating students and managing schools, with a heavy emphasis on customized digital learning

PS 154 Harriet Tubman, an elementary school in Harlem, is piloting a personalized digital-learning system that tailors language arts and math lessons to students' individual progress. At the East Bronx Academy for the Future, a 1-to-1 computing initiative is infusing technology into learning and giving students more opportunities to work at their own pace. And the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School in Manhattan has structured classes so that students can roam from one grade level to the next for certain subjects depending on how quickly they are progressing.

Welcome to the New York City school system's Innovation Zone , a three-year initiative launched by the 1.1 million-student district last fall that aims to test new and different ways for educating students and managing schools, with a heavy emphasis on using digital tools to customize learning geared to students' strengths and weaknesses.

The goal, ultimately, is to learn, through trial and error, what works and then can be scaled up to schools across the district. To identify those lessons, the district has partnered with the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University to evaluate schools based on a combination of subjective analysis and student...

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