Leadership Blog

Vander Ark on Innovation

This blog was written by Tom Vander Ark (@tvanderark), an education advocate, adviser, and author of Getting Smart: How Personal Digital Learning is Changing the World. Tom is Founder and Executive Editor of Getting Smart and a partner in Learn Capital. This blog is no longer being updated.

Education Opinion Signaling Job Readiness: Degrees Decline in Value, Alternatives Emerge
"In the new world the learner will be in the driver's seat, with a keen eye trained on value." That was the conclusion of Pearson's senior academic team who said "an avalanche is coming" to higher education. Chief Education Advisor Sir Michael Barber and his colleagues Katelyn Donnelly and Saad Rizvi released a report last year that outlined this problem statement for higher education:
Tom Vander Ark, February 6, 2014
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6 min read
Classroom Technology Opinion What If Kids Co-Created Customized Learning Pathways?
New tools are making it easier to customize learning for every student. Playlists, projects, and portfolios support big blocks, maker spaces, and flex schools. One thing I appreciate about the Christensen Institute definition of blended learning is that it stresses student agency by requiring "student control over time, place, path, and/or pace."
Tom Vander Ark, February 3, 2014
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4 min read
Classroom Technology Opinion Alpine Advances Online and in Blended Learning
Alpine School District, the largest in Utah, serves more than 73,000 students in 80 schools in a sprawling area south of Salt Lake City. It has among the lowest per-pupil-funding in the country, but strong academic results. The district has several partnerships with local companies resulting in school-wide improvements and individual student success stories.
Tom Vander Ark, January 29, 2014
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3 min read
Classroom Technology Opinion What To Read?
A person who knows state government, but is relatively new to the digital learning revolution asked what to read to get up to speed. Here's a quick list.
Tom Vander Ark, January 27, 2014
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2 min read
Classroom Technology Opinion Getting Kids to the Colleges They Deserve
As a college freshman, Michael Carter realized that many students had survived a more circuitous route to college than he had. As we noted last year, Carter did some digging and found out that many well-prepared, but low income students don't enroll in four year college.
Tom Vander Ark, January 23, 2014
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2 min read
Classroom Technology Opinion 10 Resources to Promote Personalized Learning
A couple of people called last week looking for advice for state and district leaders on personalized learning. Here's a recap of our conversations.
Tom Vander Ark, January 20, 2014
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3 min read
Education Opinion Smart Cities: Miami on the Move
The Miami Dade County School District won the 2012 Broad Prize. Reviewers noted the use of data to drive minority achievement gains and a unique problem-solving strategy to help challenged schools improve their student performance.
Tom Vander Ark, January 17, 2014
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3 min read
Education Opinion Smart Procurement
The good news is that the learning opportunity set is rapidly improving—devices are getting cheaper, learning systems are becoming adaptive, and new school models are blending the best of online and face-to-face instruction.
Tom Vander Ark, January 15, 2014
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3 min read
Education Opinion Literacy Design Collaborative Launches CoreTools
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are the most important professional development trend and development in education. They embody many of the broader adult learning trends: interest-driven, high engagement, flexible, and social. There are PLCs for teachers by level and discipline, PLCs for teachers in districts and networks, PLCs for principals—and even PLCs for specific tasks like aligning texts to the Common Core.
Tom Vander Ark, January 13, 2014
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3 min read
Education Opinion Smart Cities: Los Angeles (part 2 of 2)
The first half of this update on LA highlighted the warming ed-tech scene and the first Startup Weekend EDU in the City of Angels scheduled for the weekend of January 24th at UCLA Anderson. This post highlights some of the blended developments in LA schools.
Tom Vander Ark, January 10, 2014
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7 min read
Education Opinion 10 Platform Axioms
These may be short of axioms, but if you're building (or buying) a learning platform, these are 10 pretty good planning assumptions.
Tom Vander Ark, January 8, 2014
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2 min read
Education Opinion The Future: What 32 Ed Leaders Are Excited About
With two historic shifts under way simultaneously—the adoption of common college- and career-ready standards, and the shift to personalized digital learning—we asked 32 education leaders what they were excited about.
Tom Vander Ark, January 6, 2014
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6 min read
Classroom Technology Opinion Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World- 2013 Update
The first draft of Getting Smart was written three years ago and a lot has changed since then. I reread the book on a plane recently and it holds up reasonably well, but there are things I wanted to provide in an update. Below are the top 10 developments I've seen since writing Getting Smart.
Tom Vander Ark, January 1, 2014
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7 min read
School & District Management Opinion Beyond the Core: What About Other Important Outcomes?
The expectation debate in this country has been focused on common math and English standards but there are other outcomes that can be even more important to life success. A University of Chicago CCSR review and a couple of popular books suggest, "We don't teach the most important skills."
Tom Vander Ark, December 30, 2013
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5 min read
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