• In America, that means the huge numbers of students arriving at community colleges and universities, many of them already intimidated, who are immediately forced to take remedial courses in math. Such classes cost money but are usually ineligible for financial aid and don’t offer academic credit, thwarting the educational ambitions of countless people who give up before they’ve even started—and this at a time when a push is on to increase the percentage of Americans with a college degree.
• Nearly two-thirds of first-year students in the United States have to take at least one remedial class in math or other subjects before they can enroll in college-level courses. Of those who need the most remedial math work, only 16 percent complete the course requirements within three years. Some portion of the rest are assumed to have dropped out.
• Remediation—also called “developmental education”—costs community colleges as much as $2.3 billion and four-year universities a collective $500 million a year, according to the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.
• biggest reasons for this turns out to be one of the hardest to quantify: students’ self-doubt.

• postsecondary-education program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “If we don’t fix this, it’s going to be impossible to improve the success rate.”

   
• “Nothing succeeds like success, and in mathematics—especially developmental mathematics—getting the students to understand they really can be successful, that’s the most important step,”
• “They’re unthreatening,” Marsh said. “They’re aimed at people who are scared. What they’re really about is giving students a taste of being good students and competent students and confident students
• idea behind the online courses is to let people work privately and at their own speed,

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• an emporium class is one in which students work on computer-based math software and move at their own pace.
• tudents are much more engaged, and self-pacing allows them to tackle each concept methodically. Hammond and several other professors also say the one-on-one time with students is crucial.
• A red cup means the student is working on a test, while blue signals a question for professors, who busily mill around the room, working with individual students.
• the problems they couldn’t solve are replaced with new ones
• it’s easy to see how students who grew up around computers might find the coursework more engaging than listening to a professor at a chalkboard, as difficult as that may be for professorial egos.
• Pearson originally developed MyMathLab as a homework tool, with the thinking being that real-time responses could help students better grasp math concepts.
• “With the computer students get a lot more feedback
• biggest beef was that the lab requires more effort than listening to a lecture

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• But what if society increasingly doesn’t see it that way, and if people come looking for knowledge (in other words, content), and employers for an assurance that this has been acquired (without worrying too much whether it involves a degree)?
• heavily controlled degree programme with its relatively inflexible pathways to a qualification and resulting professional success may lose value.

• As connection speeds increase and the ubiquity of the Web pervades, free education has never been so accessible. An Internet connection gives lifelong learners the tools to become autodidacts, eschewing exorbitant tuition and joining the ranks of other self-taught great thinkers in history such as Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen and Ernest Hemingway.

• showed that fifth graders’ fractions test scores improved an average of over 15% after playing Motion Math for 20 minutes daily over a five-day period, a significant increase compared to a control group.

• inequalities in the networked world are: the lack of digital and media literacies; critical thinking and communication skills in order to navigate and evaluate data online; an information and knowledge gap; and collaboration and participatory inequalities.
• it doesn’t have to do so much with hardware and internet access as much as with the way those are used.
• . Information literacy involves, for example, online search, digital, media and networked literacy or technical and cognitive, critical literacy skills in order to navigate online.
• we live in an Information Society determined by a “filter Bubble”, with the vast majority of Internet and Web services moving toward the next generation of the Semantic web, access to knowledge and its deployment in everyday work and education is crucial for producing the results and fostering the competence of scientists, scholars and knowledge workers. Access to information is the key to an individual’s position in society
• education plays a significant role in either strengthening or breaking down inequalities.
• They create marginalized groups who do not have access to the Internet and therefore at some point will not be able to engage in social, economic and political life.
• collaboration possibilities using the Internet and social media services present one of the communication practices for overcoming inequalities in e-skills, twenty–first century literacies and communication
• hese digital divides, that go far beyond the pure infrastructure issues, need to become a key focus of engagement for profit and nonprofit organizations as they continue their missions to develop programs for social and digital inclusion.

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• Imagine schools where students master vital skills and critical thinking in a personalized and collaborative manner, teachers assess pupils in real-time, and social media and digital libraries connect learners to a wide range of informational resources.  Teachers take on the role of coaches, students learn at their own pace, technology tracks student progress, and schools are judged based on the outcomes they produce.  Rather than be limited to six hours a day for half the year, this kind of education moves toward 24/7 engagement and learning fulltime.

• Technology is no substitute for an inspiring teacher. However, on-line materials are far more available. Twenty times more.
• Instead of teaching (push), students can be given projects that require them to learn (pull) the necessary material themselves. Key to this is the ability to get the information they need any time anywhere, without being in the physical presence of a teacher. This project-based pull approach makes learning far more interesting for the student.

• In a PBL setting, teachers need to decenter their roles as the source of knowledge by consciously refraining from giving only right-wrong answers, and helping students observe how other resources can teach them about effective language use. Acting as "facilitators" and "cognitive coaches"

• The most effective skill that the students learned would be computer skills. They are now skilled in computer literacy as well as practicing ICT in their daily course of  study. They are using Skype for video chatting, search anything related with their lessons from Wikipedia by using the internet
• our school is situated in a rural area of Bangladesh. Once, they were so far behind with  technologies or computer and ICT; but now they are quickly catching up with technology, computer skills and ICT usage along with the rest of the world
• they are sharing their thoughts, ideas and work with  other countries around the world. My students can download limitless important learning materials from the internet. We created a social networking profile with our school name (Amena-Baki Residential Model School) on Facebook. Now they are uploading their school activities and sharing them with the world.

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  Can technology fix education?
• consider a new model, harnessing the power and popularity of technology.
• f we want to realize technology’s full potential it needs to be used in a “closed-loop” system that uses technology at every level to provide continuous improvement in instruction and outcomes, with real-time feedback and one-on-one intervention, where necessary.
• schools typically use technology to automate and support existing practices, rather than to transform learning. Computers and interactive “whiteboards” have been placed in classrooms and have been plugged into the Internet, but little has been done to use the new technology to reshape the school day, the classroom, the curriculum, or the ways in which students and teachers interact. The chief opportunity for innovation in education doesn’t center on automating the status quo, but redesigning the process.
• , asking its students to spend 25 percent of each day in a “learning lab,” where they work on customized, computer-delivered material. During this time the students are supervised by monitors, rather than teachers, saving significantly on costs.
• The classroom that does not embrace technology is becoming progressively out of touch with the way America’s children learn and interact at home and away from school.
• Still, there’s no legitimate reason education can’t adapt to the modern era. When it does we’ll see students who are more engaged, more proficient, and more likely to graduate and succeed as adults. Technology can help educators get the job done: better, faster and at a lower cost.

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• the fault of an education system which resists innovation at every turn.
• technology is treated as a cost, not a means to increase productivity and reduce costs. Using technology to actually increase productivity and reduce costs would mean reducing the demand for teachers, administrators and central office commissars.
• disruptive education startups, forget about selling to the public school districts. Take your products to the entrepreneurial schools—private schools, virtual schools, charter schools, home school networks or even directly to the students. These schools and organizations only exist by convincing parents to enroll their children—they are hungry for ways to improve.

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• According to a National Education Association (NEA) policy brief, when technology is integrated in the curriculum, there’s a direct correlation in improving a child’s achievement, motivation and enthusiasm since students and teachers are more engaged.
• supplemental math work along with 24/7 support from their teachers, tutors, and classmates, 90 percent of the students said they were “more comfortable” taking math and 81 percent said they have increased confidence in talking about math

• absurd disconnect between the college study sequence and the experience of students with their eventual career pathways.
• We need educational systems that are more results driven, particularly as it relates to career pathways.
• world of careers and the skills/education needed to fulfill entry-level requirements
• “There is widespread consensus that community colleges are failing to meet the educational needs of large numbers of students.” This is horrific and a costly drain on the state budget. We need much better results from this public expenditure.
• The status quo is our enemy
• Students are motivated to learn when they see that what they are learning has an impact on their future life success.
• Not everyone needs a 4-year college degree, but everyone must have requisite skills for the jobs of the 21st century in order to enjoy a middle-class income.

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• he old guard within the community college establishment is gearing up to oppose them because they claim they are prescriptive, limit faculty control and deviate from the historic mission of serving all students regardless of their intentions.
• We spend more than $5 billion on community colleges and have an unacceptable failure rate. We must better manage these resources.

• the use of "adaptive" learning technologies, and an increase in social media in education
• . "Tech tools that make it easier, faster, more effective--more personalized for kids--

• big, important, disruptive -- and positive -- changes are coming; and they're coming faster than many might think

• online learning as a part of the solution to crumbling school budgets and lackluster student performance are right. I now believe that the education world is on the brink of a revolution that will come about not because of politics and policy, but despite them.

  The potential is so compelling that if the education establishment does not encourage the move to smart online learning, parents, students, teachers and innovative administrators will lead the charge. They will engineer the shift. And they'll do it in a matter of years, not decades.

  Online learning is already exploding to fill niche areas that are underserved -- advance placement courses, remedial courses for those falling behind, home schooling, rural districts lacking critical mass for many electives. Various charter schools have embraced digital learning as a way to cut costs and better assess the progress of students and the performance of teachers. It's hard to imagine the strategies will not migrate into traditional schools.
• Online programs allow students to move at their own pace.

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• . In addition, students can learn at their own pace--rewatching videos--until they actually understand the material. The early results show huge leaps in student skills. Technology is being used to create a customized, interactive education that is both novel and powerful.

  The reason that I am so taken by the Khan Academy--other than that I have used its videos with my 12-year-old son--is that it is a quintessentially American innovation, a new way of thinking about education.

• “Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,”
• departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.
• warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs
• pace of automation has picked up in recent years because of a combination of technologies including robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory control, voice recognition and online commerce.
• “This technology can do things now that only a few years ago were thought to be beyond the reach of computers,
• , “the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.”

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