It is my understanding (and I may be wrong, that is to say, it may not be the same everywhere) that public school districts are issuing laptops or i-pads to support personalized learning, and the curriculum is largely online making books nearly obsolete.
While there is good and bad in everything, I am wary of "Personalized Learning" and understand it is a new means of data collection, which may include:
- turning on camera or microphone to observe the student
- collecting keystrokes
- recording how many minutes the student spends on each screen page
- biometric data:
-- watching the eyes as they scan the screen page
-- capturing student finger print
Learning from a pre-selected subset of lessons contained in one's device (typically a laptop or i-pad) seems to me to be a type of censorship... getting students to willingly forsake books and the vast stores of knowledge found in their pages (including differing perspectives over time)... as "old fashioned".
Kids may be more drawn into the "virtual" world, and be interacting less with the "real" world.
Additionally, because each student may be graded according to different criteria on assignments of varying complexity (differentiated task demands), concepts such as grades and class rank become rather meaningless.
Not a fan.
gifted... having only 1% native constituency
Without using the word "gifted", I believe the study
here is illustrating that 15%-45% of students are not well served under current grade-level standard curriculum and pacing.
