21st-century learning

Strong and steady won the race for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, winner of the 2012 Broad Prize for Urban Education, which recognizes large, urban school districts making gains in student achievement.

Boston school officials announced today that they intend to tap an education-management company to convert the Marshall Elementary School in Dorchester into a charter school next fall, under a proposal to boost student achievement at the academically struggling school.

After years of neglect, education is a hot area of interest for technology startups. Y Combinator is the latest startup in this space.

Julie Garcia handed Apple iPads to students in her seventh-grade pre-algebra class on a recent morning before showing the pupils how to use the tablet to graph data, hunt for correlations and record how-to videos.

Recent estimates suggest that 1.5 million elementary and secondary students participated in some form of online learning in 2010 (Wicks 2010).

Brookline-based Beaver Country Day School has been awarded a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam grant of $10,000 to create an automated robotic vehicular independence system that can carry up to 50 pounds for wheelchair-bound individuals or those needing hands-free help to transport cargo. Called JARVIS, students will showcase their prototype at EurekaFest at MIT in June.

An interview with John Martellaro over at The Mac Observer, an Apple focused e-zine, has Christopher Dawson of ZDnet Education thinking ... why can't we get this right?

As districts across the country adopt the Common Core math standards, many district math coordinators are looking for effective tools to help their students transition to the new curriculum.

On Sept. 20, Jaime Casap, senior education evangelist at Google, Inc., gave the keynote presentation at the District Administration Leadership Institute Summit at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix, Ariz. Casap had the audience thinking about the meaning of true educational vision and where we need to be in the future with regard to creating a learning environment that brings out the best in every child. A summary of his keynote is below.

So far the results are promising: Rocketship students score among the top performers on standardized tests.