DreamBox, Datamining & DeVos? – Missouri Education Watchdog:
DreamBox, Datamining & DeVos?
President Elect Trump’s choice for US Secretary of Ed, Betsy DeVos, is pro- choice. So parents would like to know:
Would Ms. DeVos support ensuring parents the CHOICE of whether to have their children datamined?
Apparently, Ms. DeVos supports allowing big technology companies to datamine children, 50,000 data points per hour, without parents knowing about it or ever seeing how the data are shared, used and profiled.
The Common Core—and basing annual tests on the objectives spelled out within it—is an exciting idea. But annual tests are just too slow, infrequent, impersonal, and inexact to be adequate in the digital era. Even individual quizzes or papers—the way many teachers assess what each of their students know and don’t—are needlessly slow and laborious and often fail to produce useable results.
…This is where new-style digital learning may be a game-changer. If computerized curricula that include constant student testing become widespread in classrooms, with daily reports showing how every student in a class is doing on various fronts, then accountability becomes much easier to enforce. Teachers, principals, and parents will know right away if students are learning and understanding. Good blended-learning softwareputs all final results in the context of where the student started out, so separating good instruction from bad instruction isn’t just a crude matter of who aces te end-of-year test.
