While schools can provide low-income students with warmth, food, supplies, and a knowledgeable teacher, asking students to bring essential work home with them may remove those pillars of support from their educational process. Further, making in-class work dependent on progress made at home invites that stress into the classroom and diminishes the positive effect of those support structures that the school has put in place.

Powerful post especially as closing the gap is in the news today. Interesting criticism of flipped learning too.

Things I Take for Granted #287 – Grabbing Stuff from Web Form Drop Down Lists a really nice geeky post.
I’ve often done similar with a combination of find & replace and multi line editing but this is so much neater (and geekier). Apart from anything else this feeds I need a computer with ‘proper’ apps as opposed to a phone/tablet sometimes. (This post is however pulled together multi app style on an iPad, pinbook and drafts). Read with the last link in this post. I’ve subscribed to Tony Hirst’s blog for years, much flies over my head. But I am ready, or nearly in the zone (ZPD) for this one.

Raspberry Pi Model B+ gets price cut to £16 (Wired UK) I am currently dipping. My toes back in the raspberry pi water tempted to buy a couple just in case.

Want to Make Your Course ‘Gameful’? A Michigan Professor’s Tool Could Help – Wired Campus – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education

The system lets students choose their own path through a course, selecting the assignments that interest and challenge them. At its heart is a tool, called the “grade predictor,” that helps to “manage some of the chaos” of such a personalized system. The grade predictor also helps students figure out what they need to do to reach the classroom goals they set for themselves.

GradeCraft also aims to give students the ability to fail without detrimental consequences. There are many assignments to choose from, so any students who do poorly on one can find plenty of other tasks to redeem themselves. Instructors, meanwhile, can allow students to revise their work.

Echoes of DS106 and Derek Robertson on failure here.

An Eye Opening Discussion

I don’t live in a box. I know that teens and adults use different devices for different purposes. But I was still surprised by how unbalanced their responses were compared to what mine (and I suspect most other adults) would be.

Some nice pupil produced diagrams about the devices they use. I wonder if we will miss the sort of skills pointed to in the second link in this post.