Last June, we had the pleasure of introducing the Summer Learning Initiative in an interview with the program’s founder and CEO, Alejandro Gac-Artigas. Last month, SLI announced several big moves, including complete rebranding to shift the emphasis from short-term gains during the “summer” to continual learning opportunities. Thus, SLI is now known as Springboard Collaborative.
Yesterday, we said goodbye and thank you to one of the world’s brilliant minds, Steve Jobs. The Smithsonian Institution has an amazing archive of Oral and Video Histories. One such record is an 1995 interview with Daniel Morrow, Executive Director of The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program. In her School Reform Blog, Whitney Tilson makes a poignant observation: “It dates from 1995, but it could have been yesterday – very sobering how little has changed in our system of education, despite the desperate need for it.” Without further ado, let’s here from the man himself on “the importance of education.”
When the Common Core State Standards were released in 2010, it was a great stride in creating a set of expectations for learners across the country. As we built out the initial LearnBoost teacher platform, we wanted to continue to lead the innovation charge and be the first online gradebook to fully support the Common Core. We hustled over to the Common Core website, and soon met subtle disappointment.
The standards, though beautifully put together in PDFs weren’t available in CSV or XLS for manipulation or upload. Sad face! As we open up LearnBoost with our new, easy standards uploading feature, we want to give some tips for going through the transcription process if you’re running into the same issue with local standards.