Tag Archives: Education

General

W07: Code Education Recap & Tally

We just want to send a thank you out to everyone for the wonderful, lively, and insightful participation in our OER activities this week. We consider you, our peers, to be “real world protagonists” in this market, and are very happy that our efforts to involve you in the process of refining and expanding our OER were successful! Also thank you for providing excellent feedback and suggestions for improvement, we will be meeting to implement changes this week.

– Group 7, Angela, Nidal, Milorad, Yuki, Colleen & Bobbi

Here were the results from the Activity #1 Poll:

poll-results

And here are the condensed results for the Activity #3 horizons review:

Looks like 2:new accreditation programs;  6:curriculum integration; and, 7: development of ‘smart code’ were the favorites although there were excellent reviews posted on some of the others. Interestingly, 5: segmentation and diversification was not well received, but is something that start-ups and corporate ventures are in some ways supporting with closed initiatives.

a3-horizons

Thanks again everyone for participating. Just thought we’d include a list of the changes made to the site based on everyone’s feedback: The activity error found by Kendra has been fixed as well as the typo that Chris found. Kirsten’s suggestion of Mozilla Webmaker Suite, Kendra’s SkillCrush, Shaun’s StackSocial and Max’s Arduino suggestions were added (the last lead to a creation of a hybrid open/closed category). James’s concerns about traversing back and forth between the two blogs for activities has been remedied by integrating the discussion directly into the resource pages (which alined with our goal of starting the commenting fresh for submission to NMC). Monique made a helpful suggestion of just strictly making hyperlinks and addition information tool-tips red, so we also incorporated this. Ashley’s mention of “conversational fluency” lead to a new horizon addition (#8 Changing attitudes regarding code as a new and prevalent “language”). We also re-arranged the horizons in order of importance as identified by our peers. Most of this was done on a new ‘clone’ of our WordPress site at the following address: http://met.bgraphicstudio.com/code-ed/

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Founders Parade

Founder and CEO of Lesson Planet

Meet Jim Hurley, Founder and CEO of Lesson Planet

Hurley

Lesson Planet is an American website that catalogues lesson plans and therefore acts as a search engine for teachers.  The website is run by a group of educators who rate and catalogue each lesson uploaded by tags that relate to the subjects, skills, grade level, and core/state standards.  Teachers, schools and school districts can purchase a membership to website which allows them to quickly search for lesson plans and technology resources that relate to their curriculum.  In addition, Lesson planet offers online tutorial videos and live professional development sessions.  The website is aimed at creating an easy and effective way for teachers to introduce technology into their classrooms.

Hurley’s mother was a teacher and she inspired him to also become an educator in 1985.  By 1993 Hurley had also obtained a Masters of Education from the university of California, Santa Barbara(Hampton, 2013). Hurley always had an interest in computers and after the web boom he started his company Education Planet that was open to parents, teachers and administrators.  After seeing the enthusiasm of teachers on the website he changed the name in 2004 to Lesson Planet and focused mainly on teachers.  The company now has 50 employees, 20 of which are teachers and Hurley considers this a “built-in focus group” (Hampton, 2013).  It seems like Hurley has a genuine interest in education and helping teachers and wants to work in the technology sector.  As an educator, he knows his audience and created a company with a number of skilled teachers working to improve the lives of other teachers.  This seems like a good strategic move and makes his organization more credible to teachers, his clients.  Though it is difficult to find information about his board and advisors, there are a number of his employees who have master’s degrees in education (Hampton, 2013).  For example, Learning Planet’s director of content and learning has 18 years of teaching experience and the company’s director of strategic relationships has 22 years of teaching and administration (Smith-Meyer, 2014).  I think that they have a strong and fairly large team of qualified individuals, some of whom have dealt with budgeting and purchasing in the education sector before (admin.).  My only concern is if the business and web design staff as they are not mentioned, but based on their website I would say the web design is good.

Hampton, C. (2013, Fall). Gaucho company helps teachers bring exciting curriculum to the classroom.  CoastLines UC Santa Barbara Alumni Associaton. Retrieved From: http://www.ucsbalum.com/Coastlines/2013/Fall/feature_planet_lesson.html

Smith-Meyer, J. (2014, March 21).  Helping teachers become campus TechEd leaders: Lesson Planet to present at CUE.  Lesson Planet.  Retrieved from: http://www.lessonplanet.com/us/about_us

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