Harnessing the Upside of Technology in Higher Education

Achieving Student Engagement in the Digital Age

How will technology change the college-going experience over the next decade? Can the plugged-in generation harness their proclivity for technology in ways that their professors can understand? Can professors move from teaching and telling to coaching and facilitating? Can faculty across the disciplines understand enough about technology to give their students the reigns they need to craft and deliver their own interactive learning? Can students have the self-reflection, judgment, and personal discipline  to create the boundaries they need to aggregate and create the content from which they can learn? Can they resist the temptations to camp on Facebook or play video games to join on-line class discussions and make meaningful, thoughtful contributions to their fellow classmates while juggling reading and other self-paced class responsibilities?
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Do Remedial College Classes Cost More Than They’re Worth?

Only 32 percent of students who graduate from high school are academically prepared for college, according to research from the Manhattan Institute Center for Civic Information1. Remedial classes in English, writing, and math are offered at many of today’s community and four-year colleges to address the overwhelming amount of students leaving high school without basic mastery of their core subjects.

Remedial classes are controversial because their worth is questioned in the grand scheme of things. Yes, remedial classes can open opportunities for more students to enter college who otherwise wouldn’t have the academic credentials to pursue an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree. However, remedial classes can also offer a false hope to many students.

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LifeBound Academic Coaching Training: Coaching Students and Professionals

LifeBound’s three-day Academic Coaching session came to an end today. LifeBound’s lead trainers Maureen Breeze and Jim Hoops had the pleasure of working with a variety of education professionals from around the country who work with students from a wide-range of backgrounds, grade levels, and types of institutions.

Yesterday, our coaches in training put their new coaching skills to the test when we brought in real students and professionals to get coached on one area they wanted to grow in. The following pictures are of each coach and their coachee engaged in a session.
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Leadership & Critical Thinking for Teens: LifeBound’s Summer Learning Workshop Series

The achievement gap between low- and high-income students is 30-40 percent higher for students born in 2001 than those born 25 years earlier, according to the National Summer Learning Association. The stigma of summer school is changing as experts find that summer learning losses continue to divide opportunities between low- and high- income students and that students can’t afford to unlearn knowledge every summer as our world standing in education continues to slip.

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LifeBound Intern Haley Justino Live at Red Rocks

Haley Justino is a talented student entering her junior year in high school at Cherry Creek High School who has many passions in the arts. Not only is she an accomplished pianist and singer, she also interns for LifeBound and writes for our student blog!
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Growing Class Sizes: Creative Solutions for Challenging Times

What could cause a student to go from Student of the Month one year to nearly failing the next? Family problems, class size, social changes, and a more challenging workload could all be indicators of a rough academic year. For Shania, a third grade student at P.S. 148 in New York who was profiled in a recent Huffington Post article, a combination of these factors brought her grades so low she came close to repeating the third grade.  She is not alone, especially among low-income, urban, and rural students in the United States.

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Will Khan Academy Replace the Traditional Classroom?

The flipped classroom model has begun to pick up speed in classrooms around the country, allowing students to watch lectures at home and teachers to spend more one-on-one time with students in the classroom as they complete work that would typically be done at home.

Khan Academy is an open-source website that has attracted many followers, from teachers creating a curriculum that require students to watch a Khan Academy video to students looking for online help to complete their homework. Many experts in education believe the flipped classroom, with the help of Khan Academy or websites like it, will change the traditional classroom for the 21st century student. However, Khan Academy and the freedom that comes with learning behind a computer doesn’t come without its critics.

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Transfer: Connecting 21st Century Skills to the Real World

Many call for students and grads to possess 21st century skills, but few know how to measure whether or not a student has mastered 21st century skills.

A group of education and science experts recently released a report that aims to “define just what researchers, educators, and policymakers mean when they talk about ‘deeper learning’ and ’21st century skills,” according to Education Week. They found skills can be divided in three categories: cognitive skills, interpersonal skills, and intrapersonal skills. However, what was most important and proves to be the hardest to implement and measure is the underlying skill that gives value to all these skills: transfer.

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Career Readiness Evaluated by a Test? The ACT Career Series

ACT Inc. just announced they are developing new assessments aimed at students between 3rd and 10th grade to test their college and career readiness skills. Many states are pushing for more students to leave school with the skills they need to succeed in college and career and ACT believes their new series, to be launched in 2014, will be the answer.

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The Importance of Family Dinners

“Does eating together really make for better-adjusted kids? Or is it just that families that can pull off a regular dinner also tend to have other things (perhaps more money, or more time) that themselves improve child well-being?”

Those are the questions Ann Meier and Kelly Musick asked and recently answered in the New York Times article “Is the Family Dinner Overrated?” Meier and Musick conducted a study of 18,000 adolescents and their parents regarding how often they ate dinner a week and the well-being of the adolescent. Well-being was measured by three things: depressive symptoms; drug and alcohol use; and delinquency.
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