Carol On Education » Carol J. Carter

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 generationÂ 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 Â 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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Leadership & Critical Thinking for Teens: LifeBound’s Summer Learning Workshop Series

Leadership Students
Hard at Work
9-12 Grade Students in Mastery of Leadership
Annette and Allegra Demonstrating an Activity
Class Discussion Notes on the Board
The Human Knot
Beginning of the Human Knot

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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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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.Â Â She is not alone, especially among low-income, urban, and rural students in the United States.

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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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Extinguishing Behavioral Problems with Peer Programs: Challenging Students to be Active and Accountable

Engaging students is at the top of every educator’s list, but how to engage today’s studentÂ is far more vexing.

For some, engagement can mistakenly be synonymous with entertainment.Â In schools around the country teachers try tricked out gadgets, expensive software, experimental pedagogies to try and tap into what interests the 21st century student. It’s important to cater to the interests of students, but the end result shouldn’t be to be hip to new technology. Instead, engagement, whether achieved through flashy technologyÂ or not, should aim to tame behavioral problems, improve student grades and retention, deepenÂ learning, and call studentâ€™s forth to be active and accountable .

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Are U.S. Students Born Entrepreneurs?

High unemployment rates have led more people in the U.S. down an entrepreneurial career path, and some believe this is just the pathway all Americans should be taking. Yong Zhao, presidential chair and associate dean for global education in the college of education at the University of Oregon, recently gave a keynote at the International Society for Technology in Education conference where he compared high-achieving students around the world with American students, known for their declining test scores, according to a recentÂ Education WeekÂ article.
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Is College Worth It? When School Loan Debt Brings Less Opportunities

Higher education usually leads to higher pay and more job opportunities. With high unemployment rates, more people are staying in school longer — or returning to school — to reap these increased employment opportunities. In 2009, bachelor’s degree holders earned more than twice as much as those without a high school diploma, 50 percent more than those with a high school diploma, and 25 percent more than associate’s degree holders.¹
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The Solution to Closing the Achievement Gap

It’s a fact. If students don’t exercise their brains over the summer months, they can lose up to three months of reading and math skills gained over the last school year. Low-income students are at the highest risk for summer learning losses, as they have less learning opportunities afforded to them over their summer vacation.

Summer learning programs can be as simple as giving a child books to read over the summer. Or they can be formally offered through a community center, school, church, or neighborhood to serve many kids in the community. In Baltimore County, the number of homeless students has doubled in the last five years. Homeless students are likely to suffer summer learning loses at twice the rate of their nonhomeless peers.^ÂThat’s why Camp St. Vincent is offering a summer learning program for homeless students in the area. Their summer students are beating the odds and walking away from camp retaining more than 80 percent of their reading and math skills.Â ¹
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Increasing Number of College Grads by Aligning K12, Business, and Higher Ed

Alignment is key to getting more students through school and into a fulfilling career. We need to align middle school to high school, high school to college, and college to career. We also need alignent between K-12 systems, colleges, and businesses. And most importantly between students, schools, and parents.
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Finding Higher Education that Fits Your Passions and Financial Ability

Raised prices and lowered standards. That’s a familiar expectation for many of our experiences and products today.

In his recent article, “Subprime College Educations,” George F. Will shares some statistics that shed light on how increased prices and lower standards are changing higher education. Over the last 30 years, college tuition and fees have risen over 440 percent. Today, twenty-nine percent of student-loan borrowers will not graduate. Many college grads are entering the workforce unable to get a job that can put a dent in their student loans (He gives the example of one young woman who graduated with a degree in religious and women’s studies and $100,000 in debt making barely enough to pay off her monthly student loan bill).

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Leadership Students

Hard at Work

9-12 Grade Students in Mastery of Leadership

Annette and Allegra Demonstrating an Activity

Class Discussion Notes on the Board

The Human Knot

Beginning of the Human Knot