Navigation North

Navigation North Learning recently concluded research on technology required for over 20 states to make the move to deliver online, adaptive, standardized assessments to all students. Within this research, district and site personnel from the states of Oregon, Delaware, and Hawaii were interviewed on how the use of these types of tests have helped them in their work to support students. (These are a handful of the states in the U.S. that have transitioned to the use of adaptive tests over the last 5 years.)

You will have to wait for the full report to be published by our contracting agency in early December, but a sneak-peek of the resulting data from the above states can be summarized as, “They’d never go back to the old way of doing assessments.”

Here is a simple video from Education Week on adaptive assessments. http://bcove.me/1er7l7ah

Karen Cator, Director of Education Technology for the U.S. Department of Education announces her new plans and identifies the departments cornerstone technology projects

Q: You talk about cornerstone efforts at the Department. What do you see as the cornerstone technology projects going forward?

A: The Learning Registry project is one example. It’s focused on helping people find, use and reuse content and resources and making sure the associated data is continually improved.

Read Betsy Corcoran’s full EdSurge Article Here.

An excerpt from Frank Catalano’s Potent Alphabet Soup: How SLI, LR and LRMI Will Shape Education Technology Content

“Imagine how you would feel if, while you’re focused on upgrading your home’s fixtures and appliances, the underlying plumbing was plotting to re-configure itself.

In a household metaphor, that’s the situation education technology application developers face with three major but little-understood multi-state or national digital education initiatives. All three plumbing efforts are foundation- or association-driven. And all will demand at least some of your attention between now and next spring – whether you’re an established company or a wanna-change-the-classroom startup.”

Frank Catalano wrote a very informative article on the role of various projects such as the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), the Learning Registry (LR), and the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) in today’s EdSurge. As most know, we are heavily involved in the development and deployment of the Learning Registry and have recently been integrating LRMI specifications into our metadata in a number of projects we have developed and are managing on behalf of a number of state and national partners…this article provides a good snap-shot of why these initiatives and their work is important and will change education technology related content and its use.

https://www.edsurge.com/n/potent-alphabet-soup-how-sli-lr-and-lrmi-will-shape-education-technology-content

November 1st, 2012
Innovate North State hosted the annual North State Innovation Awards in Chico California at the Sierra Nevada Brewery Theater. Navigation North Learning was identified as the Northern California Outstanding Technology Team of the Year. As one of three esteemed finalists, Navigation North was recognized for their ongoing contributions to educational technology and exceptional web technologies in support of statewide efforts in California. Of note was the contributions Navigation North has made to open education data as part of national efforts that have partnered Navigation North in critical technical development with agencies such as the US Department of Education, the Advanced Distributed Learning Network with the Department of Defense, and the Stanford Research Institute.

Navigation North was pleased to show a front-end demonstration of the various resources currently published to the Learning Registry framework and a means to search for them through a Common Core Browser at the White House’s Datapalooza event today.

Common Core Labs serves as a simple, free to use interface that draws active, published data from the Learning Registry. This is a way for us to show the type of architecture we can develop and surface in various agency’s online community portals or as part of a specific tool-set. Some of the team’s we are working with are anticipating a 1 to 2 year roll-out of browse and search capacities for teachers wanting to access the Learning Registry. Here is a place they can use it now.

www.commoncorelabs.com

The White House’s Chief Technology Officer Todd Parks and Deputy Superintendent of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education just published a news release in advance of the Open Data – Datapalooza event that Navigation North will be attending tomorrow at the White House.

Here is an excerpt focused on the work Navigation North is doing in this space. (full article can be accessed below)

“the Education Data Initiative will include work to develop a common trust mechanism for schools that want to exchange student data with each other and other qualified parties, and to promote the newly developed Learning Registry—an open-source technical system to help educators and learners use and share digital content—which can help fuel the next generation of educational technology services and tools.”

The Power of Open Education Data