Read this. If you read one thing today, it must be this!
There is a good chance a predator is in the classroom with your child right now.
He is reading her homework assignments, quizzes and emails. He is timing how long it takes her to answer questions, noting her right and wrong answers. He’s even watching her body language to determine if she’s engaged in the lesson.
He has given her a full battery of psychological assessments, and she doesn’t even notice. He knows her academic strengths and weaknesses, when she’ll give up, when she’ll preserver, how she thinks.
And he’s not a teacher, counselor or even another student. In fact, your child can’t even see him – he’s on her computer or hand-held device.
It’s called data mining, and it’s one of the major revenue sources of ed-tech companies. These are for-profit business ventures that produce education software: programs to organize student information and help them learn. They make…
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The Season Of Myths 
The irksome thing is that edtech products are all focused on the WRONG DATA. Daily classroom assignments should be tracked, and any fall-off should be detected and flagged in order to begin immediate intervention within 72 hours or less. That is the kind of data tracking that actually supports learning and benefits students. But we don’t do it. All our metrics are focused on a whole-year timeframe. We could do it – we have the data – but schools don’t have the will to follow up. With that kind of tracking, we could identify the moment and the classroom where a student first ran into difficulty. Now THAT’S accountability.
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