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Two Educational Challenges

1. Teaching Challenge

To enter the Teaching Challenge, you need to do the following:

  • Identify a core concept that students in your subject area struggle to learn, along with a challenge involved in teaching it.  Convince the judges that students need instructional support to improve their learning of this concept. Document your rationale for choosing this concept and the instructional challenge as a publicly shared Google document linked on your website.
  • Develop a learning experience that can improve students' learning of this content. The pedagogy needs to be appropriate and effective for the learning desired. Document your teaching/learning materials on a public website that you create.
  • Develop strategies and materials for using technology to creatively enhance student learning for the selected concept. Document these technological decisions and show your developed materials on the website you create.

2. Data Challenge

Data-driven decision making depends on the availability of a sufficient amount of accurate data about students, their learning-relevant characteristics and behaviors, and their academic performance. Examples of these data might include the amount of time a student spent doing a reading assignment, the score a student received on Item 23 of last night's homework, a student's level of engagement in today’s lecture, or the score a student received on last week's math assessment.

  • Identify one or more types of data that teachers could leverage to greatly improve student learning. Justify your claim that access to these data would enable teachers to improve student learning. Explain specifically what kinds of new decisions a teacher could make and actions he/she could engage in with access to these data.
  • Design a tool and process for gathering these data and storing them in a database.
  • Design the data dashboards or visualizations teachers or students will use to interact with the data. Make sure that these designs provide the information teachers will need to make the decisions and take the actions you have described.