Ascend Math

JANUARY 8, 2020

I read a great article by Jessica Grose this morning that I had to share with you. It’s not a new story, but with all the dissonance on the subject I think these ideas are important to anchor. A teacher, mentor, coach, or parent’s beliefs about failure probably influences the way our students, athletes and children handle, rebound, and learn from their own set-backs.

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Learning 100

Ascend Math

JANUARY 30, 2020

2020 not only marks a new decade, it also marks the 20 th year I have had the privilege of working in education. Every day I have the opportunity to work with amazing people that make a difference in students’ lives. When Kevin and I founded Ascend Education, our vision, our big, hairy audacious goal (BHAG), was to help 10 million students graduate high school.

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Ascend Math

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Most programs put kids into three categories, the lows, the middles, and the highs. I’m so proud that Ascend Math architecture allows kids to work at their own pace. So often, the kids that started at the lowest will end up at the highest. Many students in Ms. Kathryn King’s ELL class at South Cobb High School in Cobb County, GA began at a third or fourth grade proficiency in 2018.

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Ascend Math

DECEMBER 21, 2021

With limited staffing resources, here are teacher observations on best practices to maintain effectiveness and efficiency while reducing demands on teacher time • Identify Starting Points By identifying the level in which gaps begin, you can set students up for immediate success. Starting at the level in which students are ready to learn eliminates the need for student frustration as a program scaffolds down when material is too difficult.

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Ascend Math

AUGUST 11, 2017

Engagement is driven when students know how to apply what they know. Have you seen the 2016 Gallup Student Poll?

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How To Student Engagement EdTech 199

Ascend Math

JUNE 1, 2017

“Write the following on the blackboard 100 times: Schools don’t want technology. Schools want curriculum. Schools don’t want technology. Schools want curriculum. Etc.” From THE Journal, In K-12, the New, New Thing is the Old Old Thing: Currriculum by Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway. Okay, we have certainly gotten past the premise that technology itself holds answers for education.

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Technology Instructional Materials Blackboard Classroom 159

Ascend Math

SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

We consistently ask the teachers and administrators at our Ascend Math partner schools to tell us how to make Ascend better so we can help students have more success. This has resulted in important improvements including adding interactivity to all video lessons, new conceptual lessons and virtual explorations, plus the dashboards for school, teacher, class and student.

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Ascend Math

AUGUST 2, 2016

Education Week just released a highly informative article summarizing what has been learned from a decade of federally funded research into math instruction. I enjoyed reviewing these findings again. The research has been very advantageous. At Ascend Education, we developed 80 new math lessons over the past two years taking advantage of these findings bringing our total objective count to over 600.

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Ascend Math

APRIL 27, 2016

Last week, the New York Times ran an article on Kahoot, an online quiz system from Norway being played in some schools. The article is well worth reading for its smart discussion of “engagement” and “gamification.”. These are two subjects near and dear to my heart. The article, by NY Times reporter Natasha Singer, also made mention of Ascend Math.

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Ascend Math

APRIL 7, 2016

In past articles I’ve written “Interactive engagement, not entertainment, is at the core of a computer game’s ability to motivate. Finding ways to make math more interactive and more engaging is the key to making math software better as well.”. When students play a game they expect to face a struggle of some kind at which they may need to try multiple times before succeeding.

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Ascend Math

DECEMBER 8, 2015

There has been a lot of discussion lately regarding Personalized Learning. What is Personalized Learning? Is it really any different from Individualized Learning? Some people think so. I read an interesting article on the subject of “personalized learning.” For today’s students … “The approach, called personalized learning, differs from the traditional classroom their parents probably experienced, when teachers gave unifying lectures and told all students to work on the same proble

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Learning Personalized Learning Classroom Study 113

Ascend Math

DECEMBER 8, 2015

I was recently asked for a good source on differentiated instruction. I replied that ASCD put out some exceptional publications. You can find them at: [link]. My concern with differentiated instruction has always been classroom management, simply put one teacher trying to see to the needs of numerous students. When each of these students has individual skill gaps, that challenge becomes even more daunting.

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Differentiated Instruction Classroom Study EdTech 124

Ascend Math

JANUARY 26, 2016

No two students are exactly alike. In a perfect world, we would treat each as an individual, but it’s not a perfect world. Most often, one teacher must guide twenty or more young people to find the path to success and understanding. For many of us that’s okay. Since, with the teacher’s guidance, we often assist in finding our own unique path to learning.

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