Quick and Dirty tip for Amplifying LinkedIn

When you think about cutting edge social media tactics, PDF file-sharing probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But when it comes to getting seen on LinkedIn, the world's biggest B2B and professional social network, it's something to keep in mind.

I stumbled upon by accident a couple of months ago as part of my work managing ACUE's brand account on LinkedIn. We'd been doing a good putting out an increasingly diverse array of content. Native video, infographics, photo slideshows, etc. For anyone who's familiar with LinkedIn's publishing tools, there's also the "File" button that shows up when creating new content.

And it's basically a function to give B2B and SMB a place to share content that ordinarily has a pretty short shelf-life as a print-out document. think about it. You spend a ton of money and time fine-tuning the copy of a press release, or iterating on the design and format of glossy marketing collateral. It gets used at a board meeting or handed out at conferences. Maybe it gets posted on your web site for posterity. But it's not a format that's condusive to much more use beyond that.

Well, LinkedIn's alrorithsm are bringing back the PDF file, so consider it something for your LinkedIn toolkit.

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Michael Horn on Mathematics

On The Education Exchange podcast, Paul E. Peterson recently had on Michael Horn to talk about how schools and districts have responded to the emergency shift to online learning. He said that they have fallen on a range from “innovative” to “rotten” – "It's an unbelievable response to this monent in time."On the rotten side, the initial confusion around guidance around "can you serve all students if you can't serve all students" – (I believe that this was a problem in Pennsylvani, but I have to look futher into it) as well as the case of Oregon, which apparently declared that schools couldn't "transfer into a full-time virtual school" – ...again, I am not sure of the effect of this. On the "innovative" side of things he mentioned spot cases, like South Carolina "bringing buses around with Wi-Fi activity so students can get online." He also mentioned that a lot of high-quality providers – such as Zearn and ST Math and Khan Academy – have made great resources free to parents and school districts. "It's very hard to generalize right now."

Around the eight-minute mark, Horn also said that districts have to be preparing for a return to "normal" in which a "wide variety of exposure to the learning" and "significant loss of learning in some cases" and "highly unequal." How do you accommodate all of that? And also, is there a world in which this online learning can continue?

The most relevant for me, as it pertains to some of the client work I'm involved in, comes around the 9:30 mark, in which Horn talks about alignment with established grade-level learning standards. In terms of exposure to content, he raises questions around coherence of curriculum. At 10:30, Paul Peterson and Horn agree that they believe the most dramatically apparent place for learning loss could be mathematics, "where you sort of have a well-define curriculum and if you're not going to learn your fractions this year, then how are you going to learn your decimals next year."

Horn agreed that "mathematics is where we'll see..."

Math is the one place I might say, hey let's invest in putting in a really strong online resource for every single student to makes sure that they are able to progress in their mathemtics. Because that's really something that could fall off the cliff if we're not careful about it."
The Education Exchange: From “Innovative” to “Rotten”—Online Learning Amid Covid-19

Grading Policy during COVID-19

Today Success Academy is in the news for announcing that they are going to be keeping same the grading policies during school closures due to COVID-19. It's just one of the many ways in which Success Academy has been out in front consistently in the wake of COVID-19, as it pertains to emergency instructional continuity. Grading policy is one of the many aspects of teaching & learning that is being considered and reconsidered right now. In each case, we're seeing a debate unfold about whether we need to totally reimagine how we've done things in the past. Others that are worth following are teacher licensure, teacher training and teacher certification; admissions and enrollment (primarily for higher education – but I can imagine that there are plenty of significant K-12 implications to consider as well); and others.

(Success Academy, NYC’s largest charter network, will continue grading students during coronavirus pandemic).