tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41351058616914850862024-03-08T14:50:14.344-08:0021st century lessonsMusings on education and technologyelizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-75208388455784837632010-10-27T14:33:00.000-07:002010-12-14T14:34:28.355-08:00Gaming Education<b><i>Classic ed-tech games and build-your-own methods are now joined by the "gamification" movement.</i></b><br />
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There are at least three different classes of digital games in schools. Which you prefer speaks volumes about the role you believe schools should play.<br />
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The first group, the classic edu-tech games, have danced in and out of schools for so long that many kids take them for granted. Most of these programs are cute, but they fall short on pedagogical ambitions and graphic design. That doesn't make them worthless; it just limits their effectiveness. (One person's drill-and-kill can indeed be another's guiding light. When educator and blogger extraordinaire, Scott McLeod, asked, <a href="http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/07/do-most-educational-games-suck.html">"Do most educational games suck?"</a> he drew fire from just about all sides.)<br />
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By contrast, a handful of educators a few years ago sought to put game controls directly into students' hands by teaching them how to build their own games. <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a>, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT's Media Lab, is the reigning champion here. (See my take on Scratch below). There are a few others, too, including Microsoft's <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/">Kudo</a>, a programming language that kids can use to build games for the Xbox game platform.<br />
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<div align="center"><p style="width: 491px; height: auto; padding: 10px; margin: 15px 0 15px 0; border: 1px solid #ddd; font-style: italic; text-align: left;"><a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Sunrise-Moon/1202911"><img src="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/26/102610-edgames.png" border="0" alt="Screen from The Fly, a game built with Scratch" width="450" style="margin-bottom: 15px;"></a><br />
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Screen from "<a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Sunrise-Moon/1202911">The Fly</a>," a game built with <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a>.</p></div><br />
And now comes what I would dub a third approach, something that has picked up its very own buzzword before it has even reached most school gates: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification">gamification</a>. The term is as elegant as a teenager jawing a mouthful of bubble gum. But it suggests adding far more sophisticated game mechanics to applications -- no matter how stuffy or serious the application has been. Gamification probably has more momentum outside of schools than in. Case in point: <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/25/devhub-scores-engagement-increase-by-gamifying-its-web-site-creation-tools/">Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat has written</a> about how DevHub, a place for web developers, added gaming feedback and watched in awe as the percentage of users who finished their sites shot up from 10 percent to 80 percent.<br />
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Most games are naturally social, which means gamification depends on that other ubiquitous web trend, social networking. Sure, go ahead and play Solitaire. But most of us take a certain pleasure in besting the competition -- whether it's the Texas Rangers or some ugly troll in World of Warcraft.<br />
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Academics are creating a skin of respectability for gamification. <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~reeves/Byron_Reeves/Home.html">Byron Reeves of Stanford University</a> has recently co-authored "<a href="http://www.totalengagement.org/">Total Engagement</a>" to outline his ideas about how gaming can turn the erstwhile plodding company man into an engaged and motivated worker. (Reeves is also putting his ideas to the test by co-founding a consulting firm, <a href="http://www.seriosity.com/">Seriousity</a>, that will coach companies on how to do this.) The <a href="http://www.amiando.com/gamificationsummit.html">first gamification summit</a> is slated to take place in January in San Francisco.<br />
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What does each of these approaches say about education?<br />
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The first type of games were willing to entertain kids to keep them engaged -- the "just-make-it-fun" school of thought. But any standup comedian will tell you how tough it is to keep people entertained for long. It's even harder with kids who outgrow the "fun" of a game faster than most games can evolve.<br />
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The Scratch camp is more about empowerment. Scratch appeals enormously to kids who want to control their environment and be in charge. Those who build Scratch games get feedback from others when they post their games. They say they love the comments and feel great when hundreds of others play their games.<br />
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Ultimately Scratch aficionados bring their ambitions to learn with them. I'd wager that if these kids were born a generation or two ago, they'd be building transistor radios. The Scratch kids have to be self-motivated: most use Scratch outside of school. No one makes them do it. All it took to get them going was for someone to introduce them to Scratch in the first place. That's a great argument for exposing more kids to the tools.<br />
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Gamification, by contrast, doesn't rely on internal motivation. Instead, it's using the oldest tricks in the book: providing instantaneous feedback, egging on the competition, and rewarding even tiny steps of progress. Gamification assumes that the player isn't especially motivated -- at least at the beginning -- and then provides barrels of incentives to ramp up that motivation.<br />
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I'm betting that gamification, in spite of its throat-clearing name, is going to be big in the commercial world -- and in schools. Gamification can help build kids' competitive spirits. As they gain confidence, they may become hungry for tools that put them in control. At the end of the day, those who know how to create the rules of the game, know how to win.<br />
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reposted from: <a href="ttp://radar.oreilly.com/2010/10/gaming-education.html">O'Reilly Media Edu2.0</a> <strike></strike>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-29852069246608566092010-10-25T07:00:00.000-07:002010-12-14T14:31:03.157-08:00Playing Games In SchoolMany parents of adolescents curse the electronic games that soak up their kids' time and energy. But 12-year old Chris Rybicki gets plenty of encouragement to spend time on games—at least when he's building them with a program called "<a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a>." Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Scratch is a three-year old project that aims to transform education by giving kids the tools to build and develop their own computer games and multimedia projects.<br />
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Games? At a time when we worry about kids' ability to read and write? American kids are already awash in digital media, <a href="http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia030905pkg.cfm">spending an average of more than 7.5 hours a day, seven days a week with a potent mixture of digitally delivered music, television, computers and games</a>. Legions of government officials are wringing their hands over U.S. students' lackluster results in standardized tests. According to the most recent results from <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/timss/">The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)</a>, U.S. eighth graders rank 11th in the world in science and 9th in math.<br />
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But drilling students on math and science facts, contend a growing chorus of educators, won't significantly improve those scores-- nor will it help students find jobs when they finish school. Instead schools need to put math and science skills into context.<br />
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That doesn't mean endlessly entertaining students. In the past many so-called "educational" programs have been as passive as watching YouTube. By contrast, "Scratch was conceived with the idea of empowering kids to be media creators," says Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a doctoral candidate at MIT who has helped lead the Scratch program since it was officially released in May 2007.<br />
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Scratch is a downloadable set of tools that anyone can use to create digital games and animated movies. After a Scratch user builds a game, he or she can send it to the MIT website where anyone can try it out, offer comments and even improve on it. More than 600,000 people have Scratch accounts; they've built 1.3 million projects. The program is particularly popular in the 12- to 13-year old set. A third of Scratch users are girls. And although most of those students use Scratch at home or in after-school programs, teachers are also starting to use Scratch in the classroom to teach everything from math to ecology. <br />
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"What else do kids learn in school that you want them to teach their neighborhood friends?"<i></i></b><br />
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Karen Randall, who now teaches at <a href="http://saturn.spps.org/">Paul and Shelia Wellstone Elementary</a> in St. Paul, Minn., started using Scratch with students when it was still a prototype. "We helped find the bugs in the program," she recalls. Students loved taking part in the product development, she says. Along the way, they learned that technology was not a magic box but something that they could control.<br />
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When she previously taught at <a href="http://www.expo.spps.org/">St. Paul's Expo Elementary magnet school</a>, Randall encouraged students to use Scratch to demonstrate the concepts they were studying. For instance, one year Randall asked her students to use Scratch to explain the idea of complementary angles. If she had given them a multiple-choice test, some might just guess at the answers. In Scratch, the students came up with creative ways to show they understood the concept. <br />
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Could the students just make a poster? Sure, Randall replies. But she sees an intriguing difference between paper-based and Scratch projects: Ask students to draw pictures and those with poor motor skills simply shut down. By contrast, students relish learning from one another in a computer environment. "It's fascinating," she says. "In about four weeks, they go from saying, 'I can't do it,' to seeing each other as resources and building amazing designs."<br />
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For 7th grader Chris Rybicki, sharing Scratch projects is a central part of what makes it "cool." "It's fun to collaborate with others and to see what's new," he says. <br />
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Rybicki admires the flashes of inspiration he sees from his fellow Scratch gamemakers in the <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/browse/newest">galleries on the Scratch website</a>.<br />
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Others are beginning to follow Scratch's lead. For instance <a href="http://www.samanimation.com/">Sam Animation</a> is a free program developed at Tufts University that enables students to design stop- motion animation projects. Microsoft has built <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/">Kudo</a>, a programming language that kids can use to build games for Microsoft's Xbox game platform.<br />
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Monroy-Hernández's team at MIT is now working on a Web-based version of Scratch. That might make Scratch easier to use on some of the aging computers that schools have—but would also require more high-speed access. Nearly all U.S. primary and secondary schools report having <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=46">some Internet connectivity</a>. But about 78% of the schools that have received federal support for Internet connectivity say <a href="http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/tapd/universal_service/schoolsandlibs.html">they need faster connections</a> to keep up with the demand of students and teachers for online educational resources. <br />
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The buzz that goes with learning Scratch is palpable, Randall says: kids go home and teach other kids in their neighborhood about it, she says. "What else do kids learn in school that you want them to teach their neighborhood friends?" <br />
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Reposted from the <a href="http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/ts_102510.html">Cisco news service</a>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-15796719768080556682010-06-14T10:34:00.000-07:002010-06-14T10:34:13.133-07:00Makers versus Sponges<h2 class="subhead">School tech should start with a simple question: Will students absorb others' ideas or make their own?</h2><!-- RSPEAK_START --><a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/makers-versus-sponges.html#comments"></a> <!-- RSPEAK_START --><br />
The rumbling debate over whether technology helps or hurts us -- and our kids -- is growing louder. The ever articulate writer, Nicholas Carr, stoked debate <a href="http://www.theshallowsbook.com/nicholascarr/The_Shallows.html">with his new book, "The Shallows</a>." (Yes, he believes, Google makes you dumb.) Last Monday, the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html">worried that technology may be reshaping our brains</a>. Also last week, neurobiologist Steven Pinker weighed in on the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/opinion/11Pinker.html">op-ed pages today</a> with a piece that waves away those concerns. (Everything rewires our brains, he notes.) If that seems like too many quick links, the New York Times' Bits blog <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/in-defense-of-computers-the-internet-and-our-brains/">recaps some of the debate here</a>. <br />
On the education side, the Washington Post took theses questions to the classroom in a piece entitled, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/10/AR2010061005522.html">"Some educators question if whiteboards, other high-tech tools raise achievement</a>."<br />
I keep wondering why we lump all "technology" into the same basket. By doing so, we ignore the most important distinction of all: whether we are sponges for absorbing other people's ideas, or whether we're making our own. <br />
O'Reilly has long been a champion of the <a href="http://makezine.com/">"Maker" movement</a> so perhaps this amounts to singing to the choir. But here's one slice through the technologies organized according to their potential relationship to kids: <br />
<table><tbody>
<tr> <td valign="top" width="25%"><strong>IT Tool:</strong></td> <td valign="top" width="75%"><strong>Sponge or Maker?</strong></td> </tr>
<tr> <td>Smart boards in classroom</td> <td>SPONGE: Kids absorb lectures with better graphics </td> </tr>
<tr> <td>Electronic games</td> <td>SPONGE: Kids learn to master rules of the games (and sometimes the content, too) </td> </tr>
<tr> <td><a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/">Scratch</a></td> <td>MAKER: Kids create their own games </td> </tr>
<tr> <td>iPod Touches</td> <td>SPONGE: Kids absorb & interact with presented material </td> </tr>
<tr> <td>iPod Touches with "homemade slides" </td> <td>MAKER: Kids create their own "flashcards" to present on gadget </td> </tr>
<tr> <td>Powerpoint / Keynote / <a href="http://prezi.com/">Prezi</a> / <a href="http://edu.glogster.com/">Glogster</a>, etc,</td> <td>MAKER: Kids have to pull together materials to create presentations</td> </tr>
</tbody></table><br />
A Powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation is hardly the height of intellectual achievement. But when we think about how kids interact with ideas and media -- what promotes creativity and learning -- it seems to me we need to focus on whether the gadgets are the means for kids expressing themselves or a way of imprinting someone else's ideas onto their brains. <br />
Of course, a kid doesn't need to make a Prezi presentation to deliver a great and inspiring report. But we live in a world that values flashing lights and cool transitions. <br />
That struck home a few weeks ago when I saw a group of fifth grade students show off a semester's worth of work to their parents and guardians. They had done traditional, glue-and-paper reports on different U.S. states, a project that had extended over about a month as the students gathered information, wrote summaries and clipped out pictures. Then, a week or so before "open house" night, the students were asked to deliver a report on one element in the periodic table using a Keynote presentation. <br />
On the evening the parents and guardians showed up, I saw the same act repeated over and over: students grabbed the arm of their guest and dragged them over to watch their Keynote. They stood by, beaming as the slides clicked through. They had also absorbed a surprising amount of information about their elements, where they were found and why they were located on the periodic table. The students were proud of their state reports, too =- and knew they had worked far longer on them. But at least on this evening, the Keynotes stole the show. <br />
Back in the 1970s, kids who sat glued to the television screen didn't have a choice: we were all just sponges for the stuff broadcast over the airwaves. Today's computer technology lets us choose if we want to be a maker or a sponge. Shouldn't that be starting point when we argue about the role of technology in schools? <br />
<em>Postscript</em> -- Could this be the ultimate "Maker" class? <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/education/14engineering.html?hp">Encouraging engineering in kindergarten</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/makers-versus-sponges.html">Reposted from O'Reilly Radar Edu 2.0</a><br />
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<!-- RSPEAK_STOP -->elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-9973592422100018682010-05-26T18:11:00.000-07:002010-05-26T18:11:24.121-07:00Venture capitalists do it. Why shouldn't philanthropists do it, too?Pitch a new idea to venture capitalists and the first question they’ll shoot back is: “Who else is in your space?” <br />
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If you can’t answer that question, go straight back to “Go” and don’t even dream of collecting $200. <br />
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VCs, of course, needs to weigh competitive as well as potentially complementary efforts. But answering that question should help the entrepreneur, too. Entrepreneurs are most likely to help a field move forward if they build on the knowledge and the mistakes of the past rather than tripping down the well-trodden road. <br />
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Really compelling ideas draw multiple entrepreneurs (think of how the idea of social networking brought out Facebook, MySpace and a swarm of other startups). And sometimes ideas have to wait for the technology to catch up (picture phones and electronic books come to mind). <br />
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Smart startups, however, look for unique approaches even when tackling a problem that others are--or have--taken on. And the fastest way to assess whether an approach is fresh or a rerun is to know what else is going on.<br />
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So what about the educational-technology space? We want to invent new approaches and ideas that will engage students, teachers (and even the occasional parent). But do we have good maps of what’s going on—not just in the for-profit venture sector but in the philanthropic sector, too? <br />
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Dale Dougherty, who’s no slouch when it comes to staying on top of the latest technology, summed up the problem well in <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/what-would-technology-do-for-l.html">his recent post</a>: <br />
<em><br />
“I wished the teams themselves were a better judge of their own proposals, and that they understood how their project advanced appropriate uses of technology in education. I wished that each of the applicants had been able to consult an evolving set of best practices for developing educational technology projects. …. They might help others avoid pitfalls and learn from failures.“ </em><br />
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Our problems in education are too intense, funding is too thin and time too precious to take on duplicative efforts. We need to apply some of the same discriminating standards in our philanthropic Edu2.0 projects that we use in for-profit ones. <br />
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So what would be the relevant features of a topographical map of the educational-technology sector? Here’s one set of categories: <br />
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Projects aimed at: <br />
• Improving instruction <br />
• Individualized (adaptive) instruction <br />
• Doing assessment <br />
• Improving teacher practices <br />
• Promoting project-based learning <br />
• Improving transparency <br />
• Bridging the school-home communications gap <br />
• Improving school infrastructure<br />
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What would you add? What elements do you think would help people designing education-technology projects get a useful picture of what else is going on?elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-45357001521166925922010-04-19T16:29:00.001-07:002010-04-19T16:40:48.998-07:00Drop Testing EduTechA researcher I know has devoted three years to following a group of low-income students in the Baltimore area who have been learning geometry with the help of an innovative online program. Her paper (which isn't published yet) is a marvel of careful observations and statistical analysis. Its conclusion, however, is poignant: not only did the students who used the computer program <em>not</em> learn more geometry than the ones taught the old-fashioned way--they might have learned less.<br />
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The program was thoughtfully designed and took advantage of the latest and greatest learning algorithms. If any program should be able to help students learn geometry, one might be tempted to conclude, it should be this one. That kind of logic could give ammunition to those who declare that computer-assisted learning is bunk. <br />
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But there's more behind the story. <br />
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The researcher told me (and is writing in the paper) that she observed even the most well-intentioned teachers really struggled to figure out how to use the technology. The program wasn't well integrated into the regular classwork. The "protocols" for use, carefully constructed by the developers, weren't followed because, as every teacher knows, stuff just happens. Students moved out of town; new students showed up. Teachers came; teachers went. The list goes on. <br />
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It was, in short, a pretty good reflection of how technology gets implemented in most classes -- hardly in the precise and careful way designed by those who have sweated over the program. <br />
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The trial was a flop -- not because the technology failed but because there was a mismatch between how the designers believed it should be used and how the teachers wound up using it. Was that the teachers' fault? Nope. Every day, in every class in the world, teachers come up with workarounds to cope with the unexpected. Most technology, however, isn't yet as resilient. <br />
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We drop test hardware before we send it into the field. Seems like it's time to start drop testing software programs before sending them into the classroom.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-28853574015198521492010-04-14T09:44:00.001-07:002010-04-19T20:01:25.260-07:00Changing MindsTwo fantastic posts that I have to share by women who are helping change people's minds about the role of technology in education: <br />
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First: Lucy Gray, an education technology specialist at the University of Chicago. On Monday she gave a powerful presentation "Beyond Buzzwords" at the TED x TLN conference. Flip through <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/elemenous/beyond-buzzwords">her slides here</a>. <br />
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And the money quote if you're in a rush: <br />
"Before we expect students to step up, teachers to work harder than ever, administrators to lead with vision, and the data to change, we must engage and re-inspire." <br />
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The challenge before us: use technology to engage and re-inspire--not to frustrate and confuse. <br />
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A second, compelling conversation was started by Marie Bjerede, Vice President of Wireless Education Technology at Qualcomm, on the O'Reilly Radar blog. <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/cell-phones-in-classrooms.html">(Look here.)</a> Of course, Qualcomm is in the cell phone business, but she has a fascinating story about using the technology to engage 150 kids in North Carolina studying algebra. It's called <a href="http://www.projectknect.org/">Project K-Nect</a>.<br />
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She isn't shy about pointing out this is hardly a scientific survey. Still the kids' reactions are pretty impressive: <br />
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"Overall, proficiency rates increased by 30 percent. In the best case, one class using the devices had 50 percent more kids finishing the year proficient than a class learning the same material from the same teacher during the same school year, but without the cell phones." <br />
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And I can't help but add this: check out this <i>Fast Company</i> piece, echoing the same idea:<span style="font-size: small;"> "How Smartphones, Handheld Computers Sparked an Educational Revolution,"</span> <span style="font-size: small;">http://bit.ly/9QqWTR</span><br />
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Thank you, Lucy & Maria! Those are the kinds of signals we need to change minds.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-66303052805906522162010-03-01T11:28:00.000-08:002010-03-01T11:28:49.768-08:00Do What I Say -- Not What I Do?Kids are pretty savvy truth-seekers.<br />
If an adult tells a child to do something but does the opposite in practice, the child will follow the action not the command.<br />
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Tell a kid to read and then put on the television -- and you don't create a love of reading.<br />
Tell a kid to eat spinach and then stuff a hot dog in your mouth and guess what they will choose to eat?<br />
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Kids who grow up in homes where there's no obvious regard for learning, where commands to learn are given but seldom demonstrated, have a tough time.<br />
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Some of the enthusiasm for using games to spur learning comes from this: put kids in an environment where they naturally go (namely an online game) then give them an opportunity to natively learn skills you want them to learn (such as reading or math). <br />
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That suggests an important clue about using technology: we need to figure out which tools are appropriate for what kids. In other words, emphasizing games may not be as essential for kids with basic skills as for kids who are really struggling. We give early writers a pencil with an eraser; we give more sophisticated writers a pen. We should now understand enough about technology and about learning to give kids the tools appropriate to their skills and needs. But only if we have a way of organizing the tools so that we can easily find the pens from the pencils.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-35740601248291542002010-02-21T20:52:00.000-08:002010-02-21T20:52:14.394-08:00Four days a weekSchools in Georgia are considering staying open <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-21-georgia-schools-4-day-change_N.htm">four days a week</a> to cope with budget cuts. One school district did this last fall; more are considering it now. <i>"Peach County officials have estimated they saved $313,000 in transportation and utilities costs by making the schedule change,</i>" according to a report by the Associated Press. <br />
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It raises a host of questions:<br />
1. Are the school hours longer on the four school days?<br />
2. How are working parents coping with the change?<br />
3. Where are kids going on their day off?<br />
4. Are they engaging in any distance-learning or project-based learning?<br />
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To be continued!elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-68993895874611425772010-02-19T17:58:00.000-08:002010-04-19T16:27:30.858-07:00The Value of 21st Century SkillsOracle's Thinkquest is circulating a paper on the value of teaching 21st century learning skills. They've boiled it down nicely: <br />
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Learning projects: <br />
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* start with a Big Question, an essential question, usually from the real world<br />
* are central to the curriculum so learning is tied to standards <br />
* include a variety of activities (over a long time) designed to explore the big question<br />
* requires collaboration (inside and outside the school)<br />
* asks students to take the initiative <br />
* involves the use of technology to extend students capacity for research, analysis and collaboration <br />
* culminates in a product that requires students to communicate results <br />
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What Lucere is doing: essentially modeling project learning for teachers. Here's how it plays through: <br />
* Big Question: How do you use the tools you have to tackle a Big Project? <br />
* resources should be tied to the curriculum <br />
* there are plenty of activities over time <br />
* there's a huge need for collaboration (involving both children and adults) <br />
* technology is an essential tool (not the end all in itself) <br />
* the product: cool classroom projects <br />
<br />
Time to get building!elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-74154014539641100452010-02-09T18:12:00.000-08:002010-02-09T18:12:06.254-08:00What's it worth to you?A fellow named Doug Johnson, who has strong street cred in education and technology, posted <a href="http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2010/2/5/where-are-the-savings-in-using-googleapps.html">this fascinating commentary</a> yesterday about how to save money using technology, specifically Google Docs. <br />
<br />
His street cred in education tech is deep: he directs Media and Technology for the Mankato (MN) Public Schools, which is a district of about 7200 students and 3,000 supported computers. He believes he'll get a whopping big cost savings in printing/copying supplies, cutting those expenditures by 20% a year. Even taking a whack at his estimate, he gets to a savings of $200K/year (out of a $1.2 M budget). <br />
<br />
That's big. <br />
<br />
It also gets at a question that I've been wondering about: have schools saved anything, so far, because of their use of computers? Have they been able to do literally anything that they haven't done in the past? <br />
<br />
Schools that answer "no" have simply added to their expenses without any benefit. It's time to change that answer to "yes."elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-74992628744535287042010-02-03T15:08:00.000-08:002010-02-03T15:17:04.082-08:00What has technology done for you lately?The very first movie cameras were hulking beasts: filmmakers would plop them down and the actors would act in front of them. As technology improved--lighter! cheaper!--actors started to do <i>something different</i> in front of the camera than they could do on stage: they let the camera follow them. <br />
<br />
Technology can help you cut costs. It can also permit you to do something you never dreamed possible before. So far in schools, technology has likely not cut costs (I'd guess it actually increases costs). Worse: we too seldom use it to do something different than we might have done in its absence. <br />
<br />
Over the past decade, corporations have put extraordinary efforts into articulating the "total cost of ownership" of a piece of technology. It's a combination of the fixed capital costs and the soft (typically recurring costs) of training and support. Companies bear the brunt of both of those buckets. (And corporations have found that the second costs--the soft costs--often exceed the fixed costs by a gaping margin.) <br />
<br />
Schools are different. The district budget bears the fixed cost of the assets. It bears a small portion of the soft costs. But teachers themselves bear most of the burden of the soft costs. That means that only the most benevolent (or well-funded) districts worry much about the scale of the soft costs. Teachers, meanwhile, are largely indifferent to the scale of the fixed costs (they get given books and supplies and don't pay for those). <br />
<br />
Technology for schools can reduce costs if you use it to secure "free" curriculum materials and so reduce your text book costs. Done right, it should also reduce the "soft" costs -- or "hidden" costs -- or costs to teachers. It would have to quantify both of those. <br />
<br />
Now to the positive side of the ledger: what can technology deliver that text books can't easily do? <br />
<br />
* Technology can deliver lesson plans. (Cost reduction to overall expenditures budget). <br />
* Technology can make it possible for kids to experience things that they would not otherwise be able to experience. (Bugscope. Writing to kids in other countries.) <br />
* Many educators believe that kids are mostly likely to learn "21st century" skills by undertaking self directed projects. Technology SHOULD make it possible for every kid to undertake such projects. <br />
<br />
In other words, technology should let kids become makers--of things (gismos), of content, of ideas--rather than just consumers of content. <br />
<br />
Learning Passions. Maybe that's it. Technology should and can be connecting kids with passions. Teachers can help. Parents can help, too.<br />
<br />
Note: Here's the Washington Post's Jay Mathew's take on <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/26/AR2009042602177.html">"senior projects,"</a>a more organized version of finding a passion. <br />
<br />
Comment from a high school student: <br />
<i>'It's an experience that I will never forget that will help me so much in my future,' said Wendy Ramirez (a previously dubious high school student). <br />
<br />
That's mushy and nice, but it doesn't explain something odd. The program's success at the Arlington County school shows senior projects are a good idea. So why are they so rare in area public schools? </i><br />
....<br />
<i><br />
"Many high school students still don't get to learn what Wendy Ramirez did: "When I set my mind to something and work hard to accomplish it," she said, "I will conquer it and complete it." We want our teenagers to get something out of high school, but we usually define that as good grades, high test scores and a few extracurricular activities, whatever the colleges want. We don't think they are capable of much else. Look how they complain when we ask them to take out the garbage! Maybe it's time to be imaginative and firm, as the Wakefield teachers are, and take the risk that our kids might actually enjoy wrestling with ideas and skills they see in their futures."</i>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-68866513516832860542010-02-01T18:10:00.000-08:002010-02-01T18:13:13.184-08:00Another visit to the shadowy realm of catherdrals and bazaarsI've covered many U.S. budgets over the years and so am suitably wary about the gulf that grows between what an Administration likes to see and what Congress ultimately rewards. That said, education seems to top the list of "winners" in this first round of budget wars.<br />
From <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/01/AR2010020101869.html?hpid=topnews">the Washington Post</a>: <br />
<br />
<i>"K-12 education. Despite the straitened times and his freeze on overall discretionary spending, Obama is increasing federal funding for public education, one of the three main areas of his domestic agenda, alongside energy and health-care reform. The Education Department's proposed budget is up by nearly $3 billion, or more than 6 percent."</i> <br />
<br />
Although Obama's team seems happy to dismantle parts of the NCLB legislation, which most teachers despise, they don't want to let go of the idea of accountability. From the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/education/02child.html?ref=education">NYTimes</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<i>“We want accountability reforms that factor in student growth, progress in closing achievement gaps, proficiency towards college and career-ready standards, high school graduation and college enrollment rates,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in announcing the proposed changes. “We know that’s a lot to track, but if we want to be smarter about accountability, more fair to students and teachers and more effective in the classroom, we need to look at all of these factors.”</i><br />
<br />
But there's a kicker: we don't really know how to measure what works in classrooms and what doesn't. <a href="ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practiceguides/dddm_pg_092909.pdf ">A report</a> issued in Sept. 2009, from a group under the Institute of Education Sciences on "Using Student Achievement Data to Support Instructional Decision Making," came to a heart-rending conclusion: <br />
<i><br />
"Overall, the panel believes that the existing research on using data to make instructional decisions <b>does not yet</b> provide conclusive evidence of what works to improve student achievement.“ </i><br />
<br />
The report lays out a number of contributiong reasons for why we seem to muddle through the dark. Teachers don't use the same measures. We don't have control groups. We don't systematically keep and report data. We aren't quite sure which is the data and which is the noise. <br />
<br />
All of which got me thinking about Eric Raymond's classic: <a href="http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html">The Cathedral and the Bazaar.</a><br />
<br />
Raymond's musings on why a ragtag group of programmers could craft a study and even elegant operating system has become a classic. Among his observations (I've left out a few that feel less relevant at the moment): <br />
<br />
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.<br />
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).<br />
3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)<br />
<br />
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.<br />
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.<br />
<br />
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. <br />
[Sociologists years ago discovered that the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. They called this the Delphi effect. It appears that what Linus has shown is that this applies even to debugging an operating system—that the Delphi effect can tame development complexity even at the complexity level of an OS kernel.] <br />
<br />
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.<br />
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.<br />
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.<br />
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.<br />
13. ``Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.''--Antoine de Saint-Exupery<br />
<br />
Not one of his stated rules but it should be: <br />
<br />
It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style [IN]. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.<br />
<br />
19: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.<br />
<br />
Long way of saying: we're at a moment on the opportunity curve where change is possible. All we need is a starting point -- even if that starting point is a long, long way from the ending point.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-63069637827281877502010-01-29T18:00:00.000-08:002010-01-29T18:00:02.758-08:00Hating Interactive WhiteboardsHere's a <a href="http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2010/01/27/tln_ferriter_whiteboards.html?tkn=UZTDQRYuzTJp%2BpKhYjpVKYK802T7yTI8w0oo&intc=es&intc=mes">provocative post by a veteran teacher</a>. <br />
<br />
Here's a common comment on this piece: <br />
<i><br />
"We tried hard to work with new IWB; streaming off proven math sites, walking students through basic algebra - and ended up frustrated. Administrators, though, demanded we incorporate IWBs into daily instruction. The district wanted in on the "cutting edge" hysteria, the systems were paid for and parents were wowed over the requisite dog and pony shows.<br />
Math teachers quietly rebelled and returned to the grease pen and overhead projectors. The immediate effect was two-fold: Students became more engaged, and the math teachers suffered negative observations. To wit: We were not using our technology properly and thus clearly not team players. The experienced, long-tenured teachers told the administrators to go fish, and I was exiled the next year to a remediation class.<br />
The abuse, cost and misuse of computers and its expensive off-spring (e.g. IWBs) has chased a lot of good teachers into the swamps."</i><br />
<br />
One writer commented on a Hawthorne affect of these boards: <br />
<br />
<i>The High School I teach at has now furnished most of our classrooms with interactive whiteboards (Promethean boards). The result.....technology that we need training for and are not provided. Sure some of my peers have self-taught themselves, but most of us have only just scratched the surface with it's functions and usefulness.<br />
<br />
I will say this, they are expensive but for teachers that really enjoy this technology, it has increased their energy and morale. This of course benefits students.</i><br />
<br />
And there's certainly a consensus that there is grossly inadequate training. <br />
From another teacher: <br />
<br />
<i>I disagree that they are a waste of money, but ONLY IF teachers take the time to learn to use them effectively. I have been forcing myself to use mine every day for at least a few minutes in each class so that I can become familiar with it. The math teachers use them a lot for interactive teaching aids, although if they want the entire class to work at the same time, individual whiteboards at each desk (very low tech!) work just as well.</i><br />
<br />
No training makes interactive whiteboards a $5K expense at a time when schools can't afford books.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-19664911925022420182010-01-28T09:22:00.000-08:002010-01-28T09:22:09.526-08:00A spot in the value creation chainAm walking through a very helpful process with a friend who is fluent in b-school speak aimed at identifying where Lucere sits in the classic "value chain." Here's one point worth reflection that came from yesterday's session: <br />
<br />
Businesses use technology to save costs. So far education really hasn't done that: for-profit online publishers clamor to replace the classic textbook makers. Those textbook makers are the priesthood of this profession -- like the travel agents or even the staff writers of branded news organizations. They were people who had special access to a market (in this case the schools) and there were signficant barriers preventing newcomers from penetrating that market. <br />
<br />
But for all their expertise and efforts the textbook makers haven't figured out how to address the needs of kids. If they had, then test scores would eventually go up, dropout numbers would fall. <br />
<br />
Lucere's contention: There's tremendous value in the content available via the Internet, not just as "broadcasted" material but as instructional material. It's not just about "telling me" about climate change--it's inspiring me to figure out how to explore what climate change means for me, my community and then the world. <br />
<br />
Everything comes with a cost: the cost of a textbook is printed on the side. The "cost" of so-called "free" content on the Internet is time. That's the "hidden" costs of those materials. Teachers value their time tremendously. That means they've made an economic judgment: The hidden cost of using Internet materials has greatly exceeded the cost of a textbook. The benefits of using Internet materials are murky: do they help? How do they help? Who do they help? The benefits of using textbooks may not be precise (do kids really learn?) but the penalties for not using textbooks could be severe (class is disorganized, the state standards are not touched.) <br />
<br />
Lucere's job is clear: Lower the "hidden" costs of reaching content on the Internet -- and demonstrate the benefit.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-58967074661685898882010-01-25T09:16:00.000-08:002010-01-25T09:16:03.893-08:00Penny dropping momentsWhat Lucere is aiming to do isn't rocket science: in fact, there are plenty of people who recognize the same problem. Here's a quote from the <a href="http://http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/who-needs-harvard.html">Sept. 09 issue of Fast Company magazine </a><br />
<br />
<i>Richard Ludlow, a 23-year-old Yale graduate, has his own ideas about a workable business model for open educational resources. His for-profit startup, Academic Earth, is a Web site that brings together video lectures and other academic content from various sources. As an undergrad looking for help grokking a tough concept in his linear algebra class, he stumbled onto MIT's OpenCourseWare. He realized that there were some really cool educational resources out there and that most of his classmates didn't know about them. <b>"My idea was to first, aggregate this huge critical mass of content disconnected over various sites; second, apply best practices in user interface design and Web standards to do for educational content what Hulu has done [for TV]; and third, build an educational ecosystem around the content," Ludlow explains. "Showing the videos is one thing, but building the right interactive tools and the right commenting system will really create something of value.</b>"</i><br />
<br />
That's the same value proposition as Lucere, albeit aimed at a different audience. <br />
<br />
Also relevant: <a href="http://http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_14251382?nclick_check=1">the headlines in today's San Jose Mercury about the state of funding for California schools</a>: <br />
<br />
Only unpleasant surprises there: cuts that amount to $200 per child. <i>The new reductions of approximately $200 per student come after successive cuts, including a cut of $253 per student in July. The governor's proposed 2010-11 education budget would be about 10 percent less than 2007-08 levels, according to School Services. </i><br />
<br />
Bottomline: money will continue to leak away from education. And as the Fast Company article nicely puts it: <i>The challenge is not to bring technology into the classroom….The millennials, with their Facebook and their cell phones, have done that. The challenge is to capture the potential of technology to lower costs and improve learning for all. </i>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-65561524303456380562010-01-21T10:38:00.000-08:002010-01-21T10:45:42.463-08:00Communities of learners vs. studentsHere's an <a href="http://http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2010/01/20/tln_ferlazzo_effectiveness.html">excellent piece</a> by a high school teacher in Sacramento who draws a distinction between communities of "learners" versus "students." To my ear, his community of "learners" is much like a community of makers -- people who are building something. Here are a couple of the salient points -- and some interesting feedback from other teacher/readers: <br />
<i><br />
In a classroom of students, a teacher does most of the talking. In a community of learners, students work in small groups and are co-teachers. In a classroom, people laugh when others make mistakes, but in a community, people are supported when they take risks. In a classroom, the teacher always has to be the one to keep people focused. In a community, students take responsibility for keeping themselves focused.</i><br />
<br />
Now for a couple of reader comments: <br />
<br />
The dispirited teacher: <br />
<i>I teach in a middle school, and time after time my fellow teachers report the plans of primarily ELL students to drop out and get job. That is their plan, and frequently the parents endorse the plan. The parents usually won't tell the teacher this but it is clear what their plan is. Frequently these students have cousins in Mexico who are no longer in school, but they are working. This is the culture battle, that frankly I am losing. When I showed my pre-AP students that they would have history and English classes for the first two years of college, they were shocked. The majority of middle school students regardless of background are not likely to be interested in becoming a community of learners. Maybe if our building principal were more engaged, it would be different. Right now that is not my world. I am sad.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
And people who disagree: <br />
<i><br />
I disagree with the poster RHE that "the majority of middle school students...are not likely to be interested in becoming a community of learners." That's not my experience at all. But how much Larry Ferlazzo has been helped and inspired himself by building-level leadership that values the collective and meaning.</i><br />
<br />
Another reader: <i><br />
The reason to do well "in school" is NOT to avoid a death penalty, but, instead, because it's fun. I feel so sorry for RHE and those agreeing with his despair, since it is astoundingly simple to engage kids - on their own behalf - regardless of their culture and ethnicity. In fact, THAT IS THE JOB, at least according to Horace Mann. Teaching how to learn from each other is far, far more important, with outcomes of far better test scores by the way, than teaching that older people know "stuff" more than younger ones. The anthropology of a classroom trumps everything else.</i><br />
<br />
And still another: <br />
<i>I feel for you, RHE. Different people have different experiences, and your situation sounds hard. I also teach in a middle school, and for the most part my students are all over the idea that they can be a community of learners. A few are worried that being able to participate in choosing the topics the study, what projects they do, and how they share what they've learned with others, will not prepare them for high school where they expect to simply have to do as they are told (not always the reality, of course). But for the most part, even those kids roll with it, and the majority love it.</i><br />
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Bottom line: I think you can create a "community of learners" and doers, at many levels in schools. It might be easiest in 4th and 5th grade. But it's possible throughout. And this is what education should be about.<br />
<br />
And a postscript: an excellent presentation by CoolCat teacher, Vicki Davis, who lives in Camilla, Ga. <br />
<br />
http://www.slideshare.net/coolcatteacher/twenty-first-century-influencerelizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-86589242021908797322010-01-21T10:16:00.000-08:002010-01-21T10:16:51.454-08:00Crystal ball gazingSome aspects of the future aren't all that mysterious. <br />
<br />
Given that it takes between three and five years for hardware to roll out, it's not all that hard to predict the underlying trends for say, the next five or so years. In other words, the environment is predictable. Far less predictable is what people do in that environment. <br />
<br />
So here's a bit of crystal ball gazing on the future of kids & electronic media, where "kids" = children 8 to 18. <br />
<br />
Predictable trends (hardly soda bottle-rocket science): <br />
1. Internet connectivity will continue to become widespread; bandwidth will grow.<br />
2. Handheld devices proliferate. They become cheaper and more powerful. <br />
3. More kids continue to have access to both of the above. <br />
4. This is a field of dreams scenario: because kids have access to handhelds & Internet access, they *will* use it. (Past trends predict this will be the case. From the Kaiser Family Foundation report: <br />
<i>Over the past five years, the proportion of 8- to 18-year- olds who own their own cell phone has grown from about four in ten (39%) to about two-thirds (66%). The proportion with iPods or other MP3 players increased even more dramatically, jumping from 18% to 76% among all 8- to 18-year-olds.</i> <br />
and this too: <i><br />
In the last five years, home Internet access has expanded from 74% to 84% among young people; the proportion with a laptop has grown from 12% to 29%; and Internet access in the bedroom has jumped from 20% to 33%. The quality of Internet access has improved as well, with high-speed access increasing from 31% to 59%.</i><br />
<br />
Now here's an observation: the adult world does a fine job modeling how to consume media. (Just listen to Shaq on those Comcast commercials.) What we don't do much: model how to *use* the media-- how to manipulate it, how to create stuff with it. <br />
<br />
The KFF report is grumpy about kids who consume alot of media: <i>Youth who spend more time with media report lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment.</i><br />
<br />
And further: <br />
<i>Nearly half (47%) of all heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly C’s or lower), compared to 23% of light media users. Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored. Moreover, the relationships between media exposure and grades, and between media exposure and personal contentment, withstood controls for other possibly relevant factors such as age, gender, race, parent education, and single vs. two-parent households.</i><br />
<br />
It's not news to parents that the "tween" or early teen years are tough ones: those are the years when kids are starting to exercise their own will, often in opposition to their parents (just because they can). This newfound independence is heady stuff. Again from KFF: <br />
<br />
<i>Two groups of young people stand out for their high levels of media consumption: those in the tween and early teen years (11- to 14-year-olds), and Blacks and Hispanics.</i><br />
<br />
<i>The disparities in media use in relation to both age and race are difficult to ignore. The jump in media use that occurs when young people hit the 11- to 14-year-old age group is tremendous—an increase of more than three hours a day in time spent with media (total media use), and an increase of four hours a day in total media exposure. Eleven- to fourteen-year-olds average just under nine hours of media use a day (8:40), and when multitasking is taken into account, pack in nearly 12 hours of media exposure (11:53). The biggest increases are in TV and video game use: 11- to 14-year-olds consume an average of five hours a day (5:03) of TV and movie content—live, recorded, on DVD, online, or on mobile platforms—and spend nearly an hour and a half a day (1:25) playing video games. In other words, just as children begin to make the transition into adolescence, their media use explodes.</i><br />
<br />
Once again, we should ask: what are we modeling and teaching these kids? We've done a fine job of teaching them to be consumers. What about becoming producers? <br />
<br />
We also know that middle school is where we lose kids. The schools fail us here, even more so than at the elementary school level. And when adolescents become disaffected and want to give up, it's awfully hard to get them back on track. (Note: I've seen these statistics: will search for them again.) <br />
<br />
So here's a half thought: There are a number of ways to categorize the proliferation of education materials on the Internet. Among them: those that are intended to be "consumed," and those that are either instructions or steps on how to "produce" things. Reading a book is consumption; watching a movie (whether a Ken Burns' documentary or Pokemon) is also consumption. Maker instructions obviously are about "production," as are contests. <br />
<br />
Here's another differentiator: there are some resources that are uniquely available via the Internet -- and others that are simply more convenient when they are in cyberspace. Lesson plans -- things that lay out in text what to do -- may be more convenient when stored in the digital cloud but they can exist in books or many other forms. The Beckman Institute "Bugscope" is more unique: you could (possibly) visit it if you're in Illinois (then again, maybe not. I don't know if they like visitors in the flesh!) Maybe the last step with that is... how would you build a bug? <br />
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So perhaps another unifying idea: the resources that we should surface and share with educators should be about making things, not just consuming things.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-17605811581081912122010-01-20T11:48:00.001-08:002010-01-20T12:40:11.968-08:00Remaking Learning20 January 2010<br /><br />Interesting piece in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html">NYTimes today: "If your kids are awake, they're probably online."</a> The piece describes a <a href="http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia012010nr.cfm">new study</a> by the Kaiser Family Foundation.<br /><br />Here's the money quote:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />"Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week)." </span><br /><br />More interesting than the article itself were the almost 100 comments from folks of all generations -- parents bemoaning their kids' excessive use of media to 20-something year olds commenting about how they don't quite feel ruined for life.<br /><br />Most of us are looking for rules of the road: are parents supposed to restrict how much media their kids use? Or are they supposed to provide access to everything so that the kid is "in touch" with the world? And what about schools? Should "texting" be a part of the curriculum along with reading and running a mile?<br /><br />I'd argue that the debates over media usage miss a fundamental distinction: are you a consumer or a producer?<br /><br />Here's what we know about consumers and producers:<br /><br />If all you do is consume, you will get flabby. Flabby in body, flabby in the head, and flabby in spirit. Some consumption is essential. But to do nothing but consume all the time is deadening.<br /><br />To be a producer, however, is an energizing experience. You exercise whatever abilities you have -- physical, emotional, spiritual. You may produce goods; you may produce art. It doesn't really matter very much. To produce something creates a sense of personal value. You feel that you control some tiny portion of the universe.<br /><br />So to that end, when we use digital media to produce something -- whether it is a gadget or a movie -- we triumph. Our "media centers" should be digital workshops. They need to be about creating stuff. The reason we tap digital resources to supplement our teaching is to inspire kids about how to invent or create a portion of the world.<br /><br />Maybe that's the connection between the classroom world and the "makers." We want to teach how to create stuff. Some of it happens inside the school. Some of it happens outside the school. The internet is a vast sea where we can fish out the resources that we need to get to build something. But it's providing resources, just like the oceans provide the starting point for a fabulous seafood dinner.elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4135105861691485086.post-53941786503470317532009-10-28T00:01:00.000-07:002010-04-21T17:12:14.935-07:00Cracking An Educating Impasse<span lxslt="http://xml.apache.org/xslt" style="float: left; text-transform: uppercase;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; text-transform: none;"><img alt="Forbes.com" border="0" height="46" src="http://images.forbes.com/media/assets/forbes_logo_blue.gif" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 4px;" width="142" /></span></span><br />
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By Elizabeth Corcoran 10.28.09, 12:01 AM EDT<br />
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.--In 2005, Bronx middle school IS 339 was a wreck. A slim 9% of the students could do math at their grade level. Classes were regularly locked down to dampen conflicts. Ambulances and police cars frequently vied for parking spots with school buses.<br />
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Four years later, IS 339 is a very different school from the one principal Jason Levy inherited several years earlier: 62% of the students are at grade level in math now. Teachers share lesson plans with one another and are inspiring students to take on complex challenges, including interviewing city planners about what it would take to create something like Times Square in the Bronx. <br />
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What did Levy do? <br />
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Turning around IS 339 took tremendous--and in some instances, radical--efforts that included changing more than half the teaching staff. From Levy's vantage, however, he couldn't have done it without an infusion of technology--including giving laptops to every student and training teachers to use <org>Google<orgid idsrc="nasdaq" value="GOOG"></orgid></org> docs to share lesson plans, put out assignments and stay in touch with their students. ''We don't see laptops as toys or tools but as megaphones,'' Levy said. ''The internet is just another language that we need to speak.''<br />
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Levy shared his story at a day-and-half conference, ''Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age,'' hosted at Google's headquarters and sponsored by a trio of organizations long involved in education: the MacArthur Foundation, Joan Gantz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the San Francisco-based Common Sense Media organization. Questions were also <a href="http://www.google.com/events/digitalage/index.html">moderated online</a>. ''We have the leaders of industry, education and philanthropy in the room. This is our moment,'' declared James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media.<br />
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The undercurrent of the meeting: The Internet has changed most of the business world and lives--but for the most part, it hasn't touched public education. That means the chasm between what students experience in and outside the classroom is widening--so much so that 1.2 million teenagers quit school every year, a rate that translates to one kid dropping out every 26 seconds.<br />
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Apart from agreeing that education is fraught with problems, educators have long argued about where to start: Improve teacher pay? Get rid of tenure? Get rid of school boards? Add more standards or set schools and teachers free to experiment with novel teaching techniques? Add computers? Get the parents more involved?<br />
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Even as policymakers, educators and philanthropists debated the different approaches, a handful of speakers shared inspiring stories about individual projects that are working, much like Levy's school in the Bronx. A number are bubbling up in New York City: Geoff Canada, who runs the <a href="http://www.hcz.org/">Harlem Children's Zone</a>, described how his project offers educational, social and medical services to thousands of children--and has turned out nationally ranked teams of chess champions. There are plans to try to build similar projects elsewhere around the U.S. Last summer, New York also sponsored a unique experiment called School of One (see "<a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/21/school-of-one-technology-breakthroughs-education.html">Tools For Learning</a>") that used computers to create personalized learning programs for individual students. Test scores jumped; New York hopes to expand that program too.<br />
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In Chicago, Nichole Pinkart, who founded the <a href="http://iremix.org/">Digital Youth Network</a>, described how her team has created a space where urban kids can experiment with digital media tools as well as become experts in constructing multimedia projects that tie into school curriculum.<br />
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And in Maine, Susan Gendron, commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, discussed how all middle school students in her state <a href="http://www.maine.gov/mlti/index.shtml">are given laptops</a>. The students ''are networking and doing research all over the world,'' Gendron said. ''The ways they're presenting what they learn is much like how people present information in companies every day.''<br />
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There were also hints of projects to come: Slated for released in 2010 is <i>Waiting For Superman</i>, a movie that lays out the heartbreaking frustration of bright, economically disadvantaged kids struggling to get a good education. The film is produced by Internet executive Jeff Skoll's movie production company, which also sponsored <i>An Inconvenient Truth</i>. Former chief of Lotus Development Corp., Mitch Kapor, who now runs the Level Playing Field Institute in San Francisco, suggested that he's seen prototypes of a new class of low-cost, handheld devices like netbook computers that will debut in 2010.<br />
Yet as educators and teachers shared their stories, one thread ran through many of the comments: In spite of the spread of Internet technology, few teachers, administrators or even parents have found easy ways to share the technologies and best teaching practices that have worked in classrooms. ''I'm a little unhappy because we're not addressing the issue of how you scale what kids need,'' said Mike S. Smith, a senior counsel at the U.S. Department of Education.<br />
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Twenty years ago, when the <a href="http://www.nwp.org/">National Writing Project</a> began offering teachers workshops on how to teach writing, ''we'd see innovations in teaching practices that would spread,'' noted Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, who directs national programs and site development for the NWP. ''I'd say in the last 10 years, it has been harder to do that.''<br />
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Exactly how to get the best ideas to spread hasn't been worked out yet. But the need has never been stronger. ''In every other sector, technology has been an essential part of how to do more with less,'' noted James H. Shelton III, an assistant deputy secretary in the U.S. Department of Education. ''Pressure, relentlessly applied, causes change.''<br />
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<i>Elizabeth Corcoran was an editor and writer for Forbes for 10 years. She left recently to create a start-up devoted to sharing best practices for technology in education.</i><br />
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<i>See the original at: http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/27/google-computers-internet-technology-personal-education.html</i><br />
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</i>elizabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03609494133877618846noreply@blogger.com0