Schools in Georgia are considering staying open four days a week to cope with budget cuts. One school district did this last fall; more are considering it now. "Peach County officials have estimated they saved $313,000 in transportation and utilities costs by making the schedule change," according to a report by the Associated Press.
It raises a host of questions:
1. Are the school hours longer on the four school days?
2. How are working parents coping with the change?
3. Where are kids going on their day off?
4. Are they engaging in any distance-learning or project-based learning?
To be continued!
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
The Value of 21st Century Skills
Oracle's Thinkquest is circulating a paper on the value of teaching 21st century learning skills. They've boiled it down nicely:
Learning projects:
* start with a Big Question, an essential question, usually from the real world
* are central to the curriculum so learning is tied to standards
* include a variety of activities (over a long time) designed to explore the big question
* requires collaboration (inside and outside the school)
* asks students to take the initiative
* involves the use of technology to extend students capacity for research, analysis and collaboration
* culminates in a product that requires students to communicate results
What Lucere is doing: essentially modeling project learning for teachers. Here's how it plays through:
* Big Question: How do you use the tools you have to tackle a Big Project?
* resources should be tied to the curriculum
* there are plenty of activities over time
* there's a huge need for collaboration (involving both children and adults)
* technology is an essential tool (not the end all in itself)
* the product: cool classroom projects
Time to get building!
Learning projects:
* start with a Big Question, an essential question, usually from the real world
* are central to the curriculum so learning is tied to standards
* include a variety of activities (over a long time) designed to explore the big question
* requires collaboration (inside and outside the school)
* asks students to take the initiative
* involves the use of technology to extend students capacity for research, analysis and collaboration
* culminates in a product that requires students to communicate results
What Lucere is doing: essentially modeling project learning for teachers. Here's how it plays through:
* Big Question: How do you use the tools you have to tackle a Big Project?
* resources should be tied to the curriculum
* there are plenty of activities over time
* there's a huge need for collaboration (involving both children and adults)
* technology is an essential tool (not the end all in itself)
* the product: cool classroom projects
Time to get building!
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
What's it worth to you?
A fellow named Doug Johnson, who has strong street cred in education and technology, posted this fascinating commentary yesterday about how to save money using technology, specifically Google Docs.
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).
That's big.
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?
Schools that answer "no" have simply added to their expenses without any benefit. It's time to change that answer to "yes."
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).
That's big.
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?
Schools that answer "no" have simply added to their expenses without any benefit. It's time to change that answer to "yes."
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
What 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 something different in front of the camera than they could do on stage: they let the camera follow them.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
Now to the positive side of the ledger: what can technology deliver that text books can't easily do?
* Technology can deliver lesson plans. (Cost reduction to overall expenditures budget).
* 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.)
* 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.
In other words, technology should let kids become makers--of things (gismos), of content, of ideas--rather than just consumers of content.
Learning Passions. Maybe that's it. Technology should and can be connecting kids with passions. Teachers can help. Parents can help, too.
Note: Here's the Washington Post's Jay Mathew's take on "senior projects,"a more organized version of finding a passion.
Comment from a high school student:
'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).
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?
....
"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."
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.
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.)
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).
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.
Now to the positive side of the ledger: what can technology deliver that text books can't easily do?
* Technology can deliver lesson plans. (Cost reduction to overall expenditures budget).
* 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.)
* 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.
In other words, technology should let kids become makers--of things (gismos), of content, of ideas--rather than just consumers of content.
Learning Passions. Maybe that's it. Technology should and can be connecting kids with passions. Teachers can help. Parents can help, too.
Note: Here's the Washington Post's Jay Mathew's take on "senior projects,"a more organized version of finding a passion.
Comment from a high school student:
'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).
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?
....
"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."
Monday, February 1, 2010
Another visit to the shadowy realm of catherdrals and bazaars
I'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.
From the Washington Post:
"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."
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 NYTimes
“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.”
But there's a kicker: we don't really know how to measure what works in classrooms and what doesn't. A report 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:
"Overall, the panel believes that the existing research on using data to make instructional decisions does not yet provide conclusive evidence of what works to improve student achievement.“
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.
All of which got me thinking about Eric Raymond's classic: The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
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):
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
[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.]
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
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
Not one of his stated rules but it should be:
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.
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.
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.
From the Washington Post:
"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."
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 NYTimes
“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.”
But there's a kicker: we don't really know how to measure what works in classrooms and what doesn't. A report 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:
"Overall, the panel believes that the existing research on using data to make instructional decisions does not yet provide conclusive evidence of what works to improve student achievement.“
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.
All of which got me thinking about Eric Raymond's classic: The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
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):
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
[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.]
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
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
Not one of his stated rules but it should be:
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.
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.
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.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Hating Interactive Whiteboards
Here's a provocative post by a veteran teacher.
Here's a common comment on this piece:
"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.
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.
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."
One writer commented on a Hawthorne affect of these boards:
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.
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.
And there's certainly a consensus that there is grossly inadequate training.
From another teacher:
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.
No training makes interactive whiteboards a $5K expense at a time when schools can't afford books.
Here's a common comment on this piece:
"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.
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.
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."
One writer commented on a Hawthorne affect of these boards:
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.
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.
And there's certainly a consensus that there is grossly inadequate training.
From another teacher:
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.
No training makes interactive whiteboards a $5K expense at a time when schools can't afford books.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A spot in the value creation chain
Am 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Lucere's job is clear: Lower the "hidden" costs of reaching content on the Internet -- and demonstrate the benefit.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Lucere's job is clear: Lower the "hidden" costs of reaching content on the Internet -- and demonstrate the benefit.
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