I’m going to prime the pump a little bit for my K12 Online presentation next week…
My fifth-grade daughter’s math homework this weekend required her to find out what a radian or a grad was (hint: both are ways besides degrees to measure angles). We hit ye olde Google and quickly found this helpful (and free) learning activity from Wisconsin Online:
Bam! Ten minutes later my daughter and I had learned what a radian was (the animation was much more helpful than the mere definitions that we found), answered correctly all of the self-assessment questions, and were ready to move forward.
Okay, we actually weren’t ready to move forward because we thought the animation was so cool that we set up a Wisconsin Online account and dug around for other interesting tutorials. In other words, we were passionate, self-directed, engaged learners, prompted by a single question from my daughter’s math book.
I’ve thought about that moment quite a bit the last couple of days. Of course my mind started wandering to the K12 Online Conference, the TED videos, various podcasts, the MIT Open Courseware project, and other similar online multimedia resources. As my mind meandered around, it dug up a question:
Can a computer lecture better than a human?
That question’s not quite accurate, because there’s still a human behind every online learning activity. What I mean is that there are quite a number of examples on the Web of ways that we can learn and assess ourselves on fairly complex material using video lectures, animations, simulations, video games, and the like. As these resources grow in number – fueled by easy-to-learn, increasingly-powerful software that allows average citizens to create learning objects – and are organized and collected by individual experts, organizations like Wisconsin Online, or group efforts, it’s going to become unbelievably easy to find a variety of ways other than text to learn about almost anything we want. This will be especially true if we are intentional about it and actively work to fill in needed gaps.
Would I rather learn about a radian from a book or the Wisconsin Online animation? The animation – hands-down – due to its better explanatory power. Would I rather learn about a radian from a person or the animation? Well, the animation is infinitely patient – it doesn’t get irritated with me if I don’t understand the first time around. I can replay the animation as often as I need to but probably can’t ‘replay’ the person. The animation is more accessible – it was available to me in my home, at a time when I wanted to access it. And if the animation still doesn’t do the trick, there are other ways to learn the concept just a mouse click away (but other people who can explain radians usually aren’t so easily found).
Don’t get me wrong. There’s still a lot of value in human teachers when it comes to explaining difficult concepts, working through students’ misconceptions, inspiring students to want to explore deeper, and so on. We’re not replaceable by robots and software just yet. But it’s easy to see that simulations, animations, and other online text and multimedia resources can carry a great deal of the initial instructional delivery load.
There is a wealth of research showing that around 80 to 85 percent of classroom work is low-level factual and procedural work, exactly the kind of work that can easily be facilitated by the kinds of technology-mediated learning activities that I’ve alluded to this post. So why waste an expensive human on those things? If there’s going to be that much lecturing (and similar low-level learning work) going on, why not let the computer ‘lecture’ and free up our valuable humans for the stuff that software can’t do yet?
Here are my notes from Alan November’s keynote today at ITEC 2008 in Des Moines. ITEC is Iowa’s statewide educational technology conference so it’s always a good time. I actually had never seen Alan present before so that was fun for me. He was extremely entertaining and I got to go up and meet him afterward. He said that I was younger than he would have guessed!
There is a gap between what we teach children and what is needed in the global workplace, and the gap is growing.
Students need to be able to do three key things
Have the capacity to do good research on the Web
Have good global communication skills
We should evaluate teachers on their ability to directly engage children with people all around the world
Be self-directed
Our system is based on the concept that teachers own the learning
Corporations need people who don’t need a boss to tell them what to do
The top skill learned in school is to learn how to be taught
West Point is requiring its instructors to teach Islam across the curriculum
The Internet, rather than being a tool that will expose you to other beliefs and perspectives, is instead becoming a place to simply validate one’s own beliefs.
We need to teach teachers good assignment design when teaching them technology.
Why not teach students how to debate kids in Britain regarding their perspectives on the Revolutionary War?
We vastly underestimate kids’ ability to create rich academic content that contributes to the learning of the rest of their class.
We need to teach children to have a global voice that people all around the world can hear.
Paper gives you a little voice – paper stays in the classroom.
Bob Sprankle has 2nd graders asking for their own writing / math podcast shows. A sign of a good classroom is kids asking to do more.
The Internet has made people realize that they are really, really poor and their work ethic is almost scary to watch because they think education is the ticket out of poverty.
Check out Screencast.com: MarcosMath’s Library, Mathtrain Podcast, bob.primefactor?
Have the kids help you build learning objects (using, e.g., Jing)! This is a “shift in control” problem, not a technology problem.
Demonstrated how to set up a custom Google search engine. Can set one up so that students only search the sites that the teachers select (e.g., FunBrain, BrainPop, IKnowthat). High school students can help create the sites that go into the custom search engine.
Have an official researcher every day at the one computer the teacher has in the classroom. That person is in charge of finding answers to questions that pop up and also in charge of adding relevant sites to the class search engine.
You can create a search engine for just a particular topic (e.g., Revolutionary War). Have your class’ British ePals contribute to the search engine too!
You can access other people’s custom search engines.
Showed TinyURL.com
Too many “technology-enabled” assignments involve using the computer as a $1,000 pencil.
Collaborative class notes in Google Docs are even better than presentation notes because students can add on extra resources, etc.
Google Docs gives you a running history of the flow of writers’ thinking through version control. About 4 people can write concurrently.
Google Docs is ideal for collaborative writing. We should be teaching kids collaborative tools. The content should add up to something greater than the sum of the individual parts.
Kiva – a great web site to teach children how to make a contribution to other parts of the world. A community of contributors invests in a person / project. If the Web needed a reason to be invented, this is it. Linking people around the world to help people.
Three elements of video game design that are not present in schools
Students go to the most challenging level – they don’t want to be bored
Students get instant feedback (less than a second) – hard to reproduce in class
Third? [never got to it; we went off in a different direction]
If blocking is your only strategy for protecting children, you’re setting them up for failure in the real world. This is immoral. It’s a manipulative world out there. We have to teach kids how to navigate it.
Kids think they can take down their MySpace / Facebook content when it’s time. Show them the Wayback Machine!
We’re blocking them instead of teaching them. This is not the way to prepare kids for a web-based world.
I sat next to Angela Maiers. Vic Jaras, Evan Abbey, Carl Anderson, Leigh Zeitz, Rob and Magda Galloway, and bunch of other fun people also were there (including a good showing by Iowa State folks!). Iowa may not be where we’d like it to be but there are some fantastic educators here who are trying hard to make it happen!
Update: I added a picture of Alan to this post. It’s not the greatest picture in the world but it’s hard to get him to stand still!
Did you know that over 12,000 K-12 employees in the U.S. had a nonfatal occupational injury in 2006? As Sergeant Esterhaus used to note, Hey, let’s be careful out there!
My netbook is on its way!
Netbooks are hot, hot, hot! (see, e.g., the articles in GigaOM, ZDNet, and PC Magazine). Between netbooks and smartphones, the mobile Web is well on its way to penetrating every nook and cranny of our lives. This has positive implications for getting a computing device into the hands of every student! I thought it was time to dive into this computing sector and will share pictures of my Dell Inspiron Mini 9 when it arrives later this month. Now all we need is ubiquitous wireless broadband…
[W]e believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups.
[T]he vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. . . . [O]ne reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.
Students aren’t the only ones missing the big picture
The Florida Department of Education is concerned that students are missing the big picture when it comes to science. A task force stated that “teachers should provide a broader focus on scientific concepts and process in a ‘big picture’ sense.” Hmmm… I wonder if that means the Department is going to narrow down the list of required science standards and also pare down the size of approved textbooks. I’m guessing not. Download the full report if you dare.
I especially like the last of these three questions from Rodney Trice. We should be asking teachers and principals that question more often (and just that directly).
How do you intend to bring the global community into your classroom?
How will you prepare students for a future that is relatively unknown?
How you will eliminate the racial predictability of achievement outcomes in your classroom?
Nope, sorry. iPods are not allowed. Back to the old way. Too bad it doesn’t work as well. Gotta do it anyway. Oh, and I love how the music players are categorically, by definition, a ‘distraction’ (if not in actuality). Who needs reality when we have these little educational policy fantasy worlds that we can create for ourselves?
I bet parents and community members would really like to see scorecards like this one (maybe with different data) for their local schools. I know some schools and districts already do this. Hopefully they use line graphs rather than tables of numbers. Could you tell the essential story of a school district with 10 key, well-done graphs? I bet you could!
Finally, I’m digging Google Chrome. it’s now my default browser and I’m using Firefox less and less (and I love Firefox). Chrome is much faster. I also like that each tab is a separate process; I have yet to have a browser hang…
I don’t blog about technology tools too often, but I thought I’d share my computer setup at home (my setup at work is quite similar):
I have no data files on my tablet PC, just software. The key to my system is my portable hard drive, which contains all of my data files. It’s just 3.1 in (8 cm) x 5 in (12.6 cm) x 0.6 in (1.5 cm) and weighs 0.4 lbs (180 g). It comes with a USB 2.0 cable and a drawstring bag.
Every time I plug in my portable hard drive, it automatically backs itself up to a larger external hard drive. It also automatically backs up files on the fly as I edit them.
Basically, my computer-driven life fits in my pocket. I can carry around the portable hard drive, plug it into any other computer, and work with my files. It requires no power cord, instead drawing its power from the USB port. This is the same idea as a flash key, only the portable hard drive holds more files.
In addition to my tablet PC, I also have a second desktop computer (Dell Dimension 9200) that I use for digital audio and video.
What’s your setup?
[I use Launchy for everything. What are the four icons on my desktop? Well, one’s my curriculum vitae; it’s amazing to me how often I need it. The other three are my department’s electronic letterhead file, Computer, and the Recycle Bin.]
Yep, that’s right. Social networking for babies: Made a mess in my pants today. Slept. Made a mess in my pants today. Slept…
The $70 PC
Using a thin client model for school computers seems like an idea that has promise. And of course a $70 price tag per computer sounds great. Does anyone know a school organization that’s working with NComputing?
And, finally, here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t read
Doug Johnson while you’re supposedly participating in a serious meeting. Thy
guffaw mayest disrupt…
I am appreciating Jon Becker’s use of large-scale data to ferret out interesting questions and issues. Check out his posts on digital equity and math achievement to see what I mean.
Eduwonkette – a.k.a. Jennifer Jennings – is the queen of using data in interesting and provocative ways in her posts. She and Jon are good models for the rest of us who have access to data.
Send this to your wife or neighbors and spark a good conversation about your kids
If you somehow haven’t run across it yet at another blog, be sure to read Clive Thompson’s article in the New York Times about the brave new world of digital intimacy. Lots of conversation-provoking stuff in there…
I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on delivering effective presentations. If the Amazon widget doesn’t load in a few seconds, here’s a static picture of the list.
[Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of the proceeds. Your cost doesn’t go up any. Amazon just pays us a little for the referral through its Associates Program.]
