Google Glass Might Pose the Biggest Challenge Public Education Has Seen Since Desegregation

Put aside for the moment that segregation of public schools in the United States is at its highest level since 1968; our country has backslid. During the more than three decades from 1954 (Brown Vs Board of Ed) and 1988 (peak desegregation in the US), achieving racial equality, or at least access to equal resources was arguably a more polarizing issue than immigration, gay marriage, and abortion are today. Currently, standards-based testing, and in particular, the changes that will be effected by the voluntary adoption of the Common Core, is occupying nearly all of the mindspace of educators, administrators, and education policy makers alike. Our obsession with testing will seem trivial, however, when we begin to confront the tectonic shift in paradigm that will be inspired by Google Glass.

I have argued before that all of the edtech we have seen in the last decade, cool as it is, has not significantly impacted how well we educate our youth. Few technologies, even expertly applied, have had an impact on the end product of K12 education. STEM scores have risen slightly in the last decade, though this is probably a result of myriad federal and state programs aimed squarely at placing more highly qualified STEM educators in classrooms. Diligently applied software programs to enhance reading ability and numeracy have shown some nice improvements on student test scores; though it could be argued that any mindful application of an educational protocol, employing technology or not, will increase student test scores.

Common Core Assessment 20x More Expensive? What Can Edtech Do?

The forthcoming Common Core (CC) Assessments are the next generation of standardized tests in the US, and will meet the testing frequency requirements of the most recent version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act also known as No Child Left Behind unless congress should act to change this, which is most unlikely. Forty six of the fifty states have signed on to voluntarily administer the exams that will be written to meet the standards of the Common Core. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is one of two consortia that organizes the architecting and contracting for the Common Core assessments; SBAC is responsible for about half of the member states, including California.

I have examined the SBAC’s RFP’s for testing design and delivery of the CC assessments, and the consortium managed to construct a guide for contractors that even Finnish educators would admire. It is difficult to tell from the website, but it appears that the SBAC employed work groups that engaged school practitioners, or at least retired practitioners, to shape the tasks.

The winning bids for exam design, delivery, and reporting for the SBAC, have all gone to Wireless Generation, a company turned down by the New York Department of Education at least in part because of the parent company’s (Newscorp) role in mishandling personal data. This actually concerns me less (for now) than does the challenge that the private, for profit Wireless Generation (WG) must meet to deliver on the promise of the Common Core.

I am hopeful that WG can construct a multiple choice administration tool that is adaptive and requires less time of students to assess what multiple choice tests can; namely, what a student does not know. Call me cynical, but less time spent taking multiple choice tests is a win at this point.

One Year of Blended Learning One to One with Chromebooks

Reflections on a year of Blended Learning with 1:1 Chromebooks

Physics teachers have a unique privilege in most high school settings. Most of us work with students that have elected to take our academic course, and with the exception of a growing number of physics first programs, we teach older students. Consequently, we tend to serve a population of learners that are more likely to match our enthusiasm for ideas, and entertain our whimsical diversions than might an average sampling of the student body as a whole. Many of us take advantage of the opportunity presented by this context to innovate with novel uses of technology in our practice. I am no exception to that rule.

When my idea of teaching physics in a one to one setting with Chromebooks was met with enthusiasm by both my colleagues and my administration eighteen months ago, I jumped in with both feet. Now, in April, at the cusp of another punishing two weeks of low quality standardized testing, it is time to reflect on the first year of the blend.

So Much Data Yet Still So Little Meaning

I had a mentor early in my career, also named Jack, who was a very well respected and well liked business owner. I worked at his company in the summers of my high school and college years as a delivery boy. Jack took me under his wing and would entertain my questions about the systems he employed in his business; an interest I have spent my entire career translating to education as a practitioner.

I was particularly intrigued by Jack’s incentive system for his delivery people; and not just because this impacted my bottom line. Growing up wanting for little, my adolescent motivation was not moved by financial incentive structures. Like many product-based business managers, Jack employed his delivery force as salesmen. We were given bonuses for new account creation and upsells. All of the incentives were financial. Even route preference awards were ultimately financial because of the potential for new accounts they held.

What would Maria Montessori Say About Edtech?

What would Maria Montessori say about the use of the edtech available to us as we approach the year 2013?

Heaven forbid any actual Montessori educators should read this post. My summaries of Montessori ideas and structures most certainly do not do justice to the wonderful body of work Maria Montessori left behind, nor do I adequately represent the many mindfully conceived and executed programs based on Montessori’s work. For this I offer an a priori apology.

Maria Montessori was a revolutionary in education. During the first half of the 20th Century, she commanded global attention for her work with pre-kinder Italian street children, and later for her inquiries into the education of children of all ages. The Montessori Method requires an observer scientist’s habit of mind for educators of children and adolescents, which relies upon a carefully constructed environment that promotes individual determination. Further, the Montessori teacher becomes a student of each child, observing them work, and carefully noting their accomplishments and challenges so as to be ready to introduce the learner to an appropriately timed task that suits both his interests and abilities.

Read more at the New Media Consortium..

Experienced Educators Riff on Heads Up Display Possibilities

Three weeks ago I had the privilege of sitting down for lunch with a group of experienced educators at the New England GAFE Summit who are all using Google Apps for Education in their practice. I posed a question to the group, “What would you do with Google Glass?”

Let me back up. As a resident of Menlo Park, California, nearby to Palo Alto, I have seen Google Glass prototypes in the field. These are heads up displays (HUDs) that allow a person to augment their daily experience with an overlay of information relevant to their immediate experience. Think of Schwarzenegger’s sunglasses in the Terminator that helped him find Sarah Connor. Those are an example of a heads up display; only the current version has a graphical interface that is far superior to that donned by Arnold in 1984 – really.

“Facial recognition to learn names.” Offered one of the teachers.

“Take more pictures.” Said another.

For a few minutes, we convinced ourselves that the HUD is just a fancy camera that would let us take more pictures and learn names of students at the beginning of the year more quickly. Then, the ideas began to flow.

Forget About One to One, Let’s Talk Two to One

This summer I wrote a post about the Bay Area Maker Faire entitled, My Son Met His People at the Maker Faire. Today I met mine. I am presenting on my blended learning experience with Teacher Dashboard by Hapara at the New England Google Apps for Education Summit in Burlington, Massachussetts.

A guy from New York showed us how three Nexus devices running Android could simultaneously allow students to compose and edit each other’s work on the same document – without typing a word! The voice recognition is now good enough and the web-based collaboration capabilities of docs are now robust enough that this actually works.

Too Much Screen Time in a Blended Learning Class?

The mid-July issue of Newsweek, linked below, was sitting on the coffee table at the Tahoe cabin of a friend of mine this past weekend. My interest was piqued by the cover image so, despite the fact that it was dated, I picked it up.

The author of the feature article, Is the Web Driving Us Mad?, Tony Dokoupil, presents what I will call a deeply researched opinion piece that does more than just suggest our brains are being negatively effected by our increased interaction with computing devices. I have reprinted his final paragraph below.

But in a way, it doesn’t matter whether our digital intensity is causing mental illness, or simply encouraging it along, as long as people are suffering. Overwhelmed by the velocity of their lives, we turn to prescription drugs, which helps explain why America runs on Xanax (and why rehab admissions for benzodiazepines, the ingredient in Xanax and other anti-anxiety drugs, have tripled since the late 1990s). We also spring for the false rescue of multitasking, which saps attention even when the computer is off. And all of us, since the relationship with the Internet began, have tended to accept it as is, without much conscious thought about how we want it to be or what we want to avoid. Those days of complacency should end. The Internet is still ours to shape. Our minds are in the balance.

What Arne Duncan Said to Me Last Week

On Wednesday of last week, several members of the US Department of Education kicked off their Back to School Bus Tour at the high school where I teach science in Redwood City, California. The visit was an edtech themed visit, and spotlighted a panel discussion that included edtech pop stars Sal Khan of the Khan Academy and Andrew Ng of Coursera. If you are reading this blog, then you are an edtech nerd and none of what Andrew or Sal had to say will be news to you. Instead, you might be curious about what English teacher and author of Blended Learning in Grades 4-12: Leveraging the Power of Technology to Create Student-Centered Classrooms, Catlin Tucker, said, what activist and former grade school teacher, Todd Sutler, of the Odyssey Initiative did while he was there, and what the students of Sequoia High School did to mark the visit of these dignitaries.

Catlin Tucker sat beside Sal Khan and Andrew Ng on the theater stage in front of a packed house of the local business community, the media, and selected classes of students with their teachers. Secretary Duncan played the role of discussion moderator, and provided the panelists the opportunity to showcase their work. While Khan and Ng shared the excellent work of their edtech websites that are bringing education into the cloud, it was Tucker who stole the show.

Grounded in the practice of a classroom educator. Tucker talked about the very real challenges of getting to a one to one device for each student, and high speed internet access at home for students of little means. She raised the roof, and the Twitosphere, when she told Secretary Duncan that great edtech tools alone would not take us very far, but great tools in the hands of great teachers just might. Sal nodded.

Blended Learning in the Traditional Classroom

It’s not about the hardware. No laptop, tablet, lapdock, or webtop is going to change education by virtue of its screen resolution, haptic capabilities or processor speed. However, a proliferation of free, cloud-based, high quality, curated curricular materials (videos in particular) just might.

Sal Khan is not the harbinger of a revolution in education because he is a great lecturer. Khan is a revolutionary because he has boldly stood up in the cloud to tell us that there is nothing holding us back from making educational materials free and ubiquitous. Dozens of others have risen to Khan’s challenge; many of whom are making high quality video that can replace traditional classroom lectures.

Read more at the New Media Consortium..

Blended Learning at Harvard

Harvard Computer Science Professor and former Dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, has written an article in this month’s Harvard Magazine about his experience blending a preliminary computer science course entitled, Discrete Mathematics. While reading his first person account of this pilot course, I kept nodding my head in agreement as he recounted both the challenges and the successes he experienced in this foray into 21st Century Learning.

After some preamble in his article entitled Reinventing the Classroom, Lewis puts into prose one of the major motivating factors behind the blended, hybrid, and flipped classroom paradigms..

“I believe that if the videos exist, then all my students should have them—and they should have my handouts too. In fact, I think I should share as much of these materials with the world as Harvard’s business interests permit. I could think of ways to force students to show up (not posting my slide decks, or administering unannounced quizzes, for example). But those would be tricks, devices to evade the truth: the digital explosion has changed higher education. In the digital world, there is no longer any reason to use class time to transfer the notes of the instructor to the notes of the student (without passing through the brain of either, as Mark Twain quipped). Instead, I should use the classroom differently.”

So This is Democracy – Edcamp, the Unconference

It is easy for a middle-class, Washington outsider to become skeptical about our political system that, by some metrics, operates more like a polarized plutocracy than a socialistic democracy. However, in the same week, three members of a Russian girl punk band got two years in prison for playing protest songs in the face of the Russian Christian Orthodox Church, I attended a most democratic, egalitarian gathering of intellectual sharing of best practices.

Edcamp as a concept is in its infancy. Inspired by barcamp, a similar gathering for hackers to share best practices in their technical profession, teachers and educationists in Philadelphia organized the first edcamp less than three years ago. In that time, the edcamp concept has spread like Facebook. See edcamp foundation wiki, and an article about edcamp on edutopia.

Future Learning Short Smells Like Soylent Green

What’s the purpose of this video from Good Magazine and University of Phoenix? Is it to encourage the community to get that, “One win?”

I am as big of an edtechnophile as they come, but something about this video just doesn’t sit right with me. I felt the same way after seeing this that I feel after seeing any of the myriad infographics pumped out by the online learning advocacy associations. The feeling is the same one I felt when watching the aging population line up at the Soylent Green factory to take their long vacation. Something isn’t quite right.

If you don’t have the full twelve minutes to watch, at least listen to what Sal Khan has to say beginning at about the eight minute mark. Let me know what you think.





Multi-Touch Surface Technology Nearly Cost Me My Teaching Job

For a moment I considered leaving my years of service in education behind in favor of a new career in music mixing. I can play a little guitar. I’ve picked up some piano since my son Cody, age 7, began taking lessons a year ago. But, I have no raw talent and have never been disciplined enough to have the confidence to perform for others.

No matter. When Cody and I visited the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation today, my self doubt was dwarfed by an overwhelming compulsion to mix music from different cultures into a fusion that in my mind’s eye could be the 21st century equivalent of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

Earlier this year Corning released a viral video, A Day Made of Glass 2, showing the potential of multi-touch surface technology applications for home and educational use. Most of us thought it novel, but dismissed the portrait as blissfully optimistic. Today, I discovered that future is already here.

Read more at the New Media Consortium..

Questions at the Beginning

Motivating questions have been used by master teachers probably for as long as humans have inhabited their neocortex. An inspiring question targets the background, interests, and capabilities of a student. Such a question can be a launching pad for discussion, inquiry, and a starting place for a learning trajectory. This summer, I have the privilege of working with two teams of three master science teachers who bring an average of 12 years of experience each to a problem that the cloud is finally going to help us solve.

Read more at the New Media Consortium..

Build Your Edtech Dream in a Weekend – RemixEd

You’ve been talking about it for years. If only there were an application that graded all of your essays, delivered personalized, daily emails to all of your students, and then prepared your coffee for you just the way you like it. Now is your chance!

In less than two weeks, dozens of hardcore developers (that’s fancy for computer programmers) will be converging on the 500 Startups offices in Mountain View, Ca, waiting to hear what educators want so that they can try to build it – in a weekend! RemixEd is different that other hackathons because the ideas will be coming exclusively from educators.

Even if your dreams are as simple as world domination by simultaneously founding the next Facebook while you focus on your teaching responsibilities, RemixEd is an opportunity you should not miss.

 

Support the Odyssey Initiative

The glut of bad press about American schools and educators makes me want to point one of these speech jammers at the next person I hear use the words ‘broken’ and ‘schools’ in the same sentence.

The antidote to that is the Odyssey Initiative, a project headed up by Brooklyn teacher and former Wall Street hack, Todd Sutler. You should check out their video for yourself, but in case you only have time to go straight to their kickstarter page I will give you the short version of the story.

The team plans to loosely track Arne Duncan’s back to school cross-country bus tour (which starts at my high school in Redwood City BTW!), highlighting schools and classrooms where education is going right. When they’ve had their fill of good vibes and success stories, they will head back to Brooklyn where they are founding their own public school.

Even if all you can do is kick them ten bucks, do it. That will get you on their virtual wall of donors and it is a lot cheaper than the speech jammer that you will need otherwise.

Whither the Test When Information is Ubiquitous?

The recent attention given to the New Media Consortium Horizon Report for k12 has me thinking of the future again. I had a free couple of hours on Saturday morning when I woke up early with a gentle summer hangover and decided to pick up Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future.

In the first chapter, Kaku jumps right in and addresses what is to become of the computer. Published in 2011, after extensive interviews with the world’s leading scientists and technologists (an impressive list of names that fills a full seven pages of the introduction), and in light of Google’s recent introduction of Google’s Project Glass at the Google I/O this month, it is hardly a bold prediction when Kaku suggests that our connection to the internet will move into our lenses. With voice command technology and natural user interface capability rapidly improving, it isn’t too far fetched to predict that our interface to access the internet will soon be nearly invisible to those around us.

Summer of Video

Is there a difference between watching Sal Khan on the internet and having him teach you face to face? According to Sal’s cousins there is. In his TED appearance, Sal reveals that his cousins told him they prefer his internet videos to his in-person tutoring. The reason they prefer their virtual cousin to the real one is that they can pause, rewind and playback his teachings – at least that’s the reason they shared with Sal.

A more data-based answer to the above question may exist, but in my limited survey of research I found only a few relevant studies to help us out here. Both studies were in the post graduate medical education field and indicated that virtual teaching in that environment is about as effective as face to face teaching (Cardall, Barker). Your first question is probably the same as mine, “What if the learners are not quite as highly motivated as training professionals?”

Brace for What’s Coming – Themes from Launch Education and Kids

For the last day and a half I felt like a hungry kid in an edtech candy store. As a participant in Jason Calacanis’ Launch Education and Kids, I got to see thirty-three education startups pitch to a mixed audience of entrepreneurs and teachers and a panel of venture capitalist judges.

credit: Steve Jurvetson

Twitter is aflutter with short reviews of the spotlighted products. Search the hashtag #launchedu. Thankfully, this saves me from feeling obliged to offer a comprehensive list of reviews in this post.

Instead, I will offer some commentary about what is soon to be available to teachers and students, and the potential impacts for practice.

First, the trend of making products available to the consumer for free is still alive. Many of the edtech companies that pitched at Launch EK offer at least some part their service for free. Some then make money by upselling services that you will want once you begin using the tool and become a convert. Some make money providing user data trends to other interested parties (not necessarily selling your email address).