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The media generation

January 21, 2010 By

If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online, reports the New York Times, quoting a Kaiser Family Foundation study.

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with electronic devices — plus another hour and a half texting and a half-hour talking on their cellphones.

The study’s findings shocked its authors, who had concluded in 2005 that use could not possibly grow further, and confirmed the fears of many parents whose children are constantly tethered to media devices.

. . . Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

Not surprisingly, the very heavy media users (16+ hours a day), who make up 21 percent of the total, were more likely to earn low grades than the light users (three hours or less), who make up 17 percent.

The heaviest media users were also more likely than the lightest users to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.

The study could not say whether the media use causes problems, or, rather, whether troubled youths turn to heavy media use.

Over the past five years, ownership of cell phones and iPods has soared among 8- to 18-year-olds, growing from 39% to 66% for cell phones, and from 18% to 76% for iPods and other MP3 players.

. . . young people now spend more time listening to music, playing games, and watching TV on their cell phones (a total of :49 daily) than they spend talking on them (:33).

When parents limit TV watching, video games or computer use, children average three hours less usage per day.  But 70 percent of parents set no rules.

About two-thirds (64%) of young people say the TV is usually on during meals, and just under half (45%) say the TV is left on “most of the time” in their home, even if no one is watching.  Seven in ten (71%) have a TV in their bedroom, and half (50%) have a console video game player in their room.  Again, children in these TV-centric homes spend far more time watching: 1:30 more a day in homes where the TV is left on most of the time, and an hour more among those with a TV in their room.

“Black and Hispanic children consume nearly 4½ hours more media daily than whites,” the study found.

Some of the largest differences are in TV viewing: Black children spend nearly 6 hours and Hispanics just under 5½ hours, compared to roughly 3½ hours a day for White youth.

Time spent reading books held steady at 25 minutes a day, with another nine minutes with magazines and newspapers.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , , , ,

Why more reading isn't helping

January 4, 2010 By

Young people are reading more — but not improving their reading skills — writes Dan Willingham on The Answer Sheet.

More than ever, we are surrounded by printed words. We read text messages. We read web pages. We read instructions and information on computer games.

But if we’re reading more, why is literacy dropping?

Reading comprehension is not a skill, Willingham writes. Once a reader has practiced decoding the letters and become a fluent reader, comprehension requires background knowledge. “If you know a bit about the topic, it’s much easier to understand,” he writes.

. . . A likely solution to the conundrum is that all that extra reading we’re doing is pretty lightweight.

On Core Knowledge Blog, teacher Carol Jago comments on what teachers should make of the research.

32 years in the classroom with teenagers convinced me that more is more when it comes to reading. Relentless readers develop the ease of fluency but learn to intuit how different books need to be read differently, sometimes a tortoise, sometimes a hare. As they gobble up book after book – good, bad, and indifferent – they develop a sense of how stories work. Seemingly without effort these avid readers have wide, rich vocabularies and a broad base of background knowledge. They know stuff. Harry Potter, Count of Monte Cristo, and Twilight readers also know that long doesn’t mean boring.

If online reading is “so short, simple, and solipsistic that it isn’t having the same effect,” then teachers will have to try harder to put challenging books in students’ hands.

“If you liked … , I really think you’ll love …” It’s harder to create this bridge from the online world to the print world. Tweet, tweet.

I was one of the relentless readers she describes. I learned from the books I read — especially biographies, histories and fiction set in different places and eras –  which I used to understand more complex books.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

An online teaching surprise

December 10, 2009 By

Online teaching may encourage student-teacher interaction, writes Dan Willingham, with surprise, on The Answer Sheet. Online teachers told him they know their students better than when they taught in conventional classrooms.

For younger students, a caretaker (usually the mother) is on hand, and so the teacher does not need to do a lot of prompting to keep the child on task. For older children, the chief distraction of the classroom—other students—is not present.

If there’s a webcam connection, teachers get to see the student’s home environment. Younger children’s “mothers are usually present and so teachers get to know them much better than they ever did in a traditional classroom.”

Third, teachers tell me that older students were more willing to share their personal lives than they were in a regular classroom. Perhaps because there are no classmates to overhear the conversations, teenagers seem less reluctant to open up.

Of course, the online teacher is working one on one. But I wonder if an e-mail-only connection encourages the same teacher-student interaction.

In Illinois, a fifth grader recovering from surgery is Skyped in to his regular classroom.

Filed Under: Education, technology Tagged With: ,

Teachers sell lesson plans

November 15, 2009 By

Teachers are selling lesson plans online, reports the New York Times.

While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.

I see no reason teachers shouldn’t profit from their ingenuity. But some districts are trying to bar teachers from profiting from lesson plans, the Times reports. It also quotes an NYU prof, Joseph McDonald, who says “online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.”

So teachers who create value are obliged to give it away? I don’t see it.

Commercial sites include Teachers Pay Teachers and We Are Teachers, which offers lesson plans and online tutoring.

Lisa Michalek, 40, who taught for six years in Rochester and now works for Aventa Learning, a for-profit online education company, said she spent about five hours a week tweaking old lesson plans and creating new ones, like an earth science curriculum that sells for $59.95.

“I knew I had good lessons, so I thought, ‘Why not see what other people think of it?’ ” Ms. Michalek said.

After $31,000 in sales, she has her answer. Alice Coburn, 56, a vocational education teacher in Goshen, N.Y., said she saved two to three hours each time she downloaded Ms. Michalek’s PowerPoint presentations instead of starting from scratch. “I hate reinventing the wheel,” Ms. Coburn said.

While some teachers spend their lesson-plan profits on classroom supplies, others spend the money on themselves. After all, they did the work.

Filed Under: Education, technology Tagged With: ,

Charter does more with same dollars

November 12, 2009 By

A San Jose charter elementary school with low-income students and very high test scores has won an award for financial  efficiency, reports John Fensterwald on Educated Guess.

Rocketship Education saves $500,000 per school per year by using online instruction to supplement classroom teaching.  The savings enables the network to pay for two hours a day of after-school tutoring for low achievers, a year-long internship for new principals, an academic dean to work with teachers and develop curriculum, higher teacher pay (for longer hours) and building new campuses — without relying on private donations.

Under the hybrid model, all 450 students in each school cycle through a block of math/science and two blocks of literacy/social studies in a traditional classroom setting with teachers who specialize in their fields. They also attend one block of learning lab, where they supplement math and reading classes with online work. Because the computer lab is not counted as instructional minutes, it can be run by a non-certified instructor. With three certified teachers teaching four classes, the school requires one fewer teacher per grade and five per school, along with five fewer classrooms.

Rocketship Mateo Sheedy, which primarily serves low-income Hispanic students who speak English as their second language, has an Academic Performance Index score of 926, which is high even for schools in affluent areas. A second Rocketship school opened this fall and more are planned.

John Danner, an Internet advertising software entrepreneur and a former elementary teacher, started Rocketship. He’s determined to run his schools on the same funding available to district-run public schools.

Here’s an Education Next short on Rocketship Mateo Sheedy.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Teachers helping teachers online

October 3, 2009 By

The World’s Largest English Department is online, reports Education Week.

Hired to teach 8th grade language arts, Laura Abercrombie turned to The English Companion Ning, “where English teachers meet to help each other.”  One of the liveliest of nearly 7,000 K-12 nings, it has 6,000 teacher participants. She saw “pages of groups, forums, curricula, and multimedia resources,” but didn’t know where to start.

. . . Around 10 a.m., she posted a picture of herself, listed her credentials, and started a discussion under “New Teachers.” She titled it “HELP!!!” In her short message, Abercrombie was blunt about her situation—she would be starting her first year of teaching and she needed support. Her students would be reading Walden over the summer and responding to questions online, and then there was the issue of a “rustic, outdoorsy” trip with students in the fall. She wrote, “I am in the overwhelming process of preparing for the year and I am STUCK. There are no instructional materials for the class and the last teacher isn’t too keen on sharing. I have NO CLUE where to start. Any help would be great.”

Less than 12 hours later, there were roughly 60 responses from novice and veteran educators from across the country. Teachers offered book titles to help her bridge the gap between Thoreau and the class trip; professional development resources on reading strategies; an inquiry about the “essential question” for the year; and a healthy dose of encouragement.

What’s a ning? It’s an online platform used to create social networks. I didn’t know either.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Study: Students learn more online

August 25, 2009 By

Online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction, concludes a SRI report for the Department of Education.  The report analyzed some K-12 studies, but primarily looked at college students  and adults in training programs.  It found online students averaged a 59th percentile ranking, while classroom students in the same course ended up in the 50th percentile.

Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program, predicts more use of social networking technology to create “learning communities” in which students collaborate.

“People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”

E-books are going to replace huge, pricey printed textbooks, predicts Jim Cullen, who was asked by his school to pick a new U.S. history textbook.  He hopes the new e-books don’t imitate the current mega-textbooks, which have become almost unreadable.

They’re all just so damn busy — open up to a random page, and you’ll see a map here, an illustration there, information in the margins, headers, subheads, captions, tables. . . . Students tell me such features are appealing to them. Having lots of illustrations in particular makes the individual pages, often flowing in two columns of text, seem less dismaying. I get that. But as someone who likes and is serious about reading, I find all this activity distracting and am always surprised at just how hard it is for me to stay focused on those occasions where I decide I’m really going to read the textbook. . . . The problem is even worse when I try to read a traditional textbook in e-book form, since most e-books simply mimetically reproduce the print book without making much effort to present the material in a computer-screen friendly manner. That, I think, has to change.

If I were to write an e-textbook, I think I’d tell a story with minimal illustrations and let students click their way to documents, photos, maps, songs, bios, “day in the life” sidebars, etc.

Filed Under: technology Tagged With: , , , ,

Open learning online

August 8, 2009 By

Not every American can go to college, but what if college comes to them? (Note: Sentence recast to please Stephen Downes.) The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the potential for “open” classes offered  online.  The Obama administration has proposed a $500-million online-education plan as part of its community-college aid.

The government would pay to develop these “open” classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years — a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project’s free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost — at MIT, about $10,000 a course — has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

The Chronicle interviews Mike Smith, back in the Education Department as an advisor, who wants to create “a 21st-century library” of Web-based open courses for high-school and college students.

The courses created would reach students through multiple devices, such as computers, handheld devices, and e-book readers like Kindles. They would be modular, and therefore easily updated. Both nonprofit and for-profit entities could compete for the money to build them.

Federal aid would ensure the courses are available to anyone,  Smith said.

Here’s one possibility Mr. Smith describes: Macomb Community College, in Michigan, takes an open statistics course and puts it into its catalog. The students don’t meet face to face, but there’s a webinar every week or an open discussion online among the professor and students. Macomb gets the course free, adds value to it in the form of interaction with its professor, and charges for it.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative is a model.  While students can use the online courses for independent study, “researchers have found the material can be even more powerful when combined with live instruction.”

Carnegie’s materials have already changed how Logan Stark’s professor at California Polytechnic State University approaches her widely feared biochemistry-for-nonmajors class. Anya L. Goodman used to work from a prepared lecture, starting with the basics so she didn’t lose anyone. Now she puts the burden on students to learn the basics online. She focuses class time on clearing up misconceptions, applying the materials to real life, and working in small groups.

“They’re more attentive,” she says. Especially when she comes in and tells her students, “Here’s what you guys already don’t know.”

High-quality courseware would make it much easier for people who are working and raising kids to take college courses cheaply and conveniently.  It would make it easier for high school students to try advanced or specialized classes. It would lower costs, something higher education never seems able to do.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Cyber-schools on the rise

July 17, 2009 By

In The Rise of Cyber-Schools in The New Atlantis, Liam Julian points out that home-based cyber-schools rely on a parent to keep students on task, even if parents aren’t acting as instructors.

The curriculum is provided by an agency such as Connections Academy; a teacher with state certification oversees instruction, communicating with students and parents via e-mail, Web chat, telephone, and video-conference. . . .  Students review material at their own pace, allowing gifted children to accelerate and stay engaged, and permitting those children who need extra time to get it, with plenty of help and individual attention along the way. Cyber-school pupils take the same state-mandated standardized tests as their peers in public school.

For this approach to succeed, cyber-students need discipline, motivation, and self-direction — just the qualities that they may have been missing in the real classroom in the first place. Also, parents of younger pupils must be deeply committed to their children’s schooling and able to devote several hours a day to facilitating lessons.

Most at-risk children don’t have an “education parent” at home, Julian writes.

. . . the millions of youngsters who languish academically, the data show, do not need self-guided learning but intense, hands-on, in-your-face teacher-guided learning. Struggling pupils require the opposite of what virtual education provides.

To escape a “fuzzy” pre-algebra class, my daughter took algebra in seventh grade through Education Program for Gifted Youth, which then used CD-ROMs.  You didn’t have to be gifted to succeed; it did require a high level of self-discipline.

I see a huge future for online learning in higher education, especially for people who are working and/or raising kids while trying to meet career goals. For K-12, I think it may remain limited to kids with involved, at-home parents and the super-motivated.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Technology, politics and change

June 23, 2009 By

Cyberschools, online classes and virtual tutoring may force change in public education argue Terry Moe and John Chubb in Liberating Learning.  The book looks at how technology shifts political power, writes James K. Glassman in a Wall Street Journal review:

Teachers unions, of course, are appalled. They know that “the new computer-based approaches to learning simply require far fewer teachers per student — perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that,” Messrs. Moe and Chubb write. Online charter schools employ two or three teachers per 100 students; the average public school employs 6.8 per 100. Technology also disperses teachers geographically (making them elusive for union organizers); lets in private-sector players who aren’t members of the guild; and enables outsourcing to foreign countries. For unions, technology is poison.

Moe and Chubb believe parents will demand access to online education.  School districts, hit by rising labor costs, will “turn to technology as a way to get more for less.” Glassman fears politics will trump productivity as office-holders consider “the election-time productivity of unions that help politicians get into office and stay there.”

Frontline’s Digital Nation is hosting a discussion tomorrow on education in the digital age.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
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