You are here: Home / Archives for technology

More ‘reach’ for excellent teachers

December 23, 2011 By

One in four U.S. classrooms has an “excellent teacher,” asserts Public Impact. “Bold efforts to recruit more top teachers and remove the least effective teachers” won’t be enough to put an excellent teacher in every classroom. So let’s expand the reach of highly effective teachers by redesigning teaching roles and using technology. The education policy group plans to identify five sites to pilot expand-the-reach models.

OpportunityCulture describes possible models:

(The) teacher can work in person, teaching face to face in a school and/or leading other teachers. Or, when not enough excellent teachers are available in person, excellent teachers can work remotely, with on-site monitors’ help. Remote, excellent teachers can reach students via webcam, online whiteboard, email, and other methods that let the teacher communicate personally—live, but not in person—and at times convenient for all.

Willing, excellent teachers can have larger classes (within reason!), or they can specialize in the most crucial subjects and most difficult teaching roles, while other team members take on the rest. Or they can swap technology—online digital instruction—for some of their teaching time, enough time that the teacher can teach more students. Or they can lead other teachers, and co-teach with them, with authority to: select, assign roles, develop, and evaluate the team.

If we pursue reach extension, retaining high-performing teachers, recruiting talented new teachers and dismissing the least effective, “87 percent of classes could be taught by gap-closing, bar-raising teachers—in a mere half-decade,” Public Impact believes.

That seems very ambitious. Or perhaps I mean unrealistic.

 

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

Forget Finland: Reform K-12 the U.S. way

November 29, 2011 By

Forget Finland, writes Rick Hess. Stop trying to be South Korea. We can “tap into uniquely American strengths like federalism, entrepreneurial dynamism, and size and heterogeneity” to reform our schools.

America is a really big country. By population, it’s the third largest in the world, and it boasts the most racially and culturally diverse society in history. This is a huge impediment for those who dream of mimicking national policies suited to tiny islands of homogeneity, like Finland. However, this makes the U.S. capable of embracing and supporting many models of teaching and schooling, with each still able to reach critical mass.

“Grandiloquent international best practice reports . . . identify a couple of homogenous nations the size of Minnesota that produce good test scores, cherry-pick a few of their educational practices, and then draw broad prescriptions,” Hess writes. We need to embrace America’s comparative advantages instead of trying to copy the competition.

When it comes to utilizing new tools and technology, the U.S. is “a hotbed of dynamic problem-solving,” he writes.

Non-profits like Teach For America, Florida Virtual School, The New Teacher Project, Carpe Diem, and Citizen Schools are showing new ways to recruit and utilize educators. For-profits like Wireless Generation, Tutor.com, Pearson, Discovery, and Rosetta Stone are offering up a range of ways to harness new tools and technology to support teaching and learning.

Leveraging these new problem-solvers is the challenge, Hess writes.

And keep an eye on Qatar and India, which may be the world leaders in the future.

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

Educational insanity

November 6, 2011 By

After 20 years of education reform focused on reading and math — and billions of dollars in spending — NAEP results show little improvement, writes Lynne Munson of Common Core. It’s educational insanity, she writes, using Einstein’s definition: “Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.”

We’ve tried to bring market pressures to bear through charters and choice.  We’ve attempted to set high standards and given high-stakes tests.  We’ve experimented with shrinking school and class sizes. We’ve focused on “21st century skills” and used the latest technologies. We’ve collected and analyzed data on an unprecedented scale.  We’ve experimented with a seemingly endless array of “strategies” for teaching reading and math and have tried to “differentiate” for every imaginable “type” of student. And we’ve paid dearly in tax dollars and in other ways for each of these “reforms.”

Interestingly, all of these reforms have one thing in common (aside from their failure to improve student performance except in isolated instances):  None deals directly with the content of what we teach our students.

Teaching knowledge “of things like standard algorithms, poetry, America’s past, foreign languages, great painters, chemistry, our form of government, and much more” works for all students, Munson writes, citing International Baccalaureate, Latin schools curricula and Core Knowledge. Ignoring curricular content is nuts.

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

A technology-free school in Silicon Valley

October 27, 2011 By

In the heart of Silicon Valley (and very near where I live), a Waldorf school has banned computers, PowerPoint and any technology more advanced than colored chalk, reports the New York Times. Who sends their kids there? Three quarters of parents work in high-tech companies, such as Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard. The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos.

On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.

Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.

. . . Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples, quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.

“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I had their attention?”

Today’s high-tech kids are bored by low-tech environments, some argue. Schools that don’t use computers are “cheating our children,” Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association, told the Times.

Waldorf’s high-tech parents say their children will have plenty of time to learn computer skills.

“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

Most Waldorf parents limit their children’s screen time at home.

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

Steve Jobs: Computers won’t fix schools

October 7, 2011 By

Technology can’t fix education, Steve Jobs said. He also strongly supported school choice, notes Jay Greene on Ed Next.

“I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world’s problems, but unfortunately it just ain’t so,” Jobs said in a 1995 Smithsonian interview.

We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46 year old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn’t be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer….

As you’ve pointed out I’ve helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world and I absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can. The elements of discovery are all around you. You don’t need a computer.

As an entrepreneur, Jobs fired people who didn’t come up to his very high standards. He thought schools should not tolerate mediocre teachers.

Jobs attended public schools in Cupertino, California — now a very high-performing district — but dropped out of Reed College in his first year.

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

Technology can personalize learning

October 6, 2011 By

Brookings is hosting a conference — available live online — on education technology.

Using Technology to Personalize Learning and Assess Students in Real-Time, a new Brookings study by Darrell West, looks at new ways to teach made possible by technology.

Imagine schools where students master vital skills and critical thinking in a personalized and collaborative manner, teachers assess pupils in real-time, and social media and digital libraries connect learners to a wide range of informational resources.  Teachers take on the role of coaches, students learn at their own pace, technology tracks student progress, and schools are judged based on the outcomes they produce.  Rather than be limited to six hours a day for half the year, this kind of education moves toward 24/7 engagement and learning full-time.

Technology alone won’t remake education, West writes.  Schools will need to change their organizational structure and rethink teaching and assessment.

Filed Under: technology Tagged With: , , , ,

The push-button school of yesterday’s tomorrow

September 18, 2011 By

Paleofuture features The Push-Button School of Tomorrow from the May 5, 1958 edition of Arthur Radebaugh‘s Sunday comic, Closer Than We Think.

Baby boomers were crowding the schools. (I was in first grade.) Futurists thought technology would allow each teacher to educate more children.

The student desk of the future includes a small camera, presumably so that the teacher being projected on a large screen in the front of the class can keep tabs on the little rascals. One thing that fascinates me about computer consoles of the retrofuture is that the QWERTY keyboard is not yet an assumed input device. Each computing device seems tailored to meet the needs of the intended user, as with this learning machine of the futuristic year 1999 and this auto-tutor from the 1964 New York World’s Fair. That being said, the Google of 1964 was quaintly analog with its typewriter attachment.

A boy in a white shirt is waving to someone going by in a gyrocopter.

Filed Under: technology Tagged With: ,

Feds invest in ‘digital promise’

September 18, 2011 By

“Digital Promise,” a new national center on teaching and learning technologies, has been launched by the U.S. Education Department, Carnegie and the Hewlett Foundation.

Digital Promise will work with leading researchers, entrepreneurs, and schools to identify and spur breakthrough learning technologies, determine quickly what’s working and what’s not, and transform today’s fragmented learning technology market, paving the way for the widespread use of learning technologies that deliver the best results for students, parents, and teachers.

If You Like Solyndra, You’ll Love the President’s ‘Digital Promise’, responds Seton Motley on Less Government.

What’s wrong with a fragmented learning technology market?

Filed Under: Education, Online Learning, technology Tagged With: ,

Technology plus imagination

September 18, 2011 By

In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores, a Sept. 4 New York Times story, has set off a debate on the role of technology in teaching.

“Unimaginative uses of technology” won’t help kids learn, responds John Merrow of Learning Matters.

One teacher gave a true-false quiz but handed out wireless clickers for students to record their answers. In other classes, kids were playing a math game (“Alien Addition”) and an interactive spelling game, while other students were videotaping a skit that they could as easily have simply performed for the class.

In the so-called “classroom of the future,” technology was used to entertain or deliver information more efficiently, Merrow complains. Students weren’t encouraged to follow their own interests or connect with others outside the classroom.

Here’s a Learning Matters report that asks on a digital classroom in North Carolina.

Dangerously Irrelevant summarizes the pushback against the Times piece, concluding:

We have schools and classrooms that are still doing what they’ve always done, but with some additional infrequent and marginal uses of new learning tools. We have educators who don’t really know how to use the tools very well and who also have little access to those tools, reliable IT support, and/or regular integration assistance. For some reason we expect changes in certain learning outcomes to occur anyway, despite these environmental factors and despite the fact that those outcomes may not be what the schools were striving for in the first place. And, if we don’t see those outcomes, we’re going to claim it’s the fault of the technologies themselves rather than human and system factors and then we’re going to claim that traditional analog learning environments are just fine in a digital, global world.

So far, computer-aided instruction hasn’t improved reading or math performance, writes Robert Slavin on Ed Week‘s new Sputnik blog. Yet he believes “outstanding, sustainable improvements in daily teaching are going to depend on the extraordinary capabilities of technology.”

Filed Under: Education, technology, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,

Which technology? Used how?

September 11, 2011 By

Does technology improve schools? That’s asking the wrong question, writes Jonathan Schorr of NewSchools Venture Fund in response to last week’s New York Times story, In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores. What kind of technology? Used how?

. . . as a nation, we have spent billions of dollars on technology that has reinforced, rather than transforming, traditional models of schooling. But taking the average of thousands of computer labs where kids learn to type their essays in Microsoft Word is very different from declaring the “classroom of the future” a failed experiment. It tells us as little as the average Yelp score of all the restaurants in town.

As a guide to the future, the better question is, are there models that make innovative use of technology and offer transformative potential? The answer is an emphatic yes . . .

“Bolting technology solutions on today’s existing education system is a bad strategy for improving student learning,” writes Michael Horn on Education Next.

The United States has wasted well over $60 billion “cramming” technology in schools in this way to little effect over the past couple decades—and predictably so, according to our research. That some schools continue to do this is unfortunate—particularly in tough budget times—and is worth reporting.

. . . Technology has the potential to transform the education system—not by using technology for technology’s sake through PowerPoint or multimedia at the expense of math and reading or something like that—but instead as a vehicle to individualize learning for students working to master such things as math and reading, thereby creating a student-centric system as opposed to today’s lockstep and monolithic one.

Upgrading technology first and asking questions later about how it will help students learn is foolish, adds Horn. And common.

Online learning can make a huge difference, argues Tom Vander Ark, who’s a big fan of blended learning and personlized online learning.

Filed Under: Education, Online Learning, technology Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »