Technology and education

Losing the propaganda war

2011-09-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

It is depressing how clumsy the Chicago Teachers Union has been in its propaganda war with Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The Mayor and CPS are running circles around the union -- as Chicago News Coop columnist James Warren describes it, "Emanuel was playing 3-D chess while his union opponent was playing checkers." Much as I dislike Warren's shallow analysis of Chicago education, I to agree with his assessment of how the union is faring in the battle of the length of the school day. The union is coming off like it has its feet nailed to the floor, and, at least from what it looks like in the media, unable to meet the tremendous challenges that the current mayor and CPS administration is throwing at it, not to mention the general crisis in education.

First there was the disaster of SB 7, which I don't think the union leadership ever came clean on. The CTU leadership was outmaneuvered, and whoever they pay in Springfield as lobbyists must have been asleep at the wheel. The union's ability to strike was weakened, if not effectively eliminated, and the mechanism was put in place to push through the a longer work day without any real teacher input. The leadership should have come clean that they screwed up, due probably to inexperience. They should have apologized, done the mea culpa, and rallied the rank and file around the challenges ahead.

Then there was the CPS Board's incredibly devious initiative to raise property taxes to help cover the hazy deficit they have. I think the public will read this as "the teacher tax" -- overpaid, lazy teachers are why my property taxes are going up. Emanuel and the board slipped in another wedge between the general public and teachers, further isolating them. The union should have vocally opposed the tax increase, but I don't recall seeing anything from the union on it. The union has been good about pointing to waste at CPS, the lack of budget transparency, the scam of TIFs sucking money from education, and giving the top executives there big big raises, but none of that resonates with the public like a tax increase. (Well maybe the fat raises at the top -- why can't that get any traction?)

Now, the union is being completely out-maneuvered around the longer school day. The union is incapable of getting its position out. As far as I know, the union was never against a longer school day, but you don't see that on the union website. Partly this is a result of the fact that the home page of the site is basically a blog, so it cycles through responses and positions and news. There is a link to a "better, smarter school day", but from the overall page composition, this appears as an after-thought, not the main front of the propaganda war that the longer school day battle is.

Even in the worst kind of business unionism (to which the new CORE leadership was a welcome break) , a union would of course be in favor of more work for its members. The question never was the length of the day, but how it would be implemented -- the better, smarter thing, and how teachers were going to be paid for the extra work. But the union has been consistently portrayed as opposing the longer day. The union's message is not just muddy, but stuck in the mud. The CNC columnist Warren goes so far as to portray the teachers at the renegade, union-sabotaging schools like the brand-new STEM magnet that went with the longer day in exchange for, well, a paltry bribe, as the equivalent of the Solidarity movement standing up to the Soviet monolith of the CTU (and there is a bitter irony there, if you ever followed left politics).

If the union could get in front of the debate -- the point should always be, "Yes we agree, we want a longer day. We never opposed it. We care more about the children of Chicago that Emanuel ever will be capable of." Then it could put into perspective the awful longer day strategy pushed by Emanuel -- more work for (virtually) no pay and no thanks, all towards smashing once and for all the teacher's union. I don't really see how most people can accept that asking someone to work 29% more hours for only 2% more in pay is reasonable. But somehow, Brizard and Emanuel can propose such with a straight face, and somehow, this crazy insulting idea is accepted by the general public. Maybe this points to the challenges that the CTU faces trying to fight this propaganda war. Or that the perception of teachers is so awful now, after two years of regular anti-teacher propaganda, that expecting so much more from teachers seems reasonable?

If the union could get in front of the debate, then maybe the union could begin to recast teachers from greedy and lazy to the dedicated care-givers and guarantors of the future that they are. Every teacher I know puts in many, many hours of unpaid labor to keep up with all of the tasks expected of them. That basic fact of dedication to teaching children is completely lost in the media presentation. Also, many teachers at my former school -- I would estimate more than half -- worked after school tutoring programs already, providing the extra classroom time that Emanuel et al go on about, for the contracted extended day rate. Teachers already work a longer school day.

I really want the CTU to succeed here, but the news has been mighty painful of late.

jd

Art and technology

2011-06-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

My school is losing half of its art position next year. As a "technology school", one may wonder why this might be big deal, but I beg to differ. A technology school without a strong arts program is a perversion of education. It reveals an absolute lack of understanding of cognitive development; and a lack of vision of human beings, education, even the spirit. The decision-makers bow before the dumbest, unhuman aspects of the machine. It is the devil's work.

At my school, CPS pays for 1/2 of an art position, and the principal has made up the other half of the position out of discretionary budget money. School budgets have been cut, and my principal is saying that the discretionary money isn't there any more for the school's half of the art position. So next year we will have a part-time art position. By a rough calculation of 2.5 days a week times 6 class periods, she could serve 15 periods a week; we have 20 classes. The math is ugly.

This, of course, is especially disruptive for the art teacher. I mean it really sucks. It also tears at the social cloth of the school, more so because the art teacher is woven deeply into that fabric. We are all diminished. How much this was weighed in the decision of where to cut and what to cut, I don't know. Very little I suspect. I don't mean to minimize the personal or social aspects of the cut. There is, though, I think, a less obvious part of this -- the revealed lack of understanding, the lack of vision of how art provides the foundation, the skills, the experiences for work with technology.

Say, for example, that we take the National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S) as a starting point. The first two standards say nothing about technology operations -- they deal with creativity and innovation, collaboration and communication. The best education theory pushes students to be directors of their learning, and up Bloom's hierarchy of thinking. We want students to express themselves in many media, with posters and sound and video and photographs. Students cannot do this well without a solid art background. Art is where they learn the phonetics and grammar of media literacy. Art is where they learn how colors combine and clash, about foreground and background, about dimensions and perspective, about highlighting and shading, about seeing critically, about enlivening the imagination and creating. Implementing NETS-S without art instruction is impossible.

There are other starting points than NETS-S. Hand work is critical for brain development. Learning how to draw, how to color, how to use one's hands to create things and so on -- the kinds of things students do in art class -- is not "just art" but fundamental to developing thinkers. Art also exposes students to the joy of creating. It exposes the possibilities of discovering and expressing feelings. It exposes students to different possibilities for being in the world. And based on the success of art-intensive programs in working with at-risk youth, I can argue that art also helps with students' social and emotional development. Basically, we develop better human beings when we teach them art. When we don't teach them art, we handicap them. Devil's work.

The more we inject computers into instruction, the more we need to balance it with traditional art instruction -- working with hands, working with different materials, looking at and really seeing the real world. Computers suck the user into virtual space, imagined by someone else, shallow and incomplete. Students are taken out of the world, which can only be okay if their virtual experiences are tempered by real reality. The more students go into virtual worlds, the more armor of critical thinking and visual literacy they need to protect themselves. The most interesting and exciting computer use I think involves constructionist tools where the students create and express. But again, the basic units of understanding what to do effectively with these tools are cultivated, in large part, in art class.

The slide into the confusion of computerized spaces with real spaces, and computerized instruction with human instruction is the slide into idolatry. In the confusion, the role of the human being, the teacher, is lost. The teacher is reduced to a machine, albeit a resistant machine. And one machine can always be replaced with another. My school will have more computer-based instruction next year (e.g., Achieve3000 is mandated by our area for next year, but not paid for, approx. $6000), and fewer people to work with students.

Given the CPS budget issues, was there a choice? There are always choices. Recognizing choices though requires transparency, understanding, vision. (And, I might add, creativity and innovation, and communication and collaboration).

jd

An analysis of Scantron testing

2011-06-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

Below is a link to a paper (PDF file) I did on Scantron testing at my school. It was done for a course requirement:

An Analysis of Scantron Testing

It's written in an academic mode, as opposed to a critical or agit-prop mode, with lots of tables and basic statistics. Of some interest: mode effects overall appear small; a large number of students spoil tests; there is a large discrepancy between Scantron national percentile rankings and ISAT NPRs; there is a relatively high general correlation between school-level Scantron results and ISAT results, which breaks down when you look at individual classrooms. The final "recommendation" in the paper is that the tests should not be used for either teacher evaluation or student promotion.

jd

Drunk driving

2011-05-29T15:15:00.000-07:00

We had a staff meeting at my school on Friday. Classroom teachers received forms for sorting their students into Tier 1, 2 and 3 groups for implementing Response to Intervention, or RTI. K-2 grades will use DIBELS data to sort students, and grades 3 - 8 will use Scantron data. Since I work on organizing the Scantron testing at my school, and end up sifting through the data, I was especially interested in the choice of Scantron data to slot students into RTI tiers.

The form passed out came from our Area office, and uses Scantron National Percentile Rankings (NPR) for sorting. Students in the 24th percentile and up fall into Tier 1 (the lowest priority for special interventions). Students between the 11th and 24th percentiles fall into Tier 2, and students under the 11th percentile fall into Tier 3. (I may be off by a percentile or two -- I'm doing this from memory.)

I have written about the problems of standardized testing and "data-based decision making" before, likening it to the drunk looking for his car keys under a streetlight, not because that is where he dropped them, but because that is where the light is. The light in this case is the pale beam of standardized test data -- it doesn't tell us nearly enough about the student, and for many of the neediest students, it is hopelessly distorting. We won't find the keys to student success with the data, but it's easy for administrators to collect, and to pretend that it means much more than it does. Drunk on data, and wandering off course from the outset.

For example: After we completed the math testing this Spring, about 8 percent of students at my school dropped more that 100 points from their Fall scores. The numbers were worse for reading -- almost 11 percent of students had dropped more that 100 points. These are big numbers, well outside of the statistical error range. Excepting epidemic of brain injury, such a drop can only be attributed to subjective student factors: boredom, disinterest, a desire to be done with test, difficulty with the computer medium, etc.

The belief that these initial numbers were faulty was confirmed when we made students retake the test. Most of the re-takers did much better, erasing most of the drop, and in many cases swinging into solid gains for the year.

The point, again, is that testing students is not the same as taking their temperature, and so much depends on the subjective factor. But the RTI strategy doesn't appreciate the subjective factor -- it's all about the data, as goofy as it may be. One student at my school went from dropping over 200 points, landing in the 7th percentile, to increasing over 50 points for the year (not a great gain, but keeping him at grade level) after he retook the test -- moving from Tier 3 (deserving special interventions), to Tier 1 (no special interventions). [Value-added alert!] It should be said that the possibility of testing into a higher percentile is not very likely, so the general danger is that students will be assigned to tiers they should not be in, consuming time and resources that perhaps should go to needier students.

One of the ironies in all of this is that all of teachers I have talked to already have a sense of their students abilities, and could quickly categorize their students without the Scantron numbers in front of them. After all, they assess their students every day. And the teachers can tell which numbers are off. And all would probably say that the time and the resources to provide interventions to all the students that really them is just not nearly enough; and the process to get the help needed is too long and places too much burden on the already over-stretched teacher.

jd

Clarification

2011-05-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

I want to clarify my previous post. As a reminder of one of the many pitfalls awaiting the tech-heavy lesson.

I am teaching a course at Dominican U., Integrating Technology Into the Curriculum. On the first night of class, I have the "candidates" (how DU refers to folks in the teacher education program, to distinguish from "students", whom the future teachers will be teaching) get set up with the basic Web 2.0 tools. They create a blog if they don't have one already, set up a wikispaces account to work on a course wiki we create, and they set up a Diigo account to begin a professional library of web resources and also to experience social bookmarking.

For blogging, I suggest Google's blogger, mainly because it is what I am familiar with. I haven't created a new blogger account in a while, but "it worked fine when I tried it".

In class, however, things went differently. After the candidates created their blogs, Google prompted them to enter a phone number as a final confirmation step. I assume this is to prevent mass creation of bogus blogs for whatever spammish purpose. The confirmation process was a surprise to me, beyond the inscrutable, illegible "type these letters" images Google usually uses. The privacy warning flags went up immediately in most everyone's mind I think, compounded by having watched, a few minutes earlier, the Onion's Google Opt-Out Village hilarity, which only compounded the distrust). "Okay, I'll sacrifice myself for the class. You can use my cell number if you don't want to provide your number." Except we were in the "Lower Level" of Parmer Hall (trans. "basement"), with no cell signal. So big embarrassment. As soon as I did get a cell signal, I received a dozen or so texts from Google for the new blogs, but the texts did not identify which blogs they went to, so they were useless.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

I understand why Google has the additional confirmation steps. But the cell phone number request seems too much, especially if you are trying to create the accounts someplace where there is no cellphone coverage. Perhaps an email address confirmation is too easy to automate and circumvent Google's defenses. I don't know what a better mechanism might be, but it certainly interfered with what I hoped to do.

And hence the previous post, done during class to illustrate how to make a blog posting, and how to comment on a blog posting.

Now, I think a fundamental rule of using tech in the classroom is to go through all of the steps first, before class -- a dress rehearsal. Which of course I didn't do. On the other hand, perhaps it was the multiple attempts to create new blogs from the same IP address or pool of IP addresses perhaps triggered some additional confirmation process. A classic quality assurance engineering problem -- not testing under the actual conditions of use -- and how do you easily simulate, ahead of time, a class of students doing the same thing at the same time? Yes I know there are special apps to simulate multiple users doing something at the same time, but I don't see using such for the case described above. Experience is perhaps the better guide -- I have seen similar problems when creating GMail accounts in a class, so I should have known there might be issues.

Memo to self: In the future, ask adult students to create their accounts before class. For younger students, stick with sites where I can create their accounts.

jd

Starting a new class

2011-05-09T18:17:00.000-07:00

Having problems with Google's new account verification scheme.

Common Core and math

2011-05-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

The new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are coming, ready or not. Illinois and 43 other states have adopted them. As if everything else going on in education wasn't enough, CCSS will be a Big Deal for teachers in all grades when they go into effect in the 2014-15 school year (which right now sounds like it is sometime in the 23rd century).

For a good write-up about CCSS in relation to math education, see the latest column by the J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, titled "CCSSM and Curriculum and Assessment: NOT Business as Usual". From his write-up, expect new curricula, lots of PD and powerpoints, and much general wailing and gnashing of teeth as the oil tanker of math education is turned.

Two things stand out for me re: the math standards (especially the way Shaughnessy explains it).

One is the emphasis on both math content and math practice. According to CCSS, there are eight math practices that students should master:

Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
Model with mathematics.
Use appropriate tools strategically.
Attend to precision.
Look for and make use of structure.
Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

With the exception "model with mathematics" (#4), the math practices outlined in the new core standards are more generally life-persistent skills in thinking and solving problems. If teachers are allowed to organically infuse the classroom with these practices, education may well look very different.

The other thing about Shaughnessy's write-up that stands out for me is how standardized testing will change to reflect the new standards. He includes links to some initial draft assessments, including the Math Assessment Project (MAP) and the Inside Mathematics initiative. The sample assessments are much more about solving problems -- "performance tasks" -- than simple skill assessment (as is the case of most of the current standardized tests).

This emphasis on performance tasks is supposed to be reflected in the two initiatives to revamp standardized testing. (Illinois is supporting the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) initiative; the other one is SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC); both are supported by the Department of Education.) Both initiatives will be administered online. PARCC calls their tests, to be administered four times a year, "next-gen assessments".

I am not sure how "performance tasks" (think of ISAT's extended response as a possible example) will be done online, if at all. Both consortia are talking about computer-adaptive tests for portions of the tests, which makes me wonder how they will be different from, say, the Scantron Performance Series tests we are taking right now. From PARCC's powerpoint, it appears that the assessment process will drive the instructional frameworks that will end up driving the implementation of CCSS. This doesn't have to be a bad thing (that is, tail wagging dog), it all depends on whether really good assessments can be developed from CCSS that actually can assess a student's math practice.

The general drift in math standards, to me, reflects similar changes made to the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS), revised in 2007. NETS focuses not on technical skills, but on how the tools are used. Only one of the six NETS for Students standards refers to technique ("Technology Operations and Concepts"), the other five emphasize creativity, communication and collaboration, information fluency, critical thinking, and citizenship. That is, both CCSS math practices and NETS emphasize a meta-approach to learning -- how to think, how to create.

The mere existence of NETS does not mean of course that they are implemented in a deep way. Nor will the mere existence of thoughtful standards for math practice mean that they will improve math education. So much depends on if teachers will be allowed to implement them.

jd

Tedious tech

2011-03-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

I accidentally clicked on an old Parallels Edubuntu virtual machine instead of Windows, and thought, okay, might as well update it -- it was several hundred days (over 800? is that possible? not launched since I played around with setting up an Edubuntu server at the school in late 2008? Which never went anywhere.)

Several hours later, after downloading and installing all of the packages, cleaning up, rebooting -- oops, the X server wouldn't load, so no GUI. It was probably to be expected -- I have held off on upgrading the Parallels Desktop client -- I felt Nova was just randomly changing the product to keep a cash stream flowing. But this update might actually be necessary to get the latest Edubuntu to work.

So the new Parallels finally finished downloading, but before I upgrade it, I'm thinking I should back up the Windows disk images, just in case. So I do that backup, and twenty minutes later, I'm ready to install Parallels 6, but the installer informs me that an update is available, and I should download that.

And at the same time, I have been trying to get my tweets -- which I don't do very often -- to automatically show up on my Facebook page. The Twitter app for Facebook (which has a useless and ambiguous interface) is supposed to do that, but for some reason it stopped working. Sorting out problems with Twitter and Facebook seems like a hopeless cause. I found another Facebook app called Selective Tweet which only posts tweets that end with #fb. That seems to work, and the help page is, well, helpful.

While trying to write this, the Google search widget on this blog has stopped showing search results. Not a Firefox 4.0 issue, as it happens with Safari too. Finding help on Google products is a tedious process, sifting through Google Search results, with no date filter (the blogger search widget seems to have a history of problems).

I tried to make this post as boring as the process that it documents. But it is also a test to see if the change I made to Twitterfeed, to post these blog updates to both Twitter and Facebook, works. Because every word is precious.

jd

Diane Ravitch in Chicago

2011-03-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and frequent critic of what she refers to as "corporate education reform" spoke to over 400 people on Saturday (March 12, 2011) at the UIC Forum. The event was sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union.

An iPhone is not the easiest thing to take notes on, but here is an assortment of what I was able to take down. The bits below end up sounding like tweets, and it so happens Ravitch is a prolific tweeter ("I am not on Facebook").

"Is this an age of insanity or an age of stupidity?"

"[Corporate education reformers are ] standing on children to push agenda. School reform as a front to destroy public sector unions."

Referring to events unfolding in Wisconsin and there potential impact on education there, "Where is Arne Duncan? Will Arne Duncan meet me in Madison? Where is President Obama?" And "Money was not the point. -- killing collective bargaining was the real goal.

"We can't let the corporate reformers destroy public education."

"The NCLB mandate [that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014] is utopian. It can't be met. No country has done it. NCLB is a timetable for the destruction of public education. Private entrepreneurs are waiting in the wings." By analogy, if NCLB was extended to police departments: "If the United States is not crime-free by 2014, close all of the police departments, and give a badge to anyone who wants one."

"The future of public education is in the balance. It is the cornerstone of democracy. It should not be privatized."

Synonyms for Race to the Top:

NCLB 2.0
Race to the Trough
Dash to the Cash

On testing:

"Testing is not the same thing as instruction."
"Take test scores with a box of salt."
"Testing is not a science." Testing is a social construction.
"Data is just a representation of reality, it is not reality."
"How can you evaluate teachers on data that is meaningless."
"We need a broader vision of education. We need tests for diagnostic purposes. But high stakes testing is a corruption of the test."

Poverty is the the problem, not teachers. Where the Harlem Children's Zone (Geoffrey Canada, hero of Waiting for Superman) succeeds, it is because it is an antipoverty program. Poor children arrive at school with an achievement gap already in place. Teachers had nothing to do with that. Education in the United States as a whole is not failing, only poor peoples' schooling.

"Merit pay makes no difference." See work by Daniel Pink and Edwards Deming.

See http://www.saveourschoolsmarch.org/

jd

Solving math word problems

2011-02-21T08:37:00.001-08:00

A teacher asked me a question re: strategies for solving word problems. This is what came to mind:

1. Consider the popular 4-step problem-solving strategy (adapted from Michael Polayi, appears in the MathThematics text; there is a good description on the this Scholastic.com page) as an overall approach. The basic steps are:

Understand the problem
Make a plan (there are lists of basic strategies like "guess and check", "use a formula", "draw a picture"; see the Scholastic link above for a longer list).
Carry out the plan
Look back (review, reflect, evaluate)

2. As part of step 1, understanding the problem, Ms. Schumacher at our school has students mark the problem text in different ways to isolate the key parts of the problem. She has her students underline the portion of the problem that says what to do, or what the question is asking for. They circle numbers or number words that are important to the problem. And they draw boxes around the actions they need to perform on the numbers (see next point). Reading math problems is a kind of literacy, and this deconstruction of the text can help comprehend the problem.

3. Again related to step 1: Since reading math problems is a kind of literacy, students need to understand the vocabulary of math. There are addition words, subtraction words, and so on for each basic math operation. For example, addition words are words like "sum", "plus", "add", "increased by". Subtraction words are words like "less", "difference", "decreased by". Being able to recognize key math words, and what operations they are calling for (as well as what order to put the operands in) is important. Purplemath has a table of "key words". Here is a link to a table students and I put together last year. (It is also important to be able to determine what is important information for solving the problem, and what is extraneous or irrelevant information).

4. Students have different skill levels when it comes to what strategies they might use, but it might be useful to reinforce that a strategy that works is a good strategy, the main trade-off being effort to arrive at a solution. Guess-and-check (or using "brute force") is okay if you have the time and patience; algebraic methods are very flexible and powerful but may be prone to error if the student isn't comfortable with them. It is also important I think that students recognize that a combination of strategies is frequently used (e.g., I find it useful to first draw a picture or diagram, or make a table, to understand the problem before thinking of an algebraic solution).

5. The last step is very important. Is the answer reasonable? Does it actually solve the problem? Was there an easier way to tackle it? Will it work for other problems?

6. Regarding teaching strategies:

Whatever can be done to help students de-code the problem can help. I am thinking of comprehension strategies used with other kinds of texts.
A think-aloud of how the teacher might approach the problem could model the problem-solving strategy for the students.
After students have highlighted the key parts of the problem (what the problem is asking for, the key numbers, the operations), modeling how to put the pieces together can help.
A KWL chart might structure the process, especially if students are familiar with the format. The Know part, "what do we know already?" = the numbers and operations that the students have highlighted. The Want to know part = what the problem is asking for. The Learned part is the problem solution.
Having students make up their own word problems for other students might help them understand the structure or genre of math word problems.
Writing in a math journal about what they did to solve a problem might help gel the process for them.
Re: thinking about general problem-solving strategies, posing practical problems for the students might build their confidence in their problem-solving abilities and connect with strategies they already use, but don't think of them as such ("activating prior knowledge"). For example, a million dollars is waiting for you at the Lincoln Park Zoo -- how are you going to get it?
Having a context for understanding a word problem is important. If the problem deals with things the students don't know anything about, it is hard to understand what the problem is asking. This starts to slide into the area of math and social justice -- presenting math in terms that connect in deep ways with the lives of the students. Students need to be engaged enough with the material to want to solve the problem.
There are lots of other words that have math meanings, separate from different ways of referring to the basic operations and relations. See the ISBE Math Frameworks Glossary for words and definitions that are important to know when approaching word problems.
Being able to talk to students about how they solved or didn't solve a problem can be very useful for understanding their thinking and the source of possible misunderstandings.

This just touches on some strategies. Any comments are welcome. Literacy Strategies for Improving Mathematics Instruction, by Joan M. Kenney et al. (an ASCD book) has insights into different aspects of math and literacy.

Since most real-world problems that require math present themselves as word problems, I think it is important that students are fluent in translating them into math terms, and using math tools for finding solutions. It is one of the important ways that math becomes meaningful.

jd

The Best Classrooms

2010-12-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

I saw a reference to the article below in a mailing from The Alliance for Childhood (more play!):

Brilliance in a Box: What do the best classrooms in the world look like?

The title of the article (by Amanda Ripley, and appeared in Slate) pretty much sums it up, but there are a couple of stand-out lines:

"Classrooms in countries with the highest-performing students contain very little tech wizardry, generally speaking."

"'In most of the highest-performing systems, technology is remarkably absent from classrooms,' says Andreas Schleicher, a veteran education analyst for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development who spends much of his time visiting schools around the world to find out what they are doing right (or wrong). 'I have no explanation why that is the case, but it does seem that those systems place their efforts primarily on pedagogical practice rather than digital gadgets.'"

"But the most innovative schools around the world do not tend to be the ones with the most innovative technology inside them."

There are other observations about what may be making schools successful -- pedagogical skill, parent involvement, length of school day -- no great surprises there. The technology aspect, though, was the standout for me.

jd

Making Khan Academy-type lessons on the iPad

2010-12-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

I like, very much, the spirit of the Khan Academy videos (free!), and the content too (1800+ per the website, and growing). They are also available on the iPhone and iPad. If you have never seen them, they are basically screen captures of Sal Khan writing on a computer screen, with narration of what the instructor is doing. According to the site, this is how he does it:

I use Camtasia Recorder ($200) + SmoothDraw3(Free) + a Wacom Bamboo Tablet ($80) on a PC. I used to use ScreenVideoRecorder($20) and Microsoft Paint (Free).

I wanted to see if I could make the same -- creating something specific to my class, using my Mac, without buying anything new. I have an iPad, a MacBook, and am playing around with Apple's relatively new Magic Trackpad. Seems simple enough, right?

The Magic Trackpad didn't work very well as a drawing tablet. The Pogo stylus I have required a lot of pressure to draw with. Fingers were okay but it seemed unnatural, and difficult to simulate the click-drag combination required to draw with a mouse (which I find equally difficult to use to write legibly). The trackpad works well as a mouse replacement, but it really isn't a drawing tablet.

The iPad is a great tablet platform. Adobe Ideas, for example, has nice line-smoothing drawing ability, and with a stylus, it is very easy to draw legible handwriting (like Khan!). Plus, the iPad has the audio recording hardware, and an app like PaperDesk includes both drawing tools and recording tools. However, there is no sanctioned way to capture video of the iPad screen from what I can tell (single frame captures are part of the iPad OS, press the home and power buttons at the same time). There is software for jail-broken iPads (ScreenRecorder + FullForce) to record the screen, but I'm not ready to jail-break my iPad.

Another approach is to display the iPad screen on the Mac. You can use something like Veency on the iPad (a VNC server), and record that portion of the Mac screen, but again, this requires a jail-broken iPad. Another way to get the iPad video signal to the Mac, without jail-breaking is to use a converter from Epiphan, but it lists for $299.

An app like Whiteboard, which allows you to share whiteboards with other iPad users, would probably work if there was a Mac version of Whiteboard (and so capture the Mac version of the Whiteboard using screen recording software on the Mac).

My current, albeit crude, solution, is to use a web-based whiteboard-sharing software, GroupBoard (free for up to five collaborators). Groupboard has an iPad app (free). I created a shared online whiteboard by creating a page on a site I manage, and included the one line of HTML that Groupboard provides. On the iPad, I logged on to the Groupboard whiteboard I set up. I did the same using my browser (Firefox) on the Mac. On the Mac, I used iShowU HD ($29.95) to record the activity on the screen, in this case capturing what showed in Firefox. I used the built-in microphone on the Mac to record the narration (the sound recording was handled by iShowU as it recorded the screen activity). I used my Pogo stylus to draw on the iPad, and narrated as I drew. Here is the result:

Khan Experiment 1 from James Davis on Vimeo.

It worked pretty well. The handwriting is rather blocky on the shared whiteboard, but passable. Groupboard has a text tool which I used for the title. Unfortunately, the controls for the Groupboard app are on the bottom of the screen, so it is easy to rest my palm on the buttons when drawing and accidentally select the settings options (but this doesn't show on the video because only whiteboard drawing is shared to the Mac). The Groupboard app crashed when I tried to change the text size and line width, so I just avoided those.

The challenge of talking coherently while drawing at the same time and managing the drawing application tools is a real skill, and makes me appreciate all the more what Sal Khan has achieved. I blather on a bit at the beginning, before drawing anything, so patience.

jd

P.S. I would love to hear of other ways people have done this on the Mac, and especially with an iPad.

Playing around, web tools and teaching math

2010-11-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

Big surprise. A blog titled "Technology and Education", and here is a posting that is actually about technology used in education.

Here is an embedded Brainshark presentation on using wikis for math instruction. Brainshark allows you to upload a PowerPoint presentation (also supports OpenOffice presentations), and then record audio for each slide. The audio-enhanced presentation can then be shared using embedded HTML (as is the case here).

And here is a short video experiment with students to portray math concepts. The video is extremely rough -- I made a big mistake in shooting the video that made it very difficult to get the exact special effect I wanted. It's close, but not quite right: next time, shoot each student separately. I shot the student who appears twice separately, but included the middle student, the one holding the equals sign, in both clips. It was difficult to get rid of one of her, so I finally ended up just shifting the video position slightly so one clip overlayed the other. Just don't look too closely. And our green screen is a bit ratty. Editing was done in Adobe Premiere (CS4). It is mainly proof of concept, to give the kids an idea of what to do when we get to the project. The video is shared via Vimeo. As you can see, I didn't get the still frame right.

The Symmetric Property from James Davis on Vimeo.

And here is a comic strip (again an example for the students), using MakeBeliefsComix.com. I like the MakeBeliefsComix simplicity of creating comics with the site -- no logins; and easy to use, intuitive tools. The downside is students can't save comics and go back to edit them, and there is no jpg export. Students need to either print the comic to a PDF file, and convert, or do a screen grab of the comic on the web page. Students can also email a link to the comic to the teacher.

The classroom wiki is barely getting started, but here is a link:

Dvorak Algebra 2010

jd

Technology portfolio

2010-11-14T09:02:00.001-08:00

I suppose this is ready enough for release into the wild. This is totally self-promotion, but ...

Here is a link to the portfolio I put together for the Technology in Education Masters program I am in at National Louis University. We are nearing the end of the program, the portfolio is meant to demonstrate some understanding of the Illinois State Board of Education's Technology Specialist requirements and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) technology facilitator standards:

A Technology in Education Portfolio

It does include a personal philosophy on technology in education, as well as a list of resources and readings that I have found useful and/or important.

Comments welcome, either on the portfolio discussion pages (requirse a Wikispaces account), or here.

jd

Why do it by hand?

2010-11-11T16:25:00.000-08:00

I posted the following in an online discussion with some of my peers at other schools. I was questioning whether new technologies were making a significant enough of a difference to justify the cost and students could still do neat projects without computers; there was a response about how animated students get using technology, and yes, projects can be done on poster board, but why should they? Which got me to thinking, and this is how I responded:

Some reasons I can think of:

1. Doing projects by hand develops eye-hand coordination. Hand-work is critical to brain development.

2. It develops measurement skills. I see low scores fairly consistently on the Measurement standard (ILS #7), which I suspect is due to the fact that kids never measure things. More cooking, sewing, woodwork!

3. It develops an appreciation for materials and how they work together. Also textures, and what the tools of visual arts are: crayons vs markers vs watercolor vs tempera vs etc. Photoshop effects make a lot more sense if you know their real-world analogs

4. Overall design: the computer screen can be quite limiting when you want to see the overall effect, at 100%.

5. Designing without the computer screen can be relaxing and less stressful I think -- not sure if that is universal, but at least a personal observation.

I do not disagree with the excitement re: computers, but I also think of it like a sugar rush. And I am not saying that I would want to go back to doing layouts with press type and rubber cement, but I am glad I did that once because it makes what the computers do more understandable.

I am wondering if maybe technology education should recapitulate technology evolution -- learn the old way before you learn the new way.

Who makes education policy in Chicago?

2010-11-07T11:59:00.000-08:00

I saw this Chicago Trib blog posting (on the Clout St. blog):

Emanuel sitting down with city education leaders as he plots schools policy

It struck me for how much it says about who really shapes education policy. (Hint: It's not teachers.)

The article is about Chicago mayoral wannabe Rahm Emanuel meeting with people who can both inform his education policy, and also fund his mayoral campaign. According to the item, Emanuel met with "nine local education leaders". They include:

Penny Pritzer, of the extremely wealthy Pritzer hotel, finance, etc. family, and one of the heads of the Pritzer Traubner Family Foundation (see below).
Ellen Aberding, president of the Joyce Foundation ("Working to close the achievement gap by ... promoting innovations such as charter schools")
Juan Rangel, CEO of the United Neighborhood Organization, "one of Chicago’s most influential Hispanic organizations that has opened several charter schools in Chicago."
Bruce Rauner, venture capitalist and chair of the private-equity firm GTCR, who also serves on the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund, "we are defining venture capital for public education, the next generation in school improvement" and "aims to be the best vehicle for private sector investment in public education". Penny Pritzer is the chair of the fund. What exactly they do is an interesting read, if you can get past the management-babble. The fund provides substantial seed money to get projects going, including most of the alternative certification programs at CPS, including the one I came in on (Chicago Teaching Fellows), as well as AUSL and Teach for America. Another objective is "drive student performance by differentiating compensation for principals and teachers."
Brian Simmons, with another private equity firm, Code Hennessy & Simmons LLC, and also on the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund.
Julia Stasch, a vice president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Robin Steans, a former Mayor Daley chief of staff, and now director of Advance Illinois, an education policy group. Steans is a member of the wealthy Steans family which made its money in banking, whose foundation has been a major funder of a number of North Lawndale community projects. Advance Illinois focuses on teacher evaluation programs ("base teacher evaluation on performance, including the ability to promote student achievement"), "support[ing] districts to use compensation more strategically", and tying teacher training accreditation to teacher performance.
Beth Swanson, executive director of the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, and a former budget officer of CPS. "Partners" of the Pritzer Traubert Family Foundation include AUSL, the organization that manages turnaround schools for CPS; the Noble network of charter schools; and Teach for America.

When do we get to teach?

2010-10-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

It is Sunday, and I just finished putting together the testing schedule for my school for a new round of tests our Area Office (at the behest of CPS CEO Ron Huberman) has mandated for us.

We just finished the first of three yearly Scantron assessments on Friday. Next week we begin what has been referred to at my school as the "Riverside test", after the test's publisher. All third through eighth grade students will take an hour-long reading and an hour-long math test. The test is administered online, which means the two computer labs at the school will be unavailable for the next six or seven school days (plus occupying the computer carts for several hours).

I don't think we will find out anything we didn't know already, especially with the Scantron test just finished -- if CPS can't trust the Scantron results, why pay the close to $10 million in test setup and subscription fees for it and its close cousin, the NWEA assessment? [ Aside: I am looking at contracts 10-0623-PR33 and 10-0623-PR34 from the June 23 Board of Education Report, you can also see them on the CPS Procurement and Contracts listing. Click on the line item numbers to see any of the contracts. I'm guessing this is part of Huberman's effort to make CPS dealings transparent, which credit where credit is due, if there, it's Pretty Neat.)

I started compiling a list of what's wrong with all of the testing that CPS is asking us to do. Here are my main topics so far:

1. It is based on bad science.
(insults the intelligence, fetishizes data, misuses data, misuses and abuses statistics, gives science and statistics a bad name, is based on the very narrow world-view of the worst empiricism, demeans human beings, robs the world of its soul, etc.)

And as a result,

2. It hurts students.
(I'm thinking of stress, anxiety, theft of learning time; it sorts students into false categories, stigmatizes students according to one narrow definition of success, focuses on the lowest order thinking skills, distorts purpose and nature of education, etc.)

3. It hurts families.
(same as above, it is also misused to mis-measure school "progress" and so used to close neighborhood public schools, and when public schools are closed, communities are undermined)

4. It hurts teachers.
(data are (is?) abused to provide false evaluations of teachers, distorts the profession, demeans the role of teachers as teaching professionals, distorts curriculum, sets teachers up as fall-guy for failures of economic system, social priorities, government, politicians, educational-industrial complex, etc.)

5. It wastes the public's money.
(out-of-pocket cost of testing services, test administration costs, opportunity costs of test administration, lost teaching time, infrastructure costs, misdirection of administration and teacher time. In this category you can put me assembling schedules, talking to teachers, explaining the tests, proctoring, diagnosing and resolving technical issues, fixing rosters, training how to find test results, explaining what they might mean and won't they don't mean, tracking down students who missed the original test date. One might say, "quit your kvetching, that's your job" except it's not my job, at least on paper -- I am supposed to be helping teachers figure out ways to use new technologies to support creative learning.)

6. It destroys education.
(teaching to the test, lower-order thinking skills stressed, casts children as learning machines, narrows goal of education, used to falsely quantify school "performance" to provide false rationale for school closings, privatization.)

And here is a link supplied to me by Sharon Schmidt to "a zillion position type papers from FairTest": The Case Against High-Stakes Testing

As one teacher at my school said when I informed her of the looming next round of tests, "When do we get to teach?"

jd

Race to Nowhere

2010-10-02T14:01:00.001-07:00

I attended a screening of the new documentary Race to Nowhere last Thursday, at the Chicago Waldorf School. It is an important film I think, but left me unsatisfied.

The unsatisfaction (not dissatisfied, mind you, just not satisfied) isn't a fault of the film itself -- it does a fine job of addressing the issues it sets out to address, namely the heaps of work and stress laid on children today out of a mad desire to make it in the crazy world of adults. The title comes from a comment by one of the students interviewed in the film, but appropriately echoes the Obama administration's abusive Race to the Top initiative.

Race to Nowhere I think benefits from being released at the same time as the Waiting for Superman film, an attack on teachers and public education by the same filmmaker that made Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. (If you are in education and by some strange phenom have not heard of Waiting for Superman, check out Rethinking Schools' site set up to address the convenient untruths in the film.)

While Waiting for Superman is doing an effective job helping to mis-frame the debate around public education, Race to Nowhere addresses only a slender part of the issue -- and don't get me wrong, it makes no pretense of trying to address the totality of the problems facing public education. But that's the lack of satisfaction for me -- I was hoping for something total.

Race to Nowhere focuses on children who see themselves having a chance in the mainstream world, either because their parent(s) are there already and are pushing them along, or the students have the academic interest or drive, and possibility, of getting a precious scholarship and attending a top university. The film reminds the viewer to return to the basic question of "what is education for?" (And so it seemed appropriate that it was screened at the Waldorf school, an pedagogical tradition which has managed to keep its bearings about what education should be for.) One section of the film portrays a teacher driven from the profession by testing and the narrowing down of what education is and can be. A major theme in the film though is the amount of homework that the students work hard at doing, and the other pressures of school and expectations students face, threatening health, and in one case in the film, driving a student to suicide. And there it became clear that this film was addressing only part of the world of education.

A whole other part is immersed in poverty, where for whatever reasons, the students have been disengaged from education, or maybe never were engaged. Most of the students I have worked with never stressed about homework, as far as I can tell -- most of them never did it (so much so that in my area, the percentage of final grades comprised by homework has been reduced to five percent). The film addressed one side of the Great Divide in America.

To be fair, the film does include a few students from poor communities who are struggling along with the well-off students to keep up with classes, homework, after-school programs and community service. But largely absent are those other students, the ones that see only limited opportunity or have given up on school entirely. So while this is an important film, it isn't the film to counter Waiting for Superman.

jd

Democrats and teachers

2010-09-05T07:22:00.000-07:00

I think we've known this, but I don't remember actually seeing it in print. Here is a concise summary regarding the Obama administration vis-a-vis teachers:

To a degree that almost nobody anticipated 19 months ago, Mr Obama ... has alienated the largest single historical provider of cash and volunteers to the Democratic party – namely the teachers’ unions.

The quote is from a an article in the London-based Financial Times article published back in July. The article refers to the "astonishingly small sum of cash" dangled in front of states by the Department of Education in the Race to the Top competition. Race to the Top basically undermines teacher workplace rights by undercutting due process and seniority via the misdirection of teacher evaluations and charter schools. "The teachers’ unions, meanwhile, have been left gasping at the speed with which their objections have been overruled, often by Democratic-run state governments."

What I think is especially interesting is the Democrats willingness to undercut what, as noted above, has been one of the pillars of the party. It really is quite significant I think, the making visible of a sea-change that as been in process for several years. This change was emphasized to me by the source of the reference to article. I saw the reference in Nasser Saber's blog, The Dialectics of Finance. Saber is (or at least was) an NYU professor of finance, and the author of one of the best books that I know of on the workings of the economic system today, Speculative Capital (see the blog page for a concise summary). For Saber, this strange contradiction of the Democrats shouting out a big F U to its base is resolved by recognizing that speculative capital calls the shots today, and all of that old stuff, like a trade union movement and public education for all, just gets in the way.

On a perhaps related note, the tune being "let's beat on teachers", Huberman has come out in favor of publishing teacher "performance" data, according to WBEZ (see a previous post related to publishing teacher evaluation data in Los Angeles). CPS is supposed to work out an evaluation system with the teachers union, per BEZ, "but if an agreement is not made within 90 days of negotiations, the district can create a plan on its own."

jd

New report critiquing value-added measures

2010-08-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Economic Policy Institute has released a new report, "Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers". The report is authored by a number of big names in the education and assessment field, including Dianne Ravitch, Robert Linn, and Linda Darling-Hammond. Click here for the Answer Sheet write-up about the report, which also includes the Executive Summary.

jd

Falsely identifying "bad" teachers

2010-08-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a recent study from the U.S. Department of Education on likely problems when using test scores to evaluate teacher (and student) performance (referred to in my previous post):

Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains

The study, by Peter Schochet and Hanley Chiang at Mathematica Policy Research (which develops schemes for value-added measures for school districts, including the District of Columbia Public Schools, where teacher evaluation came into play on the recent firings), has some interesting findings:

"Type I and II error rates for comparing a teacher’s performance to the average are likely to be about 25 percent with three years of data and 35 percent with one year of data." [Type I errors are "false positives" -- you think the hypothesis is true when really it isn't; Type II errors are "false negatives" -- you think the hypothesis is false when it isn't.]
"These results strongly support the notion that policymakers must carefully consider system error rates in designing and implementing teacher performance measurement systems based on value- added models, especially when using these estimates to make high-stakes decisions regarding teachers (such as tenure and firing decisions)."
And this powerful statement: "Our results are largely driven by findings from the literature and new analyses that more than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to the variation in student-level factors that are not under the control of the teacher."

To reiterate: The first point means that when using three years worth of student test data, chances are about 1 out of 4 that a teacher would be falsely identified as a "bad" teacher. Bad odds when a career and livelihood are at stake.

jd

Some related links on the report:

Study: Error rates high when student test scores used to evaluate teachers from The Answer Sheet blog (very good blog!)

Rolling Dice: If I roll a “6″ you’re fired! from the School Finance 101 blog.

L.A. Times: Lies lies and more lies

2010-08-19T17:36:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, the L.A. Times began publishing an important series of articles on teacher evaluations (Who’s Teaching L.A.’s Kids?). Important because the Los Angeles Unified School District is the nation’s second largest (Chicago is third); important because it appears in a major newspaper; important because they printed teachers names with the data, upping the ante in attacks on teachers (Duncan came out in support of publishing teacher evaluations); important because it previews what I suspect will be the same kind of arguments that will be used by Huberman’s administration against Chicago teachers.

I am late to the party on this -- I first saw a note of it on the District 299 blog (required reading to keep up with CPS news), then on the Answer Sheet blog, and the L.A. Times piece story showed up on NPR yesterday. I’m slow (actually, ironically I suppose, or sadly, I have been mushing and sorting students by their ISAT scores for an upcoming area observation).

The Who’s Teaching L.A.’s Kids? article looks at local student standardized test scores on a by-teacher basis, using a "value-added" statistical model, and based on that model, identifies teachers as "effective and "good" teachers versus "ineffective" and “bad" teachers.

On reading the article, I was reminded of Mary McCarthy’s famous quip about Lillian Hellman (and unfair I think), "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Every word in the L.A. Times article is a lie, including "and" and "the". In this case, not unfair.

The article doesn’t have to be "true" of course -- we are in a propaganda war, after all. The tactic of the Times authors is to dress up some statistics bullshit in a pretty hat, and parade it around as science, ergo truth. Everyone is so wowed by the hat, that they fail to recognize that underneath the hat, it’s just, well, just bullshit. But if enough scientistic magic power words are folded into the story, words like "Rand Corp.", "senior economist and researcher", "reliable data", "objective assessment", "effective", the narrative sweeps along and reaches it’s obvious, stinking conclusion.

Here is the essence of the Times’s method:

The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors. Though controversial among teachers and others, the method has been increasingly embraced by education leaders and policymakers across the country, including the Obama administration.
...
The approach, pioneered by economists in the 1970s, has only recently gained traction in education.
...
Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student's past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student's actual performance after a year is the "value" that the teacher added or subtracted.

There have been a number of challenges raised to value-added measures on methodological grounds (in particular, misidentification of “bad teachers -- see Study: Error rates high when student test scores used to evaluate teachers from the Answer Sheet blog. Also from the same blog (which is Really Good by the way), Willingham: Big questions about the LA Times teachers project. I have started a list of links here.)

But I think there is a more fundamental, worldview-type fault with the general approach demonstrated in the LA Times article, the Big Lie that makes everything in the article a lie, even "and" and "the". It’s not merely the concept of "value-added" as a metric, but the overall economic approach to education.

Through the lens of economics, teachers go to the education factory. They work on human widgets. At the end of the day, teachers have hopefully added value to the widgets. Value is added if the widgets score higher on multiple choice tests. The greater the change in test scores, the more value that has been added, and the more productive the teacher is.

Implicit in the economic argument is that the education factory must strive to be as productive as possible (i.e. raise test scores as much as possible). Teachers have a greater effect on students than any other single factor, so education reform should focus of identifying the most productive teachers. School districts must then devise incentives to keep the most productive teachers (hence merit pay). Or researchers need to determine what makes for a productive teacher (e.g., Building a Better Teacher, from the New York Times Magazine last March), and teach that in teacher education programs (hence let Teach for America certify its own teachers), and/or suss that out in teacher recruitment or on the firing line in the first couple of years of teaching (see Malcolm Gladwell’s piece "Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?").

Most all of the research on this approach -- what gives this approach its academic patina of respectability -- points back to the work of Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Stanford's Hoover Institution. He has been working on quantifying the effect of individual teachers, and trying to isolate the teacher effect in education since the early 1970s, and continues to work on it today. His work, and the work of people around him, is the academic foundation, the theory on which most of the official education rhetoric, from Obama to Duncan to Huberman (from what I can tell anyway), is based.

This economic model is taken a step further with the "value-added" notion. I’m not sure where the concept arose but it is an obvious extension of Hanushek’s work. CPS uses a version from the University of Wisconsin’s Value Added Research Center, as does New York City, Milwaukee and Dallas. The LA Times study referred to above was done by researchers at the Rand Corp. A company called Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. was noted in the Answer Blog as the contractor for the Washington, DC teacher evaluation system, which uses a value-added component (and used in the firing of teachers there recently.)

As noted above, "value-added" can be calculated in different ways, but all approaches are based on standardized test scores. As is the case for Hanushek’s work. Here is Hanushek's (and collaborator Steven Rifkin's) statistical justification for saying standardized test scores mean something:

One fundamental question––do these tests measure skills that are important or valuable? –– appears well answered, as research demonstrates that standardized test scores relate closely to school attainment, earnings, and aggregate economic outcomes (Murnane, Willett,and Levy 1995; Hanushek and Woessmann 2008). The one caveat is that this body of research is based on low-stakes tests that do not affect teachers or schools. The link between test scores and high-stakes tests might be weaker if such tests lead to more narrow teaching, more cheating, and so on. (from Hanushek and Rivkin’s Using Value-Added Measures of Teacher Quality, p. 2; emphasis added)

The economic view of education, as the above indicates, assumes the goal in life is earnings and/or academic attainment. If that assumption and mindset is rejected, then the rationale of standardized tests having any meaning evaporates, and the whole argument collapses.

jd

P.S. I skipped over their important caveat re: that the justifying research assumes that tests are low-stakes, which is not the case today with ISAT, ACT, Scantron, etc. The current cheating controversy in Atlanta speaks to the greater incentive to cheat as stakes get higher. In a more perfect world, tests would be part of a bigger assessment profile, and then they might mean something. In the words of Hanushek and Rivkin themselves, the standardized test score data is suspect.

Report on Ren 2010 and charters

2010-08-13T09:40:00.001-07:00

The August, 2010 issue of Catalyst Chicago features a number of articles on Renaissance 2010 and charter schools in Chicago.

Also see the "Many Chicago Charter Schools Run Deficits, Data Shows" article by Sarah Karp, deputy editor of Catalyst Chicago, that appears in the New York Times. The article gives a peek at the finances of charters.

jd

More testing coming

2010-08-11T05:37:00.000-07:00

More standardized testing is in the works for my school next year. According to an area representative, Ron Huberman has directed the areas to produce assessments every five weeks (seven times over the school year) for grades 3 - 8 for "performance management" tracking. Areas are free to select an assessment from a list of nine vendors approved at a Board of Education meeting last June.

The Chicago Benchmark Assessment, done three times last year, is optional, and our area will not be requiring that.

In addition, because my school is on academic probation for low test scores, my school is being assigned a "performance management" representative from central office to work with our school to assist with required monthly school-based performance management reviews, and using the assessment data to (ideally) identify problem areas and strategies.

For our new 5-week assessments, we will be using an online test from Riverside Publishing, the authors of the Iowa Test for Basic Skills once used district-wide by CPS. Riverside was chosen because they have a lot of Spanish language test materials, and my area mostly covers the heavily Hispanic Little Village area, and a little bit of North Lawndale assigned to it when Area 8 was dissolved last year.

For grades 3 - 8, we will do online Scantron during the month of September (reading, math and science), Riverside (math and reading) in October and November, December, January, and Scantron again in January, ISAT (math and reading, science 4th and 7th only, writing is cancelled this year because of money) in early March, Riverside again in March, April and May, and Scantron again in May.

The Riverside tests will be done online. Students will need to do a reading and math test, and each test will last about 45 minutes. We will have a 3-day window (I think that is correct) to do the tests.

On the plus side, teachers will have immediate results. On the negative side, each test session which will require computer cart or lab time, meaning a technology support person for each test, at least to get things started, and be available to deal with the inevitable technical issues. Paper based assessments could be done simultaneously in all classrooms, online is strung out depending on technology and people resources. Scantron has been its own headache, and it has a three week window. Logistically, Riverside in three days is possible, but it will mean a lot of running around.

The Benchmark Assessment had the nice advantage of letting teaches keep the test booklet, or view the actual questions via CIM, CPS's online student test data tracking tool. This allowed teachers, if they had the time, to try to figure out why students got an answer wrong. (It turns out, from my observation, that, for math anyway, a lot of the problems stem from reading comprehension issues, or getting tripped up by misleading pr ambiguous questions, or problems with familiar words used in unfamiliar math contexts -- e.g., "the net of a cube".)

My understanding of Riverside is that we can see and use other questions from their item pool, but it's not clear if we can see the actual questions and responses from a particular assessment.

Besides the logistical problems of administering the tests, other issues include: the out-of-pocket cost to CPS of the tests, the opportunity cost of teacher and staff time administering the tests, and teacher time making sense of the data on top of all of the other regular (and more informative) classroom assessments, and the cost of lost instruction time for students.

An even bigger question is whether the tests will tell anyone anything useful. As I think I may have said before, testing students is not the same as taking their temperature. Students resist their test-heavy regime. They will resist Riverside to, spoiling the results.

Even if test scores accurately reflected student ability (which occurs only in some cases, skewed by demographics, prior academic success, breakfast, and many other factors), changes in student performance across tests given five-week weeks apart are statistically suspect. Scantron, e.g. will not produce gains reports for for tests given less than 12 weeks apart (see their P erformance Series White Paper, for example, page 9), because statistically speaking, any differences in a shorter period are meaningless -- differences can be attributed to many factors other than student learning.

Unless a test is mapped to a pacing guide and so questions adjust throughout the year according to what students "should be" learning (per the pacing guide, but many other problems here, including that the pacing guide is dictating from on high what teachers teach when regardless of their students, and the tests would need to be aligned to curriculum), it seems unlikely to me that test results will vary significantly from test session to test session, unless... Since the 5-week data will be used for the monthly performance management inquisition, the obvious thing for a teacher to do, to succeed in the current test-crazy CPS environment, would be to study the Riverside item pool, and... teach to the test!

jd

College Inc.

2010-08-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

The PBS series Frontline aired a deep investigation of for-profit higher education last May, called College Inc. The tagline from the website gives an accurate hint of the show: "Investigating how Wall Street and a new breed of for-profit universities are transforming the way we think about college in America..."

I meant to post something on this earlier but. I also wrote some more on this (including the paragraph above) as it relates to the process of "commodification" -- turning things that used to be outside of the market, in the public sector or parts of our communal life at home or in the neighborhood, into pay-for services, and how that fits into the Big Processes going on now in the world economy, on another blog.

jd

Message from Rethinking Schools

2010-08-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

The message below appeared in my mailbox, courtesy of the Chicago Teachers for Social Justice mailing list. It is from one of the editors of the magazine, Rethinking Schools, and is a good summary of the flurry of news about Race to the Top over the past week.

July 31, 2010

Dear friends,

In the past week there has been significant developments in the growth of anti-Race to the Top sentiment around the country. An impressive coalition of national civil rights groups issued a statement critical of the Obama/Duncan administration's educational policies: Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn through Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It's worth the read.

Similarly, a coalition of 24 community groups organized by Communities for Excellent Public Schools issued a stinging critique of the federal government's "turnaround" strategies. "Our Communities Left Behind: An Analysis of the Administration's School Turnaround Policies" is a comprehensive critique that shows why those policies won't work and offers concrete suggestions as to what will turn around struggling schools. For a summary see an article in the Washington Post.

The lead segment on Democracy Now on July 30 was on the Race to the Top and included interviews with Diane Ravitch and Leonie Haimson from Class Size Matters and they respond to President Obama's recent speak at the National Urban League where he defended the Race to the Top program. It's worth the listen.

These critiques confirm what those of us who are in the classroom have seen for the past several years. Many federal education policies are actually hurting students, making it more difficult for teachers to provide quality education to those who need it most. It's time for a change.

Sincerely,
Bob Peterson, Rethinking Schools

Save Our Schools Rally

2010-07-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

I attended the Chicago Teacher's Union (CTU) Save Our Schools Rally today at the Ariel Academy in Kenwood. The rally is the first public event that I know of sponsored by the CTU since the new Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) slate took office this month. I was especially interested in how the new leadership was approaching the Chicago Public Schools position regarding school finances, tenure, teacher evaluation, cuts, and so forth.

CPS and CTU have started talks, but based on what Karen Lewis reported at the meeting, a report on the CTU website, and an online report plus comments on the Catalyst blog, the Board is asking for everything and giving nothing. [Lewis also said that the union wanted, and received, the right to have 40 observers (including representatives from other caucuses) sit in on the negotiations, as part of CORE's promise to boost transparency in the union.]

I was especially interested to hear about CTU's strategy at this point. The union is launching several initiatives, all with a common theme: reaching out. Reaching out to CTU membership, to parents, to community organizations, to pastors and congregations, to aldermen and state representatives, to the general population at events like neighborhood festivals and the annual southside Bud Billiken parade. The union had sign-up sheets available for the various committees it has set up to undertake the reach-out campaign.

The union's strategy reminded me of a report on the two-week long 2005 British Columbia teacher's strike. Teachers in BC were not allowed to strike by law, but they did so anyway, over class size, student supports and pay. As I understand it, the Canadian teachers worked to win the public opinion battle first, through ... reaching out. The British Columbia Teacher's Federation (BCTF) worked hard to present teachers as human beings dedicated to the challenging job of educating the community's children under very difficult circumstances. As a result, the BCTF gained support from other unions, from parents, and from the community at large. That support enabled them effectively to win.

CPS's position, echoed by the major news media and self-appointed education experts, is that teachers are lazy, incompetent, overpaid and greedy. The CPS position is that the union shields the generally lazy, incompetent, etc. etc. from discipline. The union, effectively, is the reason for the CPS budget crisis, poor test scores, high dropout rates, etc. Only charter schools, privatization and more testing can save education in Chicago. This is the official CPS narrative. This is the CPS propaganda offensive that the union is finally, with new leadership, thankfully beginning to confront.

Getting out a counter-narrative, one that actually explains reality, really is the only way forward for the union: to win the propaganda war by speaking truth to power, forging necessary links with everyone else in the same boat (is that a mixed metaphor?), and getting over the understanding that what is wrong with education is not teachers (much less teachers organized), but something much deeper and more complex, something that will require a broad, mobilized network of community to overcome.

jd

Not so simple

2010-07-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

Below is a link to a recent (7/9/10) New York Times article that should be mandatory reading by anyone mesmerized by the possibilities of computers and education.

The article reports on several recent studies that suggest that computers in the home have little educational impact, and in the case of of low income students, they may actually result in lower test scores.

The suspicion as to why this might be the case is that with presumably more people working in low income families, there is less time for supervision, and so the kids are gravitating towards game play and not research. Their computer skills do go up though, in particular the ability to skirt around firewalls, blocks, and other security measures that keep them from doing what they really want to do.

Computers are seen, as the article points out, as the Great Equalizer in education. Which is a convenient fantasy for hardware and software developers, who have a financial stake in selling the Great Equalizers. The article indicates that education is not a mechanical problem, but a social problem -- a supportive home life, engaged families, optimism about the future, supervision and direction -- a stable and nurturing social environment -- are all critical ingredients to successful education (and successful use of technology in education).

Here's the link to the article: Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality

jd

CPS elem testing schedule for 2010-11

2010-06-13T08:40:00.000-07:00

The CPS Elementary Assessment Calendar for 2010-11 is available.

A summary, for schools on the regular schedule:

K-2:

DIBELS: September, January, May. (Schools not doing DIBELS must do either STEP or ISEL testing).

mClass Math (required): September, January, May.

Grades 3 - 8:

Scantron (required for all schools, grades 3 - 8): September (the first three weeks after school starts); January; late April-May.

Chicago Benchmark Assessment (Reading/Math) (optional): October, January, May. Since this one is optional, I don't know if my school will be taking it or not. Our Area Office seems to like lots of data though, so...

District Wide Writing Assessment (required): October, January, March 21-25, May. Note that the March test is used for promotion policy.

ISAT (required): 2/28 - 3/11 (note it is a bit earlier next year).

Grade 8 only:

EXPLORE: 9/27 - 10/6

Winter and Spring Benchmark and Scantron will overlap. The Winter Scantron testing is a month earlier than ISAT next year.

I left off some of the other testing that applies to small groups of students, see the link above for info on all of the planned assessments for CPS elementary schools for next year.

jd

Interesting results from CTU member survey

2010-06-13T06:45:00.000-07:00

If you are in the Chicago Teachers Union, you may have received an automated phone call last Wednesday inviting you to participate in a massive conference call (I confess I hung up). According to a posting on the NTN2000 Yahoo Group mailing list (that's the Chicago New Teacher Center list), some 8,000 CTU members were on the call. During the call, participants were surveyed about several topics. Some of the results (quoting from the letter re-posted on the list):

2. As a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, what do you think should be the Union's top priority?
Prevent teacher layoffs - 52%
Protecting our 4% pay raise - 18%
Smaller class sizes - 19%
Instituting a hiring freeze - 11%

3. How many students do you currently have in your classroom?
0-15 students - 21%
16-24 students - 19%
25-28 students - 26%
29-32 students - 23%
Over 33 students - 11%

4. As a CTU member would you rather have your negotiators fight harder for the 4% raise, or to preserve jobs?
Preserve jobs - 72%
Preserve the 4% raise - 28%

5. Of all the participants on the call, how many were members of the CTU when we last went on strike in 1987?
If you were a member on strike in 1987 - 15% of callers

6. How many on the line have been teaching 10 years or less?
If you have taught in CPS for less than 10 years - 38%
If you have taught in CPS for more than 11 years - 62%

One of the most surprising answers from our surveys was the overwhelming amount of members that would forego their 4% pay raise this year to protect the jobs of their fellow members.

CORE victory

2010-06-12T14:09:00.001-07:00

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) scored a decisive victory in the Chicago Teachers Union run-off yesterday (6/11). According the final vote count, CORE won almost 60 percent of the vote.

Separately, or maybe not, CPS CEO Ron Huberman has called a special Board of Education meeting for Tuesday (6/15) to give him the authority to raise class size to 35 students; to fire tenured and probationary teachers who are displaced by as a result of "cost-saving measures" (including raising the class-size limit); and borrow up to $800 million to deal with the CPS budget crisis. (See "Huberman Calls Emergency Board Meeting")

CORE has achieved what it set out what to do, and congratulations. It caught the car. Now what?

jd

New core standards

2010-06-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

Some links regarding the new national "common core standards":

New York Times article: "States Receive a Reading List: New Standards for Education" (6/2/10)

The Common Core Standards

The Math Common Core Standards

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and other math teacher organizations support the math standards.

Ron Huberman signed a letter along with heads of many other school districts supporting the core standards and urging their adoption.

ISBE also supports the core standards. And since adoption of the core standards will add points to a state's Race to the Top application (see the NYT article), it is most likely just a matter of weeks before Illinois formalizes their adoption.

jd

A historic election

2010-05-31T16:52:00.000-07:00

It sounds like hyperbole but it isn't. The run-off election for the Chicago Teachers Union leadership, scheduled for June 11 is A Big Deal. Not just for Chicago teachers, but nationally. If the CORE caucus can unite the other caucuses that challenged the current leadership in the first-round voting last month, and gain the leadership of the CTU, it will signal several things:

1. Locally, it should provide a much-needed counter-force to the policies of CPS CEO Ron Huberman -- it'a amazing how much destruction he has wrought in CPS in one year. The current union leadership has been fiddling.

2. It will be a significant challenge to Mayor Daley's control of Chicago education, and the failed policies he has pushed on CPS for the past 15 years.

3. It will represent an important victory for grass roots control of education and for the institution of public education, at a time when the idea of "public" in "public education" is under attack.

4. It signals resistance, and significant resistance at that, to the current attacks on public education. As the the largest union in the historic labor capital of the U.S., and because the CTU represents teachers in the third largest school system in the country, a CORE victory can be a rallying point for teachers across the country.

5. It will represent a blatant rejection of the privatization of public education and the general attack on teachers. The fact that the point man on this push, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan test-drove many of his policies here in Chicago, just adds to the significance.

6. An invigorated CTU can provide a national voice in favor of child- and community-centered education. There is an alternative to defunding public schools, skimming by charters, turning children into testing machines, turning teachers into room monitors, management by bogus numbers, etc.

7. It will be a victory for democratic unionism, which may help invigorate the labor movement as a whole.

That's what comes to mind. Like I said, A Big Deal.

jd

Scantron, Round 2

2010-05-29T13:03:00.000-07:00

We are just winding up our second go-round with the Scantron Performance Assessment Series testing, the computer-based assessment of students hat CPS requires.

As far as multiple choice assessments go, there are several things I like about the Scantron Performance Assessment Series. The results are available immediately. It works as both a norm-referenced and a criterion-referenced assessment. It provides useful diagnostic and grouping info. It has some okay resources for teachers. If you have the requisite resources (computers, fast Internet, staff), it is fairly easy to administer.

However... I am looking over the results from the testing. I am seeing student scores that vary by hundreds of points from February scores (in some cases, a 20% difference). Some higher, some lower. In statistical terms, really big standard deviations for some classes, especially in the reading assessment.

Scantron differs from other assessments like ISAT or the CPS Benchmark Assessment in that it provides a grade-independent number that should show growth over the years as students learn more (all other things being equal).

Considering just student knowledge (if in fact the assessment measures that) there is little reason for scores to drop. Save for brain injury, it's unreasonable to think that students lose knowledge over a three month period. I suppose maybe a teacher so completely mis-taught something that the students unlearned something. But that would show up in the numbers in a different way.

The wild score fluctuations raise, again, the striking role of all of the extrinsic factors to testing. Things that are not part of the questions themselves (i.e., the content, the wording, the pictures, etc.). In particular, it raises the human dimension of assessment, like the test-taker's willingness, confidence, interest, desire, alertness, and so on.

Napoleon said that "in war, moral factors account for three quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one quarter." ("Moral" = "morale".) In testing, the same pretty much holds, I think, for standardized testing.

In questioning students whose scores dropped significantly (let's say more than 100 points), they would say things like they didn't feel well, or they were tired, or they didn't try, or they didn't care. After cajoling and encouraging and even threatening them to really try their best, typically scores jumped considerably -- by hundreds of points. (Scantron uses a scale from about 1300 to 3900; an entire grade level jump is approximately equivalent ranges from a 70 to 220 point change, depending on the grade.)

This moral factor in testing is one of those easily ignored things in the overall fetishization of data. Testing kids is not the same as taking their temperature. When assessing a student, the student must do something -- the student must perform -- their cooperation, their buy-in, their willingness to play along is three-quarters of the whole. The horse and water.

The fake science behind "performance management" must ignore the moral factors because they aren't controllable. And because the moral dimension is ignored, it bumbles from that fundamental error to another and another, until a massive lie has been constructed.

I have to admit that there is one part of me that appreciates the resistance -- mostly unconscious -- on the part of the students to what is being done to them through the seemingly endless testing. Now if that impulse to resist could be nurtured, and shaped, and directed towards something really useful -- now that would be an education.

jd

P.S. I thought we were done, because Friday (5/28) was originally set as the final day, but I just saw an email yesterday saying that the window had been extended to June 3.

P.P.S. I did a review, rather neutral and not too critical, of the Scantron Performance Assessment, available here.

Vote for CORE 5/21

2010-05-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

As you well know, this has been a difficult year for public education in general, and CPS in particular. The general economic and budget mess is bad enough. And then teachers are scapegoated for the deep deep problems in education. We suffer, along with our students, the consequences -- slashed programs, over-capacity classrooms, a broken pension system, a performance management system where we are punished for things we have little control over.

These days fall into the "when the going gets rough..." category. Our best hope in times like these is organization. We are fortunate to have an organization that, historically at least, was formed by teachers to represent the interests of teachers. I am of course referring to the Chicago Teachers Union. I am glad the union is there. But I don't think the current leadership has been doing much to deal with the rapidly evolving crisis facing us and the students we teach and the communities we serve.

The Chicago Teachers Union election is coming up this Friday (May 21), and this is our great opportunity to change that. I am voting for the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) slate for a few reasons:

A change is necessary in the union. Marilyn Stewart's administration has been doing too little too late around school closings, CPS budget transparency, or mobilizing the membership to challenge the problems facing us and our students.
CORE has an admirable track record in doing exactly what the current leadership hasn't been doing. They have been in the forefront of the fight around closings, for budget transparency, for a democratic and mobilized union.
CORE is about a different kind of union -- a democratic union. Away from business unionism. A union, as CORE presidential candidate Karen Lewis says, that will activate the power of its 28,000 members in partnership with parents, students and community.
CORE recognizes that we need to work with other organizations to be successful -- including parent groups, community organizations, other labor organizations.
CORE has an active base throughout CPS that can make this idea of a democratic union work.
The CORE slate has been endorsed by Teachers for Social Justice, an organization that I respect.

There are other caucuses running candidates, but none of them have an organization that has been visible around the big issues facing us, or have the reach across the city to make the democratic union idea work, or have actually been trying to mobilize members to make their voice heard. CORE has, CORE does.

Finally CORE has emphasized unity among the different factions in the CTU at a time when we need to be speaking with one strong voice about the future of education.

So I am going to vote for CORE on Friday, May 21. And I encourage you to do so, too.

jd

More info:

CORE for CTU video

Karen Lewis, Presidential Candidate for CTU at Town Hall Meeting (YouTube)

Karen Lewis Campaign video

Catalyst Chicago story on upcoming election

Most education research is BS

2010-05-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

Sharon Begley reports in her Newsweek column (4/29/10) on the work of Western Michigan University professor William Cobern about how bad most education research is: poorly designed, lacking in rigor, and often underwritten by publishers who gain from the NCLB imprimatur of "research-based". Here is a fun phrase from the column: "the scientific vacuity of education research".

jd

iPad and education

2010-05-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

It was time for a new laptop, but with the iPad coming out, I thought I might see if I could manage with using it as a main, or mostly main computer. And since Apple has pushed the iPod as an education tool, I was also curious how it might work in the classroom.

First observations:

The hardware and apps are there to make it a very slick classroom tool. Usable for doing any of the basic Office-type applications, especially with the extra iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), and especially usable with the external keyboard (which is what I am using right now). While the iPad can run iPhone apps, unless they are modified to take advantage of the iPad's expanded screen size, you have a little iPhone app running inside a big black screen. I expect as the iPad market grows, more developers will modify their apps to support the platform, so the education app universe will continue to grow. You still have the old possibilities of podcast and iTunes U. But now the video experience is tremendously enhanced. Video can come from iTunes, YouTube (as long as the school doesn't block it), and Netflix has a viewer too. BrainPOP has an iPad app as welll, although right now it only plays a free "movie of the week".

Apple also provides an iBook reader for the iPad, as do other developers. The iPad plus these apps opens the door for much richer support for e-textbooks, or web-supported curricula in general.

Drawbacks: The mobile Safari browser is sufficient for many web-based activities, but it still does not support Flash, which is used in many educational web apps (see Steve Jobs final word on Flash on the iPhone/Pod/Pad). I have learned to more or less live with this on the iPhone, but the bigger irritation -- no, failure -- is the mobile browser's inability to support EDITING GOOGLE DOCS. I put that final phrase in caps for emphasis. First, because Google Docs has, in practice (for my teachers at least), proven to be the simplest and cheapest way to manage student work done on computers. Apple provides online storage space via iWork.com, but it is tightly integrated with their iWork apps, while Google Docs is wonderfully ecumenical when it comes to computing platforms. [Note: the lack of support for editing text Google docs could possibly be solved on either the Google side or the Apple side, but what from I've been able to find, the culprit is Safari's lack of support for the contentEditable tag, which Google Docs relies on for formatting. For typing this, I had to switch from "Compose" mode to "Edit HTML", which provides a plain text editing area.]

There are other iPad apps which support working on Google docs, and saving them in the Google cloud space, but they are not free, and so that's an added expense for schools.

Related to this is the issue of file management, which is a problem for any school. The iWork apps can be transferred to a Mac, and worked on them there (also using iWork, or saving as another file format I suppose, and working on them like that. But that gets away from the point of an iPad in the classroom -- a relatively inexpensive standalone multimedia tool. If a school committed to the iWork tools, perhaps there is some way to use iWork.com as a central file management space, but students would still be locked into local apps for working on documents away from an iPad. Tim O'Reilly commented recently that Apple was missing the boat on the cloud computing thing, and this Google Docs thing reinforces that for me. Figuring out a good app / file management strategy (what apps do students use that support flexibly saving their work, where the teacher can see it, that is accessible from a non-Apple device, and can be accessed from home -- this is the biggest challenge I see to committing to the iPad in the classroom.

I assume someone will come out with iPad charging / sync stations, which will make managing a classroom set of iPads much easier than laptops.

The iPad I think supersedes the now-brief possibility of net books supplanting laptops as the one-to-one computing platform of choice. Although still twice the cost of the cheapest net books, it offers a far richer user experience I think (the screen, really, is very nice) and is half the cost of Apple's laptops.

jd

Composed on a iPad, using the iPad Keyboard Dock, which makes typing Really Easy.

Reflecting on a recent PD

2010-03-13T14:30:00.000-08:00

Reflecting on a recent professional development that I organized... Our school was getting to the end of the Scantron Performance Assessment, and I wanted to give the teachers at my school a briefing on the data the testing generated and a little bit of info on the kinds of resources available via the Scantron site. (Here's a link to a blog entry on how the testing went -- read the comment from Nicole Zumpano also.)

The PD consisted of two main parts. First I gave some background on the testing, described the kinds of scores Scantron site generated, and showed the teachers how to access the reports and resources. During the second part of the PD, teachers were supposed to look at their student data, and practice generating study guides and quizzes for their students.

Good things about the PD:

It was well attended.
Teachers paid attention to the information I gave them.
It didn't go on too long (about one hour).
I think I was coherent (not sure!).
I thought the handout and PowerPoint were good -- short, informative, supportive of the goals of the PD.

Not so good things about the PD:

I spent most of the practice time generating new passwords for the teachers, since they didn't know what their passwords were.
I don't the teachers had much of a chance to really see how the data and resources might be useful to them.
Time was short.
The PD was held in our building, and teachers wanted to get to other things they had to do in their classrooms.
I was lax about getting evaluations from the teacher, either no the PD or on the testing process in general.
The talking part that I did went on too long (I videotaped it, and was surprised to see that I blabbed on for 20 minutes).

If I was to do it over again I would:

Make sure everyone had a sense of the importance of the Scantron assessments (the data may be useful, the resources can be handy, teachers will likely be evaluate on their students performance on the test, the principal should reinforce the relevance of the assessments and resources) -- or more generally, make sure that there is a real need for the PD, and that the participants are aware of the need.
Do it off-site, so teachers wouldn't be so distracted by things in the building or their classrooms; or do it for teachers at another school.
Talk less, do more.
Have all of the password stuff straightened out ahead of time (!!!!).
Be better about collecting evaluations.

The handouts, PowerPoint, and additional info can be found here.

jd

Reflecting about a math competition

2010-03-13T13:04:00.000-08:00

I just got back from working on the math portion of an academic olympics for one of the Chicago Public Schools areas. First time ever. Some thoughts:

I think math competitions may best be done not as a first response, Jeopardy-style competition, but to give a paper and pencil test with a tough time limit (e.g., 20 questions in 20 minutes). Students would still need to know their math, and be quick about it, but not be penalized if the luck of the draw puts them with some super competitors. At least for the first round...
Or maybe do a paper-pencil for Round 1, and then go to the first response mode for a second and third round.
And/or have a class of questions that are 10-second questions, and some that are 5-second questions.
In the case of a Jeopardy-style competition, run all of the questions by some teachers first to see if they can answer them in the allotted time (in this case, five seconds). I came up with a number of questions that were not mathematically difficult, but were complex enough that it was hard for anyone to figure out in five seconds. And so time ran out before anyone attempted a response.
Double-check the slides, projected, to make sure all of the labels and text are nice and big.
And if you switch from Windows to a Mac, or from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, look at all of the slides beforehand to catch any problems with incompatibilities between their respective formula editors and fonts/symbols! (By the way, there's a beta version of an OpenOffice extension that provides a very nice two-screen presentation, (the "Sun Presenter Console") where the audience sees the presentation slide projected, and the presenter has a nice view of the slide, notes, time, and upcoming slide.)

For what it's worth, the finalists at both levels (intermediate and upper grades) did a remarkable job.

jd

Draft National Educational Technology Plan

2010-03-11T09:39:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Department of Education has released its draft National Educational Technology Plan. The Five Year Plan is supposed to be a model of "21st century learning powered by technology" according to a post to one of ISTE's special interest groups.

The 80-page draft is available at: http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/netp.pdf

There is a 10-page executive summary available at:

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/os/technology/netp-executive-summary.pdf

jd

PD definition yawn

2010-03-07T13:20:00.000-08:00

Tedium alert: This posting is being done for a course requirement on The Most Boring Subject in the World, "professional development". So if you were maybe beginning to the think that you might want to see what it's about, well...

The National Staff Development Council (yes, there is one! And my my brain fogs over and I start looking at my inbox to see what needs to be cleared out) created this definition of PD for the No Child Left Behind (sic) law:

The term “professional development” means a comprehensive, sustained, and intensive approach to improving teachers’ and principals’ effectiveness in raising student achievement...

[BTW: if you need help with intelligent-sounding phrases to spice up your PD, here's a useful tool: Education Jargon Generator]

Per the definition, PD should be aligned (check), conducted by well-prepare people (umm check), based on teacher and student performance data (hmm -- when I see these words I look around to see who is swinging the ax), goal-oriented (check), regularly assessed for effectiveness (check), and informing continuous improvement in teaching (check).

Which all sounds very good as defining concepts. The real challenge comes in trying to successfully implement PD.

The concept of continuous process improvement comes out of the automobile industry and W. Edwards Deming's ideas about quality control. One of the radical concepts in his management ideas is the idea of treating production workers as human beings with ideas and opinions and pride in their work. See the Wikipedia summary of Deming's Key Principles for an idea of what he was on about.

A problem arises when the exhortations to improve conflict with an adversarial, even antagonistic relationship between workers (that would be us, the teachers), and management (pick whatever level of administration you want). If one side is expected to change, and the other side isn't, trouble is on the horizon. Why are just the teachers and staff fired when a school is supposedly failing? Why not the school board, the CEO or superintendent or the administration? When the resources aren't there to support either the PD itself, or to implement what you have learned, nothing is going to happen. If everyone is convinced that they are in fact on the same boat, and rowing in the same direction, and not stuck in steerage or the engine room, then good things are possible.

Anyway, talk is cheap. The NSDC definition is fine, and the idea of continuous improvement is good. But they can only work if there is a sense of a future, of common purpose, of shared reward. All of which seem to be lacking at CPS right now. No matter what you have this year, there will be less of it next year.

jd

Trying out a problem-based lesson

2010-03-07T05:49:00.000-08:00

I continue to play around with Etoys. As noted in an earlier post, I think Etoys works best as a construction kit for students. This, as opposed to a multimedia development environment for teachers or other lesson designers to assemble ready-made, teacher-directed activities for the students. The construction kit idea fits with the constructionist roots of the project. Veteran computer researcher and educator Alan Kay, one of the forces behind Etoys and Squeak (the Smalltalk implementation that Etoys is built on, and in many ways has superceded), described it like this:

The most important thing about powerful inexpensive personal computers is that they form a new kind of reading and writing medium that allows some of the most important powerful ideas to be discussed and played with and learned ...

This is what our work and Squeak is all about. We are interested in helping children learn to think better and deeper than most adults can. We have made the Squeak medium to serve as a new kind of electronic paper that can hold new ways to represent powerful ideas. ("Background on how children learn", 2003?)

I have been wanting to try a genuine Etoys project on some students, to see how they do with it, how the constructionist idea plays out in practice. I suppose this sounds a bit mad-scientist-ish, but that's also a lot of what teaching is -- a never-ending tinkering.

I'm working with Shane Jonas at Kellman to develop a lesson plan that uses Etoys to design something, in this case a simple seascape with a few beasties that crawl or swim about. The exercise is inspired by a similar project on the Etoys Illinois site. The main purpose of the exercise is to develop problem-solving skills (design something and make it go), but in the course of creating the seascape, the students will hit a number of cross-curricular standards, including technology design, ecosystems (both science), transformations and the coordinate plane (math), drawing (art), and public speaking when they present their work. Shane and I are also going to experiment some more with having students at our two schools video conference about their projects.

I tried the exercise out on some prospective teachers at a class I am teaching at Dominican of "integrating technology into the curriculum" (!). We had been looking at different types of educational technology, organized by where the center of teaching/learning occurs. Drills and tutorials are at one end of the spectrum ("teacher centered", even if the authority is a computer program); webquests and scavenger hunts and the like in the middle ("directed inquiry", teacher-directed but the student plays an active role in directing the outcomes), and problem-based learning and constructionist tools on the other end ("student-centered"). The idea was that the candidates would both get a chance to work with Etoys, and also to experience from the students' point-of-view what a constructionist exercise might feel like.

An instruction sheet for the exercise is available.

A few things about the exercise stand out:

1. Etoys is a software development environment, so before a student (of any age) can feel success, he or she needs to at least get comfortable with the tools. Etoys comes with three very good tutorials that take the student through the basics of working with the program.

2. Still, even the simple seascape exercise allowed for some important wrong turns. In the exercise, students are supposed to create a background, save that, and then add new objects on top of the background. A few students missed the important step of saving the background before adding their octopi and fish. As a result, their sea beasts were not separate objects that could be programmed to move about on their own. When I do this with the young ones, I need to make sure that they get this step -- maybe even break the session into two parts to make sure the background is created as a background.

3. The tutorials did not go into enough detail about the Etoys programming model. Some additional direct instruction is needed up front I think to help students understand about scripts or code snippets, and looping and tests (if-then statements). And also how this is done using Etoys (tear offs and drag-and-drop tiles).

4. One of the challenges of constructivist teaching is providing the Goldilocks mean of teacher involvement -- just enough scaffolding to keep each student in his or her zone, not too much, not too little. With adults, and probably with children as well (we'll see), each person has their own tolerance for trying things out, failing, trying again, etc. before frustration sets in. Some need more encouragement than others. So the teacher is not giving just one lesson, but many. On the other hand, students were very helpful with each other as they figured things out. That's another hallmark of constructivism -- student peers are important teaching agents.

Being able to try out such a lessons is a great opportunity because complex lessons like this are not easy to organize and execute. The feedback is there, but it is so long between executions that it takes a long time to really make the lesson work well.

Hopefully I will get around to doing a report-back on trying it out with elementary school kids.

jd

Getting teachers to use more technology

2010-02-28T07:42:00.000-08:00

Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer. That's the first thing I thought of when I read a blog-posting prompt for a class I am taking: "What is the best way to get others at your schools to use more technology in their teaching and the students' learning?"

The main charge for my position at my school, as I understand it, is to coach and assist teachers in integrating technology into their teaching. I don't see my job as getting them to "use more technology." There is a fine distinction there, so let me see if I can make the line clearer.

I have latched on to a couple of guiding principles for my work. The first one is a techno-take on the Hippocratic Oath of "First, Do No Harm". The second one stretches Occam's Razor: All things considered, the simplest solution is the best solution. The second principle relates to the idea of "appropriate technology" and the "Keep It Simple" principle of design. And usually, the simplest solution will be a low-tech solution. Electronic equivalents complicate.

I see my role as helping teachers accomplish their teaching tasks most effectively. In terms of technology, that means identifying the most effective technology to deliver instruction or facilitate learning. (There might be some fine points to make re: teachers teaching vs. students learning, and who is doing what in the process and whether the center of it is closer to the teacher or the student, but let's set those aside for now.)

There will be times when there will be compelling reasons to use new technologies. But always, with any medium or tool, there are trade-offs. Marshall and Eric McLuhan's "Four Laws of Media" captures this idea of something gained, something lost. According to their "four laws", every medium (and they include tools as media) enhances (this is the part we tend to focus on), but it also obsolesces (something is lost or made obsolete), and when taken too far, it reverses, or yields an undesired, or even opposite effect (the classic example is the automobile that results in gridlock). [FYI, the fourth effect is retrieves.] While something is gained, something else is lost. It may not be a zero-sum game, but there are definitely trade-offs.

Case in point: virtual math manipulatives are kinda neat, and offer some useful opportunities for students. But they are also virtual, and the tactile benefits of handwork is lost. Or online collaboration -- the online medium inserts itself into the communication process, and collaboration is altered. While online collaboration creates new possibilities, the benefits of face-to-face communication are lost. If we only interact with online personae and avatars, I fear we will end up somewhere on the autism spectrum, incapable of reading faces anymore.

Anyway, I do not see my role as encouraging the use of more technology, but assisting in the process of making wise choices to help teachers be successful. While I can't say I am doing a particularly good job at this (why is a subject for another post), it means working closely with a teacher, understanding what she is trying to accomplish, and making her aware of her options, including the benefits and drawbacks.

If the concept of classroom technology is relaxed to include traditional tools like chalk and blackboard, and even lecturing, my understanding of what a "lead technology teacher" should be perhaps becomes clearer. I work with teachers (or should anyway) to help them select the most appropriate tool for the job and use it effectively.

If teachers are driving the teaching process (understood in whatever way one wants to conceive of what teachers do), then I do not need to "get them to use more technology". I just need to help them clarify what tools will help them the most (and hopefully do no harm). Given the opportunity, they will use as much technology as they need, and hopefully no more.

jd

21st Century Literacy

2010-02-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

The term "literacy" is tossed about a lot, and is loaded up with many layers of meaning. Case in point is the video "What Does It Mean to Be Literate in the 21st Century?" from a couple of Canadian teachers. Definitions (or really, "understandings") provided by the teachers interviewed in the video range from classic "read and write" printed texts to facility with tools, to a Gardner-esque "multiple literacies" that correspond to different intelligences (e.g., emotional literacy, outdoor literacy).

I prefer to go with a media-independent notion of literacy as the ability to construct (or maybe discover) meaning from the world. "Reading" becomes a generic term for this process -- reading clouds, reading printed text, reading symbols, reading faces, reading film, reading math proofs, reading music, and so on. One teacher in the video used the Freirean terms of literacy as not just reading the word, but reading the world. And I might add, again in Freirean terms of active engagement, not just reading the world, but writing the world as well. Literacy becomes a general ability to be in the world in a meaning-ful way.

When it comes to electronic technology, literacy is often reduced to facility. The U.S. Department of Education, back in 1996, defined technology literacy as "computer skills and the ability to use computers and other technology to improve learning, productivity, and performance" (cited on this Technology Literacy page). One state education office defined is as "the ability to use, manage, assess, and understand technology." The ability to use a technology is a rather shallow skill -- much more important is the ability to create meaning, and to gather (or construct) meaning from what is done with the technology.

Electronic technology is only a subset of the technologies around us. The phonetic alphabet is a technology. As is the book and the newspaper. Part of being a critical reader and writer of any medium, is understanding the prejudices that the medium pushes onto the world (hence McLuhan's "the medium is the message"), and also the social context or matrix within which any particular technology is developed and deployed. Technologies always change the person that uses them. Literacy means understanding those changes, and being able to make critical and ethical choices.

The Alliance for Childhood's TechTonic report does a nice job of exploring this dimension of computer technology:

In the past, technology literacy was largely defined as skill in operating computers. That narrow approach was misguided from the start. But it is now dangerously outdated. A new approach to technology literacy, calibrated for the 21st century, requires us to help children develop the habits of mind, heart, and action that can, over time, mature into adult capacities for moral reflection, ethical restraint, and compassionate service. (p. 8)

And later,

The Alliance for Childhood proposes the following definition: Technology literacy is the mature capacity to participate creatively, critically, and responsibly in making technological choices that serve democracy, ecological sustainability, and a just society. (p. 60)

So what are the most important aspects of 21st Century literacy? As always -- the ability to construct or discover meaning in the world, the ability to make critical and ethical choices about the tools available to construct or discover that meaning, to engage meaningfully with the world. With new technologies, that means understanding how those tools are used to construct meaning, what "meaning" looks like, how to decode and critically reflect on media artifacts. (At my school at least, we spend a fair amount of time on strategies for making sense of printed texts, but no time on strategies for making sense of TV, movies, music, PowerPoints, websites, etc.) It also means understanding how economic systems work and how they push technologies into particular directions.

And especially it means learning how to think.

jd

Computer games as learning tools

2010-02-15T12:17:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about games (in particular, computer games) as learning tools. Can computer games be effective learning tools? Of course. It is possible. A more generic question would be, can children learn from play? And the answer is even more "of course".

There is considerable literature on the importance of play in learning. Susan Engel, the director of the teaching program at Williams College, summarized this in a recent New York Times op-ed piece ("Playing to Learn"):

Research has shown unequivocally that children learn best when they are interested in the material or activity they are learning. Play — from building contraptions to enacting stories to inventing games — can allow children to satisfy their curiosity about the things that interest them in their own way. It can also help them acquire higher-order thinking skills, like generating testable hypotheses, imagining situations from someone else’s perspective and thinking of alternate solutions.

The Alliance for Childhood has published a lot of material about the role of play. The title of their most recent report summarizes their general perspective: "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School." Their report argues that "play builds competence in many domains."

Research shows that children who engage in complex forms of socio-dramatic play have greater language skills than nonplayers, better social skills, more empathy, more imagination, and more of the subtle capacity to know what others mean. They are less aggressive and show more self-control and higher levels of thinking.

A Big Question though is whether the benefits of play in general are preserved in the realm of computer-based games. A key term in the above quote is "socio-dramatic play", a feature transformed or completely missing from computer games. Yes there are social games (role-playing ones in particular), and the Internet is great for matching up players from different corners of the world. But computer-mediated communication and socializing is not the same as face-to-face socializing. (For more on this see an earlier posting, a response to Heather Bromberg's chapter on whether MUDs are communities.) The recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey on media use of 8-to-18-year-olds reinforces this idea, finding a strong correlation between higher media use and lack of personal contentment, boredom and getting into trouble. (The report does caution about assuming a causal effect, and that the relationship may go in either direction -- bored, unhappy kids may immerse themselves in media, as opposed to more media use making kids unhappy. But the point remains that they are not happier for their media consumption.)

If computer games fall short in developing social and emotional skills, what about cognitive skills? Computers are used extensively in education, and even when a computer activity doesn't rise the the level of game, they still have a gaming component (rewards, playful screen design, even just interacting with the machine having an element of play to it). Computer game play, like all play can engage students in content, and as Engel noted (see above), children learn best when they are engaged in what they are learning.

So don't computer games have an important role? Certainly computers have their place (for a good summary see M. D. Roblyer and Aaron Doering's Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching, chapter 3). The whole debate is a complex one, intertwined with learning theory. Let's just say for now that yes, they can be helpful under specific circumstances and with the proper teacher-support.

The more interesting question to me is how effective can computer games be in teaching about history, economics, and social studies in general.

Take chess. Chess is a very abstract game, using an idealized playing space with highly stylized pieces. Technically the pieces refer to feudal social positions, but in practice, they represent six sets of abilities. On the other hand, a board game like Monopoly is much less abstract, more anchored in the world (in particular, real estate markets in 1930s Atlantic City). And then you have computer games like SimCity or Civilization that purport to be about the actual world. But what can they teach one about how the world really works? Any lessons from chess will likely be stylized, abstract, and as a result highly transferable. Lessons from SimCity or Civilization (e.g., how to keep cities happy and productive) are likely to be at best shallow and at worst, misleading.

Yes games like SimCity and Civilization can be fun In the course of play, one needs to practice some math, and cultivate some kinds of problem-solving skill. But the depth of problems doesn't go that deep. One masters the rules of the game to achieve pre-set goals. For all of the engaging graphics though, these games fail to rise to the pure simplicity masking deep deep complexity in a game like chess. For a hint of this, check out Garry Kasparov's wonderful article The Chess Master and the Computer from the the February 11, 2010 New York Review of Books (here's some more blog and quotes from the article).

It is very important to recognize that SimCity and Civilization and other games are designed. That is, they are not the real world. [Yes chess is a social product, and in a sense "designed", but more in the way that evolution "designs" -- chess has evolved over time, with many hands and minds touching it, refining it, smoothing it. It has withstood the test of time, and doesn't require electricity.]

Will Wright and Sid Meier and other game designers have a particular understanding of the way the world works. And that understanding, including ideology, power relationships, how the world changes, the range of possibilities, infuses, and ultimately limits, the games. Games are highly structured, and only work because they have well-defined rules. (There is a substantial literature on this too, but here is one link to a 2004 article from a libertarian website that looks at this: "Free Play", from reason.com. Take-away quote: "Political ideas are infiltrating not just the back-stories of games but their 'play mechanics' -- the inner workings that shape game behavior. ")

I actually spoke to Will Wright about the question of possibilities in SimCity, briefly, on the floor of MacWorld, more than 15 years ago. Why not have an element of citizen morale that could kick in in times of trouble? After all, morale was an important component that saw the heroic citizens of Leningrad through its thousand-day siege, and London through the blitz, during World War II. And why not have a potential of solar power as a possible technology, instead of just smoke-spewing coal-fired plants and nuclear power plants that inevitably blow up? Wright just got mad. (Maybe these things eventually made it into SimCity, I haven't looked at the game in a decade.)

[The idea of ideology infusing a game is true even of a centuries-old, rich-in-tradition game like chess. Chess is a war game, with a heirarchy of pieces, and an implicit ideology. (The ideology includes some surprises. I like the idea that (a) pawns can checkmate a king, (b) the queen is the most powerful piece on the board but not the most important one, and (c) a pawn can become a more powerful being when it completes its journey across the board.) Chess to me is a pure game: it is a game of deep thought, of intricate patterns, of complex problem-solving. It is also rich in life lessons. Some of the life lessons are short-changed when chess is played against a computer. Gone are the social niceties of shaking hands before a game, the discipline of touch-move, and the novelty of human play. Online is different from face-to-face.]

When computer games are used in the classroom, there is always a teaching moment to clarify the hidden sides of the game. Especially with games that attempt to portray actual events or processes. What does it say about what happened or happens? What does it imply about power and change? What is there? What is missing?

jd

Scantron performance assessment, so far

2010-02-07T17:57:00.000-08:00

We began the online Scantron Performance Assessment at our school last week. Here are some initial observations about the testing so far.

As a plus, the web-based software has been responsive. I assume there is some significant load on the test servers, since I think most CPS schools are operating within the same test window as us. (I'm not sure of this -- in any case I haven't seen a problem with test server response.) When tests have been interrupted, the Scantron site has been doing a good job starting back up where the students were. (We have had a particular situation where students have accidentally unplugged computers mid-test.) The administration functions are easy to use, and the reports are nice (all caveats regarding the type of test that it is notwithstanding!).

On the negative side, I see a number of issues with the assessment:

Younger students (3rd graders in particular) are unfamiliar with the testing medium. Some have limited experience with mouse buttons, especially avoiding the right mouse button. Accidentally pressing the right-mouse button throws up a context menu, and clicking the wrong item seems to exit the test. This confuses them.
Then there is the general anxiety about "taking a test". If the regular classroom teacher is not present to help ease student anxieties, I suspect that students will not do as well.
There is of course the general stress of test-taking, but this is true of paper-based tests as well (or does the computer have a special authority?) Still, for some students at least, the stress probably has a negative effect on performance.
Student focus, behavior, and alertness varies during the school day. Prime testing time seems to be at the very beginning of the day. However, it is not possible to test all students at the beginning of the day (unlike ISAT), given equipment constraints, and the fact that we are administering 3 tests X 15 classrooms = 45 test sessions in a 12-day test window.
There is an opportunity cost to the assessment -- diverting teachers from teaching, expropriating technology prep time or lab availability to do assessments, plus the administrative time to organize sessions.

The adaptive aspect of the test means some students may take longer to complete the test. This gives rise to a few issues:

The reading assessment contains lengthy passages. After an hour of reading text on-screen, test fatigue starts to set in, which must affect performance. The test actually seemed cruel for some 4th graders who kept seeing additional reading passages to read and answer questions on.
Students who complete the test early need to be kept occupied. It is hard enough to keep students still for extended periods, especially if their regular classroom teacher isn't present. If they are in a lab, they want to do fun things with the computer. Splitting the class up (sending students who are done back to their regular classroom) presents additional challenges for both the classroom teacher and the test proctor.
Keeping students focused on the test for 45 minutes or an hour can be a challenge.
Students who take longer to finish see their peers finish. This looks like it becomes another source of anxiety.

Test integrity is another issue:

When students take a paper-based test, desks are re-arranged in rows. In a lab setting, students are sitting next to their fellow test-takers. Students have to be told not to talk to the students next to them, not to be distracted by what is on their screen, not to volunteer answers. Students have to be trained how to take the assessment.
Some classes, when inclusion students are present, exceed the number of computers in the lab. Special arrangements have been made (commandeer some laptops from the Parent Resource Center, use an overflow room), but test administration and adequate proctoringbecomes an issue.
At least one student had the wits to call up an online dictionary to help with some vocabulary passages. Oops. It is difficult to monitor 35 computer screens at once.
I see this one as a big flaw: Testing is active for students outside of school hours. We have one student who completed the test on Sunday from an ATT IP address. I am able to log on as a student and begin and resume testing.

From at least some of the points above, it is clear that the assessment medium is in-between the student and their skills and their understanding. It is not a transparent, neutral thing. I repeat a sentence from above: Students have to be trained how to take the assessment. Not only do they need to know the content being assessed -- they have to master the testing medium ("testing as a genre"). This includes not just the format of text passages, the deliberate deception built into multiple choice answers, the often ambiguous test questions and answers. It also includes things like pacing and focus (testing as an athletic event). With the computer thrown in the mix, they need to master the mouse and keyboard skills, understand how buttons, program flow and the browser works, and deal with physical factors like screen glare, reading text onscreen, and sitting in a chair at a keyboard for extended periods of time.

If this was just part of the overall assessment toolbox for teachers, the negatives above might not be such a big issue -- a good teacher would just factor in the limitations of the testing medium. But this test is different I think -- teacher careers will hang on the results. (See previous posts for the rapid advance of evaluation teachers on the basis of student test performance.)

jd

A PD I liked

2010-02-05T16:22:00.000-08:00

Another course assignment -- thinking about a great professional development that I attended, and what made it great. The assignment actually is about the last great one, but I have a hard time thinking of a great one, at least recently. I attended a good day-long program on websites for K-8 students last year. "Good" because it was fast-paced, because I learned about a lot of new websites, because it reminded me of how much stuff is out there. The presenter was up on web resources, and I felt that I learned a lot from the session. The session included a good takeaway reference with a companion web site to keep the reference material current.

What made it good for me might have made it not so good for other attendees. I appreciated the speed and density of the material, but someone with less comfort with the Internet might have felt that it was too much. Since attendance was voluntary (it required payment), the PD organizer could forewarn attendees of the workshop level. The attendees could self-select if the PD was for them. This is a much simpler PD scenario than one where attendees with a wide range of skills and expectations are required to attend.

Jd

A good read

2010-02-03T16:42:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to a charming op-ed piece about child development and its curriculum implications: Playing to Learn by Susan Engel, the director of the teaching program at Williams College (from the 2/1/10 NYT). Some choice quotes:

Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.

What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

Our success depends on embracing a curriculum focused on essential skills like reading, writing, computation, pattern detection, conversation and collaboration — a curriculum designed to raise children, rather than test scores.

Evaluating student use of technology tools

2010-01-31T09:22:00.000-08:00

How should teachers evaluate student use of technology tools? For projects, use a rubric derived from the learning goals of the project. Assess the quality of the artifact content, the quality of the form of the artifact, and maybe the quality of collaboration. For the result of a computer-based direct instruction tool, assess the student on the mastery of the concepts using either the assessments built into the tool, or some teacher-generated pre- and post-assessment matched to the content presented in the tool. Time spent on the exercise might be another assessment criteria.

[You can stop reading now if you want. The rest just wanders around. That first paragraph was an automated response; then I started to think about it some more; but if you read to the end, you will see that I ended up back at the beginning anyway. Sigh.]

But wait. I am equating assessment with evaluation. Some of the academic literature, though, distinguishes between the two. Wiggins and McTighe (2006), in the glossary of their Understanding by Design (2nd ed.) view assessment as a more general category of attempting to determine a student's progress in a rather human way ("the implication is that in an assessment, the teacher makes thoughtful observations and disinterested judgments, and offers clear and helpful feeback"). Evaluation, on the other hand, suggests attaching a value to student performance, hence a quantification and possibly a ranking. "A teacher can assess a student's strengths and weaknesses without placing a value or grade on the performance." A Google search on "assessment vs. evaluation" turns up ten hits. One hit, the Assessment Center Toolbox page, outlines a number of distinctions. Generally evaluation leads to a grade; assessment leads to an adjustment of teaching and perhaps learning. (Although if all of the students received low grades, one might want to reconsider teaching strategies, no?)

On the other hand, Linn and Gronlund (1995), Measurement and Assessment in Teaching, 7th ed., makes no obvious distinction. Nor does Nitko (2001), Educational Assessment for Students. I can't find any attempt to distinguish between them in the NCTM Grades 6-8 Mathematics Assessment Sampler (2005), which refers to the NCTM 1995 Assessment Standards for School Mathematics. The NCTM assessment standards use "evaluating" as a rationale for assessment.

Underneath the distinction is a whiff of the eternal tussle between the direct instruction/behaviorist camp and the constructivist camp. Objectivists struggle to assign a quantity to everything as a proxy for reality. Constructivists struggle to find more elusive indicators of growth and mastery through authentic student artifacts. The implication is that objectivists evaluate; constructivists assess. (My personal take: (1) "objectivist", used here because it is in common use in education circles (see e.g., Roblyer and Doering, 2010, Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching (5th ed.), is a poor choice of term, but that leads to an entirely other digression; (2) both strategies for teaching in fact have a valid place in the overall teaching process, and I think a really good teacher knows when to use which.

This leads to another subtlety in the posed question. If the goal of teaching is to push student thinking up the ladder of Bloom's taxonomy, a teacher would want to see evidence of the analysis, evaluation and creation (or analysis, synthesis and evaluation in the original scheme). Recognizing evidence of higher-order thinking, or genuine relevant novelty requires intellectual flexibility on the part of the teacher. The best a good teacher can do is to hint to the student what that looks like because it (by definition?) cannot be quantified.

This difficulty (if not impossibility) of quantifying novelty or true understanding is reflected in the maddeningly vague rubric terms in Wiggins and McTighe (2006, see above). Two rubrics are needed (or two distinct parts to the rubric): a rubric for understanding, and a rubric for performance. The rubric for understanding must, by necessity, consist of soft, subjective, Bloomish terms; and the teacher must really work at expressing what real understanding looks like.

So following from these two dimensions (understanding vs. performance; which can roughly be translated into content vs. form), evaluating (or assessing) student use of technology tools, at least in the problem-solving / inquiry / discovery / constructivist mode falls into two categories. First and foremost is the content of the project -- does it reflect real understanding of the material? Second, does the form, the presentation or performance, reflect creativity or facility with the chosen tools. And we might add a third category, related to the social dimension of the knowledge construction / acquisition process: how well did the student do with the collaboration part?

Which brings this back to the beginning.

jd

Essential questions

2010-01-30T15:35:00.000-08:00

Essential questions are considered a key aspect of inquiry-based learning. Here is my first pass at creating a list of essential questions:

What are the 39 Steps?

Who do you love?

Why is the ocean near the shore?

How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?

How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall?

Who wrote the Book of Love?

Who will stop the rain?

How come you say you will when you won't?

How come you say you do when you don't?

How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?

How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?

Will the circle be unbroken?

¿Que es mas macho? Light bulb or school bus?

Why does a cube have six sides?

"Hey buddy -- why the long face?" (A horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, ...)

When the DVD says that the image has been re-formatted to fit my TV screen, how do they know what size my TV is?

Knock, knock. Who's there?

What ails thee?

I have some feedback for you. Would you like to hear it?

jd

Generation M2: Media in the lives of young people

2010-01-29T16:55:00.000-08:00

The Kaiser Family Foundation released an important study earlier this month on the media use of young people. Titled Generation M²: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, the study is the latest in a series of surveys of media use of young people over a 10-year-period.

A few quotes from the "Key Findings" section jumped out at me:

"Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38—almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day."

"Youth who spend more time with media report lower grades and lower levels of personal contentment... Heavy media users are also more likely to say they get into trouble a lot, are often sad or unhappy, and are often bored."

"Two groups of young people stand out for their high levels of media consumption: those in the tween and early teen years (11- to 14-year-olds), and Blacks and Hispanics."

In an interesting discussion with technology teachers and principals, some felt that we should embrace this phenomena, and find ways to engage students and deliver instruction in more mediated ways. Others suggested media zones at schools, like the smoking patio of old (my high school had one), where kids would be free to use their cell phones and MP3 players. Still others had an opposite response: schools should provide more unmediated spaces, like basketball programs or chess clubs or cheerleading, and more opportunities to engage with the outdoors.

I see another implication of the study: we should be emphasizing media literacy (e.g., how to "read" a television show or an advertisement or a music video or even a video game) more. We have a detailed set of standards and goals and performance objectives for the written word. Perhaps an expanded set of learning goals for other media, so that students can become more critical consumers of all of the media they are exposed to...

jd

Teacher evaluations

2010-01-25T17:28:00.000-08:00

The speech by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, giving the union okay to teacher evaluations based on student test performance may have given Illinois governor Pat Quinn the political cover to sign the "Performance Evaluation Reform Act of 2010" on January 15. The bill "requires every school district to incorporate student performance as a significant factor in teacher and principal evaluations" according to the governor's press release.

The bill is an example of the extortions demanded by the Obama/Duncan administration from cash-strapped states and school districts to qualify for "Race to the Top" funds ("Dangling Money, Obama Pushes Education Shift"; "State Looks at Doubling Cap on Charter Schools"). There have been some brave "just say no"s from some states and districts. See e.g. "Texas Shuts Door on Millions in Education Grants", "In Race for U.S. School Grants Is a Fear of Winning").

An article in the Atlantic Monthly this month, "What Makes a Great Teacher?", praising the Teach for America alternative certification program, also gives a nod to teacher evaluations based on student performance (referring to the District of Columbia, which begins a new evaluation system where half of a teacher's performance "score" is based on student standardized test performance).

On a related note, someone passed along a link to a 2008 article from The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, "Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?". I hope to dig into the reasoning in the article real soon now. The article is especially interesting because it references some of the (academic) economic research behind the push for teacher evaluations based on student test performance.

jd

Three caucuses challenge Stewart

2010-01-23T16:33:00.000-08:00

For reference, here are links to the websites of three Chicago Teacher Union caucuses that are challenging the current leadership in the upcoming May, 2010 election.

Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE)

Caucus for a Strong Democratic Union (CDSU)

Pro-Active Chicago Teachers and School Employees (PACT)

I can't find a web site for current CTU president Marilyn Stewart's United Progressive Caucus (UPC).

jd

Teaching technology

2010-01-23T15:36:00.000-08:00

Posed in class: Should technology (computer skills, typing, software instruction, etc.) be taught as separate skills or as part of an integrated lesson?

What do we really mean by technology? Certainly computers are technology, as well as the different software that run on the computers. But technologies can be read in a much larger sense, a la Marshal McLuhan, as the tools we use to interact with the world, the artifacts that mediate our relationship with the world -- media. In this sense, the phonetic alphabet is technology, so is writing, the printed word, the arts in general, number systems and so on.

Given a broad definition of technology, one could argue that teaching has always involved both the teaching of technology as well as concepts, understandings, cultures mediated by the technology (and hence shaped if not determined by the technology). So much of early schooling is devoted to mastering the phonetic alphabet and the written word and numeration. When teachers teach phonemes and the alphabet and addition, they are teaching technology. Running with that idea, what is the best way to teach those skills? Isn't it a mix of direct instruction of basic skills, supported by guided and independent practice which can eventually lead to inquiry-based learning to extend and deepen the skills and cement their real-world relevancy? I think so.

So the short answer to the question above is: both. Skills taught without practical application are quickly lost. Trying to incorporate skills into a project without some prior introduction to those skills is inefficient and probably counter-productive. [I am thinking here of an article by Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching", from Educational Psychologist, 2006. In a teeny nutshell, the authors argue that constructivist etc. learning place a heavy load on the cognitive functions, and if basic knowledge isn't there to support the constructivist learning, it is inefficient and ineffective. Guided learning is critical to create the structures that experiential learning can build on: "The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide 'internal' guidance." (p. 75)]

One immediate question that arises when talking about new (i.e. unfamiliar) technologies is who will do the technology instruction? The NETS for Teachers standards expect the classroom teacher to be able to do the instruction ("design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments" and "model digital age work and learning"). This expectation is also implicit in the Chicago Public Schools Technology Academy Program (TAP, aka Technology Magnet Cluster Program; see for example the CPS Tech Academy wiki) which is investing heavily in teacher training programs. However, in practice (and following from the distinction in instructional modes described by Kirschner et al above), depending on the mix of teacher skills and infrastructure, it may make more sense to separate technology direct-skill instruction, and do it in a separate lab setting; but coordinate it with traditional subject lesson units (albeit technology-enhanced) in the classroom. That is, let the technology teacher introduce technologies and basic skills (e.g., in the lab during a prep period). Students then deepen their skills working on technology-rich (and inquiry-rich) projects, supported in constructivist style by their more tech-savvy peers, the regular classroom teacher (as able), or a technology coach. The teacher's priority would be encouraging quality content and higher order thinking.

Over time ideally the regular classroom teacher has the time and support to deepen technology skills to better support students in their new media work. But the complexity and mix of new technologies, as well as good pedagogical practice, calls for a division of teaching labor.

jd

Qualitative science as a theory of problem-solving

2010-01-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

This is a concept map of qualitative science as a model for doing "inquiry-based learning". It is perhaps mis-titled as "qualitative science as a theory of problem-solving." "Problem-solving" to me is a negative way of framing inquiry -- "problems" indicate something is wrong, they are obstacles to be overcome as opposed to opportunities to be embraced. The spirit of qualitative science (or Goethean science) is much more in the inquiry-as-opportunity domain than the problem-as-obstacle one.

The most complete expression of qualitative science in the education world can be found in the Waldorf movement.

The references for the concept map are below.

Davis, J. (2006). "The Goethean approach and human artifacts." Retrieved from http://www.gocatgo.com/texts/goethe.artifact.pdf January 17, 2010.

Holdrege, C. (Summer, 2005). Doing Goethean science. Janus Head. 8(1).

Miller, D. ed. and trans. (1988). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Scientific studies. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers.

Root, C. (Spring, 2006). Conversation between friends: An inspiration for Goethe's phenomenological method. In context. 15. Ghent, NY: The Nature Institute.

Steiner, R. (1996). The education of the child. Great Barrington, MA: The Anthroposophic Press.

The map was done with Kidspiration (mainly to develop skills with the tool since we use at my school. Images from Wikipedia (Creative Commons license or Wikimedia Commons); http://www.clipartof.com/gallery/clipart/conversation.html; or images distributed with Kidspiration.

jd

Bad PD

2010-01-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

I am thinking about the last awful professional development session I attended, mainly because I am taking a course this winter in staff development and educational technology, and that's what the first assignment asks us to do.

This of course is a difficult assignment because they are all generally bad, although usually not for the same reasons. And mea culpa some of them are ones I have done. To pick one (not mine) at random: the organizer asked everyone to be sure to be at the training by 8:00 a.m. On a Saturday morning, but had failed to tell the trainer to be there then. So the PD started an hour late to a group of grumpy teachers. The first hour (or at least it seemed like an hour) was spent going over a tedious history of the organization behind the topic of the PD. The entire material that we needed to cover could probably have been covered in an hour, but was successfully stretched out to three hours. No follow-up. And it was several months before everything was in place to actually apply what we learned about in the training.

Another session, one that I did facilitate, turned out to be severely overbooked by the training organizers. There was a serious failure to think through ahead of time which sessions training attendees would go to (and for many of them, there were no options). The assigned room for the training did not have enough seats, let alone tables or work surfaces. The session was supposed to provide an overview of features of the MacBook and Mac OS X for teachers new to the Mac. A session like this will have lots of questions and confusions, so the ratio of presenters and helpers to attendees is critical. In this case there were two of us in a crowded room trying to help forty or more people. I'm not sure what anyone got out of the session.

Some takeaways: There is some formula governing the the technical content of the material, the expertise of the learners, and from those two what the ratio of teacher to learner should be. In general, I think, the lower the level of expertise, the lower the ratio of teacher/learner. Adequate facilities are important (room size, seating, line-of-sight, sound, heating/cooling, lighting, table space if relevant, etc.) Starting on time and respecting the time of the learners is just good manners. Follow-up would be nice.

The National Staff Development Council has developed standards for staff development. Most of the problems described above failed on the process standard of design (trainings incorporated inappropriate or weak learning strategies) and weak content (failed to deepen content knowledge given the amount of time).

jd

CORE launches a Testing Task Force

2010-01-17T07:49:00.000-08:00

I joined some 400 other people on January 9 at the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) Educational Summit. Currents and events at CPS seem to be building to a head. Between the funding crisis, Huberman's performance management mania, hit lists and turnarounds and closings, and, well, the general social crisis that comes through the front door of the school every day, some sort of resistance has to, needs to develop. The Chicago Teachers Union is an obvious organized force to address what's going on, but as far as I can tell, it is a no show. One of CORE's main principles is a member-driven union which I think at this point is sorely needed. (CORE announced a slate for the upcoming CTU elections.)

Since "teacher evaluation" is the big stick to beat teachers with right now, and the big end of that stick is standardized multiple-choice tests, I was especially interested in CORE's new Testing Task Force: "CORE is launching a testing task force to look into how the misuse of standardized tests interferes with making schools that serve the best interests of our students."

The announcement flyer continues: "Our first task will be to encourage teachers that they are not alone in their feeling that tests are terrorizing students, parents, teachers and entire schools. The current testing regime replaces the joy of learning with the bureaucracy of learning."

As I have written in some earlier posts, CPS teachers are working on two testing fronts. ISAT remains the main measure of Adequate Yearly Progress mandated by No Child Left Behind. ISAT is still the main "high stakes" event for the student (it affects their promotion) and for the school (it affects probation, etc.). The second front is the new Scantron Performance Series, which will be administered three times a year, is done online, and provides immediate scores. It is being phased in this year and will replace the Benchmark Assessment in 2010-11. It is a "computer adaptive" test, which means that questions will increase or decrease in complexity until the software determines a score for the student. The test is standards-based, and will provide a number of metrics, including a scaled score, approximate grade-level performance, a normed national percentile ranking and a Lexile score.

I believe the Scantron test will become the main tool for assessing teachers. CPS will expect a student's score to increase throughout the year. And depending on what statistical voodoo the district uses, the amount of expected increase may vary from school to school. A student's score could increase absolutely, but if the increase does not meet CPS expectations, the teacher has not added enough "value" to the student, and so has failed. Since classroom teachers are being targeted as the sole agent responsible for student advance, the scores will be reflected back on the classroom teacher.

Describing the standardized testing regime as a form of terrorism is on the mark I think, given the pressure put on teachers who are presented with the spectre of turnaround, closure and unemployment. Teachers are not being motivated, they are just being demoralized.

From the CORE workshop on January 9, I heard two messages coming from panelists about testing. One message says that high stakes multiple choice tests are okay, but the opacity around them makes them suspect. And so the pushback is to make it possible to see the tests and challenge the kinds of questions on them and the scoring methodology -- i.e., to make "better" tests.

A second message challenges the whole premise of standardized testing -- that they are, in fact, designed to "sort and track," as one panelist put it. They are very limited assessment tools. This is of course a much more radical position.

As teachers we recognize the importance of student assessment. But it needs to be responsible and effective assessment that matches the student. Multiple choice tests can have a useful role, under specific circumstances, but for many reasons, right now the standardized testing regime is an education disaster.

In a major speech to the National Press Club last week, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, outlined her "New Path Forward for Public Education." In the speech, Weingarten opened the door to significant changes in teacher evaluation, including assessing the "student performance" of their charges. The evaluation of teachers is a valid expectation (but keep the term "accountability" out of it! Reject the intrusion of market-speak into the sphere of teaching!). But teaching takes place within a complex matrix of factors. The teacher is not a lone actor. To her credit, Weingarten added that her "new path forward calls on principals, administrators and elected officials to ensure that teachers get the tools, time and trust they need to do their jobs."

BUT BUT BUT. Without a strong, effective organization (read "union"), that second part will not happen. Teachers will be expected to perform miracles because they do not have the "tools, time and trust". "Tools, time and trust" are the preconditions for successful teaching. This second part of her message will be lost, and all the dogs will hear is "the union says it is okay to evaluate teachers on test scores." The particularities of a given school and community will be disappeared. And teachers, especially the experienced ones at the top of the pay grade, will be hung out to dry.

jd

Where the light is

2009-12-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

Repeating a joke:

Late one night, a cop came upon a drunk, on his hands and knees, under a streetlight.

"Hey buddy," the cop asked. "What're you doing?"

"I'm looking for my keys," the drunk replied.

"Where did you lose them?" the cop asked.

"Over there," the drunk replied, pointing down a dark alley.

"Then why are you looking over here?" the cop asked.

"Because this is where the light is."

Ron Huberman, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, has made "performance management" a central tenet of his management strategy. The key metric for measuring performance is standardized test scores. Because that is where the light is.

The impulse behind performance management I think generally is okay -- what one does in the world should be based on what one observes and experiences, and not just what one cooks up based on whim. That is the best part of science. Where this falls down is when one starts confusing the observed quantified data for observed reality.

Steve Talbott, whose work I tremendously appreciate, has written quite a bit about the deep hole that a lot of modern scientific practice has fallen into. (A good collection of his writings are available on the From Mechanism to a Science of Qualities page). In "The Vanishing World Machine", Talbott argues that modern science began when people turned away from labyrinthine abstractions along the lines of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" to observing the world around them. But science, especially of late, has made something of a U-turn.

It's true that we no longer ask, 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' but we are certainly entranced with the question, 'How much data can we store on the head of a pin?' And our trance is only deepened when the answer turns out to be: 'a hell of a lot'. What many haven't realized yet is how easily our preoccupation with the invisible constructions on that pinhead blind us to the world we originally set out to perceive and understand in its full material glory.

The world ceases to be the world of dandelions and earthworms and snowflakes and becomes instead a mass of numeric data. Talbott asserts that "our preoccupation with workable mechanisms, far from contradicting our preference for abstract cerebration, is itself a primary symptom of our flight into abstraction and our refusal to see the world." Much of modern science has turned away from the dark alley of the world, back to the sterile streetlight of abstraction.

In modern education, the turning away takes the form of poring over reports of easy-to-process (thanks to computers, etc.) multiple-choice test data. The living child has been replaced with a data shadow. And teachers are pushed into interacting with the shadow, not the child.

Setting aside consideration of the political forces behind the overdrive to privatize education in Chicago, and looking at Huberman's emphasis on performance management from a strictly methodological perspective, I argue that it rests on a broken understanding of science and a disturbed view of the world.

What might be an alternative? I quote from Talbott again, this time from a chapter in his most recent book, Devices of the Soul. Talbott quotes a description of the assessment process at a Camphill community, a network of residential communities for people with special needs.

Every week the staff of a house or entire facility come together to discuss a particular child:

The child's case history is read, and then the teachers, helpers and nurses give their reports and impressions of the child in question. Many symptoms, signs and features are collected until -- usually under the guidance of one of the doctors -- the image of the child arises. His habits, achievements, faults and failures are laid out in such a way that gradually a complete picture of his individuality appears.

In this picture the staff find guidance that enables them to clear a path for the child's continued growth.

Talbott then comments:

The contrast with the mentality behind standardized testing could hardly be greater. Certainly teachers must assess student performance -- and in the most profound and intimate way possible. The problem with standardized testing is that it avoids any such rigorous assessment. It is a hopelessly crude tool, a means of studied ignorance rather than deep understanding. And, as a side effect, it removes all flexibility, the living qualities, from classroom engagement. When you know in advance exactly what knowledge the student-container is supposed to hold, there's not much incentive to attend to the particular gifts and developmental needs, or the consuming interests, of the individual learner. Standardized testing is not student assessment; it is the refusal to assess.

Let me repeat that last sentence: "Standardized testing is not student assessment; it is the refusal to assess."

The keys to making education work aren't under the convenience of multiple choice testing. They are somewhere in the dark alley. Although, when you think about it, it really isn't that dark -- there is no shortage of humane, practical, working strategies to making education work.

jd

I attempt to develop something with Etoys

2009-11-28T12:44:00.000-08:00

I just finished a project for a class in multimedia applications. I used Etoys, the Squeak Smalltalk environment, for the development platform. Here is some reflection of my experience...

Etoys works best, like most things, when it is used for what it was designed for. Etoys is something of a desktop lab for exploring concepts -- check out what's on the shelf, see what happens when you mix things, hope not to blow anything up. The underlying pedagogical theme is Seymour Papert's constructionism (a play on, and an extension of, constructivism). Kids can learn by building things and trying them out and figuring out how to make them better.

So I can see using Etoys in scenarios where students are assigned a task, like "create a virtual aquarium containing virtual fish that swim around", "make a car that moves around a track" or even "display the measure of the angles in a triangle using the tools available in Etoys." In the course of constructing the goal, or exploring a concept, all sorts of learning areas are hit, including problem solving, logic, computer science, math, modeling and design.

These are not strictly multimedia applications though, at least as I understand it. To me, an application is a closed experience. The designer has specific learning goals in mind, and creates a series of paths for the user to follow, with different experiences along the way, using multiple media, that will help the user achieve the learning goals. So multimedia applications are limited by the imagination of the designer and the abilities of the software tools in creating the experiences the learner can have via the application. This is like the difference between a webquest and true open-ended inquiry. How heavily programmed is the user experience?

Trying to create a multimedia application using Etoys was ummm a challenge. I wanted to create an environment for the user that anticipated errors and provided enough feedback (which seems like 80% or more of application development). I wanted to guide the user through stages of the activity. I wanted to program the experience. And for this, I found Etoys to be a clumsy environment, dragging tiles around and opening and closing property views and right-clicking to see halos and such.

My experience was challenged by the absence, as far as I can tell, of complete documentation on the different objects available in the Etoys catalog. (I don't know how much time I spent trying to figure out how to calculate the measure of an angle!) There are various help balloons, quick start guides, and there is free documentation on the underlying Squeak Smalltalk environment and language. But the in-between documentation of various properties and what they mean and how to use them is missing (again, as far as I can tell). There is a fairly active user community, spread across forums, IRC and a mailing list. I had trouble joining the forum, the first place I usually go to find out things. I only figured out I could use IRC late in the process, and hadn't really thought of the mailing list as an option, but that might have worked as well. So support is definitely out there, but better documentation would have served me better. I could perhaps have delved deeper into the mysteries of Squeak Smalltalk to really get under the hood, but quickly getting up to speed with a new language, with the peculiarities of new syntax and operators and precedence and all of that was beyond the investment I wanted to make. There was no Goldilocks solution for me.

But again, I was trying to do something with Etoys (create a multimedia application) that I don't think it was designed for (namely, being a desktop lab for constructionist experiences). I was able to accomplish something, but my product really isn't in the spirit of constructionist learning. My foray has some opportunities for student discovery, but not a whole lot.

But... I could not have figured out the proper niche of Etoys in the classroom except by taking the tortuous route through application development using Etoys. Creating my application (zipped, with a video used in the project) turned out to be my own constructionist learning experience. Now I have an idea of where I might want to use Etoys in the classroom. And while I knew that, as far as computer learning goes, I learn best by having a practical problem that drives me to learn the tools at hand, now I have a name for that learning model: constructionism.

jd

Note: Etoys is free and available for download from the Etoys download page. You can find my project in the Etoys Showcase at this url. I think you need to have Etoys installed on your machine to actually view the project though.

The 2009 Bracey Report

2009-11-27T06:27:00.000-08:00

I saw a reference to this in an ISTE Special Interest Group on Digital Equity mailing:

The just-published The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education, 2009, by Gerald Bracey, looks at what the author considers to be "three of the most important assumptions about how to reform public education", namely:

High-quality schools can eliminate the achievement gap between whites and minorities.
Mayoral control of public schools is an improvement over the more common elected board governance systems.
Higher standards will improve the performance of public schools.

Exactly! Today these three points are usually passed on as if they are facts. Self-evident truths. Obvious. Of course. They are the bedrock of education policy in Chicago Public Schools.

And of course they aren't "facts", they aren't self-evident; and they aren't obvious. As assumptions, they are fundamentally ideological positions and essentially political.

Some points from the report that I would like to highlight:

Poverty is an objective factor in educational performance. Poverty has biological, social and psychological consequences that negatively affect educational performance. (The report details many different aspects of this.) Schools (and certainly not teachers) alone cannot resolve this problem.
The idea that mayoral control of education helps education is strictly a political assertion, and is not backed up by a serious review of its results in Chicago and New York (the most visible instances of mayoral control).
Organizing education around standardized, multiple choice tests and viewing education through the narrow slit of test data is antithetical both to educating human beings, and if you need a market rationale, to developing workers for the workplace of today and tomorrow.

I recommend the report. It has a great bibliography, too.

The Bracey Report comes from the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State. Gerald Bracey is also the author of Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality. Bracey passed away on October 20, 2009.

jd

Gradebook rant #1 and #2

2009-11-07T11:28:00.000-08:00

#1 - The first quarter ("cycle") in CPS closed last night (Friday, 11/6) at midnight. But then CPS goes and locks the online software teachers need to use, so no more first quarter grades can be entered now.

I don't get this. If the quarter ends on Nov. 6 (Friday), the next one can't start until Nov. 9 (Monday). And report card pickup this year isn't until 11/18 or 19 depending (due I think to the late school year start because of the late Labor Day this year, and Nov. 11 Veteran's Day getting in the way). So why lock Gradebook at the cycle end and prevent teachers getting last minute grades in? Not that I want to spend the weekend getting final quarter grades in, but I'd rather do it clear-headed on a Saturday than late Friday night. Why not lock it Sunday midnight?

There is an implicit understanding that teachers cannot complete their work within the standard 6.25 hour CPS workday (hence closing Gradebook at midnight and not the end of the workday). The Professional Development Day (yesterday, Nov. 6) as a day to get grades in is a joke, because it gets loaded up with, well, PD. So what is CPS thinking? Most of the teachers at my school were assuming they had some time to get the quarter grades in, and only heard Friday (yesterday) morning that the deadline was midnight last night. I'm guessing more than 3/4 of teachers will need to have their Gradebooks unlocked by the school's Gradebook administrator or heaven forbid, someone in the technology support area.

It is another example of trying to force (what looks to me to be) silly and not-thought out dictates and demands on the troops-in-the-trenches (and believe me, it is WWI out here), which ends up making more work for everybody all the way round.

I guess the good news is that the time I was going to spend today fixing up the grades is freed up now.

#2 - I attended the CPS Information Technology Services (ITS) "TechTalk 2009" event last Tuesday at the UIC Forum. TechTalk is an opportunity for the technology apparatus at CPS to talk to the "techcos" (a conflation of "technology coordinator") from the 600 CPS public schools. [Aside -- the techco position is a role, not a position. Typically a teacher or some other staff member is assigned the role of "techco", not hired as such. Techcos form a critical rubber-hits-the-road role in the chain of CPS technology service delivery, but they are stretched between multiple responsibilities. I tire myself thinking about this.] Anyway, at TechTalk 2009, attendees were treated to a talk about Gradebook, which is CPS's branding of a commercial third-party product called Gradespeed.

The presenter gave one of those classic tech talks where the end users were morons who did not read instructions. In fact users are generally smart people confronted with a confusing interface that could easily be fixed up. It is a poor technologist who blames the user for design shortcomings. Case in point: teachers can enter a numeric code to represent comments like "Is too easily distracted" (but only one for elementary schools we learned, even though there are five boxes!) . If the code is "028", you need to enter the leading zero. Why? Lazy programming. The person I was sitting next to and I agreed that this could be fixed in a couple of lines of code and eliminate untold headaches on the part of teachers who enter "28" instead of "028". Thinking about it, it isn't a couple lines of code -- it is less, just a matter of wrapping the user input in a couple of functions that check the input and clean it up for the user -- maybe 20 extra characters of code.

Example #2: The user has a row of links at the top of the screen to control options:

This is an online application, so you might think that you can click on the image, that it is a button? Nope. Only the text is a link. I have worked with computers for over 25 years and this one tripped me up. One gets in the habit of thinking how things should work, primarily a habit of life experience. Software designers design an experience, and the best ones anticipate user expectations. The user should be at the center of the design, not the designer. That's what "participatory design" and incorporating real live users in the design process is all about. Put them in a room and see what they try to do before releasing the product.

Another example is that when entering assignments, you must click an "Add" button to add a new assignment. However, after clicking "Add", you see a blank form again. No program feedback is provided to indicate that the assignment was saved. Was it saved? How would you know? Only by exiting the "Add" function by clicking "Finish" (what are you finishing?), and seeing if it now appears in the assignment list. Again, some simple code to acknowledge that the "Add" operation was successful would be a trivial enhancement.

The computer experience is often akin to stumbling around with a bucket on your head -- you have precious little feedback on where you have been or where you are or what lies ahead. The best software designers provide lots of feedback: cookie trails with trackback links, alerts, the use of color in logical places, and so on. Not so with Gradespeed / Gradebook. Instead the poor user who only wants to accomplish a task and not "work a computer" is blamed for not understanding the software.

Too much ranting? It's a beautiful day today. And now no grades to enter. Yay I think.

jd

Charter school limit raised

2009-11-01T05:56:00.000-08:00

I was reading through the Chicago Teachers Union newspaper (why do they print a four-color paper on clay-coated stock, especially given the financial problems the union is having?), and saw an article on Illinois Senate Bill 612, which was signed into law last July. Some highlights of the bill according to the article ("Charter school law includes wins and losses", p. 6):

Doubles the cap on charter schools in the Chicago area from 30 to 60 single-campus schools, plus an allowance for up to five multi-campus charters targeting drop-outs.
75% of charter school teachers across the state will need to be certified, up from 50% in Chicago before.
Charters need to disaggregate multi-campus data (single charters running multiple campuses was
There can be 30 contract schools (bound by the Illinois School Code, but the CPS Board contracts out management of a school -- click here for more on the types of schools under Renaissance 2010), plus five additional contract "turnaround schools"; but the contracts go through a new authorization process.
A parallel bill (SB 1984) says that charters fall under the Illinois Education Labor Relations Act, clarifying that teachers can organize at charters and contract schools.

The thing that sticks out the most to me is the doubling of the charter school number. In practice this will mean the closing of 30 more public schools because after students fill up the charters, the remaining public school enrollment will not justify keeping the school that lost students open.

In other CTU news, Jay Rehak and Lois Ashford won trustee seats on the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund in Friday's (10/30) election, defeating the incumbents supported by the CTU Executive Board. Rehak and Ashford are members of the Caucus of Rank and Educators (CORE). Per their web site, "We hope to democratize the Chicago Teacher’s Union and turn it into an organization that fights on behalf of its members and the students we teach."

This sounds like a rebuke of the current union leadership. What is the CTU doing anyway? And why does the CTU president draw two six-figure salaries? How can she do both jobs effectively? Which means she is doing neither one effectively. The new charter school bill, the school closings, Huberman's rampage, etc. etc. as cases in point...

jd

Creativity and education

2009-10-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

What is education for? This is a the question explored in Daniel Wolff's new book, How Lincoln Learned to Read. I confess I haven't read the book yet, but I did hear him speak at a book signing last week, and it is in the queue. This question -- what do we want out of education, for ourselves, for our children, for our community ? -- seems to fall into two broad camps. One camp (and where I hang out, or try to) sees education as a self-maximization process, the be-all-you-can-be approach. Economics is secondary, and will follow in one way of another -- more of a statement of faith I suppose, but...

You can identify people from the other camp because the words "economic competitiveness" will likely pop up early on. Education is an economic function, in Marxist terms, the social reproduction of labor power. To be economically competitive in the global market, you need to know (fill in the blank). Pablum about the nature of work today, what employers look for or need to be competitive is trotted out, and then blueprints for "education reform" soon follow. Case in point: Thomas Friedman's October 20 column in the New York Times titled The New Untouchables. The "new untouchables" are the workers who bring something special (dare I say, something human?) to the workplace, like creativity or interpersonal skills, and thus are untouchable (i.e. difficult to replace) in the workplace. This has been a common theme over the past 25 years at least -- jobs that can be done by a machine or by a cheaper counterpart elsewhere will eventually be done by a machine or moved elsewhere. Within the dismal terms of the global economy, Capital will seek out the greatest return with the lowest cost, and Labor will always be an important front in the war to maximize profit. What is difficult to replicate in technology are attributes like (per Friedman) entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

The two camps do overlap in some areas. Friedman holds that creativity is a key feature of the successful modern worker; a humanist educator would agree that creativity is a very special human potential and should be nurtured. "Entrepreneurship" is a narrow economic term and situates education in terms of the marketplace; a broader conception is to foster initiative, forward thinking, exploration, fascination and a willingness to try things out. Nevertheless, there are common elements in both camps.

The sad irony in this is that both camps are calling for a radically different kind of education than that being forced down the throats of teachers in Chicago and elsewhere. Data-driven instruction may sound scientific and efficient, but at the heart of it, it is antithetical to the kinds of skills Friedman is writing about that today's economy needs. (And Friedman has narrowly conceived of the human being as only a worker -- it doesn't begin to touch on the full range of human possibility.)

Simply put, multiple choice is antithetical to creative thinking. In terms of either globalization (Friedman) or humanism, the approach is wrong and destructive. Our society and planet face big big problems, and time is to critical to be wasted screwing around with wrong solutions.

jd

Huberman's vision for education in Chicago

2009-10-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

I heard the Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Office Ron Huberman speak on September 29 to a group of principals and teachers where he once again laid out his agenda for Chicago public schools.

Huberman's plan is organized around themes of "performance management" and "data driven instruction." Like other Mayor Daley appointees, Huberman (who, for the sake of possible non-Chicago readers, came to the school system from the Chicago Transit Authority) in theory brings private-sector style managerial expertise to the sprawling bureaucracy of CPS. George Schmidt, in his front page story ("Data Driven Drivel", sprawling in its own way) in the latest issue of Substance, uses the term "narrative" to describe Huberman's pitch. The term is well chosen I think. "Narrative" captures the essential point that Huberman is telling a story about what is happening. In this case he is framing it within the too familiar story of capitalism and the market, with all of the narrow and limiting assumptions and possibilities that that dismal story allows: In his narrative-story-vision, schools are education finishing plants that add education "value" to children. Value-added is measured by the change in standardized test scores over time. Individual schools are the education providers (not the school system, which only provides infrastructure), and schools, in the Obama-Duncan-Huberman world of "choice" (another marketplace term), compete with each other for raw material to finish. In this story, parents are free to take their raw material to whichever finishing plant is going to add the most value.

Hubeman is very explicit about this. In his September talk, he described each child as having a "backpack" of money, the money collected from taxpayers to educate children. CPS collects about $10,000 per child per year, or $14,000 for Title I schools (schools with large numbers of students from poor families that receive additional Federal money). In Huberman's vision, parents should be able to take that backpack of cash to the school of their choice. Schools will have consumer report cards showing their "value-added" scores to help parents in choosing the schools most successful at raising test scores. Teachers at each school will compete with the teachers at other schools in the city, both public and charter, and through that marketplace competition, their schools, at least in theory, will become better finishing plants.

So what is wrong with Huberman's story? I think that in practice, schools doing well now will catch the best students, and struggling schools will fall further behind. It is the same process of polarization that plays out in the economy at large -- the rich get richer, etc. Likewise, charters skim off the best students, or the students with the most parent involvement in their lives (and there is some correlation there). Public neighborhood schools become the schools of last resort -- they cannot refuse to take a student in their attendance boundaries. The students with the most needs will pool up in the public schools. Their test scores will sink the neighborhood schools, feeding a vicious cycle of increasing privatization. More charters will spring up to snatch the backpack of cash; the teacher's union will be effectively broken; and the concept of public education as a great project of Democracy will die.

Management by FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt -- is the order of the day in many CPS schools now as the pace of this process accelerates. It is questionable that that strategy works in private companies; in a school it is disastrous. Teachers feel like they are under siege. They have a difficult-enough time as it is, coping with classes with too many students, with too few resources, no recess, and a steady stream of new mandates from on high. The axe of school closing and unemployment, based on one testing event a year, now swings over their heads as well.

The marketplace model has other problems too. Certainly accountability is important, but it needs to recognize that schools are not separate from social and historic forces playing out outside of the school building. But reducing accountability to test scores is fundamentally flawed. Test scores are a convenient metric, and fit in with the overall quantification of everything that is part and parcel of the marketplace metaphysic. More on that in my next post.

jd

CPS moves to online assessments

2009-09-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

I attended a briefing for principals and test coordinators on the CPS district-wide assessment plan for the coming year. The briefing was given folks from the Department of Student Assessment, a part of the Office of Research, Evaluation and Accountability. Click here for a link to the Powerpoint presentation for elementary schools. The DoSA page also has a link to the high school strategy presentation.

I was primarily interested in Grades 3 - 8, so this summary only touches on that. CPS will administer three benchmarks assessments in reading and math this year, in October, January and May. (Here's a link for the complete assessment schedule.) The district is moving towards an online benchmark assessment, and is supposed to be working to get all schools ready to move to all-online benchmark assessments in 2010-11. Some schools (if they have the technology infrastructure) will be able to start with online assessment beginning with the winter assessment in January. (Constructed response questions will still be graded by hand, by teachers, and entered manually into CIM.)

Setting aside the tremendous limitations of multiple choice as an assessment tool (and how education, like so many things today, is inverted to serve the available technology, and not the other way round, but that's another discussion) ...

The advantage to online assessment is that multiple choice results are available immediately, instead of two to three weeks later. The disadvantages: getting the students used to the testing format and software (sigh, that this should be an issue -- we train them to be multiple-choice test-takers), scheduling test time in the computer lab, the inevitable network and software and computer problems, the extra burden on technology staff, handling accommodations in a computer lab setting, and no doubt other issues not immediately popping into my brain.

CPS is also moving to a second testing format, the Scantron Performance Series, which is a computer-based adaptive testing tool. "Adaptive" means that the testing software presents the test-taker with more difficult questions if he or she answered the previous question correctly; or an easier question if the previous question was answered incorrectly, until the testing algorithm can determine a performance level for the test taker. Students will take reading, math and science Scantron tests.

In 2009-10, Scantron is available as either an addition to the district benchmark assessment, or as a substitute. In 2010-11, students will take both tests, three times a year. This flows from the new Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman's emphasis on data collection as an education management tool. See Catalyst's 9/3/09 posting "Huberman outlines strategies to improve Chicago schools" for a brief overview.

The Benchmark Assessment is a criterion-referenced assessment, and so is intended to measure student mastery of particular skills (the criteria). [The math assessment question mix is also mapped to the Chicago Math and Science Initiative (CMSI) pacing guide for the four chosen CMSI math curricula (Trailblazers, Everyday Math, Connected Math and MathThematics).] As a performance measurement tool, the Benchmark Assessment is not so useful. The best proxy in the BA data for tracking overall performance has been the ISAT Predicted Scale Score, a guesstimate of how the student will perform on the state standardized test. The predicted score is supposedly anywhere from about 75% to 90% accurate (I just got our schools numbers so haven't seen yet how this relates to our results.)

The Scantron test is a performance measurement -- it doesn't say specifically what a student knows or needs to work on (which isn't to say necessarily that the Benchmark Assessment does, although that is its purpose), only where a student is in the mass of students, and is he or she making "progress" based on prior Scantron scores. The Benchmark Assessment is considered "low stakes" (no one's job is on the line, schools won't be closed because of scores, students won't be held back -- as opposed to "high stakes" like ISAT where all three of the above are the case).

I suspect that the Scantron test will come to be considered by school administrators and teachers as high stakes. I am guessing that the Scantron numbers will be the bottom line numbers to determine if students are "progressing", and therefore used by top-level administration to lean on principals and teachers.

jd

P.S. Writing assessments are built into the Reading Benchmark (3x a year, scored by teachers) plus one additional district-wide assessment, scored externally, that will be used for promotion determination. K-2 students will use one of three early literacy assessment tools (including DIBELS).

Links on play + link on distraction

2009-08-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

Here are a few links on the importance of play in learning, especially for younger children. The first is an op-ed piece from the New York Times about baby smarts, Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think.

And then some follow-up comments.

And there's this related 2008 NPR story, Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills by Alix Spiegel (thanks Roberta!)

Finally, apropos my earlier post related to attention / distraction, there's this link from Russ Revzan's "Thoughts of Russ" blog:

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows

(Russ works with CUIP, the Chicago Public Schools - University of Chicago Internet Project, advising schools on how to make the most of their new technologies).

jd

Beyond textbooks

2009-08-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

Some links from today's (8/9/09) New York Times:

In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History

Beyond Textbooks

CK-12 Foundation: "CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the 'FlexBook,' CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning."

Huh.

jd

An open-ended inquiry webquest

2009-08-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

Webquests are typically examples of guided inquiry. The webquest defines a task for the student, and takes the student step-by-step through the quest. In the better webquests, students have some leeway in terms of outcomes and procedures. Even better webquests rely on student direct observation, perhaps through hands-on experiments or observing artifacts available on the web (e.g., investigating movies, animation, old radio programs, or even webquests).

In an earlier post, I looked at the relationship of webquests and open-ended inquiry. Open-ended inquiry looks more like real science-in-practice. It requires the student to develop their own questions and methods of investigation. It also requires a more delicate role for the teacher -- guiding the student, but not telling or directing too much. The student is on his or her own path of discovery.

The assumption then is that, all things being equal, open-ended inquiry is better than guided inquiry. With that in mind, I put together a rubric for assessing the "inquiry quotient" of a webquest. I identified five parameters to assess:

Allows student to generate own question
Uses open-ended question
Relies on direct observation
Goal is to acquire concrete concepts
Capable of maintaining student interest

Most webquests that I have looked at score rather low: they generally don't provide questions that aren't open-ended questions, and they often don't rely on direct observation.

Given the nature the webquest format, is an open-ended inquiry webquest possible? What would it look like?

Here is a link to my effort, called Knowledge Explorer. You also need to look at the accompanying Teaching Guide, and in particular the "Important note" to make sense of what the webquest does.

The subject matter is not so important, I don't think, as long as it is capable of attracting the interest of students. Social justice pedagogy suggests that you start with something from student popular culture (see earlier blog posting). Since the world is interconnected, the in-depth investigation of any social phenomenon will provide insight to the whole if the various connections are pursued critically. So in general terms, Knowledge Explorer is about exploring a commodity of interest to the student. In my specific case, it is a snack food of the students' choice, but I suppose this could easily be opened up to starting with any commodity of the student's choosing.

The quest begins with a focused examination of the physical commodity, allowing questions to arise from that. (This is one part of the direct observation.) This part of the investigation relates to the methods of qualitative science; you can read more about this if you want in a piece I did called Talking with History.

The student then develops his or her own questions out of the direct observation and designs a research strategy to investigate the questions. At this point the teacher must intervene in the webquest to support the student's investigation. The teacher can (and thinking about it, should) support the investigation face-to-face by asking probing questions, how-type questions and so on (see the Teaching Guide for examples taken from An Inquiry Primer by Alan Coburn).

The new part in this webquest is that support and scaffolding can also be done via the webquest. Technically this is done using a dynamic web page (specifically, some trivial PHP code). The teacher places files of HTML code snippets in folders assigned to each student group. Students select the Process page for their group; as the page loads the web server scans the group's folder for any snippet files, and displays the contents of the group-specific snippets on the group's page. Rather simple, and should not be too difficult for a teacher with moderate web page design skills. I realize that that might be too much of an assumption -- the code skills might automatically exclude most teachers from using such a webquest.

At this point, the Knowledge Explorer webquest is a hypothetical, and needs to be shaken out in the classroom. Let me know if you are interested.

I have no idea how this will go over in practice. One issue I see is true of all open-ended inquiry. Open-ended inquiry requires more effort on the part of the teacher, because it requires closer work with the students, monitoring their progress, anticipating their needs, getting into their thinking deeply enough to plant suggested avenues of investigation without explicitly telling the students. Which sounds like the way things should be. But it is a labor-intensive, time-consuming process. Time which teachers rarely, in my experience, feel like they have. The attraction, I think, of traditional guided-inquiry webquests is that they allow some measure of higher order thinking exercises with little or no extra work on the part of the teacher. Even better, teachers can use existing webquests developed by other teachers, too often I expect, with no modifications. The webquests succeed, in some little way, of automating the teaching process. To bring the teacher back to the center of the webquest in the spirit of open-ended inquiry means giving up the time-saving, automated benefit of the webquest.

This is one of the knotty dilemmas of digital technology-supported pedagogy. Digital technology offers the possibility of extending the teacher's reach (e.g., via automations like webquests), but to be used with optimal effectiveness, the wits and insights of the teacher must be brought back to the center of the teaching process.

There is no royal road -- or automated one -- to education.

jd

Virtual science education

2009-08-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

So William Gibson began his classic cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. That sentence captures the inversion -- or is it sublation? or negation? of the human-nature relationship. Human-made technology is not like nature. No -- the opposite is the case. Nature is now like our technology. Our technology has become the reference point, more real than nature. Our life around and in technology has become more primary, a more recent and ready reference point, and in that sense more real, than our experience with grass, breeze, sunlight, woods, robins, etc. etc. Quick -- can you say what phase the moon is in?

River City is an interactive computer simulation application for middle school science students. The program is hosted on the ActiveWorlds virtual world platform. Students work through different stages of a simulation of an American town in the late 1870s beset with a mysterious disease. Students adopt avatars and move around the town, "interacting" with town residents, visiting town sites, collecting data, and conducting virtual experiments. Students can chat with each other in the virtual world, collect notes, make hypotheses, and test them. The simulation was developed as part of a National Science Foundation Harvard research project.

One of our 7th Grade classes did the project last year. I can't say how much their science knowledge grew by using the project, but I was impressed by how engaged students were in the project. The silence in the classroom as 30 students focused on their laptops was ... amazing. As simulations go, River City looked varied, well thought through, and fun. The students tool on new bodies, traveled through time, flew through a 19th-century town, and investigated disease without the risk of getting sick. What's not to like? I look forward to seeing the research results (the research portion of the project officially ends this month; Activeworlds is considering keeping the project alive on a fee basis).

In a world where virtual science activities are just part of an overall rich science curriculum, with lots of "wet science" and field trips and nature walks and other real world experience -- in such a world River City-type projects could be a useful addition. Virtual worlds create certain guided experiences difficult to achieve otherwise.

But... (as Pee Wee Herman famously said, "everyone I know has a Big But -- Let's talk about your Big But") In my school we don't have a rich science curriculum, and River City was the closest that that 7th Grade came to a real world in-depth scientific investigation outside of science fair projects. This is not the fault of the teacher, or the school necessarily. The ultimate factors I think are the big ones of the polarization of wealth and poverty associated with globalization, the related processes of de-industrialization, the privatization of education, the overall destruction of the working class, the war on the poor, ... As a result: the destruction of the family unit, deep social problems transferred to schools, and in the school, shorter school days, large classes, stressed teachers, crumbling infrastructure, the rule of the standardized computer-scored test, and on and on. We know this already don't we?

These desperate times become a rationale for the expansion of technology in the classroom. Save money -- do science virtually! One of the problems in this line of thinking is that virtual reality is a poor, poor replacement for real reality (somehow, perhaps sadly, I don't think that that phrase is redundant). It also makes for poor scientists. Goethe (who considered himself as much a scientist as a poet) said that "Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible." (the quote is from Douglas Miller's 1988 translation of Goethe's scientific works, p. 311) This may sound heretical to those who have been taught to mistrust their senses in favor of the cold precision of technology. But I think it gets to the notion that scientists need to be open to the sensual world to successfully investigate the world. Science has an intuitive and imaginative dimension that comes into play in the identification and the formulation of hypotheses, and this dimension is crippled when robbed of the interaction with the real world. Science cannot adequately be done in a virtual world. Too much is not there. (More on this: Maura Flannery wrote a nice article, "Goethe and the Molecular Aesthetic"; see also Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute.)

Computer applications cannot encompass (support, yes; encompass, no) an inquiry-based learning experience because computer applications are programmed experiences. They incorporate rules of the program designers, a minuscule subset of the law system of the universe. Regardless of the possible paths of investigations that programmed worlds offer, they are nevertheless impoverished representations of the world. The learner is channeled into the limited imagination of the programmer further constrained by his or her chosen technology. Inquiry-based learning -- the heart of the scientific adventure -- is supposed to avoid the "sage on the stage" teacher model; but instead, in virtual worlds, the teacher's role has been supplanted by the programmer. And worse, the supplanting is not immediately apparent. The programmer is a hidden presence, the wizard behind the curtain.

Given the dismal funding of education and the awful pressure on public schools, teachers are between a rock and a hard place. Yes a rich set of real world interactions supplemented by developmentally appropriate technology would be ideal. But the real world is more and more out of reach of the public school. We are offered up virtual experiences instead. And in the inversion (or is it sublation? or negation?) captured by Gibson, the scary part is how compelling the virtual experience can be.

Let's hear it for the negation of the negation...

jd

Criteria for evaluation of educational web resources

2009-08-04T17:41:00.000-07:00

Here is another blog posting to satisfy a course requirement. This one lay out some criteria for the evaluation of web-based educational materials.

My list starts off with criteria I lifted from a university library site. This is only natural I think, because educational web resources function much like other media resources. Librarians belong to a profession devoted to material evaluation and selection, organization and retrieval. From the librarians list, the site should:

be relevant to school learning goals
the site should have quality content. Some indicators of quality include peer-reviewed content, positive reviews from librarians, or an authoritative sponsor.
have a significant amount of content
be distinguished from sites that cover similar subjects (e.g. in ease of use, or in depth in particular niche)
be easy of use
be reliable (available), stable, without broken links

Really good sites

continue to be updated, and informs the visitor of what is new.
allows others to share their great ideas, multiplying the sites usefulness.
are easy to navigate
from a design point of view, are not cluttered, with a clean design. Visiting the site shouldn't tire the visitor. (While not an educational site, I consider the godaddy.com site a prime example of hyperactive clutter and difficult to use. I like the design of the Mrs. Meacham's Classroom Snapshots site -- thanks again Lindsay.)
have no popup ads or other ads that interfere with the content
have a way to easily contact the site operator
is supported
does not use browser specific features (and specifically, will work fine with Firefox)
use cookies responsibly
are responsive -- they have enough hardware and bandwidth behind them to support their purpose
have useful search functions

"Easy to navigate" and "clean" granted are subjective terms, and show my design preferences. I don't like frames, especially when they are poorly implemented.

The above criteria are really independent of the educational purpose of the site, and really apply to any site that intends to inform visitors.

If a site has a social networking feature, it also needs to have some protections for students. Educational sites should be free of advertising, and shouldn't be commercial sites masquerading as educational sites. I'm thinking that the most appropriate educational functions for websites should be either sources of information (search engines, online encyclopedias, archives, newspapers, tutorials, etc.) or places where students can express themselves (e.g. wikis, blogging, cartooning, digital storytelling, postering, etc.) I have mixed feelings about virtual manipulatives -- hands on is generally better. I am suspect of the educational value of role-playing sites and virtual worlds; also of testing or drill sites, and gaming sites. My next post will consider the role-playing/virtual world sites.

jd

Inquiry-based learning and webquests

2009-08-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

Best technology-in-education practices direct students to problem-based / project-based / inquiry-based student-centered learning models that are the hallmark of progressive and constructivist education. The student is pushed to exercise and build higher order thinking skills through the problem-solving process. Ideally, computers and other digital technologies just provide additional means of investigation and reporting.

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is a method of learning where students pursue an interesting open-ended question (that's my working definition of IBL). The student is the subject of that definition, the main actor. The object of their pursuit needs to be interesting to the student, to ensure the pursuit takes place. The object of the pursuit is an open-ended question: the question may lead the student in many possible directions as part of a process of discovery. Ideally, through IBL, students develop stronger transferable knowledge and a deeper understanding of the world than through traditional educational methods of fact-delivery and regurgitation. Inquiry-based learning works especially well for developing concrete concepts as a result of direct observation. Hands-on exploration is an important component of the best IBL. Also important is allowing students enough time and space and encouragement to formulate their own questions and conjectures. I see five important categories in the measurement of the "inquiry quotient" of a lesson. The best IBL:

Allows student to generate own question
Uses open-ended question
Relies on direct observation
Has as a goal the acquisition of concrete concepts
Maintains student interest

Inquiry-based learning and other student-centered approaches to learning are subtly inverted when technology takes center-stage, and the inquiry becomes centered around and dependent on the technology being used.

Educators have developed different genres of applications to try to implement technology-based student-centered models. "Webquests" are one popular example. Webquests are structured investigations oriented around a given task. Students work in teams using well-defined roles towards accomplishing the given task. Students are often expected to produce a report or deliver a presentation arguing for a position or solution that they have developed. Webquests support student collaboration, typically require the students to make their own assessments about a topic, and defend conclusions they have reached.

As an IBL application, though, webquests cannot help but fall short. First, by design they provide an already-constructed question (the task). Maybe students have a choice of possible solutions, but a webquest (in Bernie Dodge's original definition) cannot provide a truly open-ended question. Webquests are really a "quided inquiry" structure (see, e.g. QuestGarden, the site for a webquest creation tool developed by Dodge, where it is described as "guided inquiry made easy"). In Alan Coburn's spectrum of inquiry models, "guided inquiry" falls in the middle between "structured inquiry" and "open inquiry". Students are provided the problem and materials, but they must devise their own procedure. Second, as the name "webquest" suggests, webquest observations are usually observations web page content. (One can view video of phenomena, but this is a weak second-best to direct observation. Math explorations can be done using virtual manipulatives, which might come the closest to working with their real world counterparts, although something still is lost when the physical activity is sacrificed.)

This is not to say that webquests can't be valuable learning activities. Good webquests require students to be creative in assembling and combining data, and reflect and build on what they find. Students can build their collaboration skills and skills using computer applications. But as inquiry-based learning, webquests miss the important elements of student-formulated problems and direct observation.

I developed a rubric for assessing the "inquiry quotient" of webquests, and then tested it out on ten middle-school math related webquests. (You can view the rubric as well as links to the webquests and how I scored the webquests by clicking here.) The highest score I gave any of the webquests was a 14 out of 20. That particular webquest, The Dilemma of the Dangerous Meat Loaf, did use some direct observation that was brought back to the webquest, and, with a little tweaking, allowed for a high degree of open-endedness. [I should note that I developed the rubric as part of an "inquiry quotient" webquest developed by Craig Cunningham at National-Louis University, and in this case, my direct observations were observations of webquests.]

As guided inquiry lessons, webquests can be useful. A potential danger in their use is to think that they can replace direct observation. An exercise that pushes the student beyond "guided" and into "open" inquiry would push beyond the boundaries of the webquest format. Possible features of such an exercise might include heavier reliance on student collection of data via direct observations, and perhaps a relaxation of the task directive -- this is something to explore.

jd

Bookmarking

2009-07-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

I started using diigo a few months ago to keep track of links that I found. Mainly I dump them there so I can keep track of them, but diigo is nice for also sharing them with the wider world. Most of the resources relate to education or math, though I think there are some other odds and ends in there.

Before that I used Portaportal, but it's functionality (describing, tagging, sharing, listing, etc.) is limited (here is a link to my Portaportal page, but I stopped adding to it several months ago). Before that, I did my lists by hand (here is a link to my teaching math resources page), but it has been too cumbersome to maintain, and while generally available on the web, not as rich in features as a site like diigo. I tried delicious at one point, but couldn't get comfortable with it.

One of the most useful features of diigo has been its "group" feature. I am a member of the "diigo in education" group, and as a result, I receive a daily summary of new links that other members of the group have found. Links include both online activities as well as news articles on education. This has been an ongoing source of good new (to me) resources.

I have not been so good about sharing my links with others, except for whoever stumbles upon them via diigo.

I now have over 300 links on my bookmarks page organized into almost 50 lists. When I moved my Portaportal links over, the associated lists did not all transfer, so some of those links may not be in any lists. A number of the links have no description, so there is the danger of the links being orphaned in my diigo attic (now that's a rather bizarre mixed metaphor). This points to the general problem of Internet resources, the challenge of adequately indexing the material so relevant material can be quickly retrieved. Google of course is one blunt tool for retrieval. Librarians have been sensitive to this issue for a long long time. Diigo uses tags, which I have not taken advantage of until recently. The drawback with tags is the variety of tagging terms that people use.

Looking through the links, I am once again reminded first how much stuff is out there, and how the Internet is pretty amazing at making the stuff available. And second that there isn't so much a shortage of resources, but of the time to review, select and absorb the resources into one's teaching practice. That old metaphor about putting your mouth up to the firehose of information...

jd

P.S. In case you were wondering (why would you wonder?), this was posted to satisfy a course requirement.

Money ruins everything #1

2009-07-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

An insider's view of the textbook industry.

jd

Tech and ed spending in today's WSJ

2009-07-23T16:38:00.000-07:00

Today's (7/23/09) Wall Street Journal reports on technology spending in education. The article is a bit confused, replicating many of the "e-lusions" that Todd Oppenheimer described in his book a few years ago. The article described federal stimulus money going into educational technology at the expense of money for teachers and other educational needs. The money has significant strings attached -- it's only for technology and tech training. So while teachers are laid off, classroom sizes expanded, and programs cut, more machines are being thrown at an educational system in crisis.

The fundamental fallacy is that machines can replace humans in education. The article repeats common dodgy research claims: a school district introduced laptops, and student scores went up over the next few years ("Sixth-graders taught with laptops the first year saw their reading and math scores rise 27% and 15%, respectively, by eighth grade, says District Superintendent Jerry Vaughn." Uhh -- they go up anyway; that's why the ISAT cut points go up for each grade level.

One North Carolina district saw signigicant gains after going to a one-to-one laptop program, but as with most tech and ed research, there is no basis for attributing causality to the laptops. My experience does support one observation by a school official: "Dr. MacNeill credits these advances in large part to the technology program, which she says has made the students 'more engaged, more active in their learning' and made school 'more purposeful and relevant to them.'" I think there is a sad statement about education and students in that statement though -- a sublation of some sort. Relevance is found in the interaction with an electronic device; and there is something in there about achieving engagement via consumption rather than self-generated. Some completely different physiological or neurological state is in play.

Some of the technology programs are accompanied by training in student-centered instruction:

Many districts receiving these funds are looking beyond simply equipping classrooms with the latest gadgetry ... in favor of rethinking the way education is delivered. In some tech-equipped schools, teachers are playing a less-dominant role in the classroom, group work and problem-solving are emphasized...

Ms. Herdman [district head of ed tech] envisions such a transformation in North Kansas City. “It’s no longer going to be ‘Turn to page 10 and look at this,’ ” she says. “It’s more collaborative work, the learning style is inquiry-based, and the teacher is guiding, facilitating learning rather than lecturing.

Which is to applauded I think, and is a responsible way to incorporate technology into the classroom. But Herdman adds, "It’s about teaching the curriculum using technology as your vehicle." I question the necessity of delivering the curriculum via technology -- it may be possible (even about that I am not so sure) -- but if so it is an expensive, and unhuman, way to do it.

jd

What good is the Internet for education?

2009-07-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

I am taking a course from National-Louis this summer on designing Internet resources for teaching. One of the course requirements is a series of blog posts, which I will be posting here. The first topic is a reflection on the value of Internet resources for education.

What good is the Internet for education? The Internet is so many things now that there are many ways to think about its role in education. Thinking in terms of education roles, it is a conversation space, a meeting space, a filing cabinet, a classroom, a bulletin board, a library, and many types of museums. It is a printing press / radio or TV station / movie theater (where you can be the projectionist or an audience member). It's also a shopping mall, collaboratory and playground (of sorts). Thinking of Google Docs or Zoho, It is many types of computer applications, and the metaphors that they embody. I am sure I have left out important roles, and given short shrift to some. In all of these cases, the economics of the Internet mean that the Internet is a tremendously cost-effective resource for education. So one can interpret its value in a quantitative, monetary sense (quite high), or qualitatively, in terms of (for example) surprising discovered connections, social or otherwise.

On the other hand... It is important to remember what the Internet is not. It is not "right there" -- it can only be reached through electronic devices, and those magical gateways, although not that hard to find these days, are not ubiquitous or free. It is not nature, the real natural world. It is not tactile, physical, sensual world . It is not a real room where one can enjoy the richness of face-to-face interaction. The Internet experience is mediated through electronics, a bundle of media that exerts certain pressures on experience, and so alters and shapes and constrains it. The Internet, hyperlinks notwithstanding, is a programmed experience, where the rules governing interactions are limited by the imagination of the developers or the capabilities of the hardware. And all of the social networking opportunities notwithstanding, it is still a terribly segregated space, of like communicating only with like.

So while there is obvious and real value for education in the Internet, there is also a seductive lure to it. There is the danger that education gets swallowed up by the Internet. That educators might confuse the world with its (relatively) tiny subset, the Internet. Because the digital Internet is, if you are sitting in front of a screen, right there, easier to deal with than the messiness of the analog world.

Here is a more interesting question to me: What is the value of the Internet for education, versus leaving the school building, and spending an hour investigating the empty lot across the street?

jd

Developmentally appropriate

2009-06-29T14:54:00.000-07:00

The term "developmentally appropriate technology" refers to the notion that children develop, with different physical and intellectual needs and abilities at different ages. Children are not mini-me's, with the same cognitive faculties as an adult minus experience, facts, memories, etc. Their bodies are going through specific changes, and so are their brains -- they see and experience the world in different ways, and have different learning needs. So everything education-related, including technology, needs to be geared to -- appropriate to -- the child's age. The idea of "developmentally appropriate technology" is related to other "developmentally appropriate practices" in education.

I think one of the most important criticisms of technology in the classroom is that, in many cases, the technology that students are expected to work with is just not appropriate for their level of physical and cognitive development. Some criticisms of educational technology, like poor software, physical dangers, online dangers, and poor integration/application can be addressed through better modeling, scaffolding, monitoring, etc. The criticism that the cost/benefit ratio of new technology doesn't justify the education establishment's infatuation with it is another big criticism, and worth a separate posting. But the idea that a computer in the hands of a, say, 6-year-old is a bad idea, because a 6-year-old not only does not have the cognitive capacity to get the most out of the machine, but that it might actually hurt the child's development is a substantial criticism.

This is a theme in the technology critiques referenced in previous posts. For example, Fool's Gold argues that the "sheer power" of computers "seems more likely to repress the development of important intellectual capacities than to enhance it." (p. 33) Jane Healy writes in Failure to Connect that "computer use, being primarily a two-dimensional symbolic activity, may simply not be developmentally appropriate before the age of seven or eight."(p. 135) The brain-science logic behind this argument, according to Healy, is that the brain "undergoes certain 'critical' or 'sensitive periods in both childhood and adolescence when learning environments exert special kinds of effects and when certain types of activities and stimulation are most appropriate and necessary to maximize mental potential... If we waste or subvert these developmental windows, the losses may be irrecoverable." (p. 27) Important and necessary opportunities for imaginative play, concrete learning, physical activity, and social and emotional interaction with children and adults will be missed while the child is busy at the keyboard. There would seem to be a steep opportunity cost paid by thrusting computers onto students too early, or in the wrong way. (For a quick summary and great pullquotes of Healy's book, see this book review of Failure to Connect).

(Aside: The Waldorf approach to education, which informs Fool's Gold, Tech Tonic, and Oppenheimer, generally frowns on the heavy use of computers before high school. By high school age, teens are cognitively ready for the heavy amount of abstract reasoning, and will quickly pick up the basic computing skills they need for post-high school. The above-reference books agree that computer use in high schools is appropriate, as long as the technology curriculum includes an exploration of how computers work (along the lines of a shop class) and technology's role in society, in addition to learning computer operation and maintenance. Setzer and Monke (2001), also building on Waldorf ideas, in their article An Alternative View on Why, When and How Computers Should Be Used in Education are at the extreme end of the spectrum of technology use in schools, arguing that "they should not be used by children in any form before approximately age 15." Setzer and Monke lay out an ideal technology curriculum, which is of interest.)

But between the primary years (say, up to seven years old / 2nd grade) and high school (say, starting at age 14), that is, from Grades 3 through 8, there is a broad period of growth and transition in the child, with changing cognitive abilities and readiness for new types of learning.

I have not been able to find a technology curriculum that explicitly references a model of child development. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) provides examples of its National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS) for students that are tiered in grade bands (K-2, 3-5, 6-8) in its 2007 Profiles for Technology Literate Students. For ISTE, a kindergartner might "identify, research, and collect data on an environmental issue using digital resources and propose a developmentally appropriate solution." Such an example recognizes that the kindergartner is a mini-me, constrained only by his or her knowledge. For ISTE, "developmentally appropriate" means -- well the way they use it I don't know -- a solution that kindergartners could implement? That uses vocabulary a kindergartner understands? But it does not suggest that a kindergartner sees the world in different ways than older students, that he or she needs to strengthen certain faculties through tactile engagement and physical activity and active, imaginative play that older students maybe no longer need, or need as much.

Anyway, this is my quest now -- to find a technology curriculum that includes a "developmentally appropriate" dimension that is based on a model of child development that recognizes distinctive stages of development and matches technology use to those stages.

To be continued...

jd

Teaching social justice via science and math

2009-06-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

These are some notes from a Teachers for Social Justice event I attended here in Chicago way back in March. Titled "Teaching and learning mathematics and science for social justice", the speakers discussed ways that social justice issues have been raised in the course of teaching chemistry and math at the Little Village/North Lawndale Social Justice High School. Again, these are notes, and may be verbatim (or close to) material from the main speakers, Daniel Morales-Doyle, Alejandra Frausto and Rico Gutstein.

What does it mean to teach social justice in science? Science is a way of grappling with identity. It provides a means for students to shift away from solely being consumers of knowledge and culture to also being producers of knowledge and culture. Science can also be used to de-mystify the objects of consumption.

In the chemistry class example, youth popular culture provides the entry point for social justice issues in the curriculum. Scientific concepts and experiments tie in with artifacts of popular culture and their production process (including environmental implications, the labor process, and the political and social conditions of production).

The (ideal) social issue science curriculum needs five components: A reference point to youth popular culture, engaging lab activities, a social justice issue, good science content, and rigorous academic skills. The successful curriculum relies on good pedagogy: clarity of purpose (to help students and their community), high expectations, caring, discipline, a good work ethic, consistency, modeling uncertainty and seeking additional information, passion, enthusiasm. [Discipline and punishment are two different things.] Good pedagogy also values student knowledge ("foreground their knowledge").

For younger science students, teachers can help students visualize what a scientist is (and help them visualize themselves as scientists). Teachers should help students maintain (or encourage in them) a curiosity about the natural world. Teachers should build student confidence in the student's observations and thinking.

The speakers handed out a diagram of "Critical Praxis in Chemistry" that portrayed a cycle on inquiry. The cycle begins with a problem in popular culture. This is followed by learning about chemistry theory to support the inquiry into the popular culture problem. Chemistry theory is supported and enhanced by experiments, conducted in series of threes, or triads. Experiment one introduces a concept; experiment two builds skills, and experiment three has students exploring and inquiring about the unit problem. The learning/experimenting stages may go through multiple iterations. The fourth stage of the cycle comprises assessment and action -- students are asked "to apply their newly constructed knowledge of nature to produce culture that may affect changes in the problems [they] have identified." This in turn may initiate a new cycle of investigation.

The speakers provided several examples of "critical chemistry" in practice. One example, "The Science of Bling", begins with the unit question, "How is the value of diamonds justified by their physical and chemical properties?" The question connects to youth culture through engagement and wedding rings, hip-hop, fashion, and films like Bling and Blood Diamond. Social justice issues include conflict diamonds and the exploitation of natural resources in developing countries. Key chemistry concepts include the chemical and physical properties and classification of matter. For an authentic assessment, students write a pre- and post-unit "Love Letter" to a hypothetical fiance(e) about the issue of a diamond engagement ring.

Social justice issues in math are introduced in a similar way. Math is used to help students understand social reality. Units begin with authentic problems that students encounter in their community. Rico Gutstein described a unit that he did with high school students on predatory lending. The impetus for the unit arose from one student's family facing foreclosure. The math component included concepts like principal and interest, growth rates, compounding, budgeting and so on. Gutstein also described an investigation students did into the 2004 elections which addressed probability and the possibility that the presidential election was stolen (students produced an editorial raising these questions as a result of their work). Gutstein has elsewhere described a unit on racial profiling which incorporated probability concepts. An important element of "social justice math" is that it should tie into the lives of students. [Personal aside - This places an additional burden on the teacher to collect the necessary data and research to ensure a productive unit for the students.]

jd

What a good Technology in Education program should include

2009-06-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

I have just completed another term at National-Louis University (NLU), in their Technology in Education (TIE) program. As part of the coursework, I also finally finished Todd Oppenheimer's Flickering Mind, and it got me to thinking about what a good Technology in Education program should have (and what I think is missing from the NLU program).

First, a good technology in education program needs a solid history (and maybe philosophy or ethics) of technology class. The class would delve into the relationship of humans to their technology, the relationship of technology to social change, technology as extensions of the human body and what that has meant for social development, and some good discussion of the dialectic between technology and mind or ideas (ideas shape technology, technology shapes ideas). Some exploration of the specific relationship between capitalism and technology would be good. Students could prepare reports on the development of specific technologies and their impact. Students should somewhere in the program be exposed to the idea of "appropriate technology", this might be the class to introduce it. Readings might include Mumford, Marx, McLuhan, maybe E. F. Schumacher, also Steve Talbott. The main hoped-for outcome of the class would be for students to understand that technology is developed within a social and historical context, and affects a society in unpredictable and not always desirable ways. The class should discuss "Ten Principles for a New Literacy of Technology" and evaluate the NETS standards. The NETS standards are curiously weak on these topics.

Second, a good technology in education program should have a serious course on the history of technology in education. This class would parallel a history of education, especially in the United States, but with a special focus on technology in the classroom. Obvious authors to read would include Larry Cuban and Todd Oppenheimer. Tech Tonic might fit here also. This class would provide an important context for technology teachers to understand their role in education. The development of the NETS standards could be explored here.

Third, while educational psychology is included in the current TIE curriculum, it should have a special focus on the role of technology in learning. This would include an exploration of concepts of child development, and their implications for technology in the classroom. The fundamental question to address would be what kinds of technologies are appropriate in the classroom, and at what age. The NLU "Cognition and Instruction" course used the National Academy Press book How People Learn, which is okay, but for some reason the course skipped Chapter 9, "Technology to Support Learning" that specifically addressed research findings (which, in the context education research, might be an oxymoron) relating to technology and learning. A Jane Healey reading would be helpful here; also maybe Fool's Gold.

I'm not sure where this should go, but I think serious personal reflection on how one thinks about technology should take place somewhere. Maybe in the context of one of the two classes above. I had to develop a "personal philosophy of education" for a history and philosophy of education class which was a useful exercise; I'm thinking here of a "personal philosophy of technology in education". Or even better, a perspective written at the start of the program, and then at the end of the program. The end-of-program perspective would be an important portfolio artifact. (As a principal, I would want to know a prospective technology teacher's view of technology in education.

I am generally disappointed in the NLU Program, including its conception and its delivery. I will skip the analysis, but offer this possible enhancement. I think programs like this would be more effective if they were organized more like a "work-study" program, and the coursework more tightly bound to our work lives. Assignments in the course work would be actual projects that we would be expected to carry out at our respective school, not in addition to everything else we do, but as part of it. So the school work would also be work work. (As it is now, homework assignments are on top of an extra-heavy workload, and rarely tie in with what is happening at school.) This would require some tighter coordination between our program sponsor, the Office of Academic Enhancement (OAE), the NLU TIE program, the principals at our respective schools, and the students (and we would then really become co-creators of our education). The principals especially would need to be on board, and transcend their perception of their technology teachers as OAE-subsidized tech support personnel (aka electronic janitor). I think there are a lot of possibilities here. Our schools would become more like lab schools for discovering best practices; and our classes at NLU become more like a collaborative forum for evaluating results.

jd

Globalization and charter schools

2009-06-02T14:36:00.000-07:00

Below is a link to a paper I did a few months ago for a class on current education issues. I wanted to better understand the charter school phenomenon as an expression of globalization as I have understood it. Here is the abstract:

Education has always reﬂected the mode of production. "Globalization" is a new mode of capitalist production, capitalism in the age of electronics, with distinctive features and demands. Charter schools, as an education reform, reﬂect important threads within globalization. First, the reform of educational content and delivery is really a change to meet the needs of globalization for new skill sets. Second, charter schools are a form of privatization, which is an important feature of globalization's demand for new sites of valorization and proﬁt. Third, the network form is an emergent property of globalization, which is expressed through attempts to break down the centralized public school system through charter schools. The debate around charter schools takes place within the assumption of the supremacy of the market and the inevitability of globalization, leading to a set of limited or even false choices. For a real debate on education reform, one must move beyond the narrow conﬁnes of the terms of globalization.

I need to work a more on the ideas I think. Comments welcome; here is the link to the full piece: Globalization and charter schools.

jd

Why isn't this mandatory reading in teacher ed?

2009-05-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

I am just starting to read over the Alliance for Childhood's publication Fool's Gold (see previous post), and am surprised that I only just heard of this publication (or its sister publication Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology) after spending the past almost two years in teacher education classes, which included completing one Masters program and now being almost halfway through a second one. And I only happened across the Alliance's publications because of a reference in another book, Todd Oppenheimer's Flickering Mind.

Mea culpa: I should have been more conscious of this technology in education counter-culture. I worked on Computer Professionals for Social Responsibilities (CPSR)-Berkeley's "A Computer and Information Technologies Platform" in 1992; I have been in CPSR for as many years (okay, membership lapsed for a year+, but I just took care of that), I have read a fair amount about Waldorf methods, I have read a good deal of Steve Talbott's work (which is in a similar vein), and worked with computers long enough to know many of the risks and limitations of their use in learning. I am pretty sure I am in an emailable relationship (i.e., they would open an email from me and maybe respond) with two members of the "Alliance for Childhood Roundtable of Rethinking Technology Literacy", very fond of the writing of another member (David Abram), have read things by another member, and recognize the name of one more member. So I feel like I should have been more on top of this. Why not I ask myself -- perhaps it is because the last two years have been such a blur of switching professions, trying to get up to speed on how to teach, switching roles again, taking grad classes, etc. that I have not really taken the time to seriously reflect on, especially, the proper role of new technologies in education. But that sense of knowing better, of not being more cognizant and critical and self-critical is part of why Oppenheimer's book, and the Alliance's publications, have made such an impression on me.

And this year I am a technology teacher, with the specific charge to help teachers integrate new technologies into the curriculum and instruction. I am in a Masters program cohort with other teachers in a similar position in CPS, and we have yet to seriously discuss what is appropriate technology in the classroom. Serious in the sense of what is a proper framework, why do it, what do others say, what does research have to tell us (accepting that educational research is so mushy and inconclusive), what does our own experience tell us -- personal experience as well as experience teaching and helping others to teach. Let's step off of the train for a few minutes, and consider where it is going.

That set of questions in the previous paragraph -- those are important questions!

jd

Ten Principles for a New Literacy of Technology

2009-05-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

This is probably old news to people who have followed educational technology for a while. But I just came across the Alliance for Childhood's two publications on technology in education. Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood came out in 2000, followed by Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology (both publications are available as PDFs from the Alliance website). Hopefully I will be able to review them here, but in the meantime, here are "Ten Principles for a New Literacy of Technology" from Tech Tonic:

1. Slow down: honor the developmental needs of children.

2. With adolescents, teach technology as social ethics in action, with technical skills in a supporting role.

3. Relationships with the real world come first.

4. Technology is not destiny; its design and use flow from human choices.

5. Choice implies limits—and the option to say “no.”

6. Those affected by technological choices deserve a voice in making them.

7. Use tools and technologies with mindfulness.

8. To teach technology literacy, become technologically literate.

9. Honor the precautionary principle: When uncertain, err on the side of caution.
• Ask tough questions about long-term consequences.
• Make time, space, and silence for reflection.
• Responsibility grows from humility.
• Be resourceful with the tools you already have.

10. Respect the sacredness of life in all its diversity.

jd

The limits of technology - thinking about two recent articles

2009-05-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

Reviews of two recent articles...

I came across Sam Anderson's "In Defense of Distraction", which appeared in New York Magazine (May 17, 2009) via the main source of my education news, the Diigo in Education group email updates. The article is quite funny. Anderson considers the "attention crisis": "the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention." The source of the many distractions are new technologies; and the distractions are leading us into a "dark age": "Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce." Anderson writes, "has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese."

The "doomsayers" are silly, he argues, because (a) every technological advance has had its crop of doomsayers [I'm not sure why that makes it silly, only consistent - jd] and (b) "the virtual horse has already left the digital barn", so the question is not how to stem the tide of inattentive multitasking, but how to deal with it, if at all.

New technologies lead us to "continuous partial attention" (Anderson is quoting "tech theorist" Linda Stone) -- we are never quite focused on anything, flitting from task to task, and we are less capable for it. Two quotes from his article: "People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana," and "If Einstein were alive today, [David Meyer -- a leading cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan] says, he’d probably be forced to multitask so relentlessly in the Swiss patent office that he’d never get a chance to work out the theory of relativity."

As something of an aside, Meyer's quote raises an aspect of distraction that Anderson does not address. Distractions are forced onto the modern worker (especially those who process information) as part of the intensification of work. This is classic Marxist economic theory -- the imperative to maximize profit requires either the extension of the work day or the intensification of the work process, to squeeze more value out of the worker in a given slice of time. As in "forced to multitask so relentlessly". As Anderson does note, such task-switching is death to deep creativity, which reinforces the idea that most "information workers" are not there to add value as creative thinkers, but are simply meatbots routing information and making quick decisions too complex (yet) to be done by a machine. So an important source of distraction is not technology per se, but the conditions under which technology is deployed. While public school teachers are putatively in the not-for-profit sector of the economy, they face the same productivity mandate. It bleeds in from the privatized education sector and education directives emanating from the world economy. So teachers are constantly pulled from one thing to another in an attempt to produce more in the same or less amount of time.

Anderson reviews one possible solution to "the attention problem": deliberately focusing attention or meditation. He also explores medical solutions -- neuroenhancers like Adderall, intended as an ADHD treatment, which tends to "focus the mind" ("can produce, in healthy people, superhuman states of attention"); and "lifehacking", an endless quest for organizing one's life (but, "One of the weaknesses of lifehacking as a weapon in the war against distraction, [Merlin Mann, one of the "stars" of the lifehacking movement] admits, is that it tends to become extremely distracting").

Anderson then moves from possible antidotes to distraction to suggest that we should embrace the "poverty of attention". After all, an important part of creativity is allowing the mind to float so that it can "mark the before unapprehended relations of things" (as Shelley described metaphor). He remarks on the perhaps quintessential distraction in literature of Marcel Proust and his madeleine. A super-focused person would not allow him or herself to be transported by a cookie. As Anderson notes, people who take Adderall also have the sensation of losing their creativity (quoting Slate writer Joshua Foer, "I had a nagging suspicion that I was thinking with blinders on"). The ability to be distracted is a gift, part of our human makeup, that helps us in many ways.

So new technologies have created a world of constant interruption, but distraction is good. The constant stream of distractions allowed by email, text messages, phone calls, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. maybe are good things? As Anderson concludes,

There’s been lots of hand-wringing about all the skills they might lack, mainly the ability to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but surely they can already do things their elders can’t—like conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media, or pay attention to switching between attentional targets in a way that’s been considered impossible... Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in ﬂights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.

There are a lot of "mights" in those final sentences. "Might and maybe", but (maybe) or (probably) teachers have a role to play here in helping make that leap from attention-switching or flitting to connection-making and solution-finding.

As any teacher will tell you, attention, engagement, focus, etc. are major issues in the classroom. Electronic media are a major part of students' lives; Anderson writes that "One recent study found that American teenagers spend an average of 6.5 hours a day focused on the electronic world, which strikes me as a little low." One of the most striking things to me, from this past school year, has been the degree to which otherwise rowdy students will focus on a computer screen, whether it be watching a BrainPOP video or floating around the virtual science investigation of River City or assembling a beat with GarageBand.

One is tempted to declare victory and leave it at that. But what are the kids learning? As I am reminded from different directions, including by our advisors from CUIP (the expanded acronym is too long to write out, check the link for more) or Todd Oppenheimer's book, The Flickering Mind, or any decent pedagogy course, we want the students to become deeper thinkers (or move higher up Bloom's taxonomy). The verbs that go along with Bloom's highest level (I am looking at "Quick Flip Questions for the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy" from Edupress, 2001) include "adapt", "build", "create", "elaborate", "imagine", "predict", and so on. My suspicion, or perhaps, my fear, is that the way we use technology (or to 'fess up, the way I have helped my teachers use technology this year) has not led to these "higher-order thinking skills" ("HOTS" in ed lingo, a field which is as fond of acronyms as the high tech field). To go further, I suspect that these skills are not attainable via technology.

Goethean science provides a useful structure for sorting out and organizing the conflicting actions of focus and "distraction". Goethe was also a scientist, and approached scientific investigation in a distinctive, rather poetic, way. Inasmuch as it can be described as a "method", it is consists of two main phases. The first phase is the focused examination of the object under investigation, including both careful observation as well as learning what past researchers have observed. The second phase is the recreation of the phenomenon in the imagination, reflecting or meditating on the object. These two phases succeed each other iteratively, each feeding the other, towards new questions and further and deeper understanding of the phenomenon. (This method is described and explored in the writings of Craig Holdrege at the Nature Institute). The concentrated focus is essential for apprehending the phenomenon; while the recreation of the object in the imagination opens the mind to a kind of "distraction" or wandering that can yield new insights, connections, and meaning, of developing a deep sensitivity and knowledge of the phenomenon. Both phases are necessary, and reinforce each other.

In this process, technology can take one only so far. The role of the imagination in the process of knowing cannot be done with technology. It is uniquely done in the mind. Technology might help in the focused observation phase (microscopes, data collection and statistical analysis, literature review) and in the reporting of results (which granted is an opportunity for additional reflection), the meaningful higher order thinking skills are cultivated away from computers, during reflection time. It might happen during walks or conversations or staring out the window or sitting with one's eyes closed, thinking about the phenomenon.

Attention-flitting has some benefits somewhere along the timeline of investigation, but for Anderson's mights and maybes to come into being, it needs to be combined with other skills and attitudes like focus and reflection. Reflection allows for a kind of gentle distraction, not the jangle of electronica. Here comes into play the role of a teacher, to cultivate the entire range of mental activities that go into deep understanding.

Another recent article also raised questions for me about the role of technology in education. Sunday's (May 24, 2009) New York Times Magazine includes an article by Matthew Crawford, "The Case for Working With Your Hands", which discusses something I have been thinking about vis-a-vis the kids at my school. I don't think the students at my school get nearly enough experience working with materials, with stuff. Partly this is a function of economics, what they are exposed to at home, opportunities, what their families can afford, etc. Partly this is a function of the economy at large, of globalization, or capitalism in the age of electronics. People are more likely to buy things instead of make them, further constraining the opportunities to work with matter. Neighborhood opportunities may be constrained, because of social marginalization. Partly it is a function of other, related social conditions. I am thinking about Richard Louv's "nature deficit disorder", and the lack of opportunities for kids to interact with nature. The streets can be dangerous, so better to stay inside. Outside of the very important opportunities in once-a-week art class, and maybe occasional hands-on science lessons, students do not have a lot of opportunity to work with stuff, to interact with matter.

Crawford's article reminds us that interacting with matter -- wood, stone, fabric, dirt, flowers, clay, paint, etc. directly is an important, direct source of knowledge. In our mediated world, "confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar." We have become world-stupid. I am reminded of a perhaps apocryphal story related by a former co-worker who had returned from a photo safari in East Africa. On a previous outing, a tourist was mauled by a lion after he insisted on getting out of the Range Rover to photograph the animal close-up. I assume that the tourist had previously encountered lions on television, with no mishaps. Nothing in his experience led him to think there was any danger in getting out of the car.

This indicates another weakness of technology's typical role in the classroom. Technology is often used to give students exposure to the world, by reading articles or watching video. But these are mediated experiences, and have lost most of the richness of direct contact. (Which is not to say mediated experiences are not useful, just that they are not a proper substitute for the real thing.) We learn with our hands as well as our eyes and ears. You can't really understand how the world works without engaging with it directly.

Crawford brings up another dimension of engagement with the world -- how we engage with it. In describing the learning process of working with motorcycle engines, Crawford describes the process as a "conversation": "Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness." This echoes what Craig Holdrege has written about doing Goethean science. He describes scientific investigation as a conversation with phenomena, which also implies an ethical respect for the object of investigation. (See also this piece I wrote: "The Goethean Approach and Human Artifacts")

Again, there is a proper place for technology in the classroom, but the material interaction with keyboard and mouse cannot replace the important interactions with everything else.

I realize I am not saying anything new.

jd

Making media

2009-05-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a nice slideshow/video I had to put together for our 8th graders Ribbon Ceremony, part of their overall 8th grade graduation activities.

A couple of thoughts about the video: I am very happy about the way it turned out. The pictures are a happy accident -- I have no photography skills. Perhaps it was because the principal requested this the day before the event ("I need you to take pictures of all of the 8th graders and ..."), and I rushed the kids through the picture taking process, doing most of them in one take. All told I took the pictures in maybe 15 minutes, including having to show each batch to the students so they could see how they looked. I allowed a few re-takes for the kids who really objected to the first take.

I used a cheapo Canon Powershot digital camera on a tripod, using autofocus, set to indoor lighting, shot against a blue mat in the gymnasium. After uploading the pictures, I saw the background blue varied in each shot, so trying to do some kind of blue-screen thing with them was going to work. At first I thought I could use Adobe Premiere to assemble the pictures, but then I realized that iPhoto's slideshow feature could do it all for me. IPhoto converted them to black and white, added the random transitions, and timed them to fit exactly the Kirk Franklin song "Imagine Me" that the students were going to sing while the pictures were projected. I did some quick re-arranging to come close to boy-girl-boy-girl, but otherwise not too much choice as to order. I exported the slideshow and did some final work in Premiere, adding the title, adjusting slightly when the pictures appeared vis-a-vis the music. And voila.

The video, as I said, is mostly a happy accident, rather beautiful and melancholic, maybe even haunting in a way, for which I can take no credit. Kirk Franklin's beautiful song of course plays a tremendous part towards the overall effect.

I don't think the feeling is just because I have seen and or worked with the students and know a little bit about some of them, or maybe it is. Maybe part of it is the awful statistics that surround them: half of them will likely drop out of high school; according to one estimate, 70 percent of the boys who stay in North Lawndale will get caught up in the legal system; they will graduate from high school to a job market with 27 percent unemployment; and so on. At the same time, most of the portraits reveal an optimism and courage that has seen them through this far. Or maybe it's just me.

jd

Notes on "Are MUDs communities?"

2009-05-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

Caveat: The following response is a class assignment. The article being reviewed was published in 1996, when the Internet was still in its infancy, the classic text-based MUDs (usually the acronym refers to Multi-User Dimensions but my iPhone's Computer Desktop Encyclopedia says it can also refer to Dialogs or Dungeons) had probably peaked, Virtual Reality (VR) as The Next Big Thing had come and gone, superceded by the World Wide Web. Sufficient bandwidth and processing power to support Web 2.0, video chats, Activeworlds and Second Life and live poker and Facebook/MySpace and blogging and twittering and all of the other things we think of today as constituting "online communities" did not yet exist. Thirteen years are a few geological ages in digital-time.

Heather Bromberg, "Are MUDS Communities? Identity, Belonging and Consciousness in Virtual Worlds", Chapter 9 in Rob Shields (eds.), Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. Sage Publications. 1996.

I do not understand the title of Bromberg's chapter. The chapter does not discuss community at all; rather, the article addresses the online experience as "altered states of consciousness." From the title, I expected some exploration of what communities are, and how online interactions and networks and so on might resemble or even constitute a "community."

This is not to say that the question of consciousness and being and one's sense of self and the world as experienced via computer technology is not interesting, and there is some overlap between the online experience-as-consciousness and the experience-as-community. Blomberg identifies four social functions of online experience: computer-mediated social connection (addressing isolation); identity play; eroticism; and control over one's environment. One brings these four dimensions into any community. The possibility of assumed anonymity may distort one's online community presence. Translate online communities to the classroom and playing with some of these dimensions becomes generally inappropriate and even dangerous (manifesting as sexual harassment, bullying, etc.)

Bromberg refers to the online experience as "altered consciousness" and the online experience in some cases as "transcendent," reporting that users may feel that they are getting closer to some fundamental truth about the universe through online interactions. And one of the attractions of the online experience, she notes, is that "claims that virtual reality will provide meaning and reveal secrets of ancient wisdoms and truths otherwise unknowable are appealing when faced with the postmodern notion that there are no universal truths." (p. 147)

I don't get this idea that virtual reality or online experience can be a spiritual path. (So let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a reality that incorporates universal, knowable truths (and I do).) There is a sterility and barren-ness to the online experience. I would need to look at William Gibson's writing more carefully to cite something specific, but Neuromancer et al. effectively expressed this to me, and my own experience supports this. The transcendence in his books transcends into a spiritually empty place. The online experience takes one away from the real being and meaning and spirit of nature, the world, and the physical, tangible, qualitative experience of it all. Online can only present realities constructed by other human beings, enhanced by one's personal experience of the constructed environments. Bromberg cautions the reader about this:

the commodification of VR could be like the commodification of sugar-coated hyper-real dreams at Disneyland. While VR may allow a stage for acting out personalized dreams, the issue of censorship also arises, as there are those who would like to restrict the nature of the imagining and censor the fantasizing that is permitted within the realm of cyberspace. There are further political implications. While optimists may suggest that networked virtual reality could instigate the first, true, consensual 'global village', one might also suggest that it could be used to manufacture political consent or reinforce various ideologies. (p. 151)

What she doesn't note is that any online community (okay this is a broad assertion, but I think it can be supported) has pre-set rules or protocols that will govern participants interactions. The protocols may be set by (or implicit in) the hardware or software, or usage rules, or the nature of online world (science fiction, fantasy, economic structures, common interests, and so on).

Virtual reality is not, and cannot be -- never ever -- as rich as or as meaningful as the living nature I see right now outside of my window. I would further assert that there is something fundamentally more precious to be gained in experiencing that living nature deeply, that cannot be gained by experiencing machine-mediated online constructed spaces.

Of course there is value in online communication, and the type of community that arises there. But there should also be appropriate boundaries and understandings of the limitations of online communities. In the classroom, teachers, I should think, need to help students understand those boundaries to maximize the benefits of online interactions.

jd

"In the woods, we return to reason and faith." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The economic stimulus package and education

2009-05-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

This is a response I added to another blog posting as part of a class at National-Louis University. The original post can be be seen at http://www.toddprice.org/.

Here goes:

I don't understand why you think that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is "trumped" by the Economic Stimulus bill. One website headline captured the essence of the stimulus bill: "A one-time opportunity to make lasting impact and improve outcomes" (http://teachscape.com -- this was part of an ad that showed up on a Google search for "economic stimulus education"). That phrase, "one-time opportunity to make lasting impact" is an oxymoron in education. At best, the injection of money will make up for past cuts and chronic underfunding.

Regarding money for technology in education, as a one-time infusion, the economic stimulus will likely feed exactly the wrong kind of technology deployment. As Todd Oppenheimer repeats over and over and over in his book _The Flickering Mind_, the past thirty years of education is littered with the corpses of failed technology initiatives. One important reason they have failed is because technology has been evolving so quickly, that any purchase today will be more or less obsolete in two or three years, or the equipment will be unusable, or in need of routine maintenance that is unaffordable because the stimulus money was, well, one-time. As a case in point, my school is part of a five-year technology initiative, much like what I suspect that the stimulus package might fund. We have lots of great new equipment. But batteries on the laptops are starting to fail, bulbs in the LCD projectors and document cameras will eventually need to be replaced; we need batteries for the cameras, ink cartidges for printers, CD and DVD blanks, back-up storage, software, subscriptions, etc. etc. etc. -- all of the routine extra expenses not covered by the program for which we may or may not have money budgeted -- in any case I don't know where it is coming from. And that is if the school's money is managed well, and not spent on frivolous purchases of questionable educational value. And unless the crazy requirements of NCLB are revised, including the absurd definition of "adequate yearly progress", the technology will be directed to exactly the wrong kind of uses -- drill and kill test prep.

The problems of education in the United States are too deep for a one-time stimulus. If anything, the salivating over the economic stimulus will have the negative effect of taking the focus off of the deep problems that require long-term solutions -- solutions like smaller class size, time for lesson planning and reflection, maybe longer school days, art and music and shop programs, space for innovation in the public school classroom, recess, and so on.

No Child Left Behind law leaving children behind

2009-04-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

"No Child Left Behind" news from the New York Times:

1.‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap

2. What We Learn From School Tests (a blog / debate on recent National Assessment of Education Progress numbers on math and reading progress over the past 30-some years.

jd

Checking out the emperor

2009-04-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

Some related links:

Research connects lower grades to Facebook use:

Ohio State University Research News: "Study finds link between Facebook use, lower grades in college"

Time Magazine: "What Facebook Users Share: Lower Grades"

Frontline had a segment on a recent program on the impact of the intensive super-connected technology culture in South Korea. The program included a visit to a "digital detox" center for teenagers. I was reminded of the quote from a 5th-grader, courtesy of William Louv: "I like to play indoors 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are." The de-tox program included pitching tents and jumping rope (not sure what the exact context of the activities were, but notably they required being outdoors). That "digital addiction" is a manifestion of nature deficit disorder, and part of the remedy, as Louv writes, is "leave no child inside."

And a related post I made for a class last Fall:

Steve Talbott has written for many years about the dangers of our fascination with, and near worship of, technology. A former technology writer, he wrote The Future Does Not Compute in 1995, and released a collection of essays titled Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in the Age of Machines in 2007. Both books were published by O'Reilly, the respected and prolific publisher of a wide range of technical computer books. The subtitle of the latter book pretty much sums up Talbott's view of technology -- we are challenged to continually remind ourselves that we are not machines, and that computers are machines. "Artificial life" and "virtual reality" are fundamentally different from "real life" and umm real reality. Computers can do remarkable things, but thinking, Talbott argues, is a uniquely human activity (all of the AI research and theorizing notwithstanding). Talbott warns us that we endanger ourselves when we begin to think the way computers work -- reducing the world to quantitative, digital approximations, and then seeing and treating the world as a machine, instead of appreciating its wonderful qualitative, analog complexities.

As a working technologist, I have found Talbott's writing to be inspiring in terms of what it means to be a human being (and not a machine), and deeply helpful in reminding me not to be too swept away by the machines we have created -- to keep technology in its proper perspective. Much of Talbott's writings are available online at http://netfuture.org/. He also has an online newsletter (found at that site), called NetFuture: Technology and Human Responsibility which comes out irregularly. To subscribe to the newsletter, go to http://netfuture.org/subscribe.html.

And finally, I am reading Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind (2004). (The subtitle I think sums up his general theme: "Saving education from the false promise of technology".) From the introduction: "One could ... say that in the realm of education, technology is like a vine -- it's gorgeous at first bloom but quickly overgrows, gradually altering and choking its surroundings." (p. xiv).

jd

Map to all of the collaboration tools in the universe

2009-04-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

Check out Robin Good's Collaborative Map of the Best Online Collaboration Tools of 2009. It is impressive, and overwhelming, the number of tools out there.

The map was made with MindMeister, which has a free basic service.

jd

I think this is starting to come together

2009-04-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

Here is a schema of my Web 2.0 world now (it's basically a visual representation of the previous post). Arrows indicate direction of information flow. The size of the nodes indicates relative importance to me right now in presenting myself to the Internet. Everything from me is written or copied/pasted; the technology connecting the other services is indicated on the link. The graphic was created using Kidspiration, mainly to reinforce to myself that it can be used for adult activities.

jd

Still testing

2009-04-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

I am still testing how to best integrate blogs, twitter, Google Reader, facebook, diigo and the other tools out there. Ideally, I want to make one posting or bookmark or tweet (forgive me!), and it propagates to all of the web faces I have out there. For facebook, I want the blog items to show up as status updates so people will see short notes that the info is out there (i.e. not just on my Profile).

Blog -> (RSS feed) -> Twitter -> (facebook twitter app) -> facebook status update

Twitter -> (RSS) -> Google Reader
Blog -> (RSS) -> Google Reader (so duplicates the Twitter update!)

Diigo -> (RSS) -> Blog -> [see above, to Twitter and from there to Facebook]

Twitter -> (facebook twitter app) -> facebook status update

facebook link, events, notes -> (facebook widget) -> blog [these are links back to facebook; user needs a facebook account to see the info, so not ideal]

blog -> (facebook RSS setting (via Profile page) ) -> facebook Profile page [but not status update! -- this is redundant to the Twitter status update -- I am also checking out the Simply RSS app on Facebook, to see how it works -- which as the rationale for this post!]

I know I have missed some things. The above begs for a graphic to show the different flows.

Testing 1-2-3.

jd

Diigo in education

2009-04-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

After learning about Diigo in a Web 2.0 class a couple of weeks ago, I have been impressed with what it does (bookmarking / social bookmarking). I have especially been impressed with the links I am receiving everyday from the "Diigo in education" group -- Diigo lets you create groups, which others can join, and new bookmarks submitted by anyone in the group are sent out in a periodic (user-controlled) mailing.

Here are some samples from today's email:

The Top 10 Tech Skills Your Teen Needs Now

A People's History of the United States

Multiple Intelligences -- Assessment

Slums around the world

The Sect of Homokaasu - The Rasterbator (this is kinda neat -- you can take a picture and it makes it really big, printing a portion on many 8.5x11 sheets of paper, which you then assemble -- at least that's what I think it does...)

Dimdim: free web conferencing

Etc. etc. etc.

jd

Doing away with Microsoft

2009-04-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today has an article of note on Zoho (the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/business/05digi.html), which provides a rich suite of online applications. Zoho's offering may appear redundant to Google docs, but the NYT reviewer liked the writing app better and Zoho evidently provides offline editing tools which sounds nice and useful.

CPS's provided email and collaboration tool, FirstClass, also provides a writing app, and is available via the web, although it is slow and cumbersome and has the very very annoying shortcoming of throwing away your work if you press the backspace key with the focus in the wrong spot (the browser takes you to the previous page, sans your work).

And then there is OpenOffice, the open source suite of productivity tools. Our Macs did not come with Microsoft Office on the Mac OS side (it did have the awful Office 2007 on the Windows partition -- how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...), so I though OpenOffice would be a viable solution for our Macs. And it has worked okay -- the Aqua version for the Mac uses the native Mac interface, but there are odd inconsistencies and silly bugs and not so silly ones that are irritating. (Specifically, and off the top of my head: keyboard mapping is consistent I think with OpenOffice on other platforms, but not with the Mac, in particular the laptop keyboard, e.g. Option-Down Arrow to page down -- I cannot figure out how to page down on the MacBook; the RTF save option omits, or rather, screws up simple formatting stuff like centered text; the autocorrection has some oddities; Page Setup is not of the File Menu where I am pretty sure it is for every other app in the universe, instead it is on the Format menu; and we had a very difficult time with the presentation software hanging, but it is better with version 3.0.1). BUT... It is a free and feature-rich offering with a large user and developer community behind it. I am forcing myself to use OpenOffice just to know it and to see if there really is a fulfilling life post-Microsoft. And for the most part, yes, there is life after MSFT.

So why bother with the expense and general trauma of wrestling with Microsoft Office? Mainly because of the dead weight of history, that incredible inertia of user base and training and curriculum material specific to MSFT and .doc files and .ppt files that use some peculiar MSFT feature not ported to the online and open source alternatives. Eventually I think blunders like the Office 2007 interface catastrophe and plain old price will wean educators away from the MSFT teat. In the meantime, us tech teachers should be ecumenical in our approach to applications -- we should be teaching word processing and not Word; spreadsheets and not Excel; presentation software and not PowerPoint. I have found students to be very flexible in moving across platforms and applications.

The biggest obstacle I see right now for going to online tools in the classroom is the legal one of age restrictions on the accounts for students. Related to this is the potential issue, if student accounts come with public email accounts, of Internet safety. But is this really an issue? Don't the students already have their yahoo and hotmail accounts? I don't know. FirstClass could be a good solution, since student email accounts cannot receive email from outside of FirstClass, but the writing app is so difficult to use, and the other main tools, spreadsheets and presentation software in particular as far as I can tell are missing. There is also some risk that the online services will at some point change their terms of use or pricing models. Are they a safe basket to store eggs?

Anyway I have sent an email to Zoho regarding classroom use and student accounts.

jd

Chicago Consortium on School Research

2009-04-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

Seen on the very good weekly Scout Report e-mailing: A writeup of the Chicago Consortium on School Research website. Some examples of research reports available:

Changing Schools: A Look at Student Mobility Trends in Chicago Public Schools Since 1995

Making the Transition: How Each Elementary School's Eighth-Grade Graduates Are Doing in High School

Lessons from High Performing Small High Schools in Chicago

jd

One iPhone per Child

2009-03-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

As the happy owner of a new Apple iPhone, I am intrigued about its possibilities in the classroom. The iPhone includes many, if not most, of the features of the various bits of technology that were part of our program through CPS's Office of Academic Enhancement; but it also includes additional features that suggest additional uses.

The iPhone has web access for do just about everything one does on wih a web browser. As a sound player, it can do everything an iPod can do, including play video and audio (including podcast lectures and other offerings from iTune U). The iPhone includes a decent scientificThe iPhone includes a camera. Free software turns the iPhone into a sound recorder. The GPS chip provides positioning information, and the motion detector suggests other possibilities (math and science possibilities).

In addition, there are many, many applications (25,000 and growing according to Apple), many of which are free, and many of which have either explicit or implicit education uses. (What about textbooks on the iPhone?)

Better yet, the announced summer 2009 3.0 operating system upgrade will include collaboration features. There are obvious uses for gaming, but the Apple video of the developer announcement meeting showed two developers playing music together using their iPhones.

I called a representative from Apple in their education support program. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How can I explore using the iPhone in the classroom?
Apple: You don't want to use the iPhone, you want to use the iPod Touch.
Me: But what about the features that the iPhone has that the Touch doesn't, like the camera or GPS?
Apple: Why pay the AT&T phone charges just to have a camera?
Me: Are there no options for controlling the phone service fees?
Apple: Without phone service the iPhone is inert. You want to use the iTouch.
Me: Is there some way to control this?
Apple: You want to use the iTouch.

The conversation went around like that for a minute or so. Now I may be exaggerating slightly here, but this was my sense of the conversation, and a sense I have had in the past talking to people from large organizations -- this is what is available period, and that's that. It was clear that the rep was unable or unwilling to consider or explore possible ways around the AT&T service issue. And my school is, after all, a small fish. Her answer was the iPod Touch, period. Obviously, I would need to talk to AT&T about whatever programs they might have or consider for iPhone use in the classroom. A rep at Chicago's Apple Store echoed that, since as he point out, with the iPhone we are dealing with two providers, Apple and AT&T, and the latter is handling the cell network connectivity which is a vital part of the iPhone.

But why not use the iTouch? The iTouch does not have the camera, the GPS sensing, the microphone (although there is a way around this), or the Bluetooth ability. I don't know exactly what technologies are needed for collaboration -- maybe WiFi connectivity will be all that is needed. The camera is a biggish thing though, and the microphone, and there are a number of possibilities with GPS (although I need to experiment with GPS signal reception in our school building; I am able to get a good signal in my upstairs room at home.)

Now an iPod Touch that included the camera, microphone, GPS and Bluetooth -- that would be ideal for the classroom.

I set up a Diigo group and a Diigo list for links on iPhones and the iPod Touch in education, if you want to track links I find.

More on this as I find out more.

jd

More twiddling with Blogger, this time with Diigo

2009-03-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

I have been playing around with Diigo, a nice social bookmarking site. My only complaint so far is that when you are logged in to Diigo, it takes the liberty of putting little post-it crap on the browser screen from other Diigo users. Maybe there is a way to turn this off, I haven't looked into it enough.

Diigo has a feature where you can include an RSS-type feed from your Diigo bookmarks on another website, which I have added to the right-hand panel of this blog. These are called Enhanced Linkrolls. Use the Tools option (located on a drop-down menu under your username) to customize the HTML code that Diigo generates. I added an HTML widget to the blog (on the Layout tab when customizing the blog, and pasted in the Diigo script code.

I had some problems matching up the background colors from Diigo's code with the blog's colors. I resolved this by generating custom code in Diigo, then looking at the source code for the blog page, locating the sidebar background color (called the "Top Sidebar"), and pasting it into the Diigo code. There was another small wrinkle here -- Blogger used three-digit hexadecimal color codes, instead of the six hexadecimal codes I was familiar with. After some poking around, I found that the three-digit hex codes can be converted to the corresponding six-digit hex code by adding another digit for each digit in the three digit color code. So -- Blogger's background color was #9b5, so I removed the "#", and repeated each character like so: 99bb55 in the Diigo HTML. This gave me the same background color for my widget as for the rest of the sidebar.

Correct picture size for right-hand column on Blogger

2009-03-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

This took some experimenting. I added a picture to the right-hand column, but it bled out to past the edge of the column (Blogger said that it would resize the picture to 240 pixels wide, but that is too wide for the template I am using, "Rounder 4" I think.)

The height of the picture in the template is 160 pixels, but no width is specified. It turns out that the width of the column, allowing for margins (or, the width of the dashed line) is 216 pixels.

So -- resize or crop the photo to 160 pixels high by 216 pixels wide for a properly laid-out photo.

jd

Web 2.0 1.0

2009-03-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

I am enrolled in the Technology in Education program at National-Louis University. I may add comments about the program itself in a future post, but not now. The program requires me to take two one-credit workshops, and today, Saturday, I am in the first session of a workshop on Web 2.0. The workshop is being taught by Randy Hansen, who also happens be to the Program Director.

I know that Web 2.0 is one of those ideas that has been out there for a while now. And it is more of an idea or a concept than a specific technology, or maybe a bundle of technologies that make the realization of a general idea possible. And that General Idea is that we are not just the objects of the web, but also the subjects (in sort-of-Brechtian terms); or not just consumers but also producers (in ho-hum market terms).

Our first assignment today is to create a blog in Blogger, but I am recycling this already existent blog.

Posting now...

jd