Will teachers use online tools to track work outside of class? (photo by dave_mcmt)

Jay Mathews has a piece in The Washington Post this week that highlights a common challenge in ed tech. Many schools now partner with sites where students’ assignments can be easily followed online. This is great for kids who routinely forget to write down assignments, and it’s great for parents whose children struggle to stay on task.

One problem, though, is that some teachers aren’t embracing the change. Mathews tells the story of a mother who had to email the principal to figure out why her daughter’s work hadn’t been posted (her daughter has ADHD, so tracking assignments is especially pressing):

The teacher was discontinuing the web site, the principal replied. She felt it was not a useful tool, too much of a bother when she had different assignments for gifted and regular kids. So how could parents keep track of assignments if the teacher rejected the instrument designed to accomplish that?

You can see how situations like these would be common in schools. An online syllabus can be useful in theory, but what happens when teachers have to change assignments on the fly for different students? For teachers who are less than tech-savvy (or in the case of websites or programs that are less than user-friendly), online tools could prove to be more of a burden than a boon.

That’s why technology–not teachers–should be doing the legwork. Instead of requiring manual updates every time a study plan changes, what if a syllabus automatically adjusted to individual students? The problem of “different assignments for gifted and regular kids” would be resolved; a teacher would only have to monitor adjustments and let the system send the alerts.

This individualized approach to education is a work in progress (it’s the kind of adaptive learning technology we’re building now at Knewton), but in the meantime there have to be ways to meet teachers halfway.

A syllabus should be more than a static calendar. One idea would be to track students’ positions on a moveable timeline, where teachers could drag and drop students to different parts of the syllabus as they moved through their work.

Or what if each student had a personal syllabus that clearly showed which assignments were left to complete? We recently wrote about the online syllabus in our GMAT prep course; it’s a one-stop source of information for all student assignments and deadlines, and something like it could certainly be used to empower parents who are eager to follow their kids’ progress.

Jay Mathews insists that teachers have to accept technology if it’s going to be useful, but let’s not forget that technology still has a lot of room to grow. All teachers want to provide the best education they can — when technology helps them do that, they’ll be less likely to reject it.

[The Washington Post/Class Struggle] When teachers reject the Internet

Related posts:

1. Should all teachers post their syllabi and curricula online?
2. Now hiring: Teachers!
3. The promise of online education (and the hurdles in its way)

Students using their free laptops, courtesy of Uruguay's Plan Ceibal (photo by LIRNE.NET)

World Bank’s Edublog has a post up about an incredibly ambitious educational technology program in Uruguay. Under Plan Ceibal, all students in Uruguayan primary schools (and soon high school students, as well) receive free laptops as part of their public school education. Even better, the schools take steps to ensure that the new technology is put to good use:

Ceibal is about more than just ‘free laptops for kids’ [...].  There is a complementary educational television channel. Schools serve as centers for free community wi-fi, and free connectivity has been introduced in hundreds of municipal centers around the country as well.  There are free local training programs for parents and community members on how to use the equipment.”

Giving laptops to students is a great first step in broadening their educational opportunities, but the free wi-fi and added connectivity benefit the communities that the schools are a part of, as well. Also striking is the way the plan was implemented, with an emphasis on areas where educational improvements were most needed:

Notably, and tellingly, Plan Ceibal rolled out first in rural and poor communities, with schools in the capital city of Montevideo reached only in the final stage of deployment.  This stands in stark contrast to the way educational technologies make their way into schools and communities pretty much everywhere else in the world, where urban population centers and wealthy communities are typically first in line [...].”

What’s awesome about this program is that it’s aimed at a central challenge in improving education worldwide. Education is about access, and something as simple as connecting students to the internet could lead to incredible gains, especially in places where schools are strapped for resources, or where schools barely exist at all. This is one problem we try to address with our GMAT prep and LSAT prep courses; since all the teaching is online, we can reach students who may not have access to the test centers that students in major U.S. cities take for granted.

Unequipped classrooms, dearths of textbooks, the costs of school supplies — all these obstacles can be made less pressing by insisting that connectivity is a basic educational requirement. Granted, laptop programs are not miracle cures. There’s a key difference between information and education. If there weren’t, we could all quit school and just rely on Wikipedia.

For technology to better primary and high school education, teachers have to be brought on board with every advance that is made, parents have to be able to follow what their kids are learning, and students have to be shown ways to explore, filter, and evaluate the vast body of knowledge (and junk) they encounter online.

Ceibal is exciting, though, because it’s applying a simple mission on a massive scale. The futures of education and technology are intertwined. As learning evolves, students deserve the resources to keep up.

[Edublog] How do you evaluate a plan like Ceibal?

Related posts:

1. Business schools working harder to attract international MBAs
2. GMAT students, welcome to your redesigned syllabus page
3. Keeping students in the driver’s seat

The contest has two categories, both open to the public. The 21st Century Learning Lab Designers category fields entries that use digital media to create interactive “learning environments” — especially ideas that facilitate learning through social interactions and group challenges. Another category, Game Changers, encourages entrants to create new learning games for PlayStation’s LittleBigPlanet (!).

The most interesting thing about the competition is its focus on education that emphasizes student interaction. From the MacArthur Foundation:

The competition is designed to promote “participatory learning,” the notion that young people often learn best through sharing and involvement. Participatory learning, as defined by the competition, is a form of learning connected to individual interests and passions, inherently social in nature, and occurring during hands-on, creative activities. Successful learning labs and games will exploit all of these elements.”

Since most education has traditionally relied on a top-down instructional approach (teacher →  student; learn it or else), there is a lot of room to innovate in terms of making learning more interactive. One solution is this very cool emphasis on social and peer-to-peer learning; another is to design learning programs that adapt to individual students.

The next few years will bring a lot of exciting developments in both of these areas, so it’s great to see ideas on the frontiers of education getting some serious (and well-funded) recognition.

Related posts:

1. Video games and failure-based learning
2. Knewton Tops Digital Education Category at AO Global 250 Awards
3. Knewton Announces Completion of $12.5 Million Financing Led by FirstMark Capital

The test-preparation industry makes $4 billion a year convincing students to come to their classes, taught in test centers in strip malls around the country. That’s just silly, in the age of the internet, according to [Knewton's CEO] Jose Ferreira, who wants to upend the industry.”

Check out the full article for a rundown of why the Knewton method makes so much sense. More of our lives are moving online every day. Isn’t it time for learning to follow suit?

[Wired] Former Test-Prep Exec Plots Industry Makeover

Related posts:

1. Knewton gets some great press
2. Knewton Tops Digital Education Category at AO Global 250 Awards
3. Big News: The Knewton SAT Course is Here

Alex Sarlin is Lead Verbal Developer for Graduate Programs at Knewton, specializing in GMAT prep.

Karen Cator, the former Director of Education and Leadership at Apple, was just appointed as the US Department of Education’s new head of the Office of Educational Technology.

Combined with the fact that $650MM that has been committed to educational tech by the federal government, this means that she could have a LOT of say about the next generation of educational tech policy in public schools.
What’s exciting about this to me (and why I’m sharing it with all of you) is that the government seems to be getting in line with private educational tech companies’ vision of the future and putting money toward implementing it in schools.

Here’s the press release.

This is a scribd slideshow by Cator about her beliefs about educational tech. Some of the interesting things regarding our work here are her focus on

1) Student experience
2) User-generated content
3) 24-7 access to educational content
4) Communication and collaboration

Related posts:

1. Should all teachers post their syllabi and curricula online?
2. Uruguay plan gives laptops, wireless to students in nation’s public schools
3. The promise of online education (and the hurdles in its way)

I used to teach afterschool in City of New York/Parks & Recreation’s Computer Resource Center program. Kids in the program spent a lot of time playing educational games like Logical Journey Of The Zoombinis and The Incredible Machine.

The kids would literally fight with each other to get to be the first to play these games, with an intensity that surprised me. I mean, the games are fun and everything, but they were nonviolent, with less-than state of the art graphics and no recognizable characters from TV or movies. The educational content was rarely disguised as “fun,” and yet, kids who snoozed through math class were riveted by the exact same content when it was presented in the context of Treasure Mathstorm.

Video games have a lot to teach designers of elearning experiences. Intuition suggests that the gratification of video games is the sense of accomplishment and victory they offer. In my observation and experience, most of the pleasure gamers experience is in moments of failure. As long as the game is balanced well, failure is fun. Beating the game feels good too, but it’s a fleeting pleasure that quickly turns into a letdown. It’s no accident that some of the most enduringly popular video games are literally impossible to beat: Tetris and Pac-Man, for example.

The pleasure of a video game is in exploring a rule set, testing out hypotheses, noticing which ones fail and which ones succeed. Every video game is an interactive learning experience. In Logical Journey Of The Zoombinis, the player learns inductive reasoning. In Halo, the player learns the game’s particular version of military strategy. In Tetris, the player learns to perform spatial logic puzzles under time pressure.

Not every game has to be explicitly goal-oriented. Will Wright’s games are more like interactive, autodidactic toys, in which the player is interacting with a complex and open-ended dynamic simulation of a city, anthill or galaxy. Any goals are set by the player. Wright’s designs are based heavily on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori. Wright says:

One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that players enjoy failures more than success. As long as it’s diverse, they like to explore the failure space of a game.

Learning is exploring a failure space. Once you’ve mapped out all the wrong paths, you can avoid them as easily as the furniture in your room when you’re walking around it at night. The point of classroom exercises and homework is to guide students through the failure space of knowledge, exploring the wrong turns and blind alleys, as well as identifying the right path.

Related posts:

1. LSAT Logic Games: Interview with Alex K. (i.e. The Man Who Explained Them All) — Part 1
2. Learning Adapted
3. LSAT Logic Games: Interview with Alex K. (i.e. The Man Who Explained Them All) — Part 2

Since I often put up both drafts of syllabi and completed syllabi for comments, I obviously think it’s a good practice. It’s been nothing but beneficial for me: I’ve gotten great suggestions, interesting critiques, a good feeling for how the syllabus plays with different intellectual communities. So why wouldn’t everyone do this? In fact, why shouldn’t everyone more or less be officially pushed to do it by colleagues or administrations. It’s not just a good thing for the person posting the syllabus, but for students who want an early view of what a course might entail and for larger publics who would like to get a sense of how much work and thought goes into an average course design. Since one of the handicaps academics have in the public sphere at the moment is that there are a number of people who think the work of college teaching consists of walking into a room, letting knowledge spill out of your head, and leaving, it might help if we gave a demonstration of what’s actually involved.

Why don’t all teachers post their course materials online? Some teachers are unfamiliar with the tools. Some are anxious about a hostile reaction to their ideas. Some are anxious about the scrutiny of their peers. Some might wish to maintain their sense of expertise by limiting the circulation and exposure of their field.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to be said for having all syllabi live on the web. Students would have a better idea of what to expect going into a class and would have another way to track their progress once the class was underway. Prospective students would have more information to go on when choosing schools, or classes or majors within those schools. Other teachers might find inspiration (or fuel for competition) to impove their own course materials.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. An ed tech challenge: Teachers can put homework online, but will they?
2. Now hiring: Teachers!
3. The promise of online education (and the hurdles in its way)

Anthony Mattox has made some particularly compelling artworks with Processing:

Processing is free to download and available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Have fun!

Related posts:

1. Learning Adapted
2. On becoming a practicing software engineer
3. Video games and failure-based learning