As I have written about before, I’m a big proponent of getting eBooks into my scholars’ hands. Previously, I cast my vote for Stanza as my favorite app for reading eBooks on an iPad or other iOS device, but I’ve recently changed my mind. Here’s why you should go with Apple’s own iBooks. (And it’s not because iBooks2 allows you to access Apple’s gorgeous new digital textbooks, though that’s certainly a huge advantage.)
I’m always looking to move information from websites to my class iPads. The reason is simple: syncing 30 iPads one-to-one with my school MacBook is a pain, but putting material on a website allows for a one-to-many distribution channel. Fortunately, iOS offers a handy default connection between Safari and iBooks. If you point iOS Safari (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) at an ePub file sitting on a webserver, it will ask if you would like to open the file in iBooks. This means I can make eBooks available on our class Moodle site and allow students to browse and download them individually at their own discretion—no syncing required.
There are lots of ways to do this, but the essential elements are:
create links on a web page that point to the files
make these links accessible to your audience
For a few weeks, I’ve been doing this with an ugly setup that involved showing book information and links in a :
But today I decided it was time to clean up and get professional. So that meant moving our private digital class library into Moodle.
Moodle includes a helpful module for making databases with a simple wizard interface. I said that each entry in the database needed to have these fields:
Title
Cover image
Open in iBooks [a URL link to the book file]
Author
Genre
Summary
Here’s what that looks like for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother
The summary info and cover image I pulled from , the phenomenal social networking site for sharing book recommendations.
Now that I’ve got a more streamlined system, I’ll need to keep growing the library and tracking to see what books my scholars are reading.
Back in September, I was sitting in a collaborative planning session with my principal and my department chair when an assistant principal stuck her head in the room and asked to speak to me outside. With her stood our technology coordinator. They showed me a piece of paper with the name of a wireless network written on it. The network emanated from my classroom, a stink wave that had left the building without Internet access for the past hour.
I knew that we weren’t supposed to use our own computers and networking equipment on school wires, but I didn’t understand the technical reason why. And I’d just set up a class set of iPads for my students that were going to prove pretty useless if I didn’t have WiFi for them.
Shamed, I hustled upstairs and unhooked the contraband wireless router. Internet access was restored through out the building shortly thereafter.
The next morning rolled around, and I still had 29 iPads what weren’t very useful without WiFi. So I cracked open my school-issued MacBook Pro and flipped on Internet Sharing in System Preferences. The essentially turns your MacBook, plugged into an ethernet port, into a wireless hotspot.
Two hours later, I started noticing that my network connection was sluggish. Then our technology coordinator knocked on my door, displeased. She asked about a wireless network that shared a name with my MacBook. This time I was too embarrassed to completely own up to the crime and quickly shut off the sharing function. But the damage had been done. Internet access was down for the whole school, not 24 hours after the first incident.
But because our middle school shares a building with an elementary school, access to the entire site was down. Apparently, central IT rules stipulate that when the system spots unauthorized networking equipment sharing net access in a school, the connection gets cut to the entire physical location. Which meant that for the second day in a row, I had brought down two school networks at the same time.
The upshot: I got an authorized wireless router later that day.
I also learned a few lessons about how (and how not) to push school tech adoption forward:
Ask about protocol.
Internet access is a shared resource, so if you’re going to use it in ways that are new or unexpected, be diplomatic. I should have asked more questions before I went rogue with my self-styled WiFi setup. It would have prevented a lot of disrupted work and instruction.
Think about bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a measure of how much data you’re pushing through the wires on a given network. All networks have a limit to how much data they can handle—think of it like the amount of water you can squeeze through a pipe of a certain diameter in a given amount of time. Bigger pipes = more data. But even mundane-seeming tasks can gobble up huge amounts of network bandwidth. Stream an entire HD movie into your classroom over Netflix and you’re talking about 3.5 GB of data—basically an entire DVD or half your free Gmail storage. If you’re consistently using a lot of bandwidth for just your classroom, that limits what everyone at your school has to play with.
Reflect: Is what you’re trying to do centered on student learning?
I was excited to get my iPads up and running. But I also had to stop and and ask myself if what I was doing was about helping them learn or just running nifty technology tricks. Ultimately, I’m glad that I pushed the rules because it meant that my students got access to eBooks, a class website, and online assessment materials within the first weeks of the year. However, I risked future support for projects like this by skirting the rules. The trust and support I’d earned from my principals was critical to continuing my experiments.
Socrative is a simple web-based student response system that I’ve tinkered with on several occasions, but its streamlined interface sits atop a deceptively powerful piece of software. The flexibility makes it something I’d recommend to any teacher with at least a handful of web-enabled devices, be those iPads, iPod Touches, laptops, smartphones, or even a computer lab of workstations. Rather than giving an overview of the whole Socrative tool, I’ll outline how I leveraged it to run a successful unit review lesson before the holiday break.
The basic brilliance of is that rather than organizing information around “users,” it organizes information around “activities.” There are no logins for individual students; there is simply a virtual “room” where the teacher runs an activity and any student can join that room using a unique “room number.” Teacher accounts are currently free and the development team is eager to hear from users and work with them.
Back to the simplicity. During a lesson, setup requires that a student 1) opens any modern web browser on any device, 2) navigates to m.socrative.com, and 3) enters the correct room number for my account:
Unit 3 in my 7th-grade English class is about narratives, and I wanted my review activity to focus on key terms that students had struggled with: the elements of a plot (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution), point of view, and theme (the lesson of the story).
During several previous lessons, students practiced explaining the elements of the plot by charting them through “story maps”—but rather than simply make another story map as a review, I wanted an engaging activity that would help students target their analysis of a new story to the elements they most struggled with. Sure, you understand rising action, but what if you really need to work on identifying the climax? You’ve got setting down, but what about point of view?
So I wrote a lesson plan that went like this:
as a class, read a short (1 page) story that scholars had not seen before
demonstrate how to create a “story poster” that captured all these key elements for a story that we had read several times previously
break scholars into teams to test their knowledge of these key elements with an interactive group quiz; each student responds to questions on their iPad (we have a class set of 30)
set students to work on their individual posters.
Here’s my exemplar version of the “story poster”—it’s based on the Richard Peck story “Priscilla and the Wimps” and I made it accessible to every student by snapping a pic of it with my iPhone and them dropping that into the day’s pdf presentation:
Socrative was the tool I chose for the third part (group quiz), as the software offers a “Space Race” feature that administers a pre-made quiz to an arbitrary number of students divided into up to 10 teams. Basically, it’s a way of “gamifying” a quiz so that students can race to see who can answer the most questions quickly and correctly.
I wrote the 10-question quiz as plain text and then moved the pieces into the Excel template that Socrative supplies for uploading into their system. Here’s a link to that file so you can see how it works for a basic set of multiple-choice questions.
After students “sign in” to the appropriate virtual room, they select their team from a simple list organized by color (no custom team names at the moment, but I just assigned colors to the tables in my physical room):
They then type in their name (so that the teacher can see how each scholar responds) and move to the first question:
This interface scales itself nicely on any size screen, but is particularly cozy on small displays like phones and tablets.
As each team moves through the questions, the teacher interface displays the progress of each team. I projected this at the front of the room and was astounded at the urgency students in every section displayed: cheering as their ship moved forward, egging teammates to think harder when other groups edged ahead.
When all teams completed the questions, I closed the activity and Socrative automatically emailed me a .
With correct answers in green and wrong answers in red, I could immediately see which questions were troubling lots of students (e.g. the third question on identifying a story’s climax), and which students need support across the board (e.g. student17). When students moved into creating their story posters, I could direct them to focus on the concepts they missed on the practice quiz.
In the end, I’d do something similar to this again as a review lesson. There was a disconnect for the students between what they missed on the quiz and what I wanted them to practice on their poster, but that’s something I could remedy by tweaking the directions or making the quiz results instantly accessible.
Finally, I have to admit that I put a little extra production time into this lesson experiment because I had two guests observing who were interested in seeing how I incorporate iPads into instruction. Below I include the lesson plan and the presentation I used to guide students through the lesson:
From time to time growing up, my dad has said something that’s been on my mind a lot recently: “Technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” This is a book about the dark side of technological magic, and how the greatest wizards are sometimes 17-year-old geeks.
Written in 2006, this young-adult techno adventure is Orwell updated for millennials living at the height of the “war on terror.” It’s a gripping adventure set in San Francisco, with gritty descriptions of young U.S. citizens being tortured at the hands of a maniacal Department of Homeland Security bent on surveilling the entire city after terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge.
This may sound preachy, but Doctorow underscores his earnestness about ensuring personal liberty in the face of state corruption by embedding the story with lucid, clear explanations of nerd culture and advanced technologies. In between discussions of Live-Action Role Playing and Scoville scales for measuring hot sauce heat, he explains Public Key encryption (which allows uncrackable electronic communication), arphid cloning (duplicating the digital signature of common devices like SpeedPasses), and hardware hacking (like installing Linux distributions on XBoxes).
I wasn’t much of a hacker when I was in high school, but I was keen on dismantling electronics, learning how to pick locks, and poking around local Bulletin Board Systems (the modem-days precursors to websites). This books took me right back and solidified my desire to learn Python, experiment with browser anonymizers (which will let me get on Facebook at school), and subscribe to MAKE magazine.
Put this in the hands of the nearest teenager and tell them to go find something to install Linux on.
And as for magic, I read this entire book (my first novel) on an iPad and an iPhone, using the booki.sh and bookworm cloud-based ereaders. You could hand that teenager a hardcopy, or you could just give them this link:
Your students need books that they will like reading. One way to get them those books is to hand them a hard copy. Another way, if you’ve got the right technology, is to give them an ebook. Anyone who has seen a Kindle is familiar with the basic idea of what an ebook is: it’s a computer file that contains a whole book. But the trouble with Kindles is that you’re locked into doing things the Amazon way: their files, their reader, their prices.
This post will offer a brief intro to open, free ways to acquire and read ebooks, with a focus on tools for doing this on tablets (read: the iPads your school has but doesn’t know what to do with) and mobile devices (read: the smartphones your students just use for Facebook, txting, and Angry Birds).
Fortunately, there are millions of books available in open, non-proprietary formats, and the most ubiquitous of those at the moment is the ePub format. Without going into the technical details, an ePub book is just all the words in a book (and maybe some images) wrapped up in a little file with standard instructions on where the chapters start and stop and info on the title, author, and publisher.
Lots of books that are no longer protected by copyright are available for free in epub format. Alas, as excited as I am to have downloaded free copies of Dracula and Moby Dick, I might have a tough time selling those to my 7th graders. To dive right in, go download Cory Doctorow’s (description ). The YA book is about teenagers in San Francisco using their hacker skillz to thwart a Department of Homeland Security that has curtailed civil liberties to an unacceptable extreme in the wake of an imagined terrorist attack. Doctorow takes a very open stance on copyright protection, and would therefore rather have more copies of his books in readers’ hands than worry that he earned a few bucks off every copy in circulation. I whole-heartedly embrace his mindset when it comes to getting high-interest texts into the hands of reluctant readers.
So now you have a file sitting on your computer called “CoryDoctorow-LittleBrother.epub”. What do you do with it?
There are a bunch of different epub readers available for Windows and Mac; some are nifty little extensions that run in Firefox or Chrome. If your goal is to develop and manage a collection of ebooks (something I’ll aim to cover in the future), then you want the heavyweight . If you just want to get your kids reading books on their computers or mobile devices, here are a few better solutions:
bookworm
Just discovered this and wish I had seen it earlier. Bookwork allows you to create an account, then upload epub books online and read them in a web browser. The interface is utilitarian, but it offers a simple mobile reading format that is very readable on mobile devices and iPads.
The learning curve here is pretty low. You upload the files; they live in your account; you login and read them. I’ll be uploading several sets of books this weekend and adding the link to the class bookworm account to my Moodle site for students to access Monday.
booki.sh
Booki.sh is a very cute indie ebook reader built by some clever Australian developers. It has a more polished interface than bookworm, but you can also upload epub files, sort them into your library, and they read them in a browser. The interface is optimized for iPads, so if you’re taking it for a spin, don’t just go by what it looks like on your laptop. This is actually how I do a lot of personal reading, because the site syncs bookmarks in the cloud: if I read a few pages on my iPhone, then I can open up my iPad later and go right to the spot where I stopped.
Booki.sh can also add books to your library directly from , a major repository of public domain (free) books. But again, Pride and Prejudice may not appeal to all your students.
Amazon Cloud Reader
Okay, so I said earlier that Kindle wasn’t the best way to go, but Amazon currently dominates this market and has a well-designed browser reader. I asked a few friends to donate Kindle books through an Amazon Wishlist, so my scholars have access to a few books in the class library. Amazon also provides access to troves of public domain books.
There are many other apps for reading epub files on your devices, and your iPad has doubtless prompted you to download one of them: iBooks. But here’s the rub: moving books into iBooks requires going through a book-buying process similar to a Kindle, or else requires that you manage your files through iTunes. If you, as a classroom teacher, don’t have administrative access to move files or apps on and off your iPads, iBooks will be of limited use. If you do get ebook readers like installed on your tablets, you still have to manage moving files onto the devices.
When I think about optimal teaching tools for iPads or other class-room based technology, I usually want to see a solution that works in a browser. Because as locked down as a set of iPads may be, or as impossible as it may be to get new software onto computers in a school lab, you can almost always access the web.
Around 2000, I volunteered at a GoodWill book sale in Atlanta. The offerings of donated books were pretty extensive and the prices were rock-bottom. While I sorted shelves and helped folks checkout, I watched a man spend 90 minutes combing the sale floor and pulling each each and every copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He probably found 50 copies of various editions. When he checked out, he told us he was a high school English teacher and needed the texts for his class. Now, given the right hardware, he could get the .
At the moment, the publishing world is in a state of flux as ebooks grow in popularity and reading devices become more affordable and available. The formats may change (VHS beat Betamax; Blu-Ray beat HD-DVD), but the bottom line is this: your kids need books, and ebooks are a powerful way to get them reading.
Over the weekend, I had the privilege to attend a portion of the . Startup Weekend is itself a startup organization that organizes gatherings of developers, designers, business and marketing experts, and investors to build startup companies in a single weekend. This year, the organization began a series of events focused specifically on innovation in education. The first was (of course) in . But despite the lack of trolleys and valleys made of silicone, the DC region is still an indisputable hub for great ideas in technology and education.
The ideas themselves showcased the huge range of possibilities for what techies call “disruptive” innovations in education. Taking top honors just earlier this evening from among about eight teams was a product called . It’s a system that moves information and assignments from college syllabi into online calendars, helping students stay on top of their work.
, a project I tagged along with for a few hours on Saturday, was focused more on the needs of under-performing schools. The prototype is an open-source assessment bank for teachers, with items written by teachers, aimed at reducing the pain and redundancy of researching and writing rigorous assessment questions.
Another project, , is a platform for helping underserved students learn “foundational skills in computer science and programming to narrow the digital divide.” is a prototype browser plugin that helps you learn another language as you read the Internet by substituting key vocabulary words with their foreign language equivalents, allowing you to see them in context.
The event is a harbinger of the kind of collaboration between educators, businesspeople, developers, and investors that is absolutely critical to closing the achievement gap. There is a significant lack of innovation in public education, and CMs must take their teaching knowledge and leverage it to build the tools and companies we need.
While I did not join a team at the event, I made several excellent connections and new friends. I explained Exit Tickets to an executive from , a leader in the new school of education software companies. I met TFA alums running their own education consulting groups, who connected me in turn to TFA alums running their own education technology groups. I swapped classroom disaster stories with former Baltimore Public Schools teachers and drank coffee with Harvard Business School grads.
Five current DC Region CMs or recent alums followed the startup beacon to Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Three of those alums devoted the whole weekend to projects ranging from a tool that re-imagined globes for learning about world cultures to clean, accessible visualizations of student data for parents.
I didn’t join a team on account of planning and grading to handle this weekend, so I’d best head to bed to preserve what little of that reserve energy remains. But let this serve as background for future arguments on why this event represents the dangers of an unchecked digital divide, and why we need more TFA folks working on startups during the week, rather than just the occasional weekend.
This is my pitch, created along with my colleague Jordyn Sims, for the TFA Social Innovation Award competition.
Textlab.org
Literacy is a technology. Technology is a literacy.
Andrew Plemmons Pratt (TFA DC Region ’10, 7th grade English in PGCPS)
Jordyn Sims (TFA DC Region ’10, 8th grade English in PGCPS)
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Innovation: Textlab Will Accelerate Literacy
Teaching students literacy skills in a digital environment requires better software. We need a laboratory for reading and writing the way college students and professionals read and write: efficiently, collaboratively, and on the Internet. We need a Textlab.
Textlab is a lightweight Learning Management System, or LMS, built specifically for middle and high school literacy instruction. It allows students to practice critical reading and writing skills and to create portfolios of digital work. It also allows instructors to provide targeted, differentiated assignments and materials to students and to offer feedback in a secure online format. It is a platform-independent web application, optimized for desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile access.
Social, political, and economic power rests in no small part on the ability to share engaging ideas over the Internet. Closing the achievement gap will require bridging the digital divide while improving literacy skills. We can better prepare students for success as thought-workers in the modern economy and accelerate their academic achievement by building specialized tools that meet their literacy instruction needs in the classroom.
Middle and high school students are savvy consumers of new media—regardless of their family income. But low-income students frequently experience these tools only in the context of entertainment and not education. The paper-based classroom makes it hard for them to see literacy within the modern digital environment, which is where they will have to continue honing their critical thinking skills throughout their lives. As teacher/researcher Jim Harmon noted in his study of iPads in his English classes, teaching with these digital tools, “.”
Teaching literacy in a digital medium also allows educators to seamlessly offer differentiated texts and practice work on class-specific topics. A single digital classroom can meet each individual student’s learning needs without dividing the teacher’s attention, isolating students and publicly highlighting their differences, and requiring mountains of photocopies.
Research has already demonstrated that bridging the gap between “the traditional print-based literacy focus of most classrooms and the ” can engage students and help them succeed academically (“Teaching with Blogs: A Case Study of Technologically Mediated Literacy,” Lapadat, et al.). This same research also suggests that reading students who collaborate, investigate, and share information through digital channels are engaged and successful at mastering the content.
Core Textlab features include:
Tools for managing digital text at a variety of reading levels
The ability to assign differentiated text and activities to students according to their current reading levels
Tools for teachers to provide rapid feedback on student work
Media management for audio recordings of text and supplemental video materials
Modules for capturing and storing student work online such as journals, collaborative blogs, digital graphic organizers, selected-response questions, and other formats that correspond to familiar print-based alternatives
Intuitive functions for submitting digital drawings, photos, and graphics; video and audio responses; and webpages built within the Textlab platform
Innovation: Engaging Students Through Digital Literacy
Twenty-first century literacy instruction is largely wedded to 19th-century technologies. Our students are daily surrounded by a flood of digital text, yet we often teach them literacy skills with worksheets, composition books, broken pencils, and outdated and low-interest texts.
A variety of entrepreneurs are leveraging digital platforms to reimagine mathematics instruction, among them the wildly successful , along with projects such as and . Yet we have hardly begun to utilize similar tools for teaching critical literacy skills.
Many of the existing Learning Management Systems are designed for college settings rather than the literacy instruction secondary students need. The open-source LMS includes some features that effective literacy teachers need, but takes a kitchen-sink approach and includes tools and modules for everything from Department of Defense-designed training protocols to college science courses. And it is not optimized for the small-screen iPad tablets available in some lucky, low-income schools. It is also not user-friendly or practical for teachers adjusting to the influx of technology into the classroom.
We need a powerful set of tools to accelerate literacy skills for students who are arriving in middle or high school reading two to four years behind grade level. Textlab will enable critical productivity gains for students and teachers to maximize instructional time and outcomes.
Textlab will also help crystalize the utility of using iPads in at-risk settings. There is widespread enthusiasm for adopting iPads in schools, but that excitement often outstrips the attention paid to effective instructional use. Early research already indicates that students working in English classrooms where iPads have been effectively integrated into the curriculum can emerge from one year of instruction reading and writing more than a full year ahead of their peers in a control group (“,” Jim Harmon).
The same study surveyed students with and without access to iPads in their English classes. Only 32 percent of students without access to iPads and digital literacy tools identified “thinking about my future” as a reason for caring about and attending English class. Yet 63 percent of students with iPads and digital literacy tools said they were invested in English class because they were “thinking about my future.” Properly tailored digital tools helped students make a clear connection between their progress as readers and writers and their future prospects.
Leadership Skills: The Textlab Team
Our team has a proven track record of effective teaching and educational technology leadership. We teach and train other educators and command the respect and attention of school and district officials.
Andrew Plemmons Pratt spent two and a half years managing the start-up phase of , a magazine of progressive science and technology policy published by the . Editing technical jargon into accessible prose and building websites led him to the simple conclusion that working in the current economy requires students to develop their literacy skills in a digital context. He saw successful lawyers, scientists, journalists, and other professionals leverage online communication tools to change the world around them. The young minds in our nation’s schools deserve to wield that same power.
Andrew decided to leave Science Progress in 2010 and take his web development, writing, and editing skills into the classroom through Teach For America. During his first year of teaching, Andrew and colleague Matt McCrea won the first annual Prince George’s County Public Schools / Teach For America Innovation Challenge for their suite of “On-Demand Professional Development” training tools for data-driven instruction (; overview).
As a second-year teacher, Andrew is currently piloting a new model for teaching 7th-grade English using a class set of iPads. These provide his students with access to high-interest ebooks, digital graphic novels, and a customized installation of the Moodle LMS that offers online classwork and multimedia tools for accessing aligned texts, audio, and video content. This new experiment in teaching literacy is essentially a year-long research and testing phase for the core Textlab features.
Andrew also serves as the 7th grade academic lead on the leadership team for his school, which is a model turnaround school in Prince George’s County. He co-edits the educational technology blog, EdTech 101, on TFA’s internal social network TFANet.org.
Jordyn Sims is a Silicon Valley, California native who grew up seeing first-hand the power of technology—and its benefits in the classroom. She learned to type in first grade, had computers available throughout her elementary, middle school, and high school career, and found herself above and beyond her peers in terms of computer literacy when she reached college.
Jordyn teaches at a Title I school in Prince George’s County as a second-year Teach For America corps member, where her students have a vastly different experience with technology. Many cannot even type, much less view technology as a tool to be wielded in their educational development. Her students made major gains in their reading levels during her first year of teaching—even without access to significant amounts of technology. The Scholastic Reading Inventory showed that her students made 1.8 years of reading growth on average, and one class grew an average of 2.5 years in reading.
This year, her students are using their iPads to access differentiated lesson materials based on reading ability and their experience with English as a first, second, or third language, and to submit classwork and formative assessments using Google Forms. She also created a class website to host this information and that also serves as an outlet for students and parents to access all of the work done during class, all class forms, and all homework in order to ensure that students are on track for success.
As the only Teach For America teacher at her school, Jordyn integrated herself into the staff community and in her first year started the first student-produced newspaper and literary magazine in the school’s history. She also serves as the Vanguard Reading Teacher on the Transforming Education through Digital Learning council at her school, a program enabling and supporting a one-to-one iPad initiative, provided through Title I funding. Additionally, the Prince George’s County Chairwoman invited her to submit a proposal to present on producing school newspapers and literary magazines at the State of Maryland International Reading Association Council (SoMIRAC) Conference. In September 2011, fellow staff members nominated her for the honor of Riverdale Teacher of the Month.
Jordyn also serves as a Content Team Leader for the TFA DC Region Literacy teachers, supporting other corps members with their literacy instruction.
Transformative Impact and Sustainability for Textlab
Properly implemented, Textlab will help skillful literacy teachers produce measurable gains in their students’ reading and writing skills. Harmon’s research suggesting that well-designed tools for digital literacy can accelerate reading gains by more than a year is just the beginning. Textlab will also accelerate these shifts:
Measureable gains in reading scores will place students using Textlab effectively at least a year ahead of their peers without access to a Learning Management System.
Textlab will prepare students for college and careers. By engaging young learners in a digital context for literacy instruction, their education will grow more connected to the college work and careers for which we say we are training them.
Students using Textlab will practice and grow their literacy skills while working at their own pace, and in appropriate learning modalities.
Students will see themselves not merely as consumers, but as creators of digital media.
The first step is to continue the yearlong experiment of integrating iPads and custom Learning Management System tools in Andrew and Jordyn’s English classrooms. During the remainder of this school year, we will distill observations, data, and experience into core Textlab features, and will then analyze data on those results to reveal trends hidden from informal observation. Preliminary findings will support school-level professional development for other teachers, and will provide valuable feedback for district implementation of the Title I iPad program.
We will then use that knowledge and data to hire one or more seasoned developers with experience building Content Management Systems to support construction of the Textlab prototype over the summer. Beginning with well-known development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django will set the project on sound footing and allow us to tap into experienced developer communities. Key development work will still be in the hands of team members, who combine computer-programming experience with proven pedagogy.
During summer 2012, we will also recruit a cohort of ELA teachers to integrate Textlab into their classrooms. Beta-testers will likely first be recruited from the TFA DC Region corps, regional charter networks, and the DCPS and PGCPS teaching forces. They will provide feedback in a tight loop that will inform updates to the software on a week-to-week basis throughout the 2012-2013 school year.
During that year, we will open the software to a wider beta testing base, tracking user metrics and connecting them to reading diagnostic scores and summative tests of objective mastery.
Leveraging connections in the DC Region, regional charter networks, and the TFA national team, we will attract a user base of at least 1,000 teachers in the 2012-2013 school year. During the summer of 2013, we will work with a high-performing charter network or school district to integrate Textlab into their existing curricular framework, leveraging existing users to train new teachers in how to utilize the software effectively.
Yet even the best software is useless without appropriate computer hardware. In order to deploy Textlab effectively, classrooms must have one tablet, laptop, or desktop terminal for each student. There are already programs providing one-to-one access to iPads for students in many high-need schools around the DC Region. We will recruit beta-testing teachers at schools that already have access to the appropriate hardware in order to demonstrate the utility of the platform. This will also catalyze grants for tablet or laptop sets to expand the pilot into classrooms that currently lack the technology.
But even the best computer hardware is of limited use without consistent, reliable Internet access. Again, we can leverage existing connections in districts such as Prince George’s County and DC to ensure that pilot classrooms have adequate networking hardware and bandwidth to ensure seamless access.
Resistance to adoption is also a major hurdle for any education technology solution. To prove the power of our platform, we will focus on recruiting beta testers who are both effective instructors and early technology adopters. We can clearly demonstrate Textlab’s power by measuring the productivity gains that successful teachers achieve with the tool.
Idea Development: Next Steps
Textlab is currently emerging from the back-of-a-napkin phase into a focused period of research and planning. The customized LMS implementations Andrew Pratt and Jordyn Sims are already using in their classrooms this year are the testing ground for features that will become the Textlab core.
Unless it receives seed funding, Textlab will most likely remain a side project, which would significantly limit the speed of its production. The funding, recognition—and most importantly—the mentoring and connections that would accompany the Social Innovation Award would be catalytic. It would provide the resources to work with a large cohort of instructors on requirements, hire knowledgeable CMS developers, and begin a rapid cycle of prototype development. Most importantly, it would accelerate literacy skills for thousands of secondary scholars.
If you haven’t signed up for a account, go do so right now.
Got it? Okay. You’ve now turned classroom management into a video game.
ClassDojo is a a "real-time behavior management system" that allows you to track on and off-task behavior for your students online. The interface is clever: each student gets a little icon or "avatar" that, by default, is a cartoonish little monster. Click on an avatar and you’re offered six choices of positive behaviors (participation, helping others, creativity, great insight, hard work, and presentation) and six negative behaviors (disruption, late, no homework, disrespect, talking, and out of chair). Click the behavior to track and a message pops up on screen "Angalina +1 for Hard work!", accompanied by a ringing sound familiar to anyone who’s ever directed a Mario brother to grab a golden coin.
The system tracks points (positive, negative, or both) on the screen, which you can leave up on your LCD projector or hide and return to as needed. This way, students can see instantly how on- or off-tack that they have been. At the end of the class, you can run an instant report that shows a pie chart summarizing pluses and minuses for the class. Further options let you aggregate data from any time period, or drill down to individual students to create personalized reports.
But here’s where your iPad (or smartphone) comes in. The system also has a "remote control" interface that runs on mobile devices. Just go to (and if you’re on an iPad, "Tap to install" on your homescreen). Login and you now get a streamlined class list allowing you to track behaviors right from your device instead of having to use the website.
Once my students got used to the +1 sound that accompanies a new point, I started leaving the website window open behind my instructional slideshow and moved around the room with the remote open on my iPad. Just the sound of classmates earning points is often enough to quiet talkative students.
ClassDojo is one of a new breed of highly refined education technology tools currently in the start-up phase. Founders Liam Don and Sam Chaudry just for the innovation. But they’re still hungry for feedback. I chatted with Sam about features a few weeks ago and they made ungrades based on my suggestions literally overnight. Point being: this is a tool you can help shape, and that can help shape positive management in your classroom. +1
My vision for this year includes migrating my class to an all (or mostly) digital environment. Reading, writing, collaborating online. Not because it’s hip or cool or social, but primarily because it’s efficient.
Today, I showed off some of those capabilities to another CM in my district and it occurred to me that rather than simply write about what sorts of things my current class software can do, it might be more (ahem) efficient to simply make a screencast. I promise I’ll have something more polished (or edited at all) in the future, but here’s a quick-and-dirty rundown of some of the things I’m experimenting with. Embeded below, but probably better to see the full-size video .
I had a conversation Friday morning with one of my female students about what plans she had for the weekend. They included gathering the last few dollars to fund the purchase of the latest Sims game for her Nintendo 3DS. We talked video games for a few minutes and then she was on her way. The exchange was fun, but it also forced me into a moment of bias recognition because I often talk video games with my male students, but had not necessarily expected to do the same with the girls. Yet females are now 40% of the electronic-gaming market.
The exchange also resonates with a short article I stumbled upon in the current issue ofKnowledge Quest, the journal of the American Association of School Librarians. In “Are Girls Game?,” Lesley S. J. Farmer outlines the basics of how electronic games (or “e-games,” in her terminology) can be integrated into the curriculum, [subscription required]. Many (though certainly not all) younger girls have difficulty getting into games as easily as boys, she points out, sometimes in part because many games have male or non-human main characters. She then makes a point about the risks of allowing negative experiences with video games to color girls’ interaction with electronic games in classroom contexts:
As more courses incorporate e-gaming activities, girls may find themselves disadvantaged in such learning environments. Furthermore, since 85 percent of jobs now involve technology, girls who shy away from technology because of e-gaming failure may self-limit their professional options. Their avoidance of technology results in lost contributions to society.
I can’t easily convince video-game makers to recast gender representations in their products by the holiday season, but I can get more technology into the hands of my female students. If there’s any risk that video games might deflect them from the technology skills they need to succeed in college and the working world, then I want more bits, bytes, and Sims in my classroom to offset that chance.
Back in September, I was sitting in a collaborative planning session with my principal and my department chair when an assistant principal stuck her head in the room and asked to speak to me outside. With her stood our technology coordinator. They showed me a piece of paper with the name of a wireless network written on it. The network emanated from my classroom, a stink wave that had left the building without Internet access for the past hour.
Your students need books that they will like reading. One way to get them those books is to hand them a hard copy. Another way, if you’ve got the right technology, is to give them an ebook. Anyone who has seen a Kindle is familiar with the basic idea of what an ebook is: it’s a computer file that contains a whole book. But the trouble with Kindles is that you’re locked into doing things the Amazon way: their files, their reader, their prices.
I had a conversation Friday morning with one of my female students about what plans she had for the weekend. They included gathering the last few dollars to fund the purchase of the latest Sims game for her Nintendo 3DS. We talked video games for a few minutes and then she was on her way. The exchange was fun, but it also forced me into a moment of bias recognition because I often talk video games with my male students, but had not necessarily expected to do the same with the girls. Yet females are now 40% of the electronic-gaming market.