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 CourseCheck. It’s a system that moves information and assignments from college syllabi into online calendars, helping students stay on top of their work.

GrowingAssessment, 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, CodeNow, is a platform for helping underserved students learn “foundational skills in computer science and programming to narrow the digital divide.” Browse and Learn 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 Wireless Generation, 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 video is a very smart exchange on the shape of federal education policy surrounding reauthorization (or the lack there of) for No Child Left Behind. Makes it seem like this is something that could get very heated in the upcoming presidential.

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Also, Dana Goldstein (the journalist and former CAPer Klein interviews here) is right up there with Paul Tough in terms of must-read education reporters. In a recent Slate article, she explains the right-wing shift in education policy that Michele Bachmann has been campaigning on since the beginning of her political career. As in, those in Bachmann’s camp push things like no sex-ed, doing away with standards, and teaching that slavery wasn’t that bad. Who’s excited for 2012?

So one of the pieces of TFA pre-school work that I find really exciting is the “vision” we’re expected to lay out for the year. This is your classroom manifesto, your big call-to-arms for what you want your students to achieve, accomplish, think, or feel about learning. This is your inaugural address, except the only people who will likely ever see it are you and your Manager of Teacher Leadership Development. I am probably a little behind in that I’m only just creating this now, but I’m off to a training tomorrow and wanted to be able to share this with folks, so here’s my first draft. Over the top, starry-eyed, and wordy, but that’s par for the course:

We will understand language as a toolkit that provides pathways to freedom and power. “Those who have the command of language have more might than those with the command of armies,” writes Ernest Morrell, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. We will also understand that being a powerful communicator means never being satisfied with your current skills. It means always pushing forward.

We will examine literacy as freedom and as power. Throughout history, the easiest way to physically or psychologically enslave groups of people against their will has been to prevent them from becoming literate. We are going to become great readers to ensure that we always control our own destiny and have the right to work hard and become powerful people in our society.

We will understand that growing as communicators will help us become better versions of ourselves and allow us to shape a better version of the world around us. Strong communication skills are fundamental to success in business, law, science, engineering, health care, policy, or myriad other disciplines where our ideas matter.

We will accept that language is complex, slippery, and at times difficult, and that being an effective communicator requires taking risks, asking questions, and thinking critically. It also requires commitment and determination.

By working hard, we will build our communications kit with the tools to persuade others, the tools to express ourselves, and the tools educate ourselves throughout life.

To do this, we will read widely in a variety of genres. We will practice writing and editing in a variety of genres. We will study ideas in a variety of media and create media that expresses our ideas. We will investigate literacy within the context of the Internet and new media, and we will practice using our tools in digital contexts. Through these channels, we will project our command of language and ensure that we always have the right tools for the job.

Image: flickr.com/jrhode

But according to one study, when it comes to Donors, they Choose middle school less often. As in, more than one third less often than high school. According to Tiffany Bergin, who tied for top honors in the “Data Analysis” category,

Projects for students in Grades 6-8 were 36 percent less likely to receive full funding than those for students in Grades 9-12 (Data -> Knowledge -> Insight)

Projects for grades 3-5 were 32% less likely to see full funding compared to 9-12; pre-k through 2 were 27% less likely. These are not insignificant gaps, and what surprised me the most is that for the grades where catching up is most critical—middle school—the additional dollars for additional resources just weren’t what the donors community supported.

Now there could be any number of reasons for this—fewer projects, projects of differing quality, more urban high school teachers asking for money, etc., etc. This doesn’t tell us anything about causes. But in terms of need for resources to make up lost ground and accelerate students on to high school and beyond, I want to figure out how to get more great middle school projects funded.

(More background on the Hacking Education data crunching competition, which gave analysis and hackers access to 10 years of DonorsChoose.org project funding data, is available here. )

A social studies teacher taught me that one.

(Obviously copyright infringement…leave a comment record company, if you’d like a take down…)

Update below

Teaching With Cloud Storage

So since the very beginning of TFA Summer Institute, the hands-down most important web tool for me as a teacher (aside from email) has been Dropbox. Dropbox is a feature-rich, cross-platform file-syncing service. If you don’t use it to store your lesson plans, collaborate with co-teachers and other colleagues, as well as store your most vital files in a secure, accessible place, then I really don’t know how you’re working on the Internet these days.

The problem with Dropbox is that the free storage is limited, and when you’re sharing folders with 6+ colleagues who are all generating 5-10 MB of files every week, your 2 GB of free space fills up fast. For each successful invite you generate, getting another user to install the software on a unique computer, you each get another 250 MB. But the pricing scheme for ramping beyond that just isn’t competitive: 50 GB of storage is $99 a year.

Having access to the lessons, assessments, and worksheets created by my fellow PGCPS TFA colleagues has been absolutely crucial, and much of what we generated this year will be useful next year. There’s just not enough free space in our respective Dropboxes to archive it all—and what’s more, searching within those folders, even on OS X which has Spotlight, is imprecise. What do do?

What Features Do I Need for Collaborative Storage?

I started thinking about this around mid-year, and made a list of several possible solutions that needed to meet as many of these criteria as possible:

• shared, syncing cloud storage space
• 10+ GB, accessible to at least 4 or more users
• the ability to upload existing folders of material currently stored locally
• effective searchibility of folder contents and within documents
• lowest possible cost
• scalable

Lifehacker did a nice side-by-side comparison of three competing services that provide most of this functionality: Cloud Storage Faceoff: Windows Live SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Amazon Cloud Drive. Their verdict:

But aside from Dropbox, none of the colleagues I was working with had accounts on these services. Moreover, while there are things I like about SkyDrive, the OS X application for syncing files, Windows Live Mesh, requires that you tell the service when to initiate a sync, so I see it more as an archive-every-once-in-awhile tool. Finally, the syncable storage is limited to 5 of your total 25 GB on SkyDrive.

There’s also SugarSync, an early competitor to Dropbox with 5 GB free storage and a focus on syncing across platforms, PCs, and mobile devices. But going this direction would effectively mean running another syncing serving in parallel to Dropbox, and I’m wary of doing that since anything that has to stay switched on will eat valuable RAM.

Forget All of the Above: Google to the Rescue

Around the beginning of April, Google unveiled a new feature in Docs: the ability to upload and share folders. This might be the solution I’ve been waiting for, I thought. Here’s how the features add up for Google Docs:

• YES shared, syncing cloud storage space
• YES 10+ GB, accessible to at least 4 or more users
• YES the ability to upload existing folders of material currently stored locally
• YES effective searchibility of folder contents and within documents (really the only service that does this—PLUS Google Docs now features “Descriptions” which add additional metadata to files, something not really possible in the other services)
• YES lowest possible cost ($0.25 per 1GB, compared with $2 per 1 GB for Dropbox)
• YES scalable (you can buy many terabytes of Google space if you need it)

So here’s what we’re doing. I just set up a new shared “Collection” in my personal Google Docs account and shared it with the appropriate people. There are two top-level folders within an encompassing “pgcps-ela” folder: “2010-2011″ and “2011-2012.” In these, we’ll upload and archive the folders of unit plans, lessons, and materials we have accumulated over the year. That will clear out our Dropboxes, allowing use to start using those for day-to-day backup and sharing next year. But now anything in the shared Docs collection will be searchable, previewable in-browser, and as soon as we get close to the 1 GB personal limits, I’m going to throw down $5 for an additional 20 GB a year.

I’ll update on the successes and bumps in this project as we start archiving. If anyone else has other effective ways that you share and archive teaching materials, leave a comment.

Update 1: Cyberduck Connects to Google Docs

So I’d messed around with this a little bit previously, but hadn’t gotten the settings right. The newest version of Cyberduck, the open-source file transfer software, interfaces with Google Docs, meaning that you can upload and download files from your storage area without even having to use the browser interface. Huge (Mac & Windows, too!):