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 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)

Download the full pitch as a .pdf | Visit our profile on vator.tv for the TFA Social Innovation Award competition.

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, “met his learners where they were in ways in which they were already literate.”

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 quotidian electronic lives of many of today’s teenagers” 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 Khan Academy, along with projects such as TenMarks.com and LearnZillion.com. 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 Moodle 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 (“Unlocking Literacy With the iPad,” 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 ScienceProgress.org, a magazine of progressive science and technology policy published by the Center for American Progress. 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 (beta project site; overview).

As a second-year teacher, Andrew is currently piloting a new model for teaching 7^th-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 7^th 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.

Above: A selection of the Kindle books for my scholars to read on their iPads, available in Kindle Cloud Reader.

As the bio box to the right says, I’m Andrew Pratt. I’m a 2010 corps member in the DC Region, currently teaching 7th-grade Reading/English/Language Arts in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Before I signed on with TFA, I helped edit a web-based magazine about public policy for science and technology at a think tank here in the nation’s capital.

A few years editing technical jargon into accessible prose and building websites led me to a simple conclusion: to be prepared for the current economy, young students need to develop their literacy skills in a digital context. I saw successful and powerful lawyers, scientists, journalists, and other professionals leverage online communications to change the world around them. I want the young minds in our capital region to have the same power.

That’s part of what I mean by saying that “Technology is a Literacy.” To shape public policy, influence coalitions, and communicate scientific discoveries, mastery of the English language is just a prerequisite. You also have to know the tools that launch ideas into orbit.

With that vision in mind, I decided last spring that my English classroom needed to move beyond pencils, worksheets, and composition books. Just a month into my 2nd year of teaching, my scholars are taking strides in that direction.

Starting with a proposal submitted to my principals in May, I was able to secure a class set of iPad 2 tablets. One of my goals as a teacher this year is to experiment with these powerful computers as much as I can. I want to figure out how they can accelerate literacy in a middle-school ELA classroom. But also I want to keep my lab notebook in public. Namely, right here. With that, I’ll share a few highlights from this week:

Wednesday
Most of my scholars took their first vocabulary quiz of the year… online. I built the quiz in Moodle, the open-source “Learning Management System” I’m using for our class website. There were nine multiple-choice questions, and as soon as the students submitted their final answers, they could immediately see what they got right, what they got wrong, and their final score. On my end, I had nearly instantaneous data on how the students performed. Sobering, but a good start.

Thursday
One of the common differentiation recommendations for lower-level readers is to let them listen to an audio recording of the text as they read along. Fortunately, we have nice new textbooks from Holt McDougal that come with some killer teacher CDs/DVDs, including professional audio recordings of most texts in the book. In addition to snagging the .pdf version of the text and making that accessible, I uploaded the audio recording to our Moodle site. Students who needed the audio support could listen along on their iPads while simultaneously reading a digital version of the article.

Friday
Maryland standardized tests emphasize a short response format called the “Brief Constructed Response,” or BCR. A BCR demonstrates that a scholar has read the text, can identify and explain a detail from the text, and can show evidence of inferring, or “reading between the lines” to figure out what is unstated in the text, but still important. A majority of the students in class today submitted their practice BCR online through Moodle. Now, I have an archive of that work and can easily score it and write feedback online.

So that’s my (long-winded) introduction. I’ll close with a question: if you could move one part of your classroom workflow from paper to a computer, what would that be? Would love to see your ideas in the comments.

Have a great weekend!
—Andrew Plemmons Pratt (@appratt on twitter.)

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

(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!):

In late April, we presented this idea to a panel of judges at a pitch event held at Gholson MS: Superintendent Dr. Hite, Chief Academic Officer Dr. Arbogast, and School Board Members Carolyn Boston and Edward Burroughs. We ended up winning the competition, which means we’ll get support from the district administration to make the proposal a reality. This post outlines the idea, the origins of the project, and other innovations proposed by our fellow TFA corp members. Read on for the full story.

Here’s Matt and I talking to the panel, our colleagues, and various county employees:

Presentation (~13 min):

Question & Answer (~1 min):

Our Executive Summary (from the evening’s program)

We can grow and expand data-driven instruction in PGCPS by giving teachers the opportunity to learn tools like Edusoft and Performance Matters on their own time. Currently, there are not enough opportunities for teachers to access professional development on data-driven instruction. Our suggestion to provide high-quality PD to teachers on their own schedules is simple: build a collection of training tools and videos on Google Sites and give teachers access to it starting at PEIP. We envision an online forum for data-driven PD that is always accessible, facilitates discussion among instructors, and is focused on increasing student achievement. Presenters: Matthew McCrea, math/science chair, G. James Gholson Middle School (TFA 2009); Andrew Pratt, 7th grade Reading/English/Language Arts, G. James Gholson Middle School (TFA 2010).

Presentation

Here’s the presentation itself:

On-Demand Professional Development

And the (very incomplete) mock-up site you see me navigating in the video: https://sites.google.com/a/pgcps.org/on-demand-pd/

Background

As part of Maryland’s Race to the Top grant, Prince Georges Country won funds for a multi-year partnership with Teach for America to begin an annual “Innovation Challenge.” In its first year, the project solicited ideas from TFA corps members working in PGCPS and helped them work through a five-month process of developing and refining an entrepreneurial idea that would solve a significant problem within the school system.

When I was first applying to TFA, I told people that in addition to learning how to teach, my time in the corps would also serve as a training course in social entrepreneurship. But burdened by the stresses of a first-year teacher, I balked at the idea of participating in the Challenge. How was I supposed to research and build an entire project when I was expending all my energy on lesson planning?

One morning at a TFA Professional Development Saturday, I arrived early for a Special Education session. But I found that some crossed communication channels had led me to an event that was no longer happening. I wandered for a minute and realized that the first Innovation Challenge meeting was taking place at the same time, so I sat down, listened in, and told Matt that I wanted to work with him.

Now we’ll be working in collaboration over the summer to build the site and record the training videos. Very much looking forward to it.

Full Event Video

To see all the presentations at the event, as well as the opening and closing remarks (all short and sweet), you can watch videos here:
https://sites.google.com/site/pgcpstfainnovationchallenge/

So that’s the basics. Please share far and wide and drop me an email, appratt [at] gmail [dot] com, Tweet @appratt, or text 202 596 9685 if you have any leads. On behalf of my scholars, thank you in advance.

More Details & Background

Gholson Middle School is a low-income turnaround school in Landover, Maryland, just across the parking lot from FedEx Field. “Turnaround” means that as part of the state’s winning application for Race to the Top Funds, Maryland agreed to overhaul four schools, including Gholson. An entirely new administrative team hired a new staff and reset expectations for culture and academics. Gholson is a different place than it was last year (before I joined Teach for America), but some things take a little longer to refresh than others. Like the school technology.

My classroom came with two Dell desktops: Pentium machines running Windows XP with 256 MB of RAM. This is barely enough to power the operating system. Most of the time, you can’t login to the machines and if you do, Internet Explorer can’t even load the style sheets for web pages you navigate to. My administration completely understands this and has pushed to get new machines, for which I am very grateful. But this takes time, and for my students, there’s not a moment to waste. There’s a computer lab down the hall, but it’s not available every period on account of testing and media classes. So I’ve begun carting old personal computers and donated laptops from friends into school for my scholars to work on. (If anyone from the county is reading this, don’t worry, I keep them disconnected from the network.)

This allowed my students to get enough computer time for every one of of them to type their last writing project: a personal narrative about a special event in their lives. For that, they wrote eloquently about visits to Coney Island, moving to new homes, and their baby sibling’s first steps, among other things. The drafts I have of their plays promise even more remarkable stories: invented tales of dragons and bank robbers; personal dramas about family strife; and reinventions of classic plays like “A Raisin in the Sun.”

For all this work, I want them to have the opportunity to write as thought workers in the modern economy: and that means on a keyboard.

The state of any donated computer doesn’t matter much, as I’ll wipe the hard drive and install the open-source Ubuntu operating system on it. This OS will run on machines of any caliber and is secure, fast, and virus-free. As long as it will boot, the hard drive ain’t busted, and the screen works, we can give it a new life.

Again, thanks very, very much in advance. Drop a line if you have any questions: appratt [at] gmail [dot] com, Tweet @appratt, or text 202 596 9685. I’ll update folks as things move forward and will of course share any results. You’re helping close the achievement gap, one byte at a time.

Prizes

There are a few thank-yous available to anyone who donates a computer.:

• You’ll get a personal note from one or more of my scholars thanking you for the donation.
• If you’re fan of the Twitterverse, I’ll have a witty and well-followed friend RT, @, or otherwise promote your thoughtfulness and/or Tumblr to the chattering masses.
• If you like homemade bagels, I’m making a batch or two this week and will save some for you.

(Prizes and participation may vary; please allow appropriate time for delivery.)

Bonus!

Here’s an early-80s Apple Computer ad touting the educational power of Macs. Wow, those are some big glasses:

In light of Obama declaring his campaign for re-election, I thought it would be a good occasion to share something intimately connected to his current presidency. Below is the farewell email I wrote to my co-workers at the Center for American Progress about 10 months ago, just before leaving for TFA summer institute. I decided to go from working at a think tank to teaching in large part because of how inspired I was by President Obama’s campaign. So here we are, entering the 4th quarter of my first year in front of a classroom. The email below has a few CAP in-jokes, but you can probably decipher the editorial conventions. Finally, this post should in no way be interpreted as an electoral endorsement connected to CAP, which is a 501(c)3. The views are solely those of the author.

My farewell email is attached and below. I appreciate any editorial suggestions.
—
[hede] A Progressive Education
[dek] Departing Staffer Indebted to Many, Attempts to Thank All
[blurb] Working with brilliant, committed CAP colleagues has inspired me for four years. Now I’m off to carry what I can of that vision and knowledge into the classroom.
[byline] Andrew Pratt

During a summer gig writing for a newspaper in college, the editor sat down with me to go over my inadequate first draft of a story. One major problem with the prose, he said, was that it was too wordy, and specifically, I didn’t need a bunch of multisyllabic verbs like “remarked,” “explained,” or “explicated” following quotes from sources. “Just use ‘said,’” he said. That simple advice has not only helped me write what I hope is somewhat better prose ever since, it’s tied the memory of that mentor to an exceptionally common word. I think about it every time I type the word “said.”

Similarly, I’ll be indebted to Ed Paisley for the lesson that even in policy writing, if you open with an anecdote, your thesis must follow fast and furious. So here it is: My time at the Center has been filled with a host of lessons that will not only help me do any future job better, but that have embedded critical knowledge into even small routines, like writing four-letter words. When I get to the bottom of a page and realize I haven’t gotten to the point, I hear Ed’s voice telling me to “flip it.” XX TOO EARNEST? PROBABLY FINE. GOODBYE EMAIL AND ALL. XX

Likewise, I owe a debt to Jonathan Moreno for taking a risk and letting me work on Science Progress in the first place. XX COULD QUIP THAT MORENO IGNORED OUR OWN RECOMMENDATIONS ABOUT EVIDENCE-BASED DECISION MAKING. MAYBE TOO FORCED? XX Part of the purpose of the project is to integrate knowledge across disciplines, something Jonathan does with uncanny effortlessness. Moving between offices in different states, he would introduce me via email from his iPhone (or Treo, remember those?) to brilliant researchers around the country and say “Write something for us.” And they would, because they trusted his vision for how to marry science, ethics, and progressivism.

Since October, 2007, when Science Progress debuted on the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, we’ve tried to tell a story about science and progressive public policy. XX SCIENCE AND HISTORY?…MIGHT START LOSING PEOPLE. XX There are a lot of ways to present that narrative, but one of my favorites emerged in a podcast Jonathan did with science writer Timothy Ferris. Ferris recently published a book called “The Science of Liberty” in which he argues that science and democratic revolutions from the Enlightenment onward are inextricably woven together, and “science continues to empower democratic freedom today.” This is one way I understand progressivism itself: it’s one ongoing experiment. Every election, every passage of a new law, and every policy is, after all, a way to test a hypothesis about how to make constant improvements to our government.

I’ll be moving on to an organization that applies this philosophy on a granular level. That is, Teach for America measures the effectiveness of everything it does, and teaches new educators how to leverage the power of data (among many other things) to close the achievement gap. I’m going to TFA in part because of the example of public service set by so many CAP colleagues—in government, non-profits, the military, the foreign service, and in the classroom. Moreover, like so many millennials, I came to DC with episodes of “The West Wing” rolling through my head, and then caught a serious case of Obama fever in the summer of 2008 while staying up late, sweltering nights helping to copyedit “Change for America.”

I owe thanks to many people. To Andrew Sherry for hiring me right out of school to work in Online Communications. To our former SP colleague Rick Weiss, now at OSTP. To our long-time partner at SP, Chris Mooney. To the Editorial and Art teams, with whom I collaborated constantly in both my jobs. To all the CAP colleagues who supported Science Progress. To all the CAP colleagues who wrote for Science Progress. To all the CAP colleagues who convinced outside contributors to write for Science Progress. To all the colleagues from whom I solicited advice on teaching. XX THIS IS REALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO THANK EVERYONE ADEQUATELY. HOW DO PEOPLE WRITE THESE EMAILS? XX Thanks to everyone who started CAP and grew it into what it is today. Thanks to everyone. Period.

I’ll be teaching English to secondary students (somewhere between grade 7-12) in the DC Region, in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland, so I’m sure I’ll be seeing folks around. There are the usual ways of staying in touch, appratt [at] gmail.com and @appratt on Twitter. I’ll contact you from one of these sources when I’ve realized I forgot to thank you properly. I’ve also made a go of writing about some of the first steps of the TFA process at my personal site, appratt.com, in case you’re interested.

XX OKAY TIME TO WRAP IT UP. XX

CAP will continue to do wonderful things, and I’ll be watching. President Obama highlighted one of them on a cold day last January. “We’ll restore science to its rightful place,” he said.

Sincerely,
Andrew