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.
Exciting news! I’m joining the blogging team on Teach For America’s internal social network, TFANet.org. I’ve partnered with Lewis Leiboh, owner of the EdTech 101 blog. Together, we’re going to develop more content to get corps members effective digital tools. Below, I’m cross-posting my first column for folks who don’t have access to TFANet.org. Interestingly, while the site is only accessible via a TFA login, the RSS feeds for the blogs are public, so if you’d like to read the blog, & subscribe in your favorite reader.
Above: A selection of the Kindle books for my scholars to read on their iPads, available in Kindle Cloud Reader.
Evening, everyone. Thanks so much for the warm welcome, Lewis. I wanted to introduce myself and share some of the EdTech excitement from my classroom this week.
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 , 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.)
Students working with printed books, a popular and wide-spread educational technology—but one with scant research linking it to student achievement.
Obviously I’m a proponent of getting more technology into classrooms. But I’m also a believer in data-driven decision making. So I read with great interest Matt Richtel’s NYT article on .
The research, in short, does not show a link between the introduction of new technology like smartboards, laptops, and other digital trinkets, and test scores. “In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning,” writes Richtel. There is little research showing that ed tech is effective, and what little there is says it isn’t.
So this got me thinking: where is the research on the technology that we’ve been using for many years in classrooms? There are learning tools far older than LCD projectors and vocabulary drill software that administrators, teachers, and parents have assumed will help their kids learn.
But, for instance, where is the data showing that printed text is a useful technology for teaching students to read? Without clear peer-reviewed research demonstrating a causal link between printed books and rising literacy scores, we must assume that the millions of dollars spent by school districts around the country on textbooks are a blind gamble. Technologies for distributing and viewing printed text, like paperbacks, magazines, and worksheets, have been around for so long, most educators assume that just using them in a classroom will pave the way to higher student achievement. But what research is there to back this up? Where are the studies linking reading from printed books to improved literacy? Or math scores? Or knowledge of history?
Before we pour untold millions into the latest educational fads, we need to know: is the technology we’ve been using in classrooms for centuries actually helping our students learn?
A fascinating tidbit of research from Cathy N. Davidson’s recent column in The Chronicle:
Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University’s Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent—not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.
—”“
This makes so much sense, it kind of makes my brain ache. It’s why I think some of the best writing on the Internet is on The Awl (hipsters trying to make hipsters laugh), and why some of my favorite personal compositions are actually emails sent to friends. So how can I use this fact to help 7th graders edit one another’s work and write to persuade each other?
This is the what Lifehacker called the “” of cross-platform plain text syncing. The Simplenote web app does one simple thing: it stores plain text notes in the cloud. But it also has a brilliant API that allows 3rd-party developers to create applications that store and access notes linked to your Simplenote account. Any note I create in Simplenote is synced to the web, and is also synced (for on or offline editing) on my Simplenote iPhone app and on a fantastic OS X application called (one of several such apps that can connect to Simplenote). Part of the beauty of this for a teacher is that I no longer have to carry an agenda book / planner / calendar / notebook / etc. The calendar is already on the iPad, and all my To-Do lists, classroom ideas, and notes from recent meetings I can just edit or add to Simplenote notes—whether I have WiFi or not.
Stanza
| Cost: free
I’ve got iBooks, Google Books, the Kindle app, etc. This is hands-down the best eBook reader application if you’re focused on open publishing and want to keep track of your own digital library. It’s slick and easy to use; but it also integrates with powerful personal library software like . You can upload books on your computer through iTunes and/or wirelessly using the Calibre content server. Stanza also has built-in access to several online eBookstores, as well as several sources of free public domain books. It opens books in a huge variety of digital formats, from ePub to pdf to eReader. The reading interface is clear, unobtrusive, and has nice bookmarking/wayfinding features.
Cloudreaders
| Cost: free
Simple comic/graphic novel/book reader. The standard formats for digital comics are PDF, CBZ, ZIP, CBR and RAR, most of which are just compressed bundles of .jpgs. This app lets you organize, bookmark, and read those comics. In short, if you teach middle schoolers and don’t have the Jeff Smith Bone graphic novels available, your students are being robbed.
The latter two apps are all I really want at the moment, in addition to Safari, on the class set of iPads I’ve convinced my principals to let me use this year. My goal over the next few months is to move as much of the classroom as possible to all-digital: ebooks & graphic novels and online classwork. I’m running Moodle as the hub for this and using Google forms for a lot of information capture. More on the project at .
Algorithms are natural forces. Software is an evolutionary powerhouse. Code, in its genetic form, has long shaped the planet, and now, on a vast scale, code, in its binary form, is also shaping the planet. Marc Andreessen’s Saturday column in the Wall Street Journal makes this point in its ominous (but ultimately optimistic) title: Andreessen is right to issue a clear statement from his vantage point in the venture capital industry that we’re just on the precipice of a software-drenched tidal wave that will continue to reshape the global economy. But it’s worth pushing his point a little further and thinking about how computers and algorithms are behaving more and more like the forces that shape the Earth. To whit, he writes:
Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing >and data visualization and analysis, which are crucial to >today’s oil and gas exploration efforts. Agriculture is increasingly powered by software as well, including satellite >analysis of soils linked to per-acre seed selection software algorithms.
Which is to say that it’s not just book-buying and shoe-shipping that software changes, but the way large oil fields get drained and the way large swaths of arable land get farmed.
Kevin Slavin made a similar point in a recent TED Talk called The apex of his point is that the computational needs of computers are pushing humans to drastically change their behavior, to make strange decisions about what to do with skyscrapers, and to terraform—that is, dig massive trenches for fiberoptic cable across the planet. His thesis goes like this:
I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the >role of contemporary math — not just financial math, but math in general. That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually >starts to shape it — the world around us and the world inside us. And it’s specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff. They acquire the >sensibility of truth, because they repeat over and over again. And they ossify and calcify, and they become real.
Slavin’s talk is also very much about “software eating the world,” and it made me think about another brilliant piece of writing that I encountered over the summer that made the same point in considerable depth. Neal Stephenson’s “” chronicles the construction of what was, in the mid-90s, the longest wire in the world, the Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe. FLAG, as the project was called, involved laying cable from England to Egypt to Thailand to Japan—along the sea floor and along trenches dug beside tropical freeways. I gushed all about how much I loved this spectacular piece of journalism/industrial archeology here.
Andreessen points out that “Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago,” and goes on to predict that, “in the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.” I don’t doubt that this will be true, but to get there, we’re going to dig a lot more trenches, lay a lot more cable, and see more power exerted by the force of nature Slavin calls algorithms, Andreessen calls software, and to which all of us are beholden.
Image: “Planetary-scale computing architectures for electronic trading,” A. D. Wissner-Gross, C. E. Freer, screenshot from Slavin’s TED Talk.
Pro tip: whenever you get overwhelmed by the over-achieving TFAers surrounding you who were born far later in the 1980s than you were, just remember that Ezra Klein, Washington Post blogger/reporter, is only 27, and he moonlights as an MSNBC anchor filling in for Rachel Maddow and Martin Bashir.
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.
Visit msnbc.com for , , and
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 . 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,” , 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.
I met with my principals today and got spectacular news. They’re going to let me use some of the Gholson cache of iPads for implementing the for daily instruction. I owe a lot of folks thanks for their confidence and encouragement, which kept me asking after the resources.
But the excitement doesn’t stop there. If the project succeeds, I’ll be expected to share the methods with other teachers across subjects so we can grow the idea. Does it get any better?
Now, back to customizing the Drupal install that will underlie the whole notion…
Middle school is a critical time for students, particularly those in high poverty schools. The stats are stark: by 4th grade, students in low-income communities are behind higher-income peers; graduating seniors in low-income communities average achievement levels compared to higher-income peers. Lots of things go wrong in middle school: puberty, friends, music, grades, clothes, sports. That just makes it all the more important for things to go right academically. A 7th grader reading at a 4th-grade level needs to cover significant ground over the course of a year. That means time, energy, and resources. The astonishing array of projects built for the competition offers powerful insights to the resources part of the equation.
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
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 )
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.
