Technology is a Literacy (and I’ll be blogging about it on TFANet’s EdTech 101 blog!)

Posted by & filed under edu tech, teach for america.

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, just click here to grab the feed & subscribe in your favorite reader.

Kindle Cloud 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 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.)

Demand More Research on Educational Technology!

Posted by & filed under edu tech.

Students reading printed boos.

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 impact new ed tech has on standardized test score at schools around the country.

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?

(Photo: flickr / Kathy Cassidy)

Writing for Your Peers Makes Your Writing Better Than Writing for Your Professors

Posted by & filed under literacy.

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.

—”Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age“

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?

Three Simple App Recommendations for Teachers with iPads

Posted by & filed under edu tech.

Simplenote

simplenoteapp.com | Cost: free

This is the what Lifehacker called the “holy grail” 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 Notational Velocity (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

lexcycle.com | 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 Calibre. 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

Cloudreaders at the iTunes store | 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 Read|Write|Rock.

Image: flickr.com/photos/gforsythe (CC)

Andreessen, Slavin, and Stephenson on How Software Eats, Re-writes, and Reshapes the World

Posted by & filed under computing.

map: Planetary-scale computing architectures for electronic trading

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: “Why Software Is Eating the World.” 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 “How Algorithms Shape Our World.” 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 “Mother Earth Motherboard” 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.

Smart Twenty-Somethings (and Matt Damon) Explain Federal Education Policy in Electoral Politics in 8 Minutes

Posted by & filed under education.

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 breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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?