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Ed Webb

Peru's ambitious laptop program gets mixed grades - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/ts-mixed-grades-071038397.html

development computers literacy education technology

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • what we did was deliver the computers without preparing the teachers
  • the missteps may have actually widened the gap between children able to benefit from the computers and those ill-equipped to do so
  • Inter-American Development Bank researchers were less polite."There is little solid evidence regarding the effectiveness of this program," they said in a study sharply critical of the overall OLPC initiative that was based on a 15-month study at 319 schools in small, rural Peruvian communities that got laptops."The magical thinking that mere technology is enough to spur change, to improve learning, is what this study categorically disproves," co-author Eugenio Severin of Chile told The Associated Press
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • OLPC laptops, which are rugged and energy efficient and run an open-source variant of the Linux operating system, are in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia and Haiti, and even in the United States and Australia. Uruguay, a compact South American nation of 3.5 million people, is the only country that has fully embraced the concept and given every elementary school child and teacher an XO laptop
  • no increased math or language skills, no improvement in classroom instruction quality, no boost in time spent on homework, no improvement in reading habits
  • On the positive side, the "dramatic increase in access to computers" accelerated by about six months students' abstract reasoning, verbal fluency and speed in processing information
  • "We knew from the start that it wouldn't be possible to improve the teachers," he said, citing a 2007 census of 180,000 Peruvian teachers that showed more than 90 percent lacked basic math skills while three in five could not read above sixth-grade level.
  • Each teacher was supposed to get 40 hours of OLPC training. That hardly helped in schools where teachers had never so much as booted up a computer. In Patzer's experience "most of them barely knew how to interact with the computers at all."
  • In the higher grades, Martinez said, children's use of the machines is mostly social
  • "For them, the laptop is more for playing than for learning,"
  • Negroponte thinks the main goal of technology educators should be simply getting computers into poor kids' hands.His proposal last year to parachute tablet computers from helicopters, limiting the involvement of adults and "educators," caused some colleagues to wince. But Negroponte is dead serious, and has begun a pilot project in two Ethiopian villages to test whether tablets alone, loaded with the right software, can teach children to read.
  • The OLPC team always considered Internet connectivity part of the recipe for success. They also insisted that each child be given a laptop and be permitted to take it home.Uruguay, a small, flat country with a far higher standard of living and ubiquitous Internet, has honored those requirementsPeru did not
  • Some schools didn't have enough electricity to power the machines.And then there was the Internet. Less than 1 percent of the schools studied had it.
Adrienne Michetti

Debbie Meier and the Dawn of Central Park East by Seymour Fliegel, City Journal Winter ... - 3 views

www.city-journal.org/article01.php

progressive education school design

shared by Adrienne Michetti on 05 Jun 10 - Cached
  • “I’ve got a problem in the Central Park East School between Debbie Meier and some of her parents,” he said. “Go see what it’s about.”
  • In 1976
  • I went over to Central Park East, which was then a fledgling alternative school just completing its second year, to introduce myself to Debbie Meier, the school’s director
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  • Debbie Meier has since become a nationally known authority on education, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, but in June 1976 that wasn’t the case.
  • . What was not yet clear to outsiders was that it had been deliberately designed to thrive on conflict.
  • From the first moment I walked into a public school I was intrigued.
  • . “The principals paid lip service to us and our aspirations,” she remembers, “but the changes didn’t last.” By the end of 1973, just as she was becoming disgusted by her lack of progress working within the established system, she got a call from Bonnie Brownstein, a science coordinator in District Four. Brownstein told Meier that Superintendent Alvarado had heard about her work and wanted her to start a new school in East Harlem. Meier, attuned to the ways of educational bureaucracies, was skeptical at first, but when she met with the new superintendent, he convinced her that he was serious.
  • and she had tried to create “open classroom” programs
  • an educational method which she believed reflected the cognitive development of children, combining John Dewey’s learning theory with more recent psychological investigations of Jean Piaget.
  • Meier and her associates proposed a pedagogy based on “open classrooms” where teachers would provide children with stimulating materials, observe them working and playing with those materials, and, guided by their observations, offer each child assistance to extend his or her skills and interests.
  • Neither the parents in the neighborhood nor the other teachers in District Four understood what the school was trying to accomplish, and they regarded Meier’s efforts with attitudes ranging from indifference to outright hostility.
  • Local educational conservatives, on the other hand, were equally mistrustful of what they saw as the school’s permissiveness.
  • There would be one rule: Children would come to Central Park East because their parents chose that school for them
  • parents were required to visit with their children in order to gain admission. Beyond that, Meier set forth no policies and promised no particular results.
Eloise Pasteur

Clark Aldrich's Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations: The Reason Why Most Rese... - 0 views

clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/...ost-research-for-business.html

research Second Life modelling business model

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 16 Nov 08 - Cached
  • Why is most research on business issues so useless? Why doesn't it drive the results that businesses require? Organizations may have commissioned reports on new markets, or Second Life, or Web 2.0, or outsourcing or re-insourcing, but why don't the reports have a richer impact?
  • I have come to the fairly unambiguous conclusion: most business research sits unused on shelves. It is thus a valid question to ask, especially in tightening budgets, why is that so? Is that inevitable? And, to a lesser degree, who's fault is that?
  • The big problem is that most business research relies on the same faulty intellectual constructs as other forms of linear content - it relies on linear analysis, case studies, and inspirational examples. And like with movies and magazines, they impress us with their cleverness but don't actually enable effective action (or any action, except more presentations), because they ar not designed to. The reports focus on knowing, not doing. The people at the receiving end of such research seldom turn the concepts into productive actions, because the research does not help them enough in doing so. At best, most research I have studied only takes the reader on 20% of the journey.
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  • The content model advocated on this blog is that of actions, systems, and results. And, there is a multiplier effect between them. If you do not have all three you really don't have anything.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 16 Nov 08
     
    Discussion of business research, why it's not so great and how it could be improved
Eloise Pasteur

Clark Aldrich's Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations: A Taxonomy of Interactivity - 0 views

clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/...taxonomy-of-interactivity.html

interactive_taxonomy learning_taxonomy taxonomy teaching

shared by Eloise Pasteur on 17 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Many conversations around interactivity in formal learning programs rests on the tools. Does WebEx allow polling? Can you have threaded conversations in Second Life? What if you gave keypads to members of an audience? And those are all good questions. But at the same time, we need to nurture cultures around interactivity that are independent of any technology. We need vocabulary and expectations around interactivity itself.Here's a suggestion, hopefully useful in practice if not in theory:
  • Level 0: The instructor speaks regardless of audience.
  • Level 1: The instructor pauses and asks single answer questions of the students.
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  • Level 2: The instructor tests the audience and based on the collective response, skips ahead or backtracks.
  • Level 3: The instructor asks multiple choice questions of the audience, where a student might have the opportunity to defend different answers, or the instructor asks real time polling questions for data.
  • Level 5: Students engage labs or other activities and create unique content; however, most solutions will fall into fairly common patterns if done enough times.
  • Level 4: Students engage labs or other activities that have a single, typically process solution, such as putting together an engine.
  • Level 6: The students engage in long, open ended activities, such as writing a story or creating and executing a plan, and where the class "ends up" is unpredictable.
  • Culture, not TechnologyBut again, while technology examples are included, all of this can be done in a traditional classroom.
  • The implication is not that Level 6 should always be used. Most programs will start ideally at Level 1, and then transition to Level 3, 4, 5, or even 6 as quickly as possible.
  • Eloise Pasteur on 17 Aug 08
     
    A discussion of, and model for how interactive your classes are - with a bias towards technology but the feet firmly in teaching in general.
Vicki Davis

District Business - 0 views

www.schoolcio.com/showArticle.php

edu_news education

shared by Vicki Davis on 17 Oct 08 - Cached
  • the possible recording of incoming calls, a serious problem with the district's grade reporting software, and a breach of a computer containing confidential student information that was not reported to the state.
  • Vicki Davis on 17 Oct 08
     
    Whistleblower lawsuit from an IT director.
  • Vicki Davis on 17 Oct 08
     
    Some push back in IT is happening such as this case with an IT director who said he was fired for "blowing the whistle" on innappropriate IT behavior such as problems with the grade reporting software and a computer with confidential student information that was breached without reporting it to the state. These sorts of things have both sides. The point that I would take here is to listen to IT directors when they have concerns: just because you don't understand the problem doesn't mean there is a problem, and that ethics must be applied when things are dealt with in IT.
Dave Truss

F for Assessment: Standardized Testing Fails | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/f-for-assessment

assessment

shared by Dave Truss on 10 May 08 - Cached
  • Dave Truss on 10 May 08
     
    If enough educators -- and noneducators -- realize that there are serious flaws in the way we evaluate our schools, and that those flaws erode educational quality, there's a chance we can stop this absurdity.
Dave Truss

26 Learning Games for Change | Serious Games for Social Change - 29 views

www.missiontolearn.com/...learning-games-for-change

games worldissues ML-7-9

shared by Dave Truss on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Dave Truss on 02 Mar 10
     
    Fair warning, you could easily eat up a big chunk of your day following the links in this post. Buy hey, you'll be helping out the world a bit in the process.
Ed Webb

Editorial Observer - What's Hot on This BBC Podcast? The Siege of Munster (1534-35) - N... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...17wed4.html

internet free open education resources BBC culture

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Feb 10 - Cached
  • There is a lot of talk about how the Internet is driving culture ever lower, but it also makes a wealth of serious thinking available.
Ed Webb

Helicopter parents not doing enough to let children fail - 14 views

www.smh.com.au/...ildren-fail-20100402-rjxy.html

education learning failure generations generationY millennials

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Apr 10 - Cached
  • children who were becoming less resilient and unable to cope with failure
  • That is when we stopped our proper work in the character formation in young people. If we are serious about building resilience, we have to let them fail. It is only through our failings in the learning process that we learn anything
  • someone invented the concept of self-esteem,'' Dr Kefford said. ''In some ways it has been the most damaging educational concept that has ever been conceived.
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  • Generation Y or the ''millennials'' (born between 1982 and 1999) are entering the workforce overconfident and with a sense of entitlement
  • Feeling special often means the expectation of special treatment
Ed Webb

News: Who Really Failed? - Inside Higher Ed - 10 views

www.insidehighered.com/...lsu

idiocy education LSU grading inflation edu_news

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Apr 10 - Cached
  • "I believe in these students. They are capable,"
  • "We are listening to the students who make excuses, and this is unfair to the other students," she said. "I think it's unfair to the students" to send a message that the way to deal with a difficult learning situation is "to complain" rather than to study harder.
  • the university's learning management system allowed superiors to review the grades on her first test in the course
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • scores on the second test were notably better than on the first one, suggesting that students were responding to the need to do more work
  • while her dean authorized her removal from teaching the course, she said, he never once sat in on her course
  • she may include "too many facts" on her tests
  • the incident "raises serious questions about violations of pedagogical freedoms."
  • many other comments about the course standards were positive, with several students specifically praising Homberger's advice that they form study groups. One student wrote: “My biggest AHA‐reaction in this course is that I need to study for this course every night to make a good grade. I must also attend class, take good notes, and have study sessions with others. Usually a little studying can get me by but not with this class which is why it is my AHA‐reaction."
  • Ed Webb on 15 Apr 10
     
    This is a travesty
Fabian Aguilar

What Do School Tests Measure? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-do-school-tests-measure

nytimes all_teachers math science

shared by Fabian Aguilar on 12 Aug 09 - Cached
  • According to a New York Times analysis, New York City students have steadily improved their performance on statewide tests since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public schools seven years ago.
  • Critics say the results are proof only that it is possible to “teach to the test.” What do the results mean? Are tests a good way to prepare students for future success?
  • Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.
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  • More serious questions arise about “teaching to the test.” If the test requires students to do something academically valuable — to demonstrate comprehension of high quality reading passages at an appropriate level of complexity and difficulty for the students’ grade, for example — then, of course, “teaching to the test” is appropriate.
  • Reading is the crucial subject in the curriculum, affecting all the others, as we know.
  • An almost exclusive focus on raising test scores usually leads to teaching to the test, denies rich academic content and fails to promote the pleasure in learning, and to motivate students to take responsibility for their own learning, behavior, discipline and perseverance to succeed in school and in life.
  • Test driven, or force-fed, learning can not enrich and promote the traits necessary for life success. Indeed, it is dangerous to focus on raising test scores without reducing school drop out, crime and dependency rates, or improving the quality of the workforce and community life.
  • Students, families and groups that have been marginalized in the past are hurt most when the true purposes of education are not addressed.
  • lein. Mayor Bloomberg claims that more than two-thirds of the city’s students are now proficient readers. But, according to federal education officials, only 25 percent cleared the proficient-achievement hurdle after taking the National Assessment of Education Progress, a more reliable and secure test in 2007.
  • The major lesson is that officials in all states — from New York to Mississippi — have succumbed to heavy political pressure to somehow show progress. They lower the proficiency bar, dumb down tests and distribute curricular guides to teachers filled with study questions that mirror state exams.
  • This is why the Obama administration has nudged 47 states to come around the table to define what a proficient student truly knows.
  • Test score gains among New York City students are important because research finds that how well one performs on cognitive tests matters more to one’s life chances than ever before. Mastery of reading and math, in particular, are significant because they provide the gateway to higher learning and critical thinking.
  • First, just because students are trained to do well on a particular test doesn’t mean they’ve mastered certain skills.
  • Second, whatever the test score results, children in high poverty schools like the Promise Academy are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment.
  • Reliable and valid standardized tests can be one way to measure what some students have learned. Although they may be indicators of future academic success, they don’t “prepare” students for future success.
  • Since standardized testing can accurately assess the “whole” student, low test scores can be a real indicator of student knowledge and deficiencies.
  • Many teachers at high-performing, high-poverty schools have said they use student test scores as diagnostic tools to address student weaknesses and raise achievement.
  • The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency.
  • While it is imperative that even the least accomplished students have sufficient reading and calculating skills to become self-supporting, these are nonetheless the students with, overall, the fewest opportunities in the working world.
  • Regardless of how high or low we choose to set the proficiency bar, standardized test scores are the most objective and best way of measuring it.
  • The gap between proficiency and true comprehension would be especially wide in the case of the brightest students. These would be the ones least well-served by high-stakes testing.
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