Playing around, web tools and teaching math

Big surprise. A blog titled "Technology and Education", and here is a posting that is actually about technology used in education.

Here is an embedded Brainshark presentation on using wikis for math instruction. Brainshark allows you to upload a PowerPoint presentation (also supports OpenOffice presentations), and then record audio for each slide. The audio-enhanced presentation can then be shared using embedded HTML (as is the case here).



And here is a short video experiment with students to portray math concepts. The video is extremely rough -- I made a big mistake in shooting the video that made it very difficult to get the exact special effect I wanted. It's close, but not quite right: next time, shoot each student separately. I shot the student who appears twice separately, but included the middle student, the one holding the equals sign, in both clips. It was difficult to get rid of one of her, so I finally ended up just shifting the video position slightly so one clip overlayed the other. Just don't look too closely. And our green screen is a bit ratty. Editing was done in Adobe Premiere (CS4). It is mainly proof of concept, to give the kids an idea of what to do when we get to the project. The video is shared via Vimeo. As you can see, I didn't get the still frame right.

The Symmetric Property from James Davis on Vimeo.

And here is a comic strip (again an example for the students), using MakeBeliefsComix.com. I like the MakeBeliefsComix simplicity of creating comics with the site -- no logins; and easy to use, intuitive tools. The downside is students can't save comics and go back to edit them, and there is no jpg export. Students need to either print the comic to a PDF file, and convert, or do a screen grab of the comic on the web page. Students can also email a link to the comic to the teacher.




The classroom wiki is barely getting started, but here is a link:

Dvorak Algebra 2010

jd

Technology portfolio

I suppose this is ready enough for release into the wild. This is totally self-promotion, but ...

Here is a link to the portfolio I put together for the Technology in Education Masters program I am in at National Louis University. We are nearing the end of the program, the portfolio is meant to demonstrate some understanding of the Illinois State Board of Education's Technology Specialist requirements and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) technology facilitator standards:

A Technology in Education Portfolio

It does include a personal philosophy on technology in education, as well as a list of resources and readings that I have found useful and/or important.

Comments welcome, either on the portfolio discussion pages (requirse a Wikispaces account), or here.

jd

Why do it by hand?

I posted the following in an online discussion with some of my peers at other schools. I was questioning whether new technologies were making a significant enough of a difference to justify the cost and students could still do neat projects without computers; there was a response about how animated students get using technology, and yes, projects can be done on poster board, but why should they? Which got me to thinking, and this is how I responded:

Some reasons I can think of:

1. Doing projects by hand develops eye-hand coordination. Hand-work is critical to brain development.

2. It develops measurement skills. I see low scores fairly consistently on the Measurement standard (ILS #7), which I suspect is due to the fact that kids never measure things. More cooking, sewing, woodwork!

3. It develops an appreciation for materials and how they work together. Also textures, and what the tools of visual arts are: crayons vs markers vs watercolor vs tempera vs etc. Photoshop effects make a lot more sense if you know their real-world analogs

4. Overall design: the computer screen can be quite limiting when you want to see the overall effect, at 100%.

5. Designing without the computer screen can be relaxing and less stressful I think -- not sure if that is universal, but at least a personal observation.

I do not disagree with the excitement re: computers, but I also think of it like a sugar rush. And I am not saying that I would want to go back to doing layouts with press type and rubber cement, but I am glad I did that once because it makes what the computers do more understandable.

I am wondering if maybe technology education should recapitulate technology evolution -- learn the old way before you learn the new way.

Who makes education policy in Chicago?

I saw this Chicago Trib blog posting (on the Clout St. blog):

Emanuel sitting down with city education leaders as he plots schools policy

It struck me for how much it says about who really shapes education policy. (Hint: It's not teachers.)

The article is about Chicago mayoral wannabe Rahm Emanuel meeting with people who can both inform his education policy, and also fund his mayoral campaign. According to the item, Emanuel met with "nine local education leaders". They include:

• Penny Pritzer, of the extremely wealthy Pritzer hotel, finance, etc. family, and one of the heads of the Pritzer Traubner Family Foundation (see below).
  
• Ellen Aberding, president of the Joyce Foundation ("Working to close the achievement gap by ... promoting innovations such as charter schools")
• Juan Rangel, CEO of the United Neighborhood Organization, "one of Chicago’s most influential Hispanic organizations that has opened several charter schools in Chicago."
  
• Bruce Rauner, venture capitalist and chair of the private-equity firm GTCR, who also serves on the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund, "we are defining venture capital for public education, the next generation in school improvement" and "aims to be the best vehicle for private sector investment in public education". Penny Pritzer is the chair of the fund. What exactly they do is an interesting read, if you can get past the management-babble. The fund provides substantial seed money to get projects going, including most of the alternative certification programs at CPS, including the one I came in on (Chicago Teaching Fellows), as well as AUSL and Teach for America. Another objective is "drive student performance by differentiating compensation for principals and teachers."
• Brian Simmons, with another private equity firm, Code Hennessy & Simmons LLC, and also on the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund.
• Julia Stasch, a vice president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
• Robin Steans, a former Mayor Daley chief of staff, and now director of Advance Illinois, an education policy group. Steans is a member of the wealthy Steans family which made its money in banking, whose foundation has been a major funder of a number of North Lawndale community projects. Advance Illinois focuses on teacher evaluation programs ("base teacher evaluation on performance, including the ability to promote student achievement"), "support[ing] districts to use compensation more strategically", and tying teacher training accreditation to teacher performance.
  
• Beth Swanson, executive director of the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, and a former budget officer of CPS. "Partners" of the Pritzer Traubert Family Foundation include AUSL, the organization that manages turnaround schools for CPS; the Noble network of charter schools; and Teach for America.
  

jd

When do we get to teach?

It is Sunday, and I just finished putting together the testing schedule for my school for a new round of tests our Area Office (at the behest of CPS CEO Ron Huberman) has mandated for us.

We just finished the first of three yearly Scantron assessments on Friday. Next week we begin what has been referred to at my school as the "Riverside test", after the test's publisher. All third through eighth grade students will take an hour-long reading and an hour-long math test. The test is administered online, which means the two computer labs at the school will be unavailable for the next six or seven school days (plus occupying the computer carts for several hours).

I don't think we will find out anything we didn't know already, especially with the Scantron test just finished -- if CPS can't trust the Scantron results, why pay the close to $10 million in test setup and subscription fees for it and its close cousin, the NWEA assessment? [ Aside: I am looking at contracts 10-0623-PR33 and 10-0623-PR34 from the June 23 Board of Education Report, you can also see them on the CPS Procurement and Contracts listing. Click on the line item numbers to see any of the contracts. I'm guessing this is part of Huberman's effort to make CPS dealings transparent, which credit where credit is due, if there, it's Pretty Neat.)

I started compiling a list of what's wrong with all of the testing that CPS is asking us to do. Here are my main topics so far:

1. It is based on bad science.
(insults the intelligence, fetishizes data, misuses data, misuses and abuses statistics, gives science and statistics a bad name, is based on the very narrow world-view of the worst empiricism, demeans human beings, robs the world of its soul, etc.)

And as a result,

2. It hurts students.
(I'm thinking of stress, anxiety, theft of learning time; it sorts students into false categories, stigmatizes students according to one narrow definition of success, focuses on the lowest order thinking skills, distorts purpose and nature of education, etc.)

3. It hurts families.
(same as above, it is also misused to mis-measure school "progress" and so used to close neighborhood public schools, and when public schools are closed, communities are undermined)

4. It hurts teachers.
(data are (is?) abused to provide false evaluations of teachers, distorts the profession, demeans the role of teachers as teaching professionals, distorts curriculum, sets teachers up as fall-guy for failures of economic system, social priorities, government, politicians, educational-industrial complex, etc.)

5. It wastes the public's money.
(out-of-pocket cost of testing services, test administration costs, opportunity costs of test administration, lost teaching time, infrastructure costs, misdirection of administration and teacher time. In this category you can put me assembling schedules, talking to teachers, explaining the tests, proctoring, diagnosing and resolving technical issues, fixing rosters, training how to find test results, explaining what they might mean and won't they don't mean, tracking down students who missed the original test date. One might say, "quit your kvetching, that's your job" except it's not my job, at least on paper -- I am supposed to be helping teachers figure out ways to use new technologies to support creative learning.)

6. It destroys education.
(teaching to the test, lower-order thinking skills stressed, casts children as learning machines, narrows goal of education, used to falsely quantify school "performance" to provide false rationale for school closings, privatization.)

And here is a link supplied to me by Sharon Schmidt to "a zillion position type papers from FairTest": The Case Against High-Stakes Testing

As one teacher at my school said when I informed her of the looming next round of tests, "When do we get to teach?"

jd

Shadow markets

Here is a link to an excerpt from a just-published book, The Shadow Market: How a Group of Wealthy Nations and Powerful Investors Secretly Dominate the World, by business writer Eric Weiner:

http://www.ericjweiner.com/shadow-market-excerpt.html

Shadow markets defined by Weiner:

[t]he shadow market is a collection of unaffiliated, extremely wealthy nations and investors that effectively run the international economy through their prodigious holdings of stocks, bonds, real estate, currencies, and other financial instruments, which they keep in largely unregulated investment vehicles such as hedge funds, private equity funds, and government-run sovereign wealth funds, as well as in vast government-owned holding companies...

Given the enormous amount of money (approaching $20 trillion) in the shadow market, Weiner argues, the players in that market are beginning to exert significant influence in global politics.

Here's a link to a review of the book in today's New York Times: Hidden Tigers.

jd

Race to Nowhere

I attended a screening of the new documentary Race to Nowhere last Thursday, at the Chicago Waldorf School. It is an important film I think, but left me unsatisfied.

The unsatisfaction (not dissatisfied, mind you, just not satisfied) isn't a fault of the film itself -- it does a fine job of addressing the issues it sets out to address, namely the heaps of work and stress laid on children today out of a mad desire to make it in the crazy world of adults. The title comes from a comment by one of the students interviewed in the film, but appropriately echoes the Obama administration's abusive Race to the Top initiative.

Race to Nowhere I think benefits from being released at the same time as the Waiting for Superman film, an attack on teachers and public education by the same filmmaker that made Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. (If you are in education and by some strange phenom have not heard of Waiting for Superman, check out Rethinking Schools' site set up to address the convenient untruths in the film.)

While Waiting for Superman is doing an effective job helping to mis-frame the debate around public education, Race to Nowhere addresses only a slender part of the issue -- and don't get me wrong, it makes no pretense of trying to address the totality of the problems facing public education. But that's the lack of satisfaction for me -- I was hoping for something total.

Race to Nowhere focuses on children who see themselves having a chance in the mainstream world, either because their parent(s) are there already and are pushing them along, or the students have the academic interest or drive, and possibility, of getting a precious scholarship and attending a top university. The film reminds the viewer to return to the basic question of "what is education for?" (And so it seemed appropriate that it was screened at the Waldorf school, an pedagogical tradition which has managed to keep its bearings about what education should be for.) One section of the film portrays a teacher driven from the profession by testing and the narrowing down of what education is and can be. A major theme in the film though is the amount of homework that the students work hard at doing, and the other pressures of school and expectations students face, threatening health, and in one case in the film, driving a student to suicide. And there it became clear that this film was addressing only part of the world of education.

A whole other part is immersed in poverty, where for whatever reasons, the students have been disengaged from education, or maybe never were engaged. Most of the students I have worked with never stressed about homework, as far as I can tell -- most of them never did it (so much so that in my area, the percentage of final grades comprised by homework has been reduced to five percent). The film addressed one side of the Great Divide in America.

To be fair, the film does include a few students from poor communities who are struggling along with the well-off students to keep up with classes, homework, after-school programs and community service. But largely absent are those other students, the ones that see only limited opportunity or have given up on school entirely. So while this is an important film, it isn't the film to counter Waiting for Superman.

jd