Napa New Tech: School of the Future is Here, Tina Barseghian

Pay Attention, T4 – Jordan School District

Math Class Doesn’t Have to Suck, The Innovative Educator

Wikipedia Turns 10: Are we Banning or Boosting?, Doug Johnson

Inverting learning requires shifting certain learning activities traditionally completed in the classroom to home. According to Stansbury,

“Students can absorb the material as homework and then practice what they’ve learned with guided help from the teacher if they need it. This new learning style not only makes class time more productive for both teachers and students, but also increases student engagement, increases achievement, and caters to all forms of personalized learning, say the teachers.”

What makes this instructional approach intriguing is it enables teachers to customize learning to meet individual student needs. By moving certain learning activities out of the classroom (e.g., direct instruction, etc.), teachers free up valuable time during class to be available for students when they could use the teacher’s attention most. Inverted learning provides more opportunities for teachers to monitor, engage, and guide students during the most critical moments of learning.

With the availability of learning management systems like Blackboard and Moodle, teachers are able to effectively transfer core learning tasks, such as watching a lecture and taking notes, away from the classroom. These learning management systems have powerful accountability tools which enable teachers to closely monitor students as they complete learning activities at home.

An inverted model, however, involves more than simply transferring learning activities to home. It requires rethinking the way teachers design curriculum, deliver instruction, and interact with students. The success of this type of learning model hinges on the teacher’s ability to customize learning experiences for each student. As certain learning activities are moved out of the classroom, valuable time is freed up to assess students, prescribe learning interventions, foster critical thinking, and focus on individual student learning needs. This approach involves utilizing a teaching cycle based on real-time data.

Because meaningful educational reform requires customizing learning, this model presents interesting opportunities for educators.

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Here is a Sports Illustrated mock-up on a tablet by Time, inc. that really demonstrates the potential power. Imagine the opportunities that this device could provide for learning. What are your thoughts?

One more note, it appears Verizon has briefed its managers to expect a busy day tomorrow. Hmmm…

In addition to her fine guest article, Jennifer has graciously provided EDBuzz fans the opportunity to win a copy of ISTE’s The Best of Learning and Leading with Technology. There are two ways to win:

1. Click here to register
2. Tweet or retweet the link to her article (http://bit.ly/1xepIM). Be sure to attach the hashtag #edbuzz

A winner will be selected Oct. 2, 2009. Spread the word and we’ll look forward to seeing you tomorrow…

Homework excuses

Fake it till you make it. That’s the idea behind corrupted-files.com. Deadlines have always been a part of the education experience. For many it has meant late night cram sessions fueled by plenty of Red Bull. As technology became more integrated into our daily lives, enterprising individuals brought SparkNotes and essay mills online. For procrastinating students this offered a hope for redemption. For teachers at best it represented superficial learning and at its worst, downright plagiarism. The battle has evolved yet again.

Currently, for $4.95, Corrupted-Files offers students the choice of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that will not open. The idea is that by the time the professor realizes the file cannot be opened, the student will have time to complete the actual assignment and submit the real work. Thus allowing the student to literally “fake it till they make it”. Marc Beja at Chronicle.com wrote an enlightening piece about this service.

While the site advises against using their service and suggests that the student should “just tell the truth”, it rings rather hollow. Submitting a corrupted file to gain additional time is dishonest. Plagiarism would technically exist as the student is turning in someone else’s work. Finally, further conversations with the instructor, regarding the corrupt file, would probably be tainted with additional dishonesty.

It appears that this tact could work in most academic settings. With heavy workloads and large class-sizes, most teachers find themselves behind in their grading, at some point in a semester. This can often mean that documents are not inspected for a couple of days after their receipt. Additionally, teachers occasionally receive corrupted files, making it difficult to distinguish bogus from genuine. Without a standard system for assignments submitted online, a loophole is created.

Four Guidelines For Authenticating Online Assignments:

1. Check the file immediately upon receipt. Notify the student immediately that a replacement file is needed for any corrupt file.
2. Instruct the students that corrupt files are THEIR responsibility. Check your sent box and open the attached file to verify that the document is functional.
3. In situations where a corrupt file is discovered, use the properties feature to discover when the file was created. A ten page paper created twenty minutes before the assignment deadline is a red flag. Realize that a tech savvy student can circumvent this technique.
4. Finally, if necessary, require a hardcopy submission.

Click the following link to receive our FREE guide Online Assignments: 3 Tools For Creating and Authenticating Online Assignments.

After over a year of debating and eventually coming to the conclusion that I really wanted an iPhone, I finally found myself in line at my local Apple store the morning the new iPhone 3GS was released. After a two hour wait due to a mix-up with my reservation paperwork, I was the proud new owner of the latest and greatest incarnation of the iPhone.

As with any toy, I started exploring the features. The ability to seamlessly watch Youtube videos was very cool. The GPS feature, again cool. Over the past two weeks, my attention has once again been drawn to the potential role for an iPhone or iPod Touch  in the classroom. Colleges seem to agree (see iPod Touch, iPhone Mandatory for Students) that these devices are not just the future but part of the now.

When browsing through the Education category of the iTunes App store, I realize that there are 176 pages of education applications, each page with 20 apps listed. This is a staggering 3,520 apps for the iPhone or the iPod Touch. Every language is represented from Chinese to American Sign Language. Does anyone else find it ironic that German and Hebrew are listed next to each other? Math, Science, Schedulers, graphing calculators, books (Kindle) available in a portable format, even a California DMV prep. Admittedly, not all apps are top-notch and challenges are posed by the small size of the device, nevertheless, the intriguing benefit of both the iPhone and the iPod Touch are their ability to combine a multisensory experience, in such a small device, into play (especially the tactile aspect).

I would like to see future innovation with apps in two major areas. The first is classroom management. Attendance, notes, and other classroom duties could be made easier through the use of the iPhone or iPod touch. These devices create a powerful and portable hand held input system  With this data sent to the classroom computer (or directly to the school’s servers), organized data can be efficiently gathered and easily used in gradebooks, progress reports, memos, and planning. Time can be saved.

The second area involves the creation of apps that enhance student learning. As mentioned previously, both the iPhone and the iPod Touch offer a multisensory experience. When this is properly used, extremely powerful, multidimensional learning can occur. Lab experiments, astronomy, and fascinating talks (ted.org) help bring a subject alive. The ability for interaction that these devices provide is unprecedented. Books would no longer tours of sites, movies, and a variety of other experiences. Bringing learning alive. I look forward to this.

Here are five educational apps that you may find useful:

• Wheels on the Bus
• Graphing Calculator
• Free Spanish Tutor/Free French Tutor (free)
• Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy
• Art
• myhomework (free)

As always please share your feedback…

In his talk, Professor von Ahn pointed out that in 2003, the world spent 6 billion hours playing solitaire. This was contrasted with the 7 million hours necessary to construct the Empire State Building or the 20 million man hours required to complete the Panama Canal. Professor von Ahn proposes that: Using human skills and abilities, it is possible to solve large-scale computational problems and teach computers many of the basic human talents.

The first example provided is reCaptcha. Professor von Ahn developed reCaptcha, a new form of Captcha that helps digitize books. In reCaptcha, the images of words displayed to the user come directly from old books that are being digitized; they are words that optical character recognition could not identify. It is estimated that 200 million Captcha’s are solved dail by humans around the world. reCaptcha was designed with the purpose of using crowdsourcing, to identify distorted text. Once a piece of text has been agreed upon by the necessary number of humans, it is re-inserted to help in the digitization of the book.

Professor von Ahn next turned his attention to the use of computer games to achieve his goal of solving large-scale computational problems that computers aren’t capable of solving. Google images provided a perfect case study. In this situation, a user may search for an image by keyword, however, the implemented method of tagging these images was woefully inadequate. Far too often, images had no relation to the keywords associated with an image. To solve this problem von Ahn invented the ESP Game. ESP takes two players that don’t know one another with an objective to get them to type the same word without communication. Both players share an image and words are provided by the players that describe the shared image. As users agree on keywords they become taboo or unusable. This helps spur the further identification of keywords to be associated with an image.

Professor von Ahn stated that already 50 million tags had been agreed upon by 200,000 players. A surprising number of which play for more than 20 hours a week and sessions of 15 hours are not unknown. These numbers lead to belief that if 5,000 players played simultaneously, all of the images in Google would have been agreed upon by humans in a few weeks. While the ESP game is rather addictive and has proven a hit (licensed to Google), the obsessive nature it fostered, bothered Professor von Ahn and a maximum of 15 consecutive hours (10 for .edu) has been imposed, after which, the the system will lock you out.

An interesting side note mentioned regarding the ESP game project, was the acquisition of user data. Students constructed prgrams that could accurately determine several demographics of ESP users. After assessing a couple of responses from players, in 98% of the cases, gender could be accurately identified, while age could be fairly accurately determined in 85% of the cases. This could potentially provide very powerful tools for marketers, as well as training material for computers.

Professor von Ahn mentioned the strong bond created between partners that play the ESP game. Partners that perform well together not surprisingly, find a warmth and connection. These have led to some users wanting to date their anonymous partners and describe the game as “anonymous intimacy”, “like crack”, “a great way to learn English”

In what manner can this be applied to today’s classroom activities? Where can crowdsourcing provide learning opportunities? Small inefficiencies in procedures or schedules can grow over the school year to an enormous figure. For example: Two minutes, five periods per day of wasted time, turns into 30 hours over a 180 day school year. How can we recycle these wasted human cycles?

L:uis von Ahn has several current projects including the ones mentioned in this article. See the URLs below for more information:

• http://gwap.com
• Luis von Ahn’s blog