Apps

I shouldn't skip educational apps -- here's a 2010 GeekDad review of Touch The Elements | GeekDad | Wired.com

if books like this were around when we were in school, it would have been a lot more fun to learn the periodic table.
Then again, this is no book. The Elements is an iPad application based on Theodore Gray’s beautiful hard cover book, The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe. Containing similar information, the pictures and data come to live in the iPad application in a way they never could in a book... Each image can also be viewed in 3d with a pair of 3d glasses.

And here is what the same company is doing now...App Review: The Barefoot Atlas Lets You Explore The World | GeekDad | Wired.com

A beautifully illustrated globe greets you as you launch the app and colorful and animated icons pop up around the world begging to be touched. ... Kids can press the speaker icon to have the paragraph read to them and an index ...
The globe is fully rendered in 3D and looks like a kind of cartoon Google Earth....
Using a reoccurring feature of Touch Press apps, Wolfram Alpha integration offers additional statistics like currency conversion, transportation statistics and CO(2) emissions per year all updated in real time. The app even calculates how far away the country is from you by using your current location.
I gave my six year old son the iPad and started up the app.... We spent some time touching the animated icons so I could show him the interface, find the narration button and related images. Then let him explore on his own.

Gallup on Schools

Gallup says public schools have a credibility problem. Americans look down on public schools:

Only 32 percent of Americans believe public schools deliver a good education, and just five percent of people surveyed believe students at public schools will receive an excellent education. Sixty-one percent of Americans think public schools will give only a fair education at best, including 18 percent who rate the education as poor.
The public school system’s disapproval rating is higher than the approval rating of charter school systems. Sixty percent of Americans think charter schools will provide at least a good (43 percent) or excellent (17 percent)....

Let there be (LED) light...and math

Suppose that you wanted to lead up to an electronics/robotics/etc. curriculum. A STEAM (Science,Technology,Engineering,Art,Math) curriculum. This kind of thing would fit in there somewhere.
Basics: Picking Resistors for LEDs | Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

So… you just want to light up an LED. What resistor should you use?
Maybe you know the answer, or maybe everyone already assumes that you should know how to get to the answer. And in any case, it’s a question that tends to generate more questions before you actually can get an answer: What kind of LED are you using? What power supply? Battery? Plug-in? Part of a larger circuit? Series? Parallel?
Playing with LEDs is supposed to be fun, and figuring out the answers to these questions is actually part of the fun. There’s a simple formula that you use for figuring it out, Ohm’s Law. That formula is V = I × R, where V is the voltage, I is the current, and R is the resistance. But how do you know what numbers to plug into that formula to get out the right resistor value?

Get some sleep

Talking about sleep learning...Student sleep problems aren't just about individual behavior - Boing Boing

Taken together, the evidence we have on the connection between sleep and academic performance suggests that the problem isn't merely an issue of student behavior, and the solution probably shouldn't be confined to lecturing kids on how they ought to be getting a full 8 hours of rest. It's also a systemic problem with the way we do education. Consider when high school starts, for instance. Studies in Minnesota (and elsewhere) have shown that simply shifting first period from 7:20 to 8:30 makes a difference not only in attendance, but also in how well students do once they get to school.

(Links to study reports included.) They talk about a substantial difference between 6 hours and 8 hours of sleep; I wonder what effect an increased bus drive has on student sleep.
Update: A slightly more nuanced view from Students Who Stay Awake to Study do Worse in School the Next Day | GeekDad | Wired.com

Interestingly, they found that in 9th grade, there was no penalty for cramming. In 10th grade, staying awake to study started to predict higher next-day hits for the responses “did not understand something taught in class” and “did poorly on a test, quiz, or homework.” And by 12th grade, kids who traded sleep for study showed a marked spike in academic problems the day after cramming.

And this is plausibly connected to overall reduced sleep, year by year.

Online Disruption

The Washington Monthly - The Siege of Academe

To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. Now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. You can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. The question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people?

Educational Games--"Purpose Games"

The idea here seems to be a class of interactive online games which are a bit like flashcards, but rather than just a list of cards you have regions on a map or diagram, e.g. muscles of the body or maybe regions of the brain. I wonder if this could be developed into a Memory Palace memorization scheme for more or less arbitrary objects to memorize. PurposeGames.com - Create & Play Online Games

Create your own games, host your own groups / classes, study for a test, or just dazzle us with your knowledge.

Education Numbers?

Back to School: Teachers Union Loses Members While Per-Pupil Spending Soars

As children head back to the classrooms, let’s look at two important figures to consider this school year: 308,000 and $11,400.
308,000: Number of members lost by the National Education Association.
$11,400: Average per-pupil, per year spending in public schools.
... Sadly, continual increases in the money spent per child and in overall spending haven’t led to increases in academic achievement.

And of course for New Yorkers, it's worth remembering a third number: New York schools lead nation in spending per pupil, Census Bureau reports | syracuse.com

New York’s public schools spend far more per student than any other state, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The bureau examined spending across the nation for fiscal year 2010. It found New York schools spent $18,618 per pupil, far above the national average of $10,615.

One way or another, things will change.

Sleep Learning?

Somehow I don't expect too much of this, but it's a reminder of how broadly we should be thinking about education reform. How to Learn in Your Sleep: Scientific American

It sounds like every student's dream: research published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that we can learn entirely new information while we snooze.

Well, we can learn to associate good/bad smells with sounds. Okay...

Telepresence education

Here's distance learning with style:

So you can sit or stand at home, or in the one-room classroom of your neighborhood, and go wherever the education is, interacting however you need to, flashing your screen instead of raising your hand.
Of course, the interactions will get better with time...it's possible that Franklin never asked "What use is a pneuborn baby?" but we can see changes coming:

So far, this particular robot has only learned to crawl.

Online Assessment

Everybody needs an IEP, especially me. But that's too hard, and we have no practical way to choose a program. But maybe we will: IBM Watson making progress to becoming a useful medical assistant for diagnosis and treatment planning

Given data on a new patient, Watson looks for information on those with similar symptoms, as well as the treatments that have been the most successful. The idea is it will give doctors a range of possible diagnoses and treatment options, each with an associated level of confidence. The result will be a system that its creators say can suggest nuanced treatment plans that take into account factors like drug interactions and a patient's medical history.

Let's try replacing "medical assistant" with "teaching assistant" and run that by again...

Will it work? Maybe. Will it be a waste of effort? Well, almost certainly in the first few times it's tried. Is it worth trying? I think so.

TED-Ed

In the process of getting and extending an education, most people should watch a lot of TED Talks. And the TED people also have the more explicitly educational TED-Ed | Lessons Worth Sharing

You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube.
Watch the video to learn how.

So any explanation or lab or demonstration worth making, any story worth telling, any song worth singing...whatever. Put it on Youtube, make it into a lesson.
(Or then again, maybe not.)

Bigger Screens

Since my own image of the School of the Future includes lots of computer screen space (so that kids collaborate with workgroups and tutors who are sitting at the same table, but not in the same state), I'm intrigued by the latest on molybdenum disulphide, a graphene-like (2-dimensional) material with a bandgap so it can be used in circuitry more easily than graphene: One-molecule-thick material has big advantages

Palacios says one potential application of the new material is large-screen displays such as television sets and computer monitors, where a separate transistor controls each pixel of the display. Because the material is just one molecule thick -- unlike the highly purified silicon that is used for conventional transistors and must be millions of atoms thick -- even a very large display would use only an infinitesimal quantity of the raw materials. This could potentially reduce cost and weight and improve energy efficiency.
In the future, it could also enable entirely new kinds of devices. The material could be used, in combination with other 2-D materials, to make light-emitting devices. Instead of producing a point source of light from one bulb, an entire wall could be made to glow, producing softer, less glaring light.

Well, maybe nothing whatever will come of molybdenum disulphide. But new things will happen. The HCS classroom of 2032 should be further from the classroom of 2012 than 2012 is from 1912. Yes, really.

Bringing an ice cream cone to a knife fight

Finding Unity in the Math Wars | BetterExplained

Human interaction matters
It’s easy to misunderstand Khan Academy’s goal. I’ve seen many of their blog posts and videos, and believe Khan Academy wants to work with teachers to promote deep understanding.
But, some news coverage shows students working silently in front of computers in class, not watching at home to free up class time for personal discussions.
The teacher doesn’t appear to be involved or interacting, and that misuse of a learning tool is a nightmare for teachers who want a personal connection. Let’s have an online resource that directly contributes to offline interactions also.

Parents as problem v. School as problem?

National education policy -- oh, how it's changed

"Poor students were framed as trapped in failing schools, and needing parents to rescue them, in 2001. This is a reverse of the framing in 1965, when they were portrayed as trapped in culturally impoverished families and needing schools to rescue them,"

"Won't Back Down"

Teachers on the Defensive - NYTimes.com

“Our very best teachers ought to be treated much, much better than they are today,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “But in order to get there, we need to be able to say out loud that some teachers are better than others.”
That’s precisely what “Won’t Back Down” says. Although the movie is bound, in this politically charged climate, to be analyzed solely in terms of the position it seems to take on parent trigger or its qualms with union behavior, it’s ultimately about the impact of superior teaching, the need to foster more of it and the importance of school accountability. Who could quibble with any of that?