Share & Learn; iPad Usage Research

Science Daily reports on literacy testing of young technology users at Kindergartners who shared iPads in class scored higher on achievement tests -- ScienceDaily

a natural experiment where classrooms in one school had 1:1 iPads; classrooms in a second school had 23 iPads to share, where kids primarily used them in pairs; and classrooms in a third school had no iPads. She looked at the effect that using 1:1 iPads for one academic year (9 months), compared to the other two conditions, had on student literacy (as measured by the STAR Early Literacy Assessment).

Results showed that students in shared iPad classrooms significantly outscored their peers in 1:1 and non-iPad classrooms on the spring achievement test, even after controlling for baseline scores and student demographics. Blackwell found that shared iPad students scored approximately 30 points higher than 1:1 iPad students and non-iPad users.

Sometimes the best teacher is another kid -- and not necessarily an older kid, though it might be. I am reminded of some of what Sugata Mitra said in his TED talk at The child-driven education

In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching....

Yes, you do need grown-ups sometimes (that's why Mitra's later work has been on his plan to School in the Cloud with the "Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) toolkit". Mitra wants to involve professional educators as much as possible...but his most dramatic successes have been with kids together with raw materials, sometimes encouraged by a "granny" who may or may not be physically present and who may or may not be professional at all. I think we need more experiments on "self-supervised" sharing. (With a grown-up in the background. Usually.)

(Virtual) Flash Cards

Flash cards help in the memorization part of almost anything you might want to learn, in school or out of it; virtual flash cards can be organized and presented in ways that physical flash cards can't. (They can also support audio and video components.) Consider Cool Tools – SuperMemo + Anki

In high school, I tried to learn Spanish, and failed. In college, I tried again, and failed again. Then, in my thirties, I discovered SuperMemo, and within a year I had memorized thousands of Spanish words and phrases and was finally on my way to speaking Spanish.

SuperMemo is software premised on the idea that there is an ideal time to practice any item you are trying to remember. You want to practice when you have almost forgotten it. Too soon, and you waste your time, and even interfere with long term memory formation. Too late, and you’ve lost the trace, and have struggle to learn it again....your ideal time to practice can be predicted from your history of attempted recall. ... None of them are perfect from a usability point of view. But any of them will work far, far better than random study of flashcards. These tools will not give you all the pieces of the learning puzzle, obviously. Memorization is only one step. But it is a crucial, difficult, first step, and it is wonderful to get a boost.

So....imagine a school where one part of course preparation is the preparation of flash card sets, building up year by year; better yet, imagine a Khan-style "One World Schoolhouse" where part of the preparation for each five-minute video is a flash card review set (to go along with, and become part of, the list of quiz questions).

Meanwhile, of course, you can use flashcards on computer, tablet, or smartphone (the open-source AnkiDroid Flashcards - Android Apps on Google Play, or the $24.99 AnkiMobile Flashcards on the App Store on iTunes for iPhone/iPad, or the open-source Windows/Mac/Linux Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcards for your desktop or laptop) for the memorization part of anything you'd like to learn. Isn't there something you'd like to learn?

Augmented Reality & Education

The Most Powerful App for Education

Bill Shribman is a photographer and a Senior Executive Producer at WGBH Public Television where he and his team create websites, games and apps for popular kids shows such as Arthur, Martha Speaks and Curious George. .... Take a tour of gesture-based games, augmented reality apps, and an app that helps kids with autism infer emotions through photos, and you may agree with Shribman that the most powerful app for education may be the camera.

The station is WGBH-TV and they blog their apps at Apps | WGBH Kids Interactive Group; I don't know that I'd say that the app is the camera, but I would say that apps using cameras (and today's tilt/acceleration/location/etc sensors along with tomorrow's everything-we-know-how-to-sense sensors) can become part of reality in a way that apps stuck with pre-defined data never could have done, and not only for the smaller kids.


Or then again, maybe not.

Networks of Imagination

Ken Bausch mentioned this last December; The Global One-Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown | DMLcentral

In this video, which contains the highlights of his “Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner” keynote at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning conference in San Francisco, he introduces the fascinating notion of “a global one-room schoolhouse through networks of imagination.”

It seems to me that this is quite compatible with Sal Khan's vision (and book) that I've mentioned a few times, but it's an interestingly different point of view. I'm inclined to see it as a mix of Khan with some of Yong Zhao's World Class Learners, but that oversimplifies as usual. I do see him as detecting and approving a trend towards tools like Scoot & Doodle | Get Creative Together, which has just received fairly major support from Pearson among others.

Google+ Hangout App Scoot & Doodle Raises $2.25M Seed, From Valley Angels & Pearson, To Get More Kids Learning Through Play | TechCrunch

Well, maybe not just kids, or just play; I'll add some emphasis in a quote from the GeekDad report on Scoot & Doodle: Makes Google Hangouts a Collaborative Playspace | GeekDad | Wired.com

essentially, it is an app that works with Google+Hangouts and lets you type, draw and engage in a visual and tactile way – as well as through video and voice. In my use of it I have found it to be really stable and offer a fluid and worthwhile experience whether with my kids or with business colleagues. Like many startups there appears to be more potential applications than you can imagine; however, kudos for both the Scoot & Doodle team and Pearson for seeing the potential of this in the education and learning space.

And I certainly approve of the idea that education works off study groups that fit in a Google+ Hangout. That works.

Or then again, maybe not.

Many to One Education

Economist Arnold Kling provides Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology

The attempt to achieve large scale in college courses is misguided. Instead of trying to come up with a way to extend the same course to tens of thousands of students, educators should be asking the opposite question: How would I teach if I only had one student? Educators with just one student in their class would not teach by lecturing....
To put this another way, I believe that the future of teaching is not one-to-many. Instead, it is many-to-one. By many-to-one, I mean that one student receives personalized instruction that comes from many educators. To make that work, technology must act as an intermediary, taking the information from the educators and customizing it to fit the student's knowledge, ability, and even his or her emotional state.

I'd tentatively say he has a large part of a point here, but...hmm. The MOOC model, whether it's carried out for higher education or K-12, doesn't have to contradict his many-to-one ideal; if there are 100,000 students finishing a MOOC, then they all have something in common (they have passed "Intro to Calculus" or "Designing a Rocket Stove" or "Baroque Music as a Commentary on Galileo" or "Origami Polyhedra" or whatever it is.) That likely means that they have all done reasonably well on a series of (peer-graded + machine-graded) quizzes, exams, and projects. It means they share some kind of assessment. It doesn't mean that they have all gotten there the same way; it doesn't mean that they have all done what Stanford students do.

But I'm not disagreeing with him about what's important; education needs to be more customized, more personalized, not less, and specific MOOC proposals may try to save money by going the wrong way. (And I hereby propose that the "normal" course length should be a quarter, not a semester. Or maybe a week. Break everything into Pieces! Hulk SMASH!). And he's at least two-thirds right about tablets.

Or then again, maybe not.

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.