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Student laptops boost standardized test scores?

While it is extremely hard to compare programs, there is some evidence that one-to-one student-laptop programs may boost standardized test scores.

Fix boring schools, not students who are bored

Offering a description of the site owner that says he is willful, unable to follow the rules and "should be seen in psychotherapy," this has to be one of the more interesting "about me" pages you'll ever read. Lisa Nielsen uses it to argue that educators should fix boring schools, not students who are bored.

Wayne

Top tech in 2010

Augmented reality could be a $714m industry by 2014, according to information in this BBC story on the technology and its uses. It could find its place among the top ten tech concepts you should be aware of for 2010.

"For sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn"

"For sale: Baby shoes, never worn." This iconic six-word story from Hemingway works its way into a MacArthur Foundation Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning post on how texting, tweeting might be incorporated into the classroom, which links, in turn, to a Wired article on Abilene Christian University's strategy for using the iPhone in the classroom.

These are the specific educational problems Abilene is targeting with the iPhone. Instead of standing in front of a classroom and talking for an hour, Rankin instructs his students to use their iPhones to look up relevant information on the fly. Then, the students can discuss the information they’ve found, and Rankin leads the dialogue by helping assess which sources are accurate and useful.

Educational games: getting to "what's worth knowing"

Inviting parents to be a part of the process, the New York Times reports on how online collaborative games are being introduced in schools to go beyond "skills and drills" to teach concepts and solve problems in context. "Educational Video Games Mix Cool With Purpose":

After years of watching technology transform the way children play, socialize and learn, a range of academics, foundations and now start-ups are working on games that will put the passion children have for the genre to good use....

The difference in many of today’s educational games is that they are online and social, allowing children to interact and collaborate to achieve common goals. Unlike the stand-alone boxed games of the 1980s and 1990s, the newest educational games are set up like services where children can enter a virtual world, try on a character and solve problems that may relate to the real world.

Newer games work concepts of math, science or language into the actual game mechanics, rather than stopping for something that feels to the player like schoolwork, experts say.

While undoubtedly a pedagogical shift, using virtual environments lowers the cost of failure, encourages cooperative and creative problem solving, and leads to the summit of academic achievement: the penetrating question.

Saying that the most important question in a changing world is "what's worth knowing?" game scientist David Shaffer was blunt in response to "Five Questions" from the IdeaFestival:

We have to move away from thinking about education in terms of the traditional organization of schools. Schools as we know them developed in a particular place and time to meet a specific set of social and economic needs. But times have changed, and the way we need to think about education has changed too. The academic disciplines of history, English, math, and science are not the only way to divide up the world of things worth knowing, the forty-minute blocks of time in which they are currently taught using lecture and recitation are not the only way to learn, and standardized tests of facts and basic skills are not the only way to decide who has learned what they were supposed to learn.

Hat tip: MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

There really is no useless knowledge

Appearing at the IdeaFestival, A.J. Adams, author of The Year of Living Biblically, The Know it All and The Guinea Pig Diaries, talked at length about his life-as-experiment and the idea that there really is no useless knowledge. Jacobs spoke at the IdeaFestival last week in Louisville. A live account of his presentation is here.

To excel in math and science, learn rhetoric. Of course.

In this iMedia Kentucky podcast, program director for the AP English portion of the National Math and Science Initiative grant supporting the goals of AdvanceKentucky, Tina Rose, explains why English is important to math and science advanced placement students.

Recorded just prior to the recent teacher training sessions held in Louisville, some background noise intrudes into the audio as tables and chairs were moved about. But it's still very listenable.

She is but one of the many people leading an expectations revolution in Kentucky.

Classroom leaders of "Expectations Revolution" in Kentucky education

Speaking to iMedia Kentucky at the recent training sessions held by AdvanceKentucky last weekend, these are some of the voices of advanced placement teachers leading an expectations revolution in the commonwealth.

AdvanceKentucky leading "Expectations Revolution" in Kentucky

Last Friday a revolution came to town when advanced placement teachers in AdvanceKentucky gathered for a weekend training at the Brown Hotel in Louisville.

Welcoming them, Dale Fleury from the National Math Science Initiative spoke for a few minutes about how much of the rest of the world had caught up to the United States in innovation and educational attainment, how the National Math Science Initiative had been created and how it had selected, along with five other states, Kentucky as a partner in a groundbreaking educational initiative. Dale Fleury can also be seen in this iMedia Kentucky video talking about the educational challenges facing the country.

In particular, he noted how those in attendance were part of an "expectations revolution". Have a listen:

Excellence will be needed to meet the challenges of a right brain future. There really isn't a student to waste.

iMedia Kentucky will bring you more audio from the gathering over the next several days.