Schools Open Doors to Students’ Mobile Devices

More schools are doing an about-face as they change policies to allow the use of student-owned mobile devices in class

By Ian Quillen

At Oak Hills High School in suburban Cincinnati, students returned from summer break to learn they were free not only to bring their mobile devices to school, but also to use them—at their teachers’ discretion—to connect to the school’s wireless network to do their work.

“The students do see [a smartphone] as a potential learning tool,” says Jessica Gingold, an education-council program coordinator for the Mikva Challenge, a nonprofit group dedicated to developing young civic leaders, activists, and policymakers by exposing them to political opportunities. “But that’s not their [primary message]. Their [message] is that we need to start changing the policy, and using the resources that are already available.”

“The cost of having some cellphones you can provide, at least in school during school time, is small compared to supplying laptops or supplying broadband in people’s homes,” says Christopher Dede, a professor of educational technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

And while most technology directors agree that, ideally, students without mobile devices would be provided loaners from their districts, there are still ways to explore using only student-owned devices.

“What we need to do as schools is to teach our kids to be responsible users,” Menchhofer says. “There’s an appropriate time to use the device and not use the device. If I’m teaching and lecturing, you should not have that device out. If you get it out while I’m teaching or lecturing, you’re going to lose your privacy and have to go back to pencil and paper.”

“The biggest thing school districts have to do is to prepare the community for this,” Schad says. “You have to spend time working with parents, answering questions and concerns, and helping them understand why we’re doing something like this.” Read more at www.edweek.org

Most pupils in schools which will face cuts, claims IFS

Most pupils are in schools which will have their funding cut, despite the announcement of an increase in the schools budget, a think tank says.

“The fact is the overall schools budget is going up in real terms including a £2.5bn pupil premium.Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

Deschooling Society

reinvention of learning throughout society and lifetime

(in 1971)

learning webs.

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.

Conviviality

Illich worked to open new possibilities. He argued that we need convivial tools as opposed to machines. Tools accept more than one utilisation, sometime even distant from its original means, so a tool accepts expression from its user. On the contrary, with a machine, humans become servants, their role consisting only of running the machine in a unique purpose. Read more at en.wikipedia.org

Everything is a matter of degree. We do need to redesign our learning environments to address, leverage and harness the new media technology environment of our schools. We need to start redesigning our school libraries and the work of teacher librarians for these learning environments. We need to adopt learner centred e-teaching. We need to share, co-operate and collaborate because we now have an information ecology that can be open, self-managed, fostered and conducive to knowledge flow between content and connections.

As Michael Wesch explains,

Students need to move from being knowledgeable to being knowledge-able Read more at heyjude.wordpress.com

How Students Measure Great Teaching

Know us personally, our interests and strengths

Let us know who they are as individuals

Smile at us

Encourage us to participate in school activities

Spend time beyond class time to help us be successful in their class

Give us descriptive feedback on assignments

Tell us why

Share how what we learn is connected to real life

Apologize when they make mistakes

Give meaningful work

Are energetic, enthusiastic and enjoy their job

We also must not forget that we have a staggering national high school dropout rate (close to 50%).  My friend who teaches in Oakland at a second chance school, for high school students who’ve already dropped out and want to come back, did some research on her students’ experiences that led to their dropping out.  Overwhelmingly they had felt all alone in their education, lacking a strong relationship with any adult at school.  Ability and time to form relationships with students needs to be given some formal value.  If we constantly measure learning outside of any real context, we are really going astray of what our students need, which is real connection–both to academic content and to their teachers.   Read more at teacherleaders.typepad.com

Schools have a role in ensuring that the next generation grows up understanding new technologies and new media.

Facebook’s classroom potential studied by board

P.E.I.’s Western School Board is developing a new policy for using Facebook and other social media in the classroom.

A draft policy that sets out rules on how teachers and students can use the popular media will also likely open the door to cellphone use in the classroom.

“Teachers do use blogs, they do use wikis, they do have Facebook pages, and we certainly want to encourage that,” Sabean told CBC News on Thursday. Read more at www.cbc.ca

LearnLong Blog

exploring lifelong learning & continuing education

Wake Up! It’s Time for School: Yeah You Too

2) Changing the role of ‘teacher’: Throughout the history of education, the teacher was the main character.  The teacher was all-wise, all-knowing, keeper of ruler, chalk, and grade report.  Today , the role of teacher must act as partner.  A partnership where all parties have some knowledge, experience, and most importantly, details making learning a living story; an enlightened and educative soap opera at best. Read more at learnlongblog.com

Assessment

Posted August 15th, 2010 by Bill

One way of changing education is to change how we assess learning.

Standards define curricular goals and objectives.

Textbook companies prepare packaged materials that are “aligned to the standards.” These textbooks, in theory, are designed to address the curricular goals and objectives as defined by the standards (and for fun, ask a textbook rep to demonstrate how their texts “align to the standards.” Ask them to define the process by which the texts are “aligned to standards.” Then, get out the boots, and enjoy the hijinks that will ensue).

Student learning is measured by a standardized test that claims to assess a student’s base of knowledge as measured against the standard.

The “quality” of a school is determined (in part or in whole) by how students have done on the test. Test results can be a key factor in closing down schools.

The “quality” of a teacher is determined (and in many of the merit pay schemes, teachers are rewarded or punished) based on student scores on these tests.

What would an educational environment look like where, in addition to or instead of a standardized test, students had the opportunity to show their mastery via two portfolios: one defined by the school, and the second defined by the student?

These shifts are possible now; they require a change in how we look at assessment, which potentially could inform changes in what and how we teach. Read more at funnymonkey.com

Firms and charities line up to run free schools

By Hannah Richardson

Private firms are lining up with parent groups to run the Conservatives’ flagship “free schools” in England.

These are the new schools that Education Secretary Michael Gove wants parent or teacher groups to set up and run with public funds.

The government argues they will give parents more choice and help raise standards.

But education commentators have questioned whether parents would have the time or the know-how to actually run them.

And consultancy firm Cambridge Education is offering on its website, “a complete package of support is available for anyone wanting to set up a free school”.

He added that the private contractors interested in running free schools would be very big players indeed.

‘Very wary’

He said: “Really the interesting question is whether the free schools can be as cost-effective or not cost-effective than the state sector and I think they can.” Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

Pupils do better at school if teachers are not fixated on test results

Children perform best in exams when teachers are not overly concerned about their test results, according to research published today.

The word “learning” was rarely heard in classrooms, he said, while teachers were more worried about their pupils’ performance in exams. They had resorted to narrowing the curriculum and drilling pupils for tests, Watkins argued, and this made the students less motivated.

In one study, some teachers were told to help pupils learn while others were told to concentrate on ensuring that their pupils performed well. The students under pressure to perform well obtained lower grades than those who were encouraged to learn.

John Holman, the director of the National Science Learning Centre, said preparing pupils for exams might lead to good grades, but this could be “at the expense of long-term learning and comprehension”. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

What if schools had to make kids happy?

by Jeff Cobb

Here’s a simple (though perhaps not easy) proposition: Let’s value schools based on their ability to help produce happy adults.

I’ve been struck by how little weight is given to fulfillment and happiness as a desired outcome of our educational system – at least in the U.S.

If it is all about higher test scores, then guess what, our educational institutions will develop approaches aimed at producing good test takers.

Trying to gauge whether schools have contributed in a meaningful way towards fulfillment, towards the type of happiness associated with “the good life,” as Aristotle put it, may seem messy, but it strikes me as increasingly possible. The research that Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others have done in the field of positive psychology suggest numerous approaches that might be tried if we have the collective will to test and implement them.

A focus on fulfillment also strikes me as increasingly necessary

But more importantly, if we expect to achieve new heights, we need the people who do these things to love them, to be passionate about them, to see them as part of a fulfilling, happy, engaged life. We don’t need to be shoving them down the throat of every student who enters our educational system.  That devalues both the outcome and the student.Read more at www.missiontolearn.com

Seth Godin on how schools teach kids to aim low and wait for instructions.

See more at garr.posterous.com

Reasons For Bringing Technology Into Schools

Support Thinking Processes

Many teachers at case study schools cited a belief that computer-based technologies could provide support for thinking processes.

Stimulate Motivation and Self-Esteem

A second frequently cited rationale for introducing technology was to stimulate motivation and self-esteem. Through either personal experience or a review of the literature, many innovators perceived the dramatic effects that technology can have on students’ interest in class activities and their sense of their own capabilities.

Promote Equity

In the case of several schools serving students from low-income homes, technology innovators stressed the importance of giving these students the technology tools that would equip them to compete with children coming from more affluent homes where technology is commonplace.

Prepare Students for the Future

I don’t care what field they’re in, be it factory worker, office worker, medicine or whatever. [There is no place where technology will not be used.] It’s getting harder and harder to get jobs. You want your kids to get a leg up. It’s becoming a necessary ingredient. - Middle school principal

Support Changes in School Structure

Researchers have argued that technology has the potential to dramatically change the way in which our schools are structured–providing pressure to do away with the division of instructional time into small blocks and discrete disciplines and to rethink the way we use physical classrooms and teaching resources (Collins, 1990; Newman, 1990). A number of our sites reported consciously deciding to use technology in order to support changes in school structure. Several district administrators expected technology to free up teacher time by taking over or supporting administrative and routine teaching tasks. The administrators setting up ShareNet expected it to lower boundaries between schools, districts, and even states.

Explore Technology Capabilities

Finally, in several cases, there were individuals who were simply intrigued by new technologies and wanted to explore what they could do. Not surprisingly, the desire to explore technology capabilities was most likely to be a factor in cases where there was an external partner involved in the design, manufacture, or selling of technology products. Although we felt that technology push was one motivation for some implementations, in no case was it the sole motivation. Read more at www2.ed.gov