Individulized computer based elementary education.....Much better than no Child left Behind

[francolettieri]

Elementary, Middle School and High School educational institutions continue to slash budgets for the arts and sciences and focus more and more on standardized testing. Universities continue this trend enforcing rote memory learning instead of inspiring students to succeed through exploration and failure.
--Thanks a lot "No Child Left Behind" another stupid conservative/ George W Bush failed policy......I've always thought that individulized computer based learning would be nice. Students would learn by watching short documentaries and learning lessons (almost sesame street style) designed to grab their attention and fascinate them with entertaining graphics and appearances by appropriate celebrities/ professional athletes that kids look up to and/or should know about. They would then be given short quizes after watching a lesson on the computer and the results would automatically be graded. Teachers would then have access to the results-which would be detailed analysis of the students interests, strengths and weeknesses. Students would be able to learn at their own pace and could jump ahead if they were motivated to. And by the way, when kids start learning their ABC's in kindergarden, I strongly feel kids should also be memorizing where each letter lies on the keyboard at the same time!! I had to wait till 7th grade till I learned this..



Anyways it was nice to learn someone had already thought of that idea and had put it into action......

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Groundbreaking "School of One" is Prototype for 21st Century Instruction
07/21/2009


Two-Month Pilot Program Uses Technology to Transform Students’ Classroom Experience

Chancellor Joel I. Klein today visited the School of One, a first-of-its-kind summer school pilot program that uses technology to provide students with highly individualized and innovative classroom instruction. The School of One pilot program combines traditional teacher-led instruction with cutting-edge instructional software like virtual tutors and other tools that customize instruction to meet each student’s academic needs and learning style. The School of One pilot program is part of NYC21C, a research and development project launched at the NYC iSchool in spring 2009 with the goal of innovating instructional practices to help schools better prepare students for careers in the 21st century. The two-month pilot program is being held in the summer school of M.S. 131 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The School of One pilot program departs from the traditional classroom model. Rather than one teacher and 25-30 students in a classroom, each student participates in a combination of teacher-led instruction, one-on-one tutoring, independent learning, and work with virtual tutors. To organize this type of learning, each student receives a unique daily schedule based on her academic needs and recent progress. As a result, students within the same school or even classroom can receive very different instruction, each lesson tailored to the concepts a student needs to learn and the ways she can best learn them. Teachers acquire data about student achievement each day and then adapt their lessons accordingly.

“Particularly in New York City, where students arrive at our schools from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, with different skill sets and skill levels, we must offer students instruction that meets their individual needs,” Chancellor Klein said. “The innovation at the School of One represents some of the most exciting and promising work being done in education today.”
“Cisco is pleased to be a part of the School of One initiative, which highlights New York City’s commitment to creating successful 21st century learning environments,” said Michael Stevenson, Cisco vice president of global education. “Cisco strongly believes that our education systems are in need of holistic transformation in order to arm students with the skills required in today’s global environment. The School of One’s innovative approach and use of collaborative technologies, coupled with improved educator development and curricular and assessment reform, is a roadmap for change that is working.”
“The world has changed dramatically over the past century, and using technology to expand learning opportunities for students is both necessary and promising,” said Joel Rose, the founder of the School of One. “Our hope is to provide teachers with a powerful tool that enables them to meet the needs of each student and allows them more time to focus on the quality of instruction.”
“The potential for School of One is enormous,” said M.S. 131 Principal Phyllis Tam. “My teachers are always looking for better ways to personalize their instruction, especially given all of the student data we now have available. School of One not only makes that possible, but it allows teachers to spend more time focusing what they do best – creating and delivering great lessons for kids. School of One has challenged my thinking on how technology can enhance the role of teachers by extending learning beyond the four walls of a traditional classroom.”
The School of One is supported by a generous grant from Cisco to The Fund for Public Schools, as well as by a prominent network of partners, including Wireless Generation, the Parthenon Group, and many others. The expansion of the program will be contingent upon funding considerations, but the School of One model is expected to be implemented in selected schools for the 2009-10 school year.

[ddeclue]

1. Technology has a place but nothing really takes the place of rote memorization and repetition

especially of basic pieces of knowledge like vocabulary, basic math (multiplication tables, etc.), basic reading and writing, names of states, countries, capitols, Presidents, historical facts, etc.

[wickerwoman]

4. Technology actually aids rote memorization and repetition.

99% of educational software today is basically flashcards with bells and whistles.

What's much more difficult is to design computer technology that encourages critical thinking. The software asks a question and the programmer has to be able to predict what the student will say in order to make it interactive. Unfortunately, this means that "out of the box" answers will not be accepted or that the questions will be designed not to test critical thinking, brainstorming, imagination, etc.

Plus, nothing beats the research paper and in-class presentation of research for teaching students how to be self-motivated learners and for giving individualized feedback. Many programs actually work against this by teaching kids that they need flashing lights, cartoons, virtual handholding etc. in order to learn something. It tends to work against true independent learning.

Technology makes the slogging part of education less of a slog but it doesn't replace competent, engaged, knowledgeable teachers by a long shot.

[ddeclue]

7. I think that for younger students research papers and research presentation is premature.

Actually computers are frequently used to encourage critical thinking in the military and aircraft simulation world by posing unique problems that you simply can't train for in real life. I'm not sure how that type of technology could be applied to more mundane real world situations however. Certainly though the gaming programmers, like the simulation programmers seem to have a good understanding of how to do it. Perhaps the educational programmers could take a page from the sim/game world.

[wickerwoman]

13. Even second and third graders can write "reports".

They won't have a thesis, but it will encourage the kid to use resources (the internet, encyclopedia, books, magazines, etc.) to say everything they know about elephants, for example. You can't write a computer program that can grade a paper like that.

Like I said, it is possible to encourage critical thinking but I'm being pretty generous when I say about 1% of the current educational products I've seen actually do this and none do them more efficiently than a live teacher could. I used to design these programs and it was a *bitch* trying to do anything more advanced than call and response/flashcarding.

You have the fundamental problem of the computer needing predictable input and students being extremely unpredictable. So you have to design the program to make the students respond predictably. And in doing so, you are excluding certain answers which a teacher would be able to handle and you are forced to use exercise types/prompts which are more in line with testing memorization than in encouraging creativity or critical thinking. Basically, you can teach kids to be critical, but only along pre-programmed lines. You can't account for the full diversity of possible responses.

[ddeclue]

16. I still think it is premature to do "reports" at that age - try grade six not two.

Kids need to build up a lot of fundamental knowledge before they can be expected to accomplish anything worthwhile in a report.

I'm actually a software engineer by trade and handling unpredictable inputs is all part of the job in what I do (data acquisition systems).

I would think that it shouldn't be so hard as you are making it out to be. There were programs like ELIZA going back into the 1970's that could parse basic sentences and make reasonable replies to human statements.

I don't view computers as a replacement for humans as teachers however.

[wickerwoman]

22. It is that hard.

ETS has been throwing crazy resources at creating technology that can grade essay responses on the SATs for 35 years. They still use human graders (albeit they've outsourced it to India and China).

There's no way to create an educational program that is truly interactive without true artificial intelligence. ELIZA just took the user response and rephrased it as a question which works great as a parody of psychoanalysis but isn't really that effective as a teaching tool because it still lacks a fundamental understanding of what the student said and why he/she said it (something a human teacher can understand in a second). ELIZA's programmer even said: "anthropomorphic views of computers are just a reduction of the human being and any life form for that matter."

A human being taught exclusively by interacting with a computer will think like a computer. And that's good for some things but not for others. And even the best software is teacher-driven, not student-driven. You can create a very engaging presentation, relevant, challenging questions and good motivation and reward systems but you are still directing the student down a prescribed path rather than teaching the student how to motivate him or herself and discover things for him/herself. So in that sense, technology is a step backward in pedagogy. It's a very engaging lecture and then a slightly more effective test.

(And I remember doing "reports" and presentations in first grade at least in English and History classes. Different classes have different requirements. Learning how to glean what information is important and how to summarize it in your own words is a fundamental early elementary school skill preparatory to learning how to critique information in fifth and sixth grade. My third grade teacher had a sign on the wall listing the order of steps for critical thinking and we all understood it. You can't teach writing skills without writing and computers are bad at grading, evaluating and giving individualized feedback on writing. Look at grammar-check on Word. How much money has Microsoft thrown at that piece of shit and it's still completely stylistically tone-deaf.)

[GreenPartyVoter]

8. Yep. My youngest son knows all of the countries of Europe thanks to this game

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/Geography.htm Definitely makes it more fun than just poring over a map on paper.

[ddeclue]

14. OK.. I'll give it a shot:

1) England (UK)
2) Ireland
3) Northern Ireland
4) Wales (UK)
5) Scottland (UK)
6) Denmark
7) Sweden
8) Norway
9) France
10) Belgium
11) the Netherlands
12) Germany (used to be East and West when I lived there...)
13) Andorra
14) Switzerland
15) Austria
16) Italy
17) Vatican City
18) Poland
19) Latvia
20) Ukraine
21) Portugal
22) Chechnya
23) Herzogovina
24) Bosnia
25) Bulgaria
26) Czech Republic
27) Turkey (part of NATO - maybe not considered Europe though)
28) Greece
29) Estonia
30) Monaco
31) Iceland (pretty far out in the Atlantic - maybe not Europe proper.)
32) Gibraltar
33) Corsica (technically part of France)

OK... I'm sure I forgot one or two of the countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union and a few of the splinters that used to be known as Yugoslavia. Of course it helps that I was born in Europe and lived there for 7 years as a kid.

[anonymous171]

2. LOL More wasteful technophile masturbation.

When are they going to realize that nothing can take the place of quality teachers and proper school supplies (pen, pencil, paper, whiteboard, textbooks, etc.)?

[ddeclue]

9. And what's up with "whiteboards"? What's wrong with good ol' fashion CHALK boards?

:P

[HeresyLives]

3. Now THAT'S what I've been waiting to hear!

We're still teaching kids the same way they did in Rome, and it's appalling in the 21st century!

One teacher, buncha kids, memorize, test. Got to go.

Many thanks for posting this! Made my day!

[anonymous171]

6. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This obsession with technological progress is absolutely ridiculous

All it does is enrich corporate sponsors and isolate children from their community.

[HeresyLives]

10. It IS broke, and should have been fixed long ago.

I'm not interested in teacher-job protection, I'm interested in educating children.

[anonymous171]

12. So am I. Throwing technology at the problem will not fix anything.

Fire bad teachers, train better ones. Use the money that is being wasted on laptops and smartboards to buy proper school supplies for all children.

[wickerwoman]

18. Technology is a tool.

If you want to dig a hole, you don't just buy a shovel and wait for the hole to appear. Likewise, having a shovel makes digging the hole faster, easier and more effective but you still need a strong person who knows how to use a shovel.

Laptops are a great in class tool, especially if the students can get online. They retain information better when they are curious and engaged and technology helps capture their attention and focus it on the task at hand. And students often share a computer, or use communication technology, so adding laptops doesn't mean that the students are isolated.

Smartboards help teacher immensely in organizing their lessons and saves a ton of time on copying things onto the board, or handing out dittos that the students will just throw away. It frees the teacher up to wander around the class and monitor everyone better than being stuck up at the board.

So, like I said, technology is a great tool and we should be kitting out our classrooms with the best stuff we can get *and* training teachers how to use it effectively. But you still need a teacher who knows what they are doing.

[HeresyLives]

19. Yes, it will.

We've spent centuries on 'firing bad teachers,' and buying 'proper' school supplies, and it hasn't done a bit of good.

Time to change.

[anonymous171]

24. Wut? The Modern Industrial School system has only existed in America for about 100 years.

[HeresyLives]

27. Well, America is not the world.

Schools have been in existence since the beginning of time, and unfortunately they haven't improved much.

[tabatha]

5. Is there a link for the two-month pilot program?

Thanks.

[sandnsea]

11. Bill Bennett's K12

Been warning about this for years. It's horrible on so many levels, not to mention the sly way they slip in their values. Like mother getting up before everyone else to cook breakfast, etc.

This is their way of weeding out liberal teachers.

And this is why public schools have got to stop resisting change and work with Obama to improve under-performing schools.

Computer education has its place, like remedial learning or selecting a particular lesson a child is having trouble with. But not as a main source of education.

[rucky]

15. Worth a try...

The other way around the achievement gap within a classroom has been through cooperative learning. At least in my experience, there are many flaws with that practice. Students don't always learn from their peers. Sometimes they learn bad habits. Sometimes the teacher spends most of the project time mediating conflicts within the group.

Granted, we need a balance of group learning and individualized instruction. I think if you take the two elements - group learning and this - you can get the best of both worlds. The computer learning can build scaffolding that will teach the basics of a higher learning objective, then kids can use group projects to collaborate and share what they know.

[LWolf]

17. Better? No. Just as bad.

Individualized education? Yes. By a machine? No.

[HeresyLives]

20. Kids spend all their free time

on those 'machines'.

Put it to good use.

[LWolf]

21. Putting them to good use

means using them for good purposes. They aren't educators, and they aren't nannies. There are some good programs that can help kids learn and practice skills out there. There are a lot more bad programs. None of them are teachers.

[HeresyLives]

23. Best educational tool we've ever had.

Teachers certainly aren't doing the job.

[LWolf]

25. Teachers are doing their jobs all over the nation.

Under adverse conditions.

Change those conditions, and you'll change the outcomes.

Machines still don't replace teachers.

Why repeat conservative teacher-bashing instead of addressing the source of a problem?

[HeresyLives]

26. We know the source of the problem.

We are still using the system the ancient Greeks and Romans had, and that's not suitable for the 21st century.

[LWolf]

30. Who is "we?"

We are using the system the law calls for, and that the law will fund.

Educators aren't mandating the system.

I would love to see a wholesale restructuring of the system. I've been advocating for that my entire career. My idea of restructuring is nothing a politician wants to hear or enact, though. Educators would actually restructure to benefit the system and the students it serves.

I can also tell you that, no matter how much it may be needed, it wouldn't happen easily, even if the politicians would allow it.

There is no "we." No general agreement on how to restructure. That's why politicians get away with destructive "reforms."

Ask educators. Do something different than has been done in the past in the classroom, and there will be outcry, and outrage.

Plenty of parents question EVERYTHING that isn't done "the way we did it when I was in school." It's an uphill battle.

Add to that those who want to generalize their experience to the entire nation into a one-size-fits-all dysfunction, and those whose agenda is to attack public education no matter WHAT we do, and restructuring education makes the health care debate look easy.

[exboyfil]

28. This is the premise for The Diamond Age

by Neal Stephenson. I don't think it is ready for prime time. In the book the resources that needed to be expended were high for a top notch education. On the other hand it did have several thoughts on improvements that could supplement your regular education.

I tried to interest my daughters in Apex online courses, and they would not have it. I do think some kids will learn better by this method, but other kids will struggle. Kids will gravitate to what they enjoy doing. If they like math, they will like it on paper or on a computer. What I find woefully inadequate in textbooks are examples - lots of examples. Examples worked out with a narrative explanation on why they were done that way are the best teaching tool (at least for math and science).

[earth mom]

29. Online learning is an excellent way to go. Here are a few great sites:

Brainpop has fun videos on a variety of subjects. Click on featured and you can watch that video for free:
http://www.brainpop.com/

Cosmeo has videos, games, etc. Click on "take a tour":
http://www.cosmeo.com/welcome/index.html

Discovery Education has a large amount of videos, etc.
http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/

I think all of these sites offer free trials.