Experiment: The Web for Very Young Students

It’s a common misconception that the web isn’t a useful educational tool for very young students, particularly pre-readers. That is simply not true.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve been working on a project called Curiosity Clubhouse that uses computers, both in the classroom and at home, to help kindergarten students learn. It’s a web-based system that uses a collection of flash-based learning activities to help kids learn their letters and numbers and get started learning to read.

It came about after some conversations with an extraordinary kindergarten teacher named Barbara Brisson. Barbara, who has also worked for IBM and NetSchools Corp., is one of the most technology-savvy teachers I’ve ever encountered. She was able to put her finger on a number of issues that limited the utility of computers in the kindergarten classroom. There are 5 computers in her classroom and with 20 kindergartners in the class she doesn’t have the luxury of having everyone working on the same activity at the same time. The class is divided into several groups, and the groups rotate through different activities at tables and at the bank of computers. Typically a student is at the computer for 20 to 30 minutes before that group rotates to another activity.

Before our project, the following factors limited the effectiveness of the machines as learning tools for the kids:

• The learning activities she was using were at web sites spread around the net. Navigating using the address bar of a browser, or even a list of bookmarks was difficult-to-impossible for non readers who didn’t even know the whole alphabet.
• Many of these sites placed the mostly flash-based activities on pages with ads and other links to material that is not relevant to the specific learning activity. In the case of ads, these are often professionally designed to attract attention, and so they would seduce the students away from the intended activity. Once off-task, students often were unable to find their way back to the page where they should have been working.
• Making assignments by trying to maintain bookmark lists on multiple machines for groups of students with differing reading and math skill levels was at best arduous.
• The typical assignment takes less than 10 minutes to complete, and setting up each machine with the next assignment for each student meant that it required a minimum of two volunteer aids to keep 5 students (a quarter of her class) working on the right page. Rarely was that possible.

Curiosity Clubhouse, our experiment in the web for pre-readers has solved these problems and added additional capabilities that have resulted in improved end-of-year reading and math scores for Barbara’s kindergartners.

The core of the system is a web site written in PHP running on an Apache web server and a MySQL database. There are pages on the site for teachers, students, and parents.

On the pages there are web forms that let the teacher enter the class roster. In addition to the student’s name, the database holds the current reading level and math skill level for each student. The database also contains a table of the URLs for learning activities (called resources) selected by the teacher. Where possible, these are deep links directly to the activity SWF file, eliminating lots of extraneous links and ads. Each resource is rated with a minimum and maximum reading and math skill level for which the teacher deems it appropriate. There is also a table containing a list of each of the state curriculum standards addressed by each activity. (More about that later).

Another of the teacher pages lets teachers build assignments. Each assignment has a reading and math level range, and a start and end date. This makes it possible to program activities for each group of students for an entire school year if the teacher wishes. As students progress, the teacher can change the skill levels in their student record and they will automatically be presented with appropriate activities.

At the start of the school year each student is invited to choose a personal icon that will serve as their login to the system. There are more than 140 tokens like the ones above, so even the last student in the process has many from which to choose. This is important because the token must be memorable, so letting the child choose an image with which she or he feels a connection minimizes forgotten logins.

To set up a machine for use in class, the teacher (or an aid) logs the machine into the web site and selects which class is in session. The system is then ready for student login. It presents the screen you see above. All of the student tokens for the current class are displayed, and to log in a student simply clicks the token chosen at the beginning of the year.

Here we see the assignments page that greets Sue after she logs in by clicking on her personal token. She is presented three assignments from those selected by the teacher for Sue’s reading and math skill level. The images on the assignment tokens are chosen by the teacher when the assignments are made, and illustrate letters and numbers currently receiving emphasis in the reading readiness lessons. Sue picks an activity to work on by clicking on one of these assignment tokens and is presented with her first work page.

Work pages present the learning activity in a simple screen with minimal distractions. The two assignment tokens that were not selected on the assignment page appear on the left. When Sue finishes the fish counting activity, she can click on one of these to move on to the next assignment. If she finishes all three assignments before the work period is over, she is taken to a “fun” activity. While these “fun” activities also have educational value, they are chosen from the assignments that have proven the most popular with kindergarteners.

Clicking on an assignment token logs the student id, the time, and the assignment resource to an activity log in the database. Since the resources are correlated with state curriculum standards, it’s easy to get reports of how much time each student has spent on activities correlated to each standard.

When the work period is over, usually 20 to 30 minutes a timer in the classroom rings. Students know that when the timer rings they must click on the alarm clock token in the lower left corner. This resets the machine to the student login page where it is ready for a student in the next group to begin.

Our experience with the Curiosity Clubhouse has been that it drastically reduces the amount of teacher time spent setting-up and managing the computer resources. Students quickly learn the skills necessary to navigate the sytem and stay engaged in their assigned activities rather than getting sidetracked and wandering off-task.
One problem encountered early in the project was students who would quickly click through the first three assignments to get to the “fun” tasks. We dealt with this problem by adding a teacher page called the “Task Monster”. Typically this page is open on the teacher’s computer, usually with the screen facing the class. It displays a recent activity log, and an image of a door opened into a darkened room with the task monster lurking in the darkness. If a student fails to spend a predetermined minimum time on any assignment, the image of the door is replaced by one of several monster images and the teacher can see who was skipping assignments. The students quickly learned that the task monster knew what they were working on and the assignment skipping problem vanished.

Because the system is web-based, students can use the system from home. Parents are given logins to parent pages. A parent can prepare a computer at home to operate like one of the classroom computers by logging-in and then selecting a student login page. That page looks like the class login page except that only student tokens for children in that household are displayed. By having assignments available at home the system effectively extends the school day and minimizes the “learning loss” that occurs over long weekends and holiday breaks. Both parents and students have enthusiastically embraced the idea of using the system at home.

Other parent pages on the site include class calendars, a bulletin page with school news, links to the district and main school web sites, as well as mailto: links to encourage parents to communicate with teachers.

We are currently contemplating what the next version of the system will be. Because this was undertaken as an exploratory experiment, the system was implemented in a piecemeal fashion, and would benefit from a top-to-bottom rewrite. The next version will make more extensive use of technologies such as Mozilla Labs JetPack and Prism to minimize distracting browser controls. We also want to explore implementing lesson activities in a more standards-based manner, perhaps making use of the html5 canvas tag and AJAX to replace the flash-based activities. Also under consideration are changes to allow students to engage in learning activities using mobile devices such as the iPod Touch or Sony PSP.

In conclusion, we’re convinced that the web can be a useful instructional tool even for very young students who cannot yet read. Please leave a comment if you know of similar projects or have experiences you can share using the web to support early education.