Rather than sending an apple for the teacher, I’d like to suggest [...]]]> “An apple for the teacher” is an old tradition in America that has fallen by the wayside. But doing a little something to show your children’s teachers that you appreciate their effort and understand the challenges they face is still worth the effort.

Rather than sending an apple for the teacher, I’d like to suggest you “Ink the Teacher”. No, I’m not suggesting a gift certificate to the local tattoo parlor. I’m talking about ink for the classroom printer. Teachers in the US typically spend hundreds of dollars each year out of their own pockets to get supplies that dysfunctional school systems don’t provide. We could all help just a little.

When you head to your child’s classroom for back-to-school night this year, do a little sleuthing and find the model number of the classroom printer. Contributing an inkjet cartridge and perhaps even a ream of printer paper will give you superhero status and help ensure your child has a productive school year less constrained by tight school budgets.

…and if you tweet the idea, maybe you’ll help more than just your child’s class.

I’ve done a bit of head-scratching over what one possible Drumbeat project aimed at K-12 education might look like.

If you have an interest in helping K-12 education make [...]]]> Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of people and projects using technology to help internet users understand, participate and take control of their online lives.

I’ve done a bit of head-scratching over what one possible Drumbeat project aimed at K-12 education might look like.

If you have an interest in helping K-12 education make better use of FOSS and the Open Web, please take a moment to look at the wiki page, add your name to the participants list, and hack on the page to make it better.

If you know anyone with an interest in helping K-12 education make better use of FOSS and the Open Web, please ask them to do the same.

Not surprisingly, Apple has [...]]]> Apple has finally taken the wraps off the iPad, a device that many in the edtech community have been eagerly awaiting. Is it, as some have opined, the perfect machine around which to build a K-12 1:1 computing program? I’m sure we will see some school adoptions, but there are problems.

Not surprisingly, Apple has chosen to make software for the iPad as restricted as the offerings for the iPhone and iPod Touch. While the market historically seems to have accepted small mobile devices with software development and distribution options restricted in various ways by manufacturers and/or carriers, I do wonder whether Apple will be able to maintain that acceptance in devices that compete more with netbooks and notebooks than smartphones. Alex Payne’s insights into why we shouldn’t accept the lack of openness are worth reading.

The iTunes App Store is a nightmare for both districts and software publishers. Things like site licenses for schools or districts are simply not supported. The basic problem is that the store model assumes that the device is an avatar of a single user and enforces a near 1:1:1 relationship between devices, iTunes desktop installations and iTunes accounts. This doesn’t work for schools or other institutions that need to manage large numbers of devices. While it’s true that Apple’s enforcement is loose enough to permit limited sharing between a few devices, it falls far short of what’s needed for a classroom full of devices, let alone school-wide or district-wide implementations. It is true that iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches can make purchases directly from the iTunes App store without synching to a desktop or notebook installation of iTunes. However, there is still too much of the old Palm/Microsoft mindset that saw the PDA as a computer peripheral rather than a device unto itself. This is evidenced by Apple’s own “Tech Specs” page which lists a Mac or PC under “System Requirements”.

UPDATE: In the original post of this article I incorrectly said that there is no enterprise management tool, like SOTI’s MobiControl, for Apple’s mobile devices. That was incorrect. Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility is a capable tool that can manage the files and applications on iPhones and iPod Touches. Presumably it will be able to do the same for iPads by the time they become available. It is available as a free download from Apple for either MacOS or Windows. For complete details on capabilities and limitations, see the iPhone OS Enterprise Deployment Guide. Apple’s configuration utility does not, however, solve the problem of site licensing to schools. The provisioning profiles necessary to deploy applications to an enterprise belong to the enterprise, not the software developer. In addition, the utility is not well suited to use by teachers for classroom by classroom device management.

Some educational technologists believe strongly that an integrated physical keyboard is essential to a successful student computing device. While many teachers, administrators and other key players in the purchase decision-making process will see the lack of an integrated physical keyboard as a problem, I don’t think it will be a significant impediment to students. Kids who cut their teeth on game controllers don’t see alternate input modes as a barrier. People like me, who learned our keyboard skills on typewriters in the middle of the last century often do. As Shawn Gross from Project K-Nect puts it; “Kids want smartphones, administrators want netbooks”. The real question is whether kids will see the iPad as too big to carry everywhere all the time. That’s the chief advantage of smartphones, Touches and other small mobile devices in extending the school day. Time will tell.

While Apple’s promo videos extol the virtues of a large-screen multi-touch browsing experience, there is almost no hard information about the version of the Safari browser included with the iPad. There is no mention of Adobe Flash, which has been missing from the iPhone and Touch versions of Safari since they were launched. The lack of Flash is a problem, huge amounts of curriculum content on the web count on the availability of Flash-capable browsers. Apple has been particularly hostile to third-party browsers on their mobile devices, so a Flash-enabled alternative browser isn’t likely, nor does Mobile Safari support a robust plug-in ecosystem like the one Firefox Mobile has. Dave Wiener has some worthwhile thoughts on both the Flash situation and the lack of openness of the iPad in general.

Adobe has announced that it’s Flash Professional CS5 development kit will allow developers to port Flash applications to native iPhone applications, but this does nothing to make existing Flash-dependent curriculum content on the web usable.

As content creators move toward using open standards like HTML5′s video tag and CSS-3 this will become less of a critical problem. Ironically, it will likely be Microsoft’s adoption of these standards that sets the pace. IE 9 on Windows 7 promises to implement 99.3% of CSS3 (as opposed to about 60% for the existing IE8). In the mobile device space their intentions are less clear. Schools still have hundreds of thousands of machines running older versions of Windows that can’t run IE 8 and will never be able to run IE 9.

The current versions of Firefox, Safari and Mobile Safari all implement 100% of the spec today. However Safari for Windows won’t run on Pre-XP versions of WIndows, and Firefox, which will run on versions as old as Windows 2000, has very little penetration into K-12 IT departments. So it’s not at all clear that software publishers with large amounts of Adobe Flash content have an obvious path to total market penetration. Even rewriting old Flash-based content to use emerging open web standards won’t get them to all of the students all of the time.

Apple will doubtless sell tens of millions of iPads. This will make the iPad the first truly successful device in the category that National Semiconductor’s Conceptual Products Group tried to jump-start with their WebPad reference design more than a decade ago. While there have been several attempts to market such a device to education, including the Fourier Systems Nova 5000, none has seen widespread adoption. Apple is likely to do better in the education sector with the iPad, but sales into the K-12 market are unlikely to be large enough to get Apple to make serious changes to some of their policy decisions that impede classroom adoption.

Assuming that the iPad will be a roaring success in the consumer market, Apple will have done one thing that is likely to have a large impact on K-12 classroom devices. They have provided a well-defined target for knock-offs running more open operating systems. With the exact specs for a potentially successful device now evident, we’re likely to see Android, Linux and perhaps even WinMobile/WinCE devices with similar packages and specifications in the near future. While none of these is likely to actually be an iPad killer, one or more will be at least moderately successful in K-12 situations. To the extent these devices implement both Adobe Flash and open web standards, they will be far easier to integrate into curriculum than the iPad.

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For this Design Challenge they are looking for innovative Firefox add-ons that turn the open Web into a rich learning environment.

Jetpack [...]]]> The Mozilla Foundation invites you to help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment and explore new possibilities for learning online as part of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge.

For this Design Challenge they are looking for innovative Firefox add-ons that turn the open Web into a rich learning environment.

Jetpack lets you build Firefox add-ons using simple web tools you’re already familiar with (html, css, & javascript).

…but you don’t have to be a web expert to participate.

Post your idea for a Jetpack for Learning add-on to Firefox on the Project Ideas Page, and Mozilla will help you find an implementation team.

Find out more on the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge page.

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 [...]]]> 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. Our experience was that almost none were forgotten.

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 this 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.

Their Standards Digital Deployment Report is an assessment of how well each state does in the digital deployment of curriculum standards. The report rates each [...]]]> The folks over at AcademicBenchmarks.org have posted a report card on U.S. curriculum standards publishing efforts. It’s important reading for anyone interested in improving K-12 education in this country.

Their Standards Digital Deployment Report is an assessment of how well each state does in the digital deployment of curriculum standards. The report rates each state in 3 areas:

• Accessibility — The degree to which a state supports or provides access to its standards to various stakeholders (teachers, parents, technology vendors, publishers, etc.) in various formats (PDF, Excel, XML, etc).
• Usability — The amount of guidance a state provides for interpreting and referencing its standards for numerous uses (curriculum, assessment, etc.) by various stakeholders.
• Revision Practices — How well a state communicates initial, iterative, or complete overhaul of its standards.

Data for about half the states comes from a questionnaire, with ratings for those states that have not yet responded based on what’s available on the department of education website for that state.

With all of the attention the web has been getting in the education world, you’d think having curriculum standards published in machine-readable form would be the rule. Sadly the situation is quite the reverse. Only 3 states, New York, Ohio, and Maryland, publish curriculum standards in XML. What’s shocking is that 26% of the states that did return their questionnaires did not understand the meaning of “machine-readable”.

The indexing for curriculum standards is a mess as well. Only 29% of states assign a unique number to each standard within that state, so even referencing a particular standard is difficult. The other states either don’t assign standard index numbers at all, or reuse numbers across different subjects or different standards documents. There is, alas, no curriculum standard numbering system in use by more than one state.

In addition to the Standards Digital Deployment Report, the site at AcademicBenchmarks.org provides searchable versions of state curriculum standards as well as links to the curriculum standards web resources for all 50 US States, the District of Columbia, and a dozen Canadian curriculum standards authorities. It’s a great resource, and Academic Benchmarks deserves a lot of credit for making so much of the work they’ve done on the .com side of the house available on the .org site.

Big issues this year include: