Create a digital white board with a Wii controller.

Franchise Whale describes how a teacher can create a digital whiteboard with a $40 Wii controller. Johnny Lee offers a video to show you how to do it. I haven't tried it, so please let me know how it works for you.

Our School Beat the Odds

Joanne Jacobs' (2005) book Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds (Palgrave Macmillan, Nov. 29, 2005) tells the saga of a San Jose charter high school that prepares underachievers — most from Mexican immigrant families — to succeed at four-year colleges.

“Joanne Jacobs has written a ground-breaking book about the most interesting, and potentially important, change in American schooling in the last 15 years.”–Jay Mathews, Washington Post education columnist, author of Harvard Schmarvard, Escalante, and Class Struggle.

Available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle formats.

It's worth reviewing, if you share interest in schooling and student learning potential.

Teacher Term Limits, Continued

Setting term limits on teachers seems counterintuitive as a way to address a teacher shortage while educators face increasingly transparent public accountability. Considering term limits seems a reasonable way to examine what and maybe how current schooling practices limit student learning and learning rates.

In the early 1970s, Carl Calkins, then a special education doctoral student, ran a summer camp for youth with disabilities. He found that campers learned more with counselors who had no formal teaching experience; his evaluation data lead him not to hire pre or inservice teachers for subsequent camps.

Carl's little study came to mind as I have mused over the idea of teacher term limits. It has helped to give focus to an emerging case statement outline.

Here's one principle for that outline:

A Given: Teachers can only instruct what we know individually and together.

Response:

1. Teacher term limits would open school positions to people with experiences addressing practical and competitive uses of skills taught in schools plus important information and skills seldom covered, such as nanotechnology, astronomy, risk analysis, profit making.

2. This potential labor pool includes former engineers, middle level corporate executives, contractors, trades and small business people, consultants, and others displaced by global economic shifts.

3. This expanded pool includes those who have helped develop and relied on high tech communication technologies (including Tablet PCs, UMPCs, and other mobile PCs), mathematics and science to conduct their businesses.

4. They routinely boil down academic subjects to efficient ways of addressing practical problems students also may face daily.

5. This process would redefine "good teaching" and "best teachers" as related to practical and competitive utilitarian responses to identified local and global problems.

6. Current "good teachers" could accept competitive positions and conduct their own businesses at the end of their teaching terms in order to hone and update their skills before reentering school teaching as former business people.

That's another step in formulating a case for teacher term limits. I'm not sure how much further I want to go with this topic. I'm uneasy with a strict utilitarian approach to schooling, so, probably I should work out this teacher term limits topic further.

I wonder what others would add as reasons to adjust what teachers know through term limits in order to teach?

Educate the Head, Hand, and Heart

Northfield Mount Hermon School prepares its students for college and for life ... the faculty sets high standards and holds students accountable, leading them to aspirations and achievements that exceed their previous expectations and accomplishments.

Mission, Northfield Mt. Harmon School

Check out their summer reading lists. They'll likely reassure efforts of many public school students and teachers who match or exceed these assignments, sometimes in elementary and middle schools.

Kudos, faculty for setting high standards that lead to student achievements beyond their expectations. And, to have a record that supports those words. Thank you for your persistent optimism.

Mark Twain I.S. Term Paper Guide

Faculty of the Mark Twain Intermediate School 239 for the Gifted and Talented offer a useful guide for writing term papers. Students of all ages and teachers will find it a useful reminder to supplement those writer's block moments under time pressures. Has anyone put this into an Ink format for Tablet PCs and other mobile PCs?

Back of the Napkin Problem Solving

bnet.com offers this book video brief:

In his book, The Back Of The Napkin, author Dan Roam asserts that that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, but that we — especially in the business world — are never encouraged to develop it. In this video, Roam shows us how anyone with a pen and a scrap of paper can exercise their imagination and work through any business problem by creating pictures.

Teachers may find his suggestions useful for imagining how to work through ways to use Tablet PCs in classrooms in order to increase student learning rates.

Teacher Term Limits

As a sometimes contributor to the Contrarian Institute of Educators, it seems useful to explore this proposition: All public school teacher (including administrator) contracts should include a sunset or term limit clause.

Contrarianism holds a venerable position in scholarship and entertainment. At its core, it provides scholars with alternative explanations for observations as well as ways to examine relative values of actions before consigning them to empirical tests. Movements such as child advocacy grew out of such thinking. Arguably, virtually all human progress has occurred because someone considered and then offered an alternative to conventional practice and wisdom.

In that spirit, I suggest that educators examine the proposition of requiring term limits for public school teachers. This proposition grew out of my interest in learning efficiency.

I'm not sure what might result from term limits, but several things come to mind promptly. I offer them in the spirit of comity and respect for teachers and conventional schooling, with no hidden agenda.

Given that teachers can only teach what they know, term limits would open teaching to more people who know different skills and information beyond school curricula and pedagogy. Also, curricula and pedagogy hold no mystery that most people do not already know and can instruct others by virtue of having attended schools and worked in groups to earn money.

At the very least, term limits would provide target dates for teachers to live as those we teach live during the next decade or so: changing employment and probably occupations repeatedly as the emerging global economy migrates to an as yet unknown distribution of personal rights and obligations.

By changing employment, teachers would take part in schooling on an equal tenure footing with students: we're all here temporarily, because life outside schools changes faster than schools keep up. Both teachers and students know when they will likely leave their school role, if they perform as their contracts require.

Term limits would increase teacher turnover by design rather than for other reasons. Designed turnover could result in these kinds of changes: (1) planned use of novel resolves to endemic schooling problems, and (2) reduction of reliance on experience based (some may call it either superstitious or political) behavior about why increased learning cannot occur promptly for all students with whatever resources exist at the instructional moment. I wonder if experience yields more "why not" rather than "how to" procedures for increasing student learning?

Required turnover:

Would provide schools with more personnel with experience in competitive business settings. These experiences could change schooling operating and political ideologies;

Could allow people of all ages to use Tablet PCs, UMPCs, MIDs, and other mobile communication technologies to learn whatever and whenever for whatever reason they want by selecting the style of instruction that fits them best for the moment. Government and private sector projects exist for expansion that make some if not most schooling physical-venue-free;

Could allow teachers to adapt their classroom lessons to electronic media and offer them through competitive business ventures they design and operate for their preferred student aggregates;

Could increase the rate of learning in public schooling and provide new (more globally realistic?) academic standards; and

Could support the proposition that "We the people ..." rely on our individual ingenuity and enterprise, not on some group, with whatever noble intent, to decide what and when we should know and do.


Hmm. I'm not sure how much confidence to have in teacher term limits increasing student learning rates. Yet, it seems worthy of exploring further. I'd like to see what others think about it, beyond familiar protectionist rhetoric. Perhaps someone will take this idea of teacher term limits on as a term paper?

Learning Efficiency Scale, POC 1.1

After drafting a series of principles and checklists related to learning efficiency, I decided to see if I had enough material to draft a proof of concept (POC) learning efficiency scale (LES). Here is an updated version of that draft. I think enough exists for teachers to conduct mental experiments and informal evaluations of learning efficiency of individual as well as aggregates of learners. Observers of lessons may also find LES useful as a guide to monitor critical mechanics of teaching-learning processes.

Measures of learning efficiency indicate the extent to which instruction and learners' attention meet. From a view of a learner, learning efficiency means spending less time, effort, and other personal resources acquiring a given set of information or skills. It also means gaining something of personal value in exchange for those resources. (I'll address this latter index in a future version.)

In this sense, teachers choose the level of learning efficiency that their students may earn. Teachers know that one way of presenting a lesson can take a few seconds, another way may take a few hours. Teachers decide the learning objective, learning criteria, timeframe, degree of difficulty a student will encounter, evaluation standards, etc. for each lesson.

LES provides guidelines for teachers to increase student learning efficiency by fine tuning observable mechanical aspects of instruction scientists found critical to learning efficiency.

Tablet PCs, UMPCs, MIDs, and other mobile PCs offer ways for teachers to provide more efficient learning options for students. An Ink based software version of this scale is in preparation.

Learning Efficiency Scale
LES yields a measure of instructional competence, e.g., power or proficiency. It provides a framework for students and school observers to rank the relative capacity of school lessons and instructional material to yield intended student academic behavior. Learning efficiencies describe which instruction assists a student to reach a learning criterion quicker, easier, or with less effort when compared with other possible ways of reaching the same criterion (Heiny, 2007).

Assumptions
LES uses the assumption that learning efficiencies reside with the instructor. That is, teachers or teaching material simplify presentations to the bare minimum number of steps and content necessary for a student to demonstrate learning each lesson. Instructional simplicity contrasts with other rating scales that use an assumption that learning efficiencies reside with the learner.

LES also uses the assumption that people use the same one step mechanics (behavior patterns) to learn. They use trial and error behavior until they meet learning criteria for a lesson.

Scientific Principles
LES uses several enduring scientific principles that indicate state-of-the-art (SOTA) of instructional presentations that yield efficient learning. These principles have legacies that extend from millennia old instruction practices and 19th century studies of learning. Many instruction programs and materials use eclectic informal and unidentified mixtures of these principles. Names of SOTA principles derive from several theories:

Trial-and-error learning – as adapted for use with mobile PCs (Heiny, L., 2005) as Direct Learning in beginning academic subjects.

Stimulus-Response learning – as adapted to instruction-learning equations by numerous behavioral specialists in a wide range of academic subjects, and by educators mostly in rhetoric.

Two Choice Visual Discrimination Analysis – as adapted and elaborated beyond the Try Another Way technology.

Direct Instruction – based on ancient instruction practices used in many cultures to sustain social institutions, such as families, economies, polities, and religions; adapted into one of the most sophisticated and largest empirically tested, technically based instruction practices and curricula available from preschool through high school.

Each principle has a body of peer reviewed experimental study reports that offer technical definitions and procedures in order to replicate results and to apply these principles in other settings, such as schools and mobile PC learning venues.


So What?
Teachers already know these four principles, but have few guides for using them quickly and concisely to plan and conduct instruction.

LES brings into one instrument assessments of how use of these learning based instructional principles influence academic behavior, specifically learning from a given lesson.

LES assesses how variations in use of technical details in the instruction-learning equation affect the likelihood of a student reaching a technical criterion for learning each lesson. These assessments allow instructors to make technical refinements to instruction and content in order to increase student learning rates.


Counterpoints
Some teachers hold that they must first consider the circumstances of a learner before they can select an instructional process or material for a lesson. They contend that they teach humans, not other animals, and therefore, must respect learners differently from applying scientific principles and predetermined procedures through lessons.

They also say that each learner must come to class ready to learn as defined by each teacher’s idea of readiness.

Some people hold that instruction is an art, an indefinable process with nuances acquired only through professional training and practice. Teaching is not a mechanical process. Many teachers consider it an insult to suggest that anyone can reduce instruction to several objectively observable and repeatable principles that affect student learning rates.

Also, teachers blog daily and comment frequently in professional association and union meetings about heavy workloads that detract from their best instruction. They say they know what’s best to do, but cannot do so, because they lack sufficient resources. They assert that non-educators cannot accurately assess their competence.

The referent used in constructing LES for indexing the level of learning efficiency rests on what-is-possible according to scientific data. References do not account for state-of-practice and other reasons for lower than maximum assessments defined by the four scientific data principles.

LES reports instruction as Highly Efficient, Efficient, Normally Efficient, Less Efficient, or Inert (Laissez-faire) Efficiency.

The Highly Efficient learning assessment uses five stars to symbolize it, Efficient uses four stars, Normally Efficient uses three stars, Less Efficient uses two stars, and the Inert (Laissez-faire) Efficiencies learning assessment uses one star as its symbol.

Dimensions of instructional resources measured to categorize efficiency levels include: use of task sequencing; of forward and of backward chaining; of redundant cues; of behavioral reinforcers; of shape, color, size, and position; of clock time; and of number of instruction-trial blocks. Other resources may be added or substituted when empirical, experimental data indicate their contributions to learning efficiencies.

Each resource has technical definitions and observable, countable indices that accumulate to rank an instructional lesson or material according to its learning efficiencies.

Star Ratings
The number of stars assigned to an efficiency level symbolizes the instructional capacity to yield efficient learning. The higher the efficiency, the more stars the instruction receives. For example, the highest level of instruction, as indexed by student learning efficiency, receives a Five Star Rating.

The easiest index of learning efficiency is to count the number of minutes (or seconds) that elapse from the beginning of instruction until all students meet criteria for learning that lesson. A lesson that takes five minutes to meet a criterion is more efficient than one that takes 50 minutes to reach the same result.

A second index is to count the number of directed instructions offered during the lesson. A lesson that offers fewer directed instructions for students to follow to reach criterion yields more efficient learning. However, lessons can include fewer directions than needed to yield effective instruction.

A third index consists of the frequency of student attempts to reach criterion. The fewer trials-and-errors the more efficient the learning.

A fourth index consists of the frequency of prompts used, such as rewards-punishments, examples, redundant cues, repeated explanations, student questions to clarify learning criteria, etc. The fewer of these that occur, the more efficient the lesson.

A fifth index consists of the frequency of tools used for students to reach criterion, such as the number of textbooks, assignment sheets, whiteboard or mobile PC screens, etc. required to complete the assignment. The fewer of these tools, the more efficient the learning.

Collecting Data
Teachers and students, or a third party observer, using LES POC 1.1 may collect data manually on tally sheets.

Beginning users select one index you consider the most important. More experienced observers may choose more than one index to monitor. Write a list of observables for each index. Place a hash mark next to it each time that event occurs. Tally the frequency of these events at the end of the lesson.

(The software under development will collect some of these data automatically on teachers' and learners' mobile PCs.)

Calculating Learning Efficiency
In general, teachers and students may calculate learning efficiency manually or your mobile PC software will complete it for you automatically. For those using LES POC 1.1, the individual raw frequencies point to changes in instruction that a teacher may make without further calculations. Based on experience, a few such changes can increase learning efficiency.

Reporting Learning Efficiency
Users of LES POC 1.1 may report learning efficiency manually for aggregates as well as individual students. I'll suggest separately ways to chart and draft narrative results for these.

(The software includes several reporting formats that teachers and students may receive automatically. In general in the spirit of transparency, teachers and students will receive the same reports.)

(Thanks for your interest. The software we're developing will include some of these data collections, calculations, and reports. I'll share them after further testing.)

Please let me know what value you find in this incomplete draft. What makes sense, what seems a stretch beyond available empirical data you use, etc. And, again, thank you for sharing your earlier comments about LES, LER, and other drafts about learning efficiency. I think I'll post an index of these, because they don't all carry the same keywords.

(I'll edit this post and add more later.)

College Prep for Student with Intellectual Disabilities - Part 4

This fourth installment of the series preparing your child with an intellectual disability for college illustrates ways to use assumptions about learning to a student's advantage. I describe more of how I assess teaching-learning processes for that preparation. These descriptions also go along with the learning efficiency discussions.

Learning Not Observable
I can only assume that learning occurs. No one sees learning. So, I imagine that I’m the learner and use my learner eyes and ears to understand learning. This is a my way to arrange using scientific ways to increase behavior pattern changes people call learning. I think this is what successful teachers do: we pretend that we’re learners and try to provide answers in our lessons to these generic questions of learners:

What is this (name it, categorize it, describe it, define it)?
What is the same (match the sample, what belongs)?
What is different (what doesn’t belong)?
What comes next (follow the sequence)?
What is missing (find the missing part or parts)?

From this view, I try to identify relevant visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and other dimensions of the problem as posed by the teacher or other learning resource, so that I can complete that task successfully.

Vocabulary and Logic
In the simplest form, all lessons, including those preparing students for college, consist of vocabulary and logic, and that’s all. It doesn’t make any difference if you use a Tablet PC or pencil and paper. It doesn’t make any difference if someone shows how to bake a cake, write my name, add numbers, or fly an airplane; these activities require vocabularies and logic.

In general, that means, as a learner I start with trial and error behavior patterns while searching for what vocabulary and what logic pattern(s) the teacher or exercise requires me to use in order to do what they ask me to do. Sometimes behavioral scientists refer to this as a search for relevant dimensions, such as identifying the correct size, color, form, location, frequency, etc. Some teachers say this is learners resolving the problem at hand.

Good teachers, good lessons, good learning venues, and good learning material, by definition from this view, reduce the amount of each learner’s trial and error behavior to reach each prescribed learning criterion.

Here are common examples of exercises teachers and parents use in order for beginning academic learners, including those labeled with academic and intellectual disabilities, to gain proficiency with finding and using vocabulary and logic to resolve daily life and academic problems.

What is this?
Use picture and word dictionaries and encyclopedias; “Say, ‘Spoon’ (or pen, book, can, etc.)” as you show your child a spoon (or other object); read common words on cards stuck to the wall; name primary colors, name coins; say “Show me Ballet Position One;” add an age appropriate hear/sight-say reading vocabulary word a day to a word list; choose a pancake from the menu for your breakfast; please pass me the butter; …

What is the same?
Match colored sticks, group long sticks; put spoons with spoons in the flatware drawer; find and bring me a Phillips head screw driver from the tool box; find all the red (ones, hearts, etc.) cards in this deck of cards; match spoken to written words; find match pictures, words, and other images, in multiple choice formats; find all the birds in the picture; find the hidden items; find where each word goes into the crossword puzzle, draw a circle around all the words on the front page of the newspaper story that start with the sound /s/ or /sh/, …

What is different?
Sort nuts and bolts / nails / boards by size, thread by color, pictures by families, Teddy bears by size, laundry by light and dark colors, maps by state, snowboards by weight, newspapers from magazines, sugar and salt by taste, …

What comes next?
Connect the dots; wash the dishes clean, dry them by hand, and then put them away; show me ballet Position One, now Two, now Three; follow a recipe to make a sugarless cookie; help me install the Snoopy cutout on our front lawn, now Charlie Brown, now Lucy; set the dining room table for guests; sing songs; say Grace before eating; count by ones to 10; recite poems; say (write, type) the alphabet; find and say the page number after page 3; place a phone call to Grandma; change the TV to a certain channel; drive a racecar without hitting walls in an Xbox game, …

What is missing?
Find the book Hop on Pop; fill in the blank letter (color, numeral, picture, etc.); write checks; complete an online survey; answer questions; color the picture; …


Many warehouse and discount stores, school supply stores, children’s magazines and newsletters, and online suppliers provide more such academic exercises than any one student will likely use to meet age level learning expectations.

Learning Principles
When choosing learning exercises, select them with these learning principles in mind: Learners proceed from known to unknown, simple to complex, and easy to hard resolves to problems.

A TIP (Teacher’s Instructional Practice)
First, show your learner how to use your Tablet PC or other mobile PC to complete some of these tasks.

Second, I’d emphasize exercises that extend sequential responses (chains of responses), such as connect the dots, telling clock time, reciting numeral sequences and poems as well as (ballet or other stylized sequences) dancing until the child can handle formal sequences on cue.

Start with simple two step sequences until these appear easy to handle. Use and then fade out prompts as behavior patterns result from solving the problem rather than relying on the prompts. Then extend to three steps, then four steps, etc.

Next, prompt generalizing the process from one sequence problem to another sequence.

These are useful steps toward college prep: learn to sequence responses on cue and without cues.

Let me know if you have suggestions or questions. I'll addresses them in future installments.

Toshiba America Foundation Grants Promote U.S. Science and Math Education

Toshiba America Foundation offers grants to support your classroom instruction in science and mathematics education in U.S. schools.

Grants are made for programs and activities that improve teaching and learning in science and mathematics, grades K-12. The Foundation focuses its grant making on inquiry-based projects designed by individual teachers, and small teams of teachers, for use in their own classrooms. (Bold added.)

The grant funding for large and small projects.

Large Grant 7-12 Application Deadline: August 1, 2008.

Teachers, be sure to check out the 10 Tips for New Applicants, even if you or your students do not use Toshiba Tablet PCs or other Toshiba products.

VEX Robotics Inventor Curriculum for Classrooms

Here's good news for students interested in robotics. Maybe you've seen other students in robotics contests on TV.

Innovation First, Inc. (IFI) and Autodesk announced they teamed up to co-develop a new curriculum to be included in the popular VEX Robotics Design System Classroom Lab Kits.

“Studies have shown, and teachers have told us, that they need hands-on activities in the classroom to help students get engaged in all the important subjects of STEM,” said Jason Morrella, senior director of education and competition at Innovation First. “We’re excited that powerful educational tools like the VEX Robotics Design System and Autodesk Inventor software can help change the way students think about the design process and prepare for many of the incredible opportunities and careers that are waiting for them.”

The curriculum uses Autodesk Inventor software, also used by professional robotics engineers throughout the world.

The VEX Robotics Inventor Curriculum will be incorporated into the VEX Classroom Lab Kits this spring. This will provide a custom way for teachers to offer robotics education that’s flexible enough to be applied at multiple grade levels, including secondary and post-secondary education.

These curriculum designers complied with STEM education standards. This curriculum contains a set of 18 module units, each containing its own lesson, concept and activity.

These units bring together VEX Robotics designs and Digital Prototyping, a practice used by manufacturers to optimize and validate their ideas before actually creating a product, helping to remove time and costs from the product development process, and get the “right” product to market faster.

Here're company drafted summaries of their market positions, including in education. They provide key words to include in proposals teachers prepare for support from administrators and board of education members.

About Innovation First, Inc.
Innovation First, Inc., a privately held corporation, was founded on the belief that innovation very early in the design process is necessary to produce simple and elegant product designs. Innovation First, Inc. began producing electronics for unmanned mobile ground robots, and is now an industry leader in the hobby, competition, education and toy markets. The company’s award-winning VEX Robotics Design System, VEXplorer, HEXBUG Micro Robotic Creatures, and IFI Robotics span the education, consumer and business-to-business markets. Innovation First’s staff are unmatched in their experience in supporting and running educational and competitive robotics competitions. Leveraging the company’s core competency in electrical and mechanical engineering, the RackSolutions division works closely with all major computer OEMs to provide custom mounting solutions and industry-wide rack compatibility for data installations of all sizes. With an advanced in-house metal fabrication plant, distribution center, and offices located together in a 13 acre complex in Greenville, Texas, the company is poised to continue on a rapid growth path. Please visit www.innovationfirst.com for additional information.

About Autodesk Education
Autodesk is committed to supporting students and educators by providing powerful 2D and 3D design software, innovative programs and resources designed to inspire the next generation of professionals to experience their ideas before they're real. By supporting educators to advance design education and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills, Autodesk is helping prepare students develop for future academic and career success. Autodesk supports schools and institutions of higher learning worldwide through substantial discounts, subscriptions, grant programs, training, curricula development and community resources. For more information about Autodesk education programs and solutions, visit tp://www.autodesk.com/education.

About Autodesk
Autodesk, Inc. is the world leader in 2D and 3D design software for the manufacturing, building and construction, and media and entertainment markets. Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk has developed the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art digital prototyping solutions to help customers experience their ideas before they're real. Fortune 1000 companies rely on Autodesk for the tools to visualize, simulate and analyze real-world performance early in the design process to save time and money, enhance quality and foster innovation. For additional information about Autodesk, visit http://www.autodesk.com.

CommonCraft Offers Free Videos

Mobile PC users, CommonCraft presents subjects on videos "in plain English" using short, unique and understandable videos in a format they call Paperworks. Check out their offerings, including authorized free video downloads usable in some classrooms. Let us know what your think of them.

Dyslexic Students Not Disadvantaged in Exam Papers

A study carried out by Cambridge Assessment, revealed surprising results about the common perception that dyslexic students are disadvantaged by certain features of conventional exam papers, such as font use and text spacing.

The research, carried out by Cambridge Assessment - Europe's largest assessment agency - which will be presented to the international conference of the Association of Language Testers in Europe this week, used a group of students identified as dyslexic, and a matched control group.

Questions used in the study were taken from a GCSE science paper.

That paper used a variety of material in the forms of writing, diagrams and tables and different versions of the paper were developed to explore the effects of features of exam questions such as font and layout. Students’ test performance was measured and a group of students were interviewed afterwards.

Results showed that while dyslexic students benefited from some techniques that make text clearer, the benefit was not significantly greater than for the control group of students that did not have dyslexia. However, there were some surprising results including:

The report concluded that results: ‘emphasised the already accepted importance of ensuring that information provided is clear, well spaced and clearly labelled’, but noted that with regard to dyslexic students, ‘some anecdotal views on good practice were not confirmed by the empirical data (e.g. the effect of Arial font, the effect of presenting materials on an insert sheet rather than the back page).’

Researchers also concluded that students preferred some elements of good practice even though they did not affect scores and that these elements might have ‘benefits in terms of reducing student anxiety.’

Futurelab Launches Power League

Futurelab has launched Power League, a free online resource for schools that support pupils of all ages to explore, debate and discuss any topic in a fun and easy way.

Power League ... enables the user to rank and display group opinions on any issue across the entire curriculum.

Power League lets you ask tough questions, stimulates debate and creates a visual league table based on votes gathered across your group.

Here's a sample of questions leagues address:

1. Discuss and debate what might be the most important invention in the world - ever.

2. Your school is being redesigned - what are the most important factors to consider?Your school is being redesigned - what are the most important factors to consider?

3. Who would you like to be the most powerful person in the world?

I especially like the second question: What factors should be considered in redesigning your school?

What above all do you want to see in your school now, by 2010, or by 2015? Do you want the design to include fewer students? More students assigned to your instruction? Less heterogeneous aggregating of students? More one-on-one learning? Fewer teachers? More self-directed electronic learning? Less bricks-and-morter schooling , shorter school day, and more independent learning?

What's your top priority feature in your school of the future?

Futurelabs has asked for your opinion and has provided a venue to receive your ideas. Please take them seriously, and offer your considered thoughts.

In short, I think educators should include more state-of-the-art hardware and software products and processes from a growing commercial education market that already exists globally in its infancy for independent and one-on-one learning in and out of schools.

This market will result in a redistribution of who learns what, when, and where among conventional preschool through high school students. This redistribution, in large part, will change who people consider teachers and what teachers do to earn that title. More students will arrive in PK knowing how to read, write, handle math and science computations at conventional 1st through 3rd grade levels than to date, but (based on data over the past 40 years) conventional school classroom curricula and teaching will not change much or fast enough to accommodate them at their learning rates.

What do you want in your school? Start your own power (opinion does not = power!) league with your own topic, or join an existing league, and then debate and vote.

A caution: Opinions plus $3.50 will get you a cup of coffee in some, but not in all places.

It's astonishing that opinions appear to outnumber facts and logic in so many school curricula and practices.

Hmm. Now there's an interesting lit research topic to review in a term paper. I hope that all teacher prep students and professors will tackle that topic.

Thanks, FutureLab for your questions.

Tableteers, did you notice the student using a Tablet PC in one of the FutureLab photos?

(Edited 04-16-08: corrected bad grammar; did I miss any other needed corrections?)

IT Reports Useful for Tablet PC Educators

Ferris Research offers a rolling collection of reports about various IT topics. This abstract sample about E-Discovery indicates the quality of other reports also.

A growing proportion of lawsuits require the production of copies of electronically stored information. IT staff must now provide timely assistance in producing the data. This new responsibility is typically extremely disruptive to IT staff, and also very expensive. This report reviews the state of current U.S. federal laws relating to electronic discovery, explains the problems that have arisen, and summarizes current thinking on relevant best practices. We focus on the perspective of IT staff and the actions they should undertake.

Rationed Learning Press Release

This press release continues the series describing school learning efficiency. The first post described Learning Efficiency Scale; the second, Learning Efficiency Rating of Instruction; and the third, Rationed Learning Interview. Readers should review comments at the beginning of previous posts about learning efficiency.

Thanks, Anonymous, for sending me a copy of this embargoed press release! I’ll post it without further comment. Here goes:


LANDGRANT UNIVERSITY, Office of Information, EduChoice Publications

CONTACT: Earnest E. Lann, Chairman

PRESS RELEASE: EMBARGOED UNTIL 04-07-2012 12:00 AM EDT

Normsville, CA Megan Smiley-Washington, Senior Research Scientist, Landgrant University, and Chip “Friendship” Larnen, Professor Emeritus and award winning education author, released the first glimpse of findings from their longitudinal study report titled Rationed Learning: A Conspiracy of “Yes, but … 2002-2012.” The study followed a cohort of digital native students as they entered public and private schools until the first one graduated from high school.

“We concluded,” said Dr. Gather Fisher, a senior research associate on the project, “that the ideological divide among educators about uses of mobile personal computers in classrooms distributed learning among students according to their use of advanced electronic communication technology in and out of schools.”

Students who used mobile PCs in schools, to complete and turn in assignments, and to learn information independently online learned 25 percent more than students who did not. Students in classrooms where teachers, but not students, used mobile PCs learned slightly more than students in classrooms without any mobile PCs.

These lightweight PCs included features such as Ink, speech and writing recognition, speech to writing, writing to speech, language translation, and video and auditory recordings.

These PCs serve as platforms for classroom notetaking, reorganizing notes, adding graphics; editing text and images; importing and adding notes to PowerPoint slides movies, animations, music as well as creating movies, composing and performing music; calculating mathematical formulae, constructing multidimensional scientific models; and linking to original sources, such as images of the Declaration of Independence, novels, and music scores.

Fisher went on to explain that in 2010, approximately 9 percent of teachers and 23 percent of students used mobile PCs in classrooms. By 2012, 52 percent of teachers used mobile PCs at least once in a classroom.

In 2012, these percentages increased to 23 percent of teachers and 29 percent of students used mobile PCs routinely to complete classroom instruction and student assignments.

At the same time 79 percent of teachers and 52 percent of urban youth and 89 percent of all youth have cell phones for personal use.

Larnen said that these scientists found that a major difference between teachers of the fastest learning students and other students appeared in the way they talked about learning with electronic communications.

Teachers of the fastest learning students talked about how they and students arranged and used mobile PCs for learning in and out of schools.

Teachers of slower learning students acknowldeged the potential of these communications in schools, but described reasons for not using them in schools.

According to researchers, these two talking patterns of school educators ration how fast and how much students learn in the same and across different schools.

“We try to give educators the benefit of the doubt, but our data indicate that they probably unintentionally hold back student learning by talking about problems rather than how to implement electronic communications for learning,” commented Dexter Booster, Superintendent of Southside City Schools, a low income central California urban school district.

Booster served as a member of the research study board of advisors representing a school with and without teachers and students using mobile PCs.

“After watching data from this study develop during the first three years, I put a sign over my door: ‘Bring me your solutions, not your problems.’ It took awhile for teachers and others to get the hang of it, but I insisted that all of our staff talk about how to make things happen. I still refuse to listen to people talk about why things don’t happen.

"I’m proud to work with such positive, can-do people.”

x X x

Zimbra Expands Mobile E-mail Availability to All Java-enabled Devices

New ZimbraME J2ME client and source code access extends Zimbra experience to millions of handsets, from Nokia to RIM, regardless of wireless device.

ZimbraME is an over the air downloadable Java-based application for mobile devices that allows ZCS users to access their mail, contacts and calendars. It retains the powerful search capability.

Zimbra, a Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) company and the leader in open source, next-generation messaging and collaboration software, announced April 3, 2008, the availability of its ZimbraME (Java Mobile Edition) client and source code for businesses. Some teachertechies also use Zimba.

Four AP Tests Dropped

David Warlick noted that the College Board told U.S. teachers that it will eliminate Italian, Latin literature, French literature, and computer science AB Advanced Placement tests after the 2008-09 academic year. This is the first dropping of tests in the 53 year of the College Board. They cite delined enrollments in these tests as their reason for these eliminations.

The drop in computer science course and test enrollments appears consistent with other reports, of declines in the number of higher education computer science majors.

This condition highlights a question of concern to all educators: Who will develop computer hardware and software for U.S. schools, if not U.S. prepared people?

Why do teachers want these teaching and learning tools outsourced to other countries as all computer and other telecommunications hardware manufacturing already is? I don't why, but I know it's already happening in several ways.

Does anyone have a plan to offer teachers more computer based choices for instruction and learning than relying on products from other countries? Without such a plan, Teachers, how long do you think it will take for offshore electronic based curricula to dominate U.S. school instruction and learning programs?

Thanks, David, for pointing to implications dropped AP tests could have for teachers and schooling.

Creativity from Complications

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity."

Charles Mingus, jazz legend

Thanks, Glenn Hall, for the quote and link.

Work-Life Balance

Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, offers an interesting light comment about how he views work-life balance. In short, he thinks electronic communications technologies make the balance easier.

Moreover, to insist on a rigid work-life balance always suggests to me that work is some awful Anglo-Saxon torture visited upon the otherwise "free" soul of Rousseau's natural man. I recognize, of course, that throughout my working life I have been fortunate to work in safe, relatively high-paying white collar jobs that provide intellectual challenge, but my point is that it is precisely in these environments that we hear most about "work-life balance." One need not be a Calvinist to believe that useful work can also contribute to a life well-lived.

I find his blog refreshing. He captured my sentiments, including as an educator as well as a business person. I found it harder, though, to justify my teaching and administration's contribution to a life well-lived than as a business person. That's curious. I'm guessing it has to do with not accepting the use in schools of Rousseau's natural man philosophy as completely as the reality of global business competition. I prefer decisive schools over others.

Hmm. I wonder how many teachers share my caution about Rousseau's philosophy dominating so much thinking about U.S. public schools?

MIT's OpenCourseWare for High Schools

MIT's Highlights for High School features material useful for students and teachers. Sign up for monthly updates on courses and news as well as view an introductory video, and then take advantage of some of the finest science instruction available anywhere. Resources include introductory MIT courses, AP biology, AP calculus, and AP physics.

Hopefully, even shy students, parents, and teachers will take advantage of MIT's OCW, even if only to say, "I looked."

Rationed Learning Interview

Rationed Learning Interview continues the series of observations about learning efficiency. Many behavioral scientists conduct imaginary studies in order to assess merits of hypotheses they consider testing. These assessments help to shape the fidelity of hypotheses, methods, and reporting. The following interview illustrates one aspect of such a test of a longitudinal study of impacts of mobile PCs on learning PK20+. As in any experimental study, the design tests the null hypothesis that no differences will exist between results from experimental and control conditions. Please share your thinking about this possible study.

Tablet PC Education conducted this interview with Bonnie Doowrite, principal investigator of the first longitudinal study about mobile learning among a cohort of six year olds as they entered and progressed through schools starting in 2002. Researchers followed these students until 2012 when the first students in the study graduated from high school. Some teachers and some students used mobile PCs, some did not. We met on the day of the final report press release in her office at Landgrant University – Normsville, California (LUNC).

Tablet PC Education: Thank you for letting me interview you about your research project. I understand that this is the first interview you have granted. You’ve caught my attention with the title of your final report, Rationed Learning: A Conspiracy of “Yes, but … 2002-2012.” It seems loaded with images that challenge more soothing political stereotypes of education. Do you intend to shock, amuse, or do something else with that title?

Doowrite: I think the title aptly describes the results of our study. Our data led to the conclusion that teachers and students ration learning as though learning is a scarce commodity. Since 2002, learning venues and choices have expanded historically and significantly to anytime and anywhere for any reason on-demand. No long must people of school age wait for anyone to guide them to learn anything they want to learn.

It took me a long time to think through the consequences of the conclusion of rationed learning before I agreed to leave it on the report. Our data were strong, so I yielded to the title suggested by our data analysts.

Tablet PC Education: What data convinced you that a conspiracy exists to ration learning? Did one idea stand out from your data?

Doowrite: Our data yielded one idea in two parts. One part is that teachers who talked about how to do something had students who learned more and learned faster. Second, using mobile PCs for teaching and learning increased the amount and rate of student learning. Let me elaborate.

Educators had to figure out how to acquire, learn to use, and maintain mobile PCs in schools. Many of them had no special help. Most of them figured it out on their own. In some cases, they rearranged existing budgets to pay for acquisition and training. In other schools, teachers and students bought and maintained their own. Between these two extremes numerous permutations from these two ideas existed.

We found that students with mobile PCs and with teachers who used mobile PCs to complete academic assignments learned at least 25 percent more during the same school year than students with teachers who did not use these tools. That finding is consistent with other studies not yet released for public review and many peer reviewed published anecdotes and shorter term studies.

Tablet PC Education: Let me press you further. What’s the conspiracy? Do you mean educators got together knowingly, intentionally to limit what any student learns? They stacked the lessons against learning?

Doowrite: Yes and no. I’ll explain.

First, all teachers and students volunteered to participate in this study. Teachers chose how they instructed and students chose how they completed lessons.

Second, teachers decided how efficient to make each lesson. Teachers who used mobile PCs for lessons offered more efficient, more targeted lessons.

Third, students decided how much to attend and complete lessons as presented. We found that the more dense the lessons, the more these students completed assignments successfully.

Tablet PC Education: What do you mean, rationed learning. I don’t understand. It seems counterintuitive that teachers or students would knowingly and intentionally restrict learning. And a conspiracy?

Doowrite: We concluded that daily choices of these teachers to present less than the most efficient, targeted lessons, the fewer students met learning criteria, and the less volume of learning students obtained. We named this condition “rationed learning” the same way others named choices about fuel consumption “rationed fuel” during World War II.

When we collected these decisions into one file, we saw choice patterns teachers made. We called these choices a conspiracy of “Yes, but …” This condition probably resulted from unintended consequences by teachers of unintentional agreements to limit learning. Their choices yielded the same result: less learning than students who used mobile PCs and with teachers who used mobile PCs.

Tablet PC Education: What do you mean, “Yes, but …”?

Doowrite: We could see that teachers do their best each day with each student during each lesson. They make noble efforts to encourage student learning, sometimes against odds stacked against teachers. “But,” and then they’d say something like this: “I could do more in my class or school, if I had X,” and they’d name this or that or something else that they said they needed in order to increase student learning further.

Tablet PC Education: What did they say they needed, and are the correct?

Doowrite: Teachers with students who did not learn as much as others talked about things over which they had no immediate control that promptly influenced student learning through the lesson at hand. They appeared to use an ideology of, “I can’t, and it’s your fault.” I know that sounds harsh, but it’s a different way of talking from the can-do way of teachers with students who increased their learning the most.

I-can’t-because teachers talked about political issues instead of how to improve lessons with whatever they had at that moment and thereby increase student learning that day. They talked about important issues, such as making learning fair to all students, changing sometimes deplorable working conditions, increasing teacher pay, changing their inservice preparation, the use of their experience to influence public policies. We assembled a long list of such noble grievances, wishes, and ideas. We’re analyzing the list with our data to see what influence each issue had on student learning rates.

Tablet PC Education: I want to change the focus slightly. What exactly are BIPS and BLIPs? You mentioned them in your report and I overheard you talking with a staff member about them before our interview.

Doowrite: BIPs is an acronym for Basal Instruction Programs, a measure of the basic academic learning of a student. It’s a function, not a single tangible thing like a curriculum or a classroom.
We saw teachers and parents instructing academics to children from about 30 months of age and older. Many of these learners, some with mobile PCs and some without them, gained control over basic academics before entering preschool, including reading at the first or second grade levels in a few months, solving mathematical and scientific problems, and handling conversations in standard English. We identified otherwise normal children entering kindergarten who read at middle school levels. Most BIPs occurred in homes, some in neighborhood learning centers, and a relatively few in preschools.

We also found these students had to figure out how to fit into classes with students who did not have these academic skills. Teachers made few accommodations of normal students with advanced academic skills. They’d say things like, “Yes, but he needs to learn to get along his peers.” We found almost the same number of girls as boys were advanced over their classroom peers.

BLIPs is an acronym, a shortcut way to talk about Baseline Learning Intervention Programs. They’re publically financed programs of last resort funded through local public school boards of education. BLIPs are to learning today what compensatory school programs had been for the past 45 years to students who tested one standard deviation or more below the mean in an academic subject. Educators developed BLIPs as intensive immersive instruction in order to insure that all children learned to use the traditional English 3Rs promptly as they enter school at whatever age they enrolled. BLIPs occurred in bricks and mortar and in virtual learning environments.

Tablet PC Education: What do you say of talk about snail schools, lemming learning, brain dead schools and other such journalistic, political labels?

Doowrite: I’m going to pass on responding to your question. We don’t use that vocabulary or way of thinking when we discuss learning and learning venues.

Tablet PC Education: What vocabulary and way of thinking do you use?
Doowrite: We use several code words and phrases we learned from educators who took part in our study. These words indicate can-do, such as, “Let’s do it,” “We can figure out how to do that,” “That’s doable,” “Keep going,” “Try again,” things like that. We adapted some of this vocabulary from successful teachers.

Tablet PC Education: Do teachers really talk that way?

Doowrite: We found two types of teacher talk and we have data to support their differences. It surprised us at first, but then we thought about it, and it seemed obvious. Just as athletic coaches show athletes how to increase their performances, so too did can-do teachers.
Teachers who used can-do vocabulary and logic had students who increased their learning rates. When can-do teachers and students used Tablet PCs, Ultra Mobile PCs, and other mobile PCs, these students gained the most and the fastest in academic performance regardless of whether they lived in depressed urban wealthier exurban areas.

Those students did not increase their volume as much or rate of learning as fast with teachers who did not use mobile PCs and who did not consistently talk about how to do something and who did not appear to use can-do logic.

Tablet PC Education: I saved this question for the last. I understand from educators that they would use more electronic learning tools, if they and their schools had more money.

Doowrite: We heard the same comments for educators, boards of education members, national policy advocates, and community members. Educators have used that same refrain for decades with substantial political responses. U.S. schools receive more government funding than total annual budgets of most nations. Perhaps politicians will respond in similar ways again about electronic communication devices in schools.

However, those educators who used the can-do talk faced similar conditions as others. They seemed to accept the premise that it’s what you do with what you have that pays off for students.

We found urban educators determined for their teachers and students to use mobile PCs for learning. So, they used whatever authority they had over their budgets to acquire and support mobiles, mostly through lease contracts. Some obtained assistance from hardware and software manufacturers as demonstrators of certain electronic products. In general, though, manufacturers and publishers did not and likely will not donate products to schools or educators.
Later, we’ll release descriptions of ways educators funded their mobile PC programs.

Tablet PC Education: Thank you, Dr. Doowrite, for taking time to talk discuss your landmark research.

x X x

Learning Efficiency Rating of Instruction

While observing over several decades hundreds of teachers instructing, I realized that I was seeing performance patterns identified in experimental empirical research literature about learning. Some teachers led their students to learning quicker than students responding to different instructional patterns. The fewer of these instructional patterns teachers used, the slower the students met learning criteria for a lesson.

What came as a surprise, some teachers chose slower learning patterns than necessary for their students. That meant that they likely limited their studends learning. That realization seemed counterintuitive, but limited learning appeared in observations repeatedly, making me uncomfortable in too many classrooms conducted by well intentioned, preservice and incumbent teachers. Also, I found in professional literature no formal way to measure learning efficiency according to teacher input.

Eventually, I formulated an informal system to rate student learning efficiency according to teacher instructional patterns. I used that system informally to rate teachers according to what I now call their learning efficiency score. Here's a summary draft of translating this informal rating into a formal system that others may consider.

A learning efficient rating score (LERS) indicates the level of confidence someone may have in an instruction to yield a learning criterion promptly, directly, and easily. Raters use the Learning Efficiency Scale (LES) to score instruction and then convert it into a rating.

This rating is to teaching what a financial credit rating score is to lending. Both indicate levels of confidence to have in someone’s future performance, based on past performance.

I'll post more of this rating system as I add to the Learning Efficiency Scale. Please let me know your thoughts about this effort, and if you want to work with me in developing it further. Perhaps your observations are different from mine, so together we can strengthen the scale and rating.

I want to develop the scale and rating score for teachers to use as a guide to adjusting their instruction and student learning efficiency.

Transforming Radioactive Decay into Electricity

Phil McKenna reports that researchers calculate that transforming the energy of radioactive particles into electricity is more effective by up to 20 times more power than from thermoelectric materials. This observation addresses a major environmental objection to use of more nuclear power.

Conditioning Smell Sensitivity Changes Brains

Gisela Telis reports that Northwestern University researchers have shown for the first time that people can quickly learn to distinguish between almost-identical smells if choosing incorrectly nets them a nasty shock. This study showsa that people can learn to distinguish various smells and alter their brain. Researchers scanned with an MRI the smell centers of subjects' brains as they distinguished between two pairs of subtly different smells, and as a slight electric shock accompanied one of the smells. They couldn't distinguish any of the molecules before the shock, but almost all could by six jolts later. Their brains also responded differently to each smell in the pair that included the shock, while their sensitivity and brain response to the other pair didn't change. Hmm, conditioning exists! That's major stuff! I wonder what other implications, beyond the obvious use of electric shock treatments (that I do not support) this study has for school teaching-learning processes.

Factoid or Optoid: Nature is Random and Unpredictable

Mark Buchanan reports in "Instant Expert: Quantum World," a feature in New Scientist that at its deepest level, nature is random and unpredictable.

That, most physicists would say, is the unavoidable lesson of quantum theory. Try to track the location of an electron and you'll find only a probability that it is here or there. Measure the spin of an atom and all you get is a 50:50 chance that it is up or down. Watch a photon hit a glass plate and it will either pass through or be reflected, but it's impossible to know which without measuring it.

Teachers of all levels, from PK up, will find this expert guide useful as a reference for understanding contemporary scientific research. It clarifies theories and facts about quantum physics in high school level vocabulary accessible to students and others who take the time to review it.

Thanks, Mark, for bringing these papers together so we may glimpse sophisticated physics research that influences our daily lives.

Another Step toward e-paper, flexible color screens

Purdue University postdoctoral research associate Sanghyun Ju and professor David B. Janes make the first "active matrix" display using nanowires. They use a "micro-manipulation probe station" in research to create transparent transistors and circuits.

The innovation represents a step that promises a broad range of applications, from e-paper and flexible color screens for consumer electronics to "smart cards" and "heads-up" displays in auto windshields.

These transistors are made of single "nanowires," or tiny cylindrical structures that were assembled on glass or thin films of flexible plastic.

Tablet PC users and other teachers will find such information useful in classes that address contemporary scientific research.

Learn to Teach with Advanced Electronic Technology

Vaishali Honawar reports in TPCK - Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge that more teacher colleges incorporate technology into math and science courses rather than just offer them separately.

In his class to train preservice teachers in the use of instructional materials in science, John C. Park, an associate professor of science education at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, uses a tool that breaks down the mystery of the experiment into digestible morsels: a digital video of the experiment that students can pause, rewind, and watch again, alongside a graph of the air pressure inside the bottle.

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education accredits more than half the 1,200 teacher-preparation programs in the U.S. It has worked with the International Society for Technology in Education to create a set of technology standards that colleges seeking its accreditation must meet.

These standards include standards that require teacher-candidates to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and dispositions that equip them to teach with advanced electronic technology. Candidates also must show they can use technology to support student content learning.

AACTE’s committee on innovation and technology released a handbook on using technology to enhance learning: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK). The book includes chapters on how colleges and districts can integrate technology into specific content areas, as well as professional development of teachers.

Reading this article reminds me of a comment made this month by an assistant superintendent for technology of one of the largest U.S. public school sytems: Any teacher is obsolete who does not integrate advanced electronic technology into classroom lessons. ... We will not hire them. (Bold added to this paraphrase.)

Obsolete! Wow! To the extent that her position represents school leadership views, a major shift has occurred in expectations for teacher performance. Kudos to teachers who meet this standard. Most of you have done it on your own. That's great initiative, worthy of the finest tradition of educators.

I wonder how many of these teachers use Tablet PCs, UMPCs, or other mobile PCs in classrooms. Hmm. I'll try to find out.