25 May
John Spencer, of the TeachPaperless blog, shares with us his thoughts on using social media and technology in education following his “Living Facebook” experiment. With each observation, he offers ideas and implications for the classroom. Check out the full post on “Face to Facebook: 5 Thoughts on Education Reform.”
7 Apr
Last week we looked at Sandy Speicher’s design for the school day of the future. Following on from that, Shelly Blake-Plock, founder of the tech education blog Teach Paperless, posted his vision of “21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020.”
Some of these things include desks, homework, lockers, parent-teacher conference night, and high school algebra I.
Be sure to check out the full list in his post and read some of the comments—this is a controversial topic!
23 Feb
What types of technology are most important for teachers to integrate into the classroom? How much of total classroom time should involve technology use?
The latest issue of ASCD’s ‘Educational Leadership’ publication, Screenagers: Making the Connections, attempts to answer these fundamental questions and more, through interviews with administrators, teachers, students, and government officers. Ultimately, it seems that:
Effectively teaching the digital generation, or screenagers as we call them in this issue of Educational Leadership, seems to involve two basics: embracing the tools that kids are immersed in and using these tools to engage students in core curriculum topics.
Examples include:
…outstanding history teachers using GoogleDocs to share different points of view, science teachers showing YouTube videos to illustrate scientific phenomena, English teachers employing clicker technology to have students weigh in before and after discussions, and music teachers creating electronic note recognition games. We also heard about educators designing class and school websites to engage their communities, tweeting to broadcast their pride in their schools, and analyzing electronic databases.
One great resource we heard about on the Eduwonk blog is KIPP Share, a website that allows teachers to share resources and collaborate online. Check out the video:
18 Feb
The Open High School of Utah is charting new territory as a completely virtual charter school using a huge range of open education resources. The school follows the same principles as our Fusion schools in California – offering one-to-one education, so that each child can move at his or her own pace, with flexible scheduling – but lacks the physical presence and therefore the in-person social aspects of a school. How does it work? Check out these Classroom Overviews to experience an online lesson; English 9 and Earth Systems together give a nice example of the different types of technology utilized for varying subjects.
You can also learn more about the instructional tools and culture of this online-only school in EdReformer’s Open High Blazing New Path.
This raises the question, does school “socialization” require a physical presence? Or are people living so online now that a virtual school for 14-18 year-olds can successfully prepare them for life?
16 Feb
As a developmental pediatrician, I have spent many years researching and diagnosing learning disorders. During my time as director of the Division of Child Development at the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine, in the 1980s and 1990s, I conducted research on Brain Electrical Activity Mapping (BEAM) and published a number of papers around the topic. Our research was driven by the belief that detecting and diagnosing learning disorders through brain activity would be much more accurate and successful than the current method of relying upon observable behavior.
Unfortunately, although we were able to identify key areas of brain abnormality, and even developed diagnostic tests to evaluate the data, I began to question the clinical diagnostic utility of BEAM. In fact, the topic remains under much debate due to the overlap and inconsistency of findings over the years.
I was interested to come across the TEDTalk from Aditi Shankardass, A Second Opinion on Learning Disorders. Her team is utilizing EEG technology in an attempt to more accurately diagnose learning disorders. She speaks specifically about the ability of this technology to detect seizures in a child that was previously thought to have autism. However, neurologists have been able to use traditional EEG for this purpose for over 90 years and there is little evidence that BEAM enhances our diagnostic ability in any significant way. Multiple studies have shown that seizures masking as autism is a very rare occurrence.
Significant differences have been detected between children with ADHD and children without, and between children with LD and children without; however, the findings are not consistent and there is considerable overlap. For instance, if you look at the BEAM maps of ADHD children compared to children without ADHD, the primary differences will be in the frontal lobe. But when you look at the BEAM maps of schizophrenic adults compared to non-schizophrenic adults, they too show abnormalities in the frontal lobe. While these studies have clearly shown that there is a neurological basis to these disorders, they are not very helpful in making a diagnosis; if a child has a BEAM map showing frontal lobe dysfunction, do they have ADHD or schizophrenia? Or are they part of the 5-10% of the population who will show frontal lobe problems without any clinical symptoms (in other words, a false positive)?
Parents, schools, teachers, and children would all benefit from the development of a technology that would accurately and definitively diagnose learning disorders. As Ms. Shankardass rightly points out, these are neurological disorders and thus it makes sense to attempt the diagnosis with neurological techniques. However, I very much doubt that these expensive and time-consuming tests really add any diagnostic utility over a combination of detailed history-taking, close observation of the child in the classroom, and current psycho-educational testing.
14 Jan
A fascinating TED Talk about the use of technology in educating children around the world: education scientist Sugata Mitra’s The Child-Driven Education. The key seems to be the focus on group interaction combined with an encouraging influence (“the Granny cloud”). And, of course, access to resources (a computer with internet). Who knows where this could take us?
13 Jan
When we think about technology use in education and at home, we have to consider the impacts of reliance, or over-reliance, on technology and debate the pros and cons. If you recall an October post, At School and at Home: From Passive to Active, we looked at the skills (or lack thereof) of your typical child today and questioned whether it isn’t technology and overly cautious parents working in tandem to develop “college kids who’ve never done laundry, taken a bus alone, or addressed an envelope.” (Are We Raising a Generation of Nincompoops, Beth J. Harpaz, 2010)
A Citizens League blog post, Infantilizing Teens, We Reap What We Sow, addresses similar questions, in particular whether technology is wholly or partly to blame for the levels of distraction and turmoil in teens, and whether:
technology use is now to blame for many teens’ failure to learn…
12 Jan
Yesterday we looked at the barriers that are often created when technology is used in education. It’s important these barriers be knocked down, and prevented when possible, as technology is becoming ever-more prevalent in most areas of our lives, including education.
Even Google is investing in education, according to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Google Pushes Education Software Through App Store, and Apple will likely follow close behind.
Games and instructional tools for teachers from companies such as Grockit Inc. and Aviary Inc. are already offered in the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store that opened in March. Google, the world’s largest search engine, seeks to lure more educational developers and is stepping up efforts to generate revenue from the project, company executives say.
11 Jan
Although technology can be used to benefit students with disabilities, this is not yet always the case, as evidenced in the article Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online, posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
With schools, and in particular higher education institutions, increasingly turning to online course, workbooks, library catalogs, and e-readers, it is crucial that the needs of all students are considered in the design and implementation. But as we learn here:
College Web pages are “widely inaccessible” to people with disabilities…(and) many colleges have no centralized way to ensure that online courses comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act.
So even though technology offers many incredible benefits to the blind, some schools are ostensibly creating:
Barriers to access (that) could deny them equal learning opportunities.
9 Dec
Autism is characterized by a lack of flexibility in thought processes that leads to communication difficulties, behavioral problems, and obsessive- and compulsive-like behaviors. However, obtaining a proper diagnosis has always been a major problem. The symptoms are not evident until 18 to 24 months of age, and diagnosis before 2 ½ years is difficult. Diagnosis usually relies upon the parent’s description of the child’s behavior and sometimes on direct observation. There exists no blood test, X-ray test, or any other objective medical test upon which to rely for the diagnosis.
However, a research group at Boston’s McLean Hospital, affiliated with Harvard University, is attempting to change that with a study published last week in the journal Autism Research. Using MRI scans, they found consistent abnormalities in the temporal lobe of the brain by measuring white matter microstructure. These measurements were able to correctly identify 94% of the children with autism and correctly identify 90% of the children without autism, resulting in an overall accuracy of 92%.
This test cannot yet be used in a clinical setting. This study was done with a relatively small group of children (30 children with autism and 30 matched children without autism) and will need to be replicated in a larger sample. Furthermore, while MRI scans exist throughout the country, the sophisticated measurements used by these researchers are not necessarily available to all operators of MRI equipiment. MRI differences in autistic children have been identified often over the last 10 years, although not with the accuracy of this study. So while very intriguing, further research will be needed before this technique can be used in “prime time.”
