In preparation for the visit to Fresno Pacific University by Bernie Trilling, I am reading 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. I expect that I will be sharing some of the key passages with you all as I go through the book.
Here’s the first one:
One of the Chinese delegates, Mr. Zheng, appeared increasingly excited the more he saw and heard [at Napa's New Technology High School]. By the time we gathered to recap the day’s experiences, he just couldn’t wait to speak any longer.
He held up the school’s curriculum guide and asked, in English, “Where in here do you teach creativity and innovation? I want to know how you teach this! We need our students to learn how to do this!”
The school’s curriculum director, Paul, took a deep breath, collected his thoughts, smiled, and answered slowly, “I have some not-so-go0d news…and some good news.
“The not-so-good news is…it isn’t in the curriculum guide.
“It’s more in the aire we breathe — or maybe the water we drink; the history of our country — Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin; it’s in our business culture, our entrepreneurs, our willingness to try new ideas; the tinkering and inventing in our garages, the challenge of tackling tough problems and the excitement of creating something new; in being rewarded for our new ideas, taking risks, failing, and trying again.”
Out here in California our governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has started a Free Digital Textbook Initiative. The theory is that too much of our California budget is spent on the print version and this is certainly true. The results, thus far, are mixed.
Yes, an initial group of textbooks have been released. Some of the textbooks do a great job of meeting our state’s content standards and some are not particularly close. This is the issue. You can’t do free if free handicaps the students.
Clearly, I am looking at this because it has come up in my day job. It is certainly intriguing, but a little problematic as well. Out here we have the Williams Settlement which requires us to make sure all students have a textbook checked out specifically to them (because we didn’t always do a good job of that and now we need to deal with the fall-out). If you use digital textbooks, there are similar rules. You can either:
- provide the student with the electronic equipment necessary to view the digital version; or
- provide the student with a print-out of the digital version.
Anyone out there work for a school or a district that used digital textbooks, free or commercial, in a meaningful way? It would be helpful to see where others have gone.
Tags: digital textbooks, electronic books, free digital textbook initiative
I would like to introduce a new column: Essential Reading. My thinking is that I will share both what I am reading and what comes my way.
Today’s essential reading comes by way of the good folks at iNACOL. The Online Learning Imperative: A Solution to Three Looming Crises in Education is a report from the Alliance for Excellent education. Written by former Governor Bob Wise with Robert Rothman. The basic premise behind the report is that a key component of educational reform must be online learning.
Why? Here’s the quote that explains it all for me:
If you think about how much the world around us has changed just in the last twenty years, it becomes clear that the education sector is like a massive mainframe computer trying to fit itself into a smartphone world.
In other words, we are not adapting quickly enough to the world around us. When I look around, I see some teachers still teaching like it is 1954. This is no longer acceptable and goes a long way toward explaining how education has gotten away from us. No, that is most definitely not the only reason, but it is certainly a component.
And:
Simply put, the current process and infrastructure for educating students in this country cannot sustain itself any longer.
The report lists three looming crises including:
- CRISIS #1: Global Skill Demands Grow While U.S. College Graduation Rates Fall Behind
- CRISIS #2: The Funding Cliff—Declining Local, State, and Federal Revenues Mean Changing the Education Content-Delivery Model
- CRISIS #3: The Looming Teacher Shortage: The Growing Challenge to Bring Quality Content and Effective Teaching to Every Classroom
I encourage you to go and take a read. It’s a good read for those of us who think advocacy is part of what we need to do every day. Without giving too much away (because I do want you to go and read), the final segment of the report starts with:
Online Learning: Bringing High-Quality Content to Every Classroom
Tags: educational reform, online learing
Are we headed toward a time when all textbooks will be digital? Absolutely. Will this happen soon? Define “soon.”
Several universities have been test-driving the Amazon Kindle this year to see how well it works for their students. Some thoughts from a USAToday.com article:
Now, as several major universities finish analyzing data from pilot programs involving the latest version of the Amazon Kindle, officials are learning more about what students want out of their e-reader tablets. Generally, the colleges found that students missed some of the old-fashioned note-taking tools they enjoyed before. But they also noted that the shift had some key environmental benefits. Further, a minority of students embraced the Kindle fairly quickly as highly desirable for curricular use.
Some would argue that the leap in technology is too great. I don’t think so. I think that the tool isn’t quite ready to do the required job.
For students who were given the Kindle DX and tried to use it for coursework, the inability to easily highlight text was the biggest lowlight of the experience.
If you can’t easily highlight text and, importantly, can’t highlight PDF files at all, that is a design flaw.
Indeed, highlighting and note-taking went hand in hand with another feature students on multiple campuses considered important: navigation. Students did not like being unable to have multiple texts open at the same time.
If an e-book reader is going to be at a sufficient level to attract users to use them as a research tool, they must be able to open multiple texts. Researchers and students know they must be able to compare documents.
Based on these comments, it appears that the Kindle DX is not quite ready for prime-time. While I have no doubt that an e-book reader will emerge that will work, it is unclear whether that will be a Kindle. While that may be a good option at the college level, without a significant price drop, it will not work at the K-12 level. The cost is just too staggering for schools and school districts.
Will online schools end up adapting to the use of e-book readers? Yes, because part of the benefit of online courses is being able to take it with you. While a number of online schools already use digital texts, many fewer have that text easily available for electronic books. Look for that to change.
Tags: amazon kindle, ebooks
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an opinion piece about the myths that are still around about distance/online learning. It is perplexing to those of us who work in the field that we can still be having these sorts of conversations. The first distance education courses were offered, what, 150 years ago? Granted, they were not online, but the world has a sufficiently long history of offering education where the teacher and the students are not in the same place.
Librarian and online instructor Todd Gilman offers the following:
I enjoy the work and feel confident that I have helped students become better readers, writers, future librarians, curators, and researchers. Yet every time I speak with faculty colleagues who have only taught what distance educators call “face to face” or “on ground” courses, I get the same bewildered responses: “I’ve never understood this whole online teaching thing” or “So do you teach via e-mail?” or “Is that like a correspondence course?”
Hidden beneath the surface of such seemingly innocuous comments and questions is a little jab, which, if put into words, would go something like this: “You’re not a real college teacher, are you? If you were, you’d be interacting with students in a bricks-and-mortar classroom like I do.”
I am still amazed that we are still having these sorts of discussions whether it is at the college or the K-12 level. One of the statistics that I share with administrators, teachers, and the general public is that the first online high school courses were offered in 1994.
Isn’t it time we get over the newness?
Tags: distance education, myths, online learning
Two questions:
- How do I know that this is a school with quality instruction and quality administration?
- How do we replicate this for our online students?
Ocoee Middle School Gotta Keep Reading from Michael Cardwell on Vimeo.
Tags: interaction, k-12 online learning
Simply Brilliant Solutions created the Best Online High Schools website and set it up with search engine optimization. They are a major reason for why the site gets the amount of traffic it gets. I was recently contacted by them to see if they could use my experience as a case study for their efforts.
If you would like to see that case study, I encourage you to go take a look. The short version is that the work they did on the site has reaped many benefits. Traffic to the site is significant, it is the largest such site on the Internet, and it only continues to grow.
The case study was rather interesting to me even though I can see the site statistics. Perhaps you would find it interesting as well. The numbers are off and traffic is actually higher than what is given, but it’s a difficult thing to determine without all of the information.
Bill Gates spent all of 2009 as the full-time co-chair of the Gates Foundation. One of the things that he now does is an annual letter. It is always interesting to read/hear his unique take on the economy, the world, and the foundation’s projects. Something that caught my eye is an on-going project for online courses. It is part of projects that they are currently funding in the U.S.
It is described as: Great online courses with video and interactive learning. The time frame is to have 10 percent of courses in three years and 80% of courses in eight years. The beneficiary of the courses are students and teachers worldwide. The beniefit is teachers learning from the best and assigning pieces to studens as well as independent students using the material on their own. Some of the constraints include how appealing the courses and whether they can be integrated with traditional schools.
I am certainly curious where all of this will end up. Given the abilities and drive of both Bill and Melinda Gates, I expect nothing but a quality endeavor.
Tags: bill gates, gates foundation, online courses
I do get that if you look for online high schools on the Internet that it is entirely possible that you will eventually work yourself to me. I do have that online high schools site that so many seem to come to as well as other sites.
That being said, this site even took me aback. It is a site with an article I wrote for EzineArticles.com as a way to market my websites and such. The person who developed this site is certainly within their rights to use the article. They included my bio statement as well as a link back to EzineArticles. Those seem to be the primary rules.
That being said, it sure looks like it is my site. If you click across the top, the same article pops up again and again with the same bio statement. Actually, not one of my better ones, but not awful. Not the one I would have chosen for that site. Also, really, the same article on every page? Really?
No idea who is behind the site. Probably, like many of these sites, just another faceless entity.
Tags: Online Schools, thomas nixon
