Santa Fe/ Panel: Santa Fe Public Schools Lacks Sense of Urgency

 

By T.S. Last

ABQ Journal

November 1, 2012  

 

 A lack of urgency within Santa Fe Public Schools was one of the main findings that came out of the school district's new superintendent's report for his 100-day entry and learning plan to the school board on Monday.

 

Joel Boyd, who began his job as schools' boss Aug. 1, formed a seven-member transition advisory team made up of educational professionals with specialization in different areas to develop the report, designed to flesh out a plan for moving the school district forward.

• "We feel comfortable where we are," Boyd said during a pre-meeting interview with reporters. "There's still a lot more to do, but we're moving at a pace where it can be absorbed."

Boyd said it was a bit of a balancing act between gathering information and feedback from parents, students, teachers and school administrators and implementing changes without causing a lot of anxiety.

• "We're moving at a pace that acknowledges the urgency, but not so quickly that it puts us over the edge," Boyd said.

 

The report was presented by Boyd, Robert S. Peterkin, a professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who chaired the transition team, and Joseph Wise, head of Atlantic Research Partners Inc..

 

Changing the culture within the school district was one of the main points that came out of the report.

• "Multiple interviewees described this lack of urgency as an example of SFPS' 'Mañana' culture, which the team finds both culturally offensive and operationally dysfunctional," according to the report.

Boyd, who came to Santa Fe from Philadelphia, where he served as assistant superintendent, said it was a term he was unfamiliar with when he arrived. Based on the report, it's one of his biggest obstacles.

• "'Mañana' has to be challenged, if you're going to meet the needs of kids," Peterkin said.

Peterkin emphasized during the meeting that the transition team's task was to make recommendations.

 

It was up to Boyd and his staff to determine what would work, or how to make it work, in Santa Fe, which is in itself unique.

 

Peterkin said there were three main themes that came out of the analysis.

• The first was the need to create a culture of urgency and to put teaching and learning at the core.
• The second theme was the need to create institutional leadership, and
• a third theme was accountability.

Throughout the presentation there were references to holding adults accountable for their job performance and student success.

 

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Socorro / GRADS Program Advances Teen Parents to Graduate

 

By Lindsey Padilla

El Defensor Chieftain

October 31, 2012

 

Socorro is the headquarters of the state wide office of the New Mexico Graduation Reality and Dual-Role Skills - NM GRADS - program, which has 26 active sites in New Mexico that help teen parents, both male and female, graduate from high school, said associate director of finance for NM GRADS Jeanne Johnston.

 

The headquarters oversees all the other sites and their NM GRADS programs at the high schools.

 

High schools must show interest in order to have the NM GRADS program as one of their courses, Johnston said.

 

Last year, there were 12 students enrolled in the NM GRADS program at Socorro High School.

 

According to the NM GRADS website, GRADS began as an in school program for teenage parents.

• The NM GRADS mission statement is to facilitate parenting teens' graduation and economic independence, promote healthy multi-generational families and reduce risk-taking behaviors.

"We help them get back in school," Johnston said. "They have a choice to do better in their education. We help them graduate to college. That's our goal."

 

According to the NM GRADS website, the NM GRADS program is a teen parenting program that helps its students learn how to balance work and family roles and prepare students for work and careers to gain economic independence. The goals for NM GRADS is to help teen parents graduate, reduce teen pregnancies, develop positive parenting skills, develop skills for healthy relationships and prepare students for work and careers.

 

Johnston said for the 2011-12 school year,

• NM GRADS teachers in New Mexico worked with 613 teen parents enrolled in the NM GRADS program and had
• a 79 percent graduation rate for 2012. She said there is an
• on-site child care center for students enrolled in the GRADS program at Socorro High School.

The biggest barrier for students, Johnston said, was that students would stay home with their child because there was no child care available at their school.

• With the NM GRADS program at the school, it provides a safe place to bring their child and students also get an education, she said.
• Students get to see positive parenting techniques in the child care center.
• The center works with all ages, from newborn to 3 years old, and some go up to 5 years old, depending on the site, Johnston said.

"We teach them the importance of prenatal care." Johnston said.

 

The GRADS program started in Ohio in 1989 and New Mexico was the first state to replicate the program and add child care to the program, Johnston said. Other states have duplicated the Ohio version of the GRADS program, and have added child care to their programs as well, she said.

 

Teen parents who aren't in GRADS can contact the high school to discuss signing up. It is a support group for them, Johnston said.

 

GRADS gives school presentations to administrators who are interested in bringing the program for their school. Referrals to the program can come from counselors, teachers and community partners, she said.

 

For more information about GRADS at Socorro High School contact Charlene Savedra at 835-0700 or visit the website http://www.nmgrads.org/.

 

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New Orleans LA/ Attention Shifts to Blended Learning at Virtual Education Conference

 

By Ian Quillen

Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 10 [Edweek.org]

October 31, 2012

 

While the rise of blended learning has long been on the radar of leaders in virtual education, last week's Virtual School Symposium may have been its unofficial coming-out party.

 

From beginning to end, blended learning-briefly defined as any of a variety of approaches that combine features of both face-to-face and online instruction-took headline status in keynote speeches, panel discussions, and report releases throughout the three-day conference hosted here by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or iNACOL.

• For example, the "Keeping Pace" report from the Evergreen Education Group, a document released every year at the symposium by the Durango, Colo.-based online learning research and consulting firm, for the first time included blended learning in its subtitle as a nod to the continual blurring occurring between fully online and blended programs.

It also found that, while hard to quantify, blended learning programs are growing much more rapidly than fully online programs, and that many traditional providers of online learning are trying to explore ways to open blended learning schools, convinced there may be more room still for growth in the latter sector.

• "If online learning is in puberty, then there's just so many different flavors of blended learning that I see it a couple years [younger than online learning]," said Andy Frost, the vice president of product management for Plato Learning Inc., an online and blended learning provider based in Bloomington, Minn., during a discussion of the "Keeping Pace" findings.

Perhaps sensitive to the emerging nature of blended learning, the Vienna, Va.-based iNACOL not only included more sessions and speeches about blended learning in the event program, but also gave those sessions top billing.

• The conference began with keynote remarks from Stacey Childress, who as deputy director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has helped oversee the awarding of grants for blended learning programs-part of the third wave of the foundation's $30 million-to-date Next Generation Learning Challenges competitive-grant program. (Education Week receives support from the Gates Foundation for coverage of the education industry and K-12 innovation.)
• It ended with a conversation moderated by Michael B. Horn, the education executive director for the Innosight Institute, a think tank in San Mateo, Calif., who is widely regarded as a leader on the theories of blended learning.

The overwhelming focus on blended learning at the Oct. 21-24 symposium was so evident, said Mr. Horn, that he jokingly suggested changing the name of the event all together.

 

Measuring Outcomes

In a presentation on the Innosight Institute's work categorizing models of blended learning, Mr. Horn suggested that the biggest benefit of blended learning models may be that they often don't require substantial changes to the structure of schooling.

 

For example, in a self-blend model-in which students select online courses to supplement classroom work-the ability to select an online course during an open class period requires little or no schedule reorganization for a high school student or a guidance counselor. Likewise, models in which students rotate from a face-to-face learning station to an online learning station-called a rotation model-are a very small step for many elementary educators.

 

"Station rotation has been alive and well in those classrooms forever," Mr. Horn said. "It's just that one of the rotations was not online learning."

 

That easier transition is also reflected in a report released by iNACOL at the symposium that aims to give lawmakers and advocates guidance on how to create accurate measures of online learning programs' performance.

 

The report highlights six areas that educators and policymakers need to consider carefully when creating such measures for full-time virtual education, but it includes only two of those-defining proficiency and creating measurements for individual student growth-in its recommendations for measuring the outcomes of online courses that are woven into a self-blend model.

 

The expectation, said iNACOL President Susan D. Patrick, is that the same thinking can also flow from metrics for fully online study to other blended learning models, and eventually into the brick-and-mortar world.

 

"We do expect this to broaden, and toadd blended education and even traditional models of education," Ms. Patrick said. "Because, if they are the right metrics for learning, they are the right metrics for all kinds of learning."

 

John Watson, the founder of the Evergreen Education Group, praised the work of iNACOL in trying to reshape the discussion around how to gauge which online and blended programs are successful. But he cautioned that just because full-time virtual education appears to be nearing a ceiling and blended learning appears to be exploding, it doesn't mean all students have those opportunities.

 

In particular, the 2012 edition of "Keeping Pace" found that a majority of states still don't provide access to online courses as a supplement to traditional courses for a majority of their public school students, and that Florida stands alone as the only state to allow, in theory, access to online supplemental courses to all its public school students in grades K-5.

 

"I worry sometimes that with all the media attention received by online and blended learning, that people are thinking, 'This is ubiquitous, this is happening all over,' " Mr. Watson said.

 

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Stonewall LA/ TAP: Career-Ladder Program Centers on Teaching Rubric, Targeted Support

 

By Liana Heitin

Education Week [from TeacherMagazine.org]

October 17, 2012 [posted online 11/1/12]

 

It's a program that combines some of the most controversial policy issues facing teachers: value-added scores, rubric-based teacher-evaluations, professional development reform, peer review, and merit pay. In other words, it's potentially a school's perfect storm.

 

And yet at one Louisiana school where the intricate career-ladder and compensation system known as TAP has been in place for four years, the climate is quite temperate. Teachers appear to be thriving and happy. And rather than using the often-inflammatory ed-policy jargon when discussing TAP, teachers there generally emphasize two simple benefits of the system: support and growth.

 

The school's adoption of the TAP program was prompted, as most reforms these days are, by student-achievement concerns.

• In 2007, Keith Simmons, the principal at 490-student North DeSoto Middle School in the small, rural community of Stonewall, La., saw that test scores, while meeting performance goals, had hit a plateau.
• "We were working as hard as we could, but we felt we could do better," the 12-year veteran principal recalls. "We needed a way to work smarter that wasn't cliché, that wasn't just the newest PD [fad]."
• The next year, he turned to the TAP System for Student and Teacher Advancement (as its officially known), a program developed by businessman Lowell Milken in 1999 as a means of overhauling a school's staffing model to help improve teacher quality.
• It didn't take long to see results. The school exceeded its growth target that year.
• Since then, the North DeSoto's performance score-a measure determined by the state based on attendance, dropouts, and student test scores-has continued to climb.

Perhaps not surprisingly, TAP is now in place in all of the DeSoto Parish school district's 13 schools.

 

Moving On Up

The TAP System, operated by the nonprofit National Institute for Excellence in Teaching, is currently in place in nearly 350 schools across the country, most of which are categorized as high poverty.

 

It relies heavily on the premise that teachers will be more invested in their work if they are able to grow, including financially, in their careers.

 

In a TAP school, that growth is facilitated in two ways.

• First, TAP teachers can move up a set career ladder, from "career teacher" to "mentor teacher" to "master teacher."
• Second, on a year-by-year basis, they can earn bonuses for receiving high evaluation marks, which are a combined measure of classroom-observation scores, value-added scores, and completion of other school responsibilities.

At the heart of this advancement process system is a complex, multi-page rubric with descriptors of good teaching practices.

• The 19 elements on which educators are evaluated fall into three categories-lesson planning, the learning environment, and classroom instruction-and have up to a dozen sub-elements.

The rubric can be overwhelming to new TAP teachers, according to Vicki Cabra, one of two master teachers at North DeSoto, but becomes clearer and more manageable with time. "At first, you see them all [i.e., rubric elements] as separate things. Then you start to see connections," she said. "They're all interdependent. It becomes a part of who you are and what you do naturally."

 

At North DeSoto, the rubric is the central dogma of instruction.

• Teachers are all but religiously devoted to understanding the elements and incorporating them into their teaching. As Nicole Bolen, a TAP executive master teacher who supports teachers in several Louisiana schools, explained,
• "The rubric terminology becomes the common language of the school." Often, even students can recite it.

All teachers at TAP schools receive four evaluations per year, some at agreed-on times and others unannounced.

• Master teachers, who evaluate career and mentor teachers (and are themselves evaluated by executive master teachers), emphasize that the goal is not to get a perfect score on an evaluation.
• Instead, teachers should aim for at least a proficient score, or a 3 on the 1 to 5 scale. "It's important to communicate to teachers what proficient means-it's rock solid," Bolen explained.

"I've never scored perfect on a lesson," said Cabra. "It's all about constantly improving."

 

New teachers also need to understand that TAP is not meant to be "a 'gotcha' system," said Bolen. "Master teachers play the role of 'servant-leaders,'" she explained. Their aim is to help improve instruction, not catch teachers doing something wrong. Cabra said that master teachers try to develop trust with mentor and career teachers by staying visible in classrooms-and not just as evaluators.

 

"You throw the clipboard down and go in there and start helping them," she said. "I'm coaching you-how am I trying to 'getcha'?"

 

A Model Lesson

One day last spring at North DeSoto, Bolen and Cabra evaluated a lesson by Brandi Rivers, a 7th and 8th grade English teacher who had been teaching in Louisiana schools for eight years but was new to the TAP system.

 

During a pre-evaluation conference, Cabra asked Rivers a series of scripted questions about what the lesson would look like. Rivers, who comes across as gentle and a bit shy, laid out a thorough lesson, replete with interactive-whiteboard visuals, reading material differentiated by paper color, and multiple grouping techniques. She answered Cabra's questions with assurance, pointing to examples in her plan. When Cabra asked what she would model for students, Rivers stumbled for a moment. "I don't really know what I would model," she said.

 

Cabra recounted an instance in which she herself had forgotten to model during a lesson, and how that had caused confusion. She offered Rivers some suggestions-perhaps she should model the jigsaw grouping or student conversations. "Make a note and think about what you might need to model," she told Rivers.

 

Upon taking her place at the front of the classroom, Rivers' reticent manner disappeared. She taught a fast-paced and organized lesson with all the elements she'd explained in the conference-and the addition of modeling how to annotate. The transitions from whole-group instruction to group and individual activities were seamless. Her students remained focused throughout.

 

At the end of the period, Bolen and Cabra shared some private reflections on the multi-faceted lesson. "I've never seen a teacher embrace and understand the rubric the way she did," said Cabra.

 

Even so, in scoring the lesson, the two spent an hour and a half pouring over each of the TAP rubric descriptors, flipping through piles of student work and their own notes to back up each score with evidence. They dove into the minutiae of individual students' learning:

• Had Rivers accommodated one student's specific learning needs?
• Had she pushed another student to show the higher level thinking he was capable of?

"When you move from proficient to exemplary [on the rubric], you're looking to move each student," explained Bolen. A score sheet of 4s and 5s illustrated that Rivers had done just that.

 

After much discussion, Bolen and Cabra teased out a weakness in the lesson that would become Rivers' area of "refinement": Students had not asked questions about the content. The evaluators then came up with several simple, concrete solutions: Rivers could build in time for questions-"Wow and Wonder" sharing, for example-or she could have students write questions on their exit slips. "It's an easy fix," said Cabra. "We're all about being real. We'll set up a follow-up time, too."

 

Targeted PD

In addition to receiving this sort of precise feedback after an evaluation, TAP teachers attend regular in-house professional development sessions. At North DeSoto, those take the form of twice-a-week "cluster," or team, meetings led by master teachers.

 

Cluster meetings are held during common prep time and run, in essence, like a school within a school.

• The master teachers have a dedicated classroom-Cabra and her partner's is decorated with a luau theme and has a constant supply of snacks-where they teach lessons on research-based instructional strategies.
• The masters select the strategies meticulously based on the clusters' needs, as determined by classroom observations and data collection.
• They even "field test" the strategies with students before teaching them to the PD group. The intended result is a sort of trickle-down, real-time instructional effect: Master teachers target and fill in instructional gaps for teachers, who then head back to class and fill in knowledge gaps for students.

According to Laura Goe, a research scientist at Educational Testing Service and a principal investigator for research and dissemination for The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, this direct link between teacher evaluation and professional growth is often more important to TAP teachers and administrators than the prospects for merit pay. "It's all about professional-growth opportunities and not about the money for them," she said.

 

A 2009 review of teacher evaluation systems commissioned by the National Education Association echoed that sentiment, finding that TAP teachers were generally positive about the system and the support they receive. Performance pay, it turned out, was the least popular element of the TAP system.

 

Simmons, the North DeSoto principal, echoed that it is the "support piece," not the accountability or performance pay, that excites him about TAP.

• "Accountability without support is counterproductive," he said.

The alignment between professional support and evaluation is also the part of the system that non-TAP schools and districts can learn the most from, according to Goe, who has written extensively on teacher evaluation.

• Schools should hire "trained observers who are required to have conversations with teachers about practice," she said.
• From there, schools should be "tying that to PD goals and opportunities for teachers, and ensuring teachers get access to those opportunities.

Goe is adamant that that kind of alignment "can happen anywhere. You don't need TAP to do that." Any school can point teachers to online resources and outside PD that correlate to their instructional weaknesses.

 

What schools do need before they can align PD to targeted teacher needs, however, is a research-based instructional rubric, said Goe.

 

For instance, Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, which the TAP rubric is based on in part, or the Classroom Assessment Scoring System from the University of Virginia are both good options, she said. The key is that schools are "using evaluation results to improve professional growth. ... That's the sort of thing TAP is very good about and [other schools] can learn about," she said.

 

Promises and Pitfalls

Learning from TAP's successes may be the best that some schools can do, because like with any overhaul, TAP will not work everywhere. First and foremost, the system requires buy-in from staff. NIET recommends that schools take a vote before adopting TAP, and only do so if 75 percent of teachers are in favor of the move. Teachers also need to accept the rubric as doctrine for good teaching and devote themselves to understanding and implementing it.

 

TAP, particularly because of the built-in bonus pay and extra staffers, is also quite expensive. Kathy Noel, director of curriculum and instruction for Desoto Parish schools, said that the average cost there is about $445,000 per school. The district has been able to fund the initiative through a combination of money from federal Title 1, Teacher Incentive Funds, School Improvement Funds 1003G, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, Title II, and local funds. But in many places, drumming up that kind of cash is simply not feasible.

 

TAP is not always as successful as it has been at North DeSoto, either. In 2007, just two years after implementing TAP in 26 schools, Louisiana's Calcasieu Parish gave up on the program. Performance scores had improved at 58 percent of schools, according to Kristan Van Hook, senior vice president for public policy and development at NIET, but "it wasn't the kind of success we normally hoped to see." Van Hook said Hurricane Rita, which closed schools for six weeks in 2005, made the first year with TAP a challenging one.

 

But Jean Johnson, president of the Calcasieu Federation of Teachers, said that teachers were "very unhappy" with the system, which the district "jumped into full force." The system "wound up costing millions for the parish," she said, and "we didn't feel like the results were any better than what we were already doing."

 

But for Rivers, the English teacher at North DeSoto, the promise of professional growth and improved practice have rung true. "One of the reasons I left my other schools is because I felt like I wasn't growing anymore," she said. Previous principals had simply labeled her teaching "satisfactory," leaving her at a loss for how or where to improve. But because the TAP mentor teachers offer specific feedback at the debriefing sessions, she said, she now knows her students better and can address their needs.

 

"We're constantly going over data, I know their abilities and weaknesses more, I know what modifications I need to make," Rivers said. "I feel like I've grown more this year than all my other years of teaching."

 

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Denver CO/ 5 Failing Schools to Lose School Improvement Grants

 

By Karen Augé

The Denver Post

November 1, 2012

 

 The Colorado Department of Education will cut off school-improvement money to five of the state's poorest-performing schools because they haven't gotten better despite the influx of cash.

 

The schools - Gilpin Montessori elementary, in Denver's Curtis Park neighborhood, and four middle schools in Pueblo - received money for two years of three-year federal School Improvement Grants. The grants are given to states to help some of the country's lowest-achieving schools improve.

 

The schools were notified this month that their grants won't be renewed for a third year.

• "We suspended the funds for four schools in Pueblo, also for one school in Denver, because of a lack of progress in academic achievement year to year," said Patrick Chapman, chief of the department's Federal Programs Unit.

The schools can appeal, Chapman said.

• "They have the opportunity to come back and talk with us about making bold changes that would allow us to free that money up. But we have to have a much better understanding of and support for what they are doing" for the funding to be restored.

Representatives of Denver Public Schools will meet with the state on Friday to present a revised improvement plan for Gilpin, said district spokeswoman Kristy Armstrong.

 

For Pueblo, the loss, if sustained, would amount to $2.4 million for the four schools.

 

Gilpin's total grant was to have been $1.26 million over three years.

 

Van Schoales, chief executive of the school reform group A+ Denver Schools, called the state's decision "very significant."

 

"It's great news because it means the department of education has begun to hold schools and school districts accountable for performance," he said.

 

Chapman said that if the state doesn't reverse its decision, the money that would have gone to Pueblo and Gilpin will be distributed to other struggling schools.

 

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would provide $3.5 billion to help improve the nation's 5,000 worst schools.

 

Colorado's education department has received roughly $52 million of that, which it has distributed to 25 schools.

 

Denver Public Schools got just shy of $15 million in improvement grants, which it used to overhaul six schools, including Gilpin.

 

Gilpin, transformed from a kindergarten through-eighth-grade school into a Montessori elementary, is the only one of the six that hasn't shown at least a glimmer of improvement.

 

The state measures academic growth by comparing students with their peers across the state and measuring that against the growth they need in order to be on track to achieve proficiency in a particular subject. The measures are based on standardized test performance.

 

The four Pueblo schools that will lose funding have actually gotten worse.

 

At Pueblo's Risley Middle School, for example, only 10 percent of students were proficient or better in math in 2012, down from 13 percent in 2010.

 

As reported by The Denver Post earlier this year, Pueblo City Schools spent $7.3 million of its $12.4 million in grant money on hiring New York-based Global Partnership Schools to help it orchestrate an overhaul of six of its failing schools.

 

One of those, Spann Elementary, closed in June because of declining enrollment and poor performance.

 

In August, GPS notified Pueblo it didn't want to renew its contract with the district.

 

In a story at the time, the Pueblo Chieftain quoted a letter from GPS director Manny Rivera to Pueblo's superintendent: "We know that achieving sustainable and significant change in performance requires that all stakeholders be completely aligned with, and committed to, the transformational strategies. Regrettably, I have become convinced over the past six months that not everyone at the school district remains committed to the agenda that we set two years ago."

 

Pueblo City schools leaders did not return calls requesting comment.

 

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Freeport ME/ Maine's Decade-Old School Laptop Program Wins Qualified Praise

 

By Ricki Morell

Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org] This story was produced in partnership with the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, a nonprofit news service in Hallowell, Maine.

October 31, 2012

 

At Freeport Middle School, students in algebra class play "Battleship" on their laptops as they learn to plot coordinates on a graph. At Massabesic Middle School, eighth-graders surf the web on their laptops to create their own National History Day websites. And at King Middle School, students carry their laptops into the field as they chronicle the civil rights movement through eyewitness interviews.

 

These students don't live in a high-tech mecca like Silicon Valley but in Maine, the nation's most rural state, where state tax money pays for one white Apple MacBook for every seventh- and eighth-grader in public schools.

 

More than 10 years ago, Angus King, then Maine's governor and now a U.S. Senate candidate, pushed the $10- to $11-million-a-year program through a reluctant legislature.  King sold it as a way to give the state a competitive edge and provide computers to low-income students. His Republican opponent, Charlie Summers, recently injected the issue into the Senate race when he mentioned the cost of laptops in a broader attack on King's spending priorities.

 

Experts say the program has achieved technological equity, but the broader goal of linking laptops to improved student achievement has been more elusive. An August 2011 report, commissioned by the state legislature, concluded that the laptop program "has had a significant impact on curriculum, instruction, and learning in Maine's middle schools," but also that it had been carried out unevenly across school districts and subject areas.

• "The benefits are difficult to quantify," says David Silvernail, the report's author and co-director of the nonpartisan Maine Education Policy Research Institute.
• "So many other things are going on in schools, it's difficult to classify what makes the difference. The laptop is a tool, just like a pencil."

Maine's 29,000 seventh- and eighth-graders use the laptops during class and take them home at night and on weekends.

• The laptops have Internet access and can be used for writing, research, communication, homework practice or simply surfing the web.
• Students are responsible for keeping them charged and in good working order.

"It's my baby," says seventh-grader Jacob Gregoire at Massabesic Middle School in East Waterboro. "It's so much better than going to the computer lab."

 

Teachers in grades 7-12 also get their own laptops under the program, which began in September 2002. Under a contract with Apple, the state pays a discounted rate of $242 per laptop per year, which includes software, training, technical support and repair.

• That adds up to about $10 million this year, and about $11 million in previous years-or less than half a percent of the state's $2 billion education budget.
• The plan lets high schools buy laptops using local property tax money.
• The Maine Department of Education's learning technology director Jeff Mao said 68 of Maine's 119 high schools chose to participate this school year.

Raymond Grogan, principal of Freeport Middle School in Freeport, was a teacher when the program first started. He says that laptops in the classrooms have helped teachers stop lecturing and start tailoring lessons to individual students.  "From a teaching perspective, it changed everything," he says. "It revolutionized the classroom."

 

Educators say problems with the laptops generally fall into two categories:

• distraction from unrestricted access to the Internet, and laptop breakage and
• technical glitches.

The breakage problems have decreased as students have grown used to taking care of the laptops, Mao says. In addition, a new generation of laptops is stronger and the cases are more protective. The distraction comes when kids look at inappropriate websites when they're supposed to be working, or more commonly, sneak time on Facebook or YouTube instead of studying.

 

At first, Mao said, schools tried to limit Internet access, but now they've found more success by educating parents and students about the Internet through Common Sense Media, a national nonprofit that helps educate children about the media.

 

"The basic philosophy is not being connected doesn't make the situation any better," says Mao. "We need to teach responsibility."

 

King says he came up with the idea for the laptop initiative in 1999, after a conversation with technology guru Seymour Papert, a founder of the MIT Media Lab. At the time, Maine had a budget surplus of $70 million. King had been thinking about bridging "the digital divide" as a key to state's economic development, but he wasn't convinced that handing out laptops to teenagers was the best approach. He remembers Papert telling him that adding a few computers to schools wouldn't do much. "It is only in the one-to-one that the power occurs," he says Papert told him.

 

It was not an easy sell. From educators to ordinary citizens, people thought it would be a waste of money. "It was not popular at all," recalls Bette Manchester, the first director of the laptop program and now president of the Maine International Center for Digital Learning in Lewiston. "People thought the money would be better spent on fixing a lot of broken buildings."

 

King, who is running as an independent for Republican Olympia Snowe's U.S. Senate seat, now counts the laptop program as one of his central achievements as governor. He says he never promised higher test scores; he wanted to connect Maine students to the world. "Teachers tell me, 'I thought you were out of your mind when you first proposed this, but now I can't imagine teaching without it,' " King says.

 

Summers didn't return messages left with his campaign asking for comment about his assessment of the laptop program. The state legislature will consider renewing funding in January, the third funding renewal since the program began. State Rep. David Richardson and State Sen. Brian Langley, Republicans who chair the House and Senate education committees, respectively, say they don't anticipate a fight over funding because the program has become so much a part of the educational landscape.

 

"Putting all the partisan stuff aside, at the time when this was introduced it was highly controversial, spending all that money," says Langley, a retired educator who taught culinary arts for 27 years at Hancock County Technical Center in Ellsworth. "But having students in rural Maine be able to have access to the world has been tremendous. I think that is probably Angus King's legacy."

 

Maine's program inspired other state-funded programs in Michigan, Pennsylvania and South Dakota. But those states abandoned their programs when they ran into politics or tight budgets. At the same time, Idaho and Alabama are moving toward state-funded programs. In a study last year, the One-to-One Institute in Mason, Mich., a national nonprofit that advises school districts about technology programs, found that 2,000 sites nationwide-either entire schools or entire grades within schools-have laptop programs.

• In Texas, a four-year study of how laptops affect student achievement showed mixed results. Beginning in 2004, the nonprofit Texas Center for Educational Research compared the test scores of students at 22 Texas middle schools where students and teachers received laptops with the scores of students at 22 middle schools where they did not. The study concluded that laptops had a positive effect on some math scores but generally not on reading scores.
• In Maine, statewide evidence of how laptops affect achievement is scarce. Test scores for Maine from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, show that the percentage of students scoring proficient or above in eighth-grade mathematics rose from 30 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2011, but that was part of a national trend of rising math scores and can't be linked directly to laptop use. Between 2002 and 2011, the percentage of Maine's eighth-graders scoring at or above proficient on the national reading test barely changed, rising from 38 to 39 percent.

Silvernail's report used online surveys to get general impressions, and gauged achievement through small research studies in math, science and writing. The surveys revealed that Maine's math teachers use laptops less frequently than teachers of other subjects and that, according to Silvernail, too few teachers use laptops to teach "21st-century skills" such as problem-solving, collaboration and evaluating information.

 

In math, Silvernail's team found that test scores were higher in the classrooms where teachers had received special training in integrating laptops into their lessons. In the writing study, researchers linked writing multiple drafts on the computer to a 3-point increase in statewide writing test scores between 2000 and 2005. And in science, they compared two eighth-grade science classrooms-one in which students used laptops to create narrated animations about the angle of the Earth's axis, and one in which students used traditional paper diagrams. The students who used laptops scored higher on tests given after the unit.

 

The program's possibilities are on display every day in three schools with vastly different profiles.

• Massabesic is typical rural Maine, with more than its share of students whose families struggle economically. But its seventh-grade science students are exposed to the wider world through the Gulf of Maine Research Institute's Vital Signs program. Through fieldwork, students study invasive species growing in their area, and then use their laptops to record, analyze and submit their results online to the group's website. "I'd put my students up against any others in the state in regards to their fieldwork and investigative skills," says science teacher Patrick Parent.
• King Middle School, in downtown Portland, is the state's most urban school, with a student body that collectively speaks 28 languages. At this school, students participate in interdisciplinary projects combining research and fieldwork, and then create original works such as documentaries. Using laptops, seventh-grade students are now working with Portland arborists to take a computerized tree inventory of their city.
• At Freeport Middle School, in a suburban setting a few blocks away from L.L. Bean's flagship store, math teacher Alex Briasco-Brin decided to create his own online math curriculum that he hopes will instill a deeper appreciation of algebra. Last year, he took a year off from the classroom as a "Distinguished Educator of Maine" to turn the curriculum into an online math textbook that could be used across the state.

On a recent day in his class, 18 eighth-graders used laptops to work alone or in groups on algebraic equations and graphing. Briasco-Brin did not lecture or write on the blackboard. He just wandered around, keeping kids on task and guiding them toward answers.

 

"If the state took away our laptops," he says, "I'd have to find another place to teach."

 

~~~~~~~~

 

New York NY/ 2 Teacher Surveys: Technology Changing How Students Learn

 

By Matt Richtel

New York Times

November 1, 2012

 

There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.

 

The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students' capability to focus.

 

Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology's impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students.

 

The timing of the studies, from two well-regarded research organizations, appears to be coincidental.

• One was conducted by the Pew Internet Project, a division of the Pew Research Center that focuses on technology-related research.
• The other comes from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that advises parents on media use by children. It was conducted by Vicky Rideout, a researcher who has previously shown that media use among children and teenagers ages 8 to 18 has grown so fast that they on average spend twice as much time with screens each year as they spend in school.

Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students' attention.

 

"I'm an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention," said Hope Molina-Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work.

 

She said she did not want to shrink from the challenge of engaging them, nor did other teachers interviewed, but she also worried that technology was causing a deeper shift in how students learned. She also wondered if teachers were adding to the problem by adjusting their lessons to accommodate shorter attention spans.

• "Are we contributing to this?" Ms. Molina-Porter said. "What's going to happen when they don't have constant entertainment?"

Scholars who study the role of media in society say no long-term studies have been done that adequately show how and if student attention span has changed because of the use of digital technology.

 

But there is mounting indirect evidence that constant use of technology can affect behavior, particularly in developing brains, because of heavy stimulation and rapid shifts in attention.

 

Kristen Purcell, the associate director for research at Pew, acknowledged that the findings could be viewed from another perspective: that the education system must adjust to better accommodate the way students learn, a point that some teachers brought up in focus groups themselves.

• "What we're labeling as 'distraction,' some see as a failure of adults to see how these kids process information," Ms. Purcell said. "They're not saying distraction is good but that the label of 'distraction' is a judgment of this generation."

The surveys also found that many teachers said technology could be a useful educational tool.

• In the Pew survey, which was done in conjunction with the College Board and the National Writing Project, roughly 75 percent of 2,462 teachers surveyed said that the Internet and search engines had a "mostly positive" impact on student research skills. And they said such tools had made students more self-sufficient researchers.
• But nearly 90 percent said that digital technologies were creating "an easily distracted generation with short attention spans.
• Similarly, of the 685 teachers surveyed in the Common Sense project, 71 percent said they thought technology was hurting attention span "somewhat" or "a lot."
• About 60 percent said it hindered students' ability to write and communicate face to face, and almost half said it hurt critical thinking and their ability to do homework.

There was little difference in how younger and older teachers perceived the impact of technology.

 

"Boy, is this a clarion call for a healthy and balanced media diet," said Jim Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media. He added, "What you have to understand as a parent is that what happens in the home with media consumption can affect academic achievement."

 

In interviews, teachers described what might be called a "Wikipedia problem," in which students have grown so accustomed to getting quick answers with a few keystrokes that they are more likely to give up when an easy answer eludes them. The Pew research found that 76 percent of teachers believed students had been conditioned by the Internet to find quick answers.

• "They need skills that are different than 'Spit, spit, there's the answer,' " said Lisa Baldwin, 48, a high school teacher in Great Barrington, Mass., who said students' ability to focus and fight through academic challenges was suffering an "exponential decline." She said she saw the decline most sharply in students whose parents allowed unfettered access to television, phones, iPads and video games.

For her part, Ms. Baldwin said she refused to lower her expectations or shift her teaching style to be more entertaining. But she does spend much more time in individual tutoring sessions, she added, coaching students on how to work through challenging assignments.

 

Other teachers said technology was as much a solution as a problem. Dave Mendell, 44, a fourth-grade teacher in Wallingford, Pa., said that educational video games and digital presentations were excellent ways to engage students on their terms. Teachers also said they were using more dynamic and flexible teaching styles.

 

"I'm tap dancing all over the place," Mr. Mendell said. "The more I stand in front of class, the easier it is to lose them."

 

He added that it was tougher to engage students, but that once they were engaged, they were just as able to solve problems and be creative as they had been in the past. He would prefer, he added, for students to use less entertainment media at home, but he did not believe it represented an insurmountable challenge for teaching them at school.

• While the Pew research explored how technology has affected attention span, it also looked at how the Internet has changed student research habits.
• By contrast, the Common Sense survey focused largely on how teachers saw the impact of entertainment media on a range of classroom skills.

The surveys include some findings that appear contradictory. In the Common Sense report, for instance, some teachers said that even as they saw attention spans wane, students were improving in subjects like math, science and reading.

 

But researchers said the conflicting views could be the result of subjectivity and bias. For example, teachers may perceive themselves facing both a more difficult challenge but also believe that they are overcoming the challenge through effective teaching.

 

Pew said its research gave a "complex and at times contradictory" picture of teachers' view of technology's impact.

 

Dr. Dimitri Christakis, who studies the impact of technology on the brain and is the director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Hospital, emphasized that teachers' views were subjective but nevertheless could be accurate in sensing dwindling attention spans among students.

 

His own research shows what happens to attention and focus in mice when they undergo the equivalent of heavy digital stimulation.

 

Students saturated by entertainment media, he said, were experiencing a "supernatural" stimulation that teachers might have to keep up with or simulate.

• The heavy technology use, Dr. Christakis said, "makes reality by comparison uninteresting."

~~~~~~~~

 

New York NY/ The Brain Trainers

 

By Dan Hurley [Neuroscience reporter, writing a book on new research into intelligence]

New York Times

October 31, 2012

 

In the back room of a suburban storefront previously occupied by a yoga studio, Nick Vecchiarello, a 16-year-old from Glen Ridge, N.J., sits at a desk across from Kathryn Duch, a recent college graduate who wears a black shirt emblazoned with the words "Brain Trainer." Spread out on the desk are a dozen playing cards showing symbols of varying colors, shapes and sizes. Nick stares down, searching for three cards whose symbols match.

 

"Do you see it?" Ms. Duch asks encouragingly.

 

"Oh, man," mutters Nick, his eyes shifting among the cards, looking for patterns.

 

Across the room, Nathan Veloric, 23, studies a list of numbers, looking for any two in a row that add up to nine. With tight-lipped determination, he scrawls a circle around one pair as his trainer holds a stopwatch to time him. Halfway through the 50 seconds allotted to complete the exercise, a ruckus comes from the center of the room.

 

"Nathan's here!" shouts Vanessa Maia, another trainer. Approaching him with a teasing grin, she claps her hands like an annoying little sister. "Distraction!" she shouts. "Distraction!"

 

There is purpose behind the silliness. Ms. Maia is challenging the trainees to stay focused on their tasks in the face of whatever distractions may be out there, whether Twitter feeds, the latest Tumblr posting or old-fashioned classroom commotion.

 

On this Wednesday evening at the Upper Montclair, N.J., outlet of LearningRx, a chain of 83 "brain training" franchises across the United States, the goal is to improve cognitive skills.

 

LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services - some online, others offered by psychologists. Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.

 

"We measure every student pre- and post-training with a version of the Woodcock-Johnson general intelligence test," said Ken Gibson, who began franchising LearningRx centers in 2003, and has data on more than 30,000 of the nearly 50,000 students who have been trained. "The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks."

 

The three other large cognitive training services - Lumosity, Cogmed and Posit Science - dance around the question of whether they truly raise I.Q. but do assert that they improve cognitive performance.

 

"Your brain, just brighter," is the slogan of Lumosity, an online company that now has some 25 million registered members. According to its Web site, "Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions."

 

Those results are achieved, the companies say, by repurposing cognitive tasks initially developed by psychologists as tests of mental abilities. With technical names like the antisaccade, the N-back and the complex working memory span task, the exercises are dressed up as games that become increasingly difficult as students gain mastery.

 

Conceived to appeal to adults, especially baby boomers looking to stanch the effects of aging, Lumosity now draws one-quarter of its audience from students between the ages of 11 and 21, according to Michael Scanlon, the company's scientific director.

• "I was taken aback that so much of our user base is so young," he said. "The particular audience I had in mind at the earliest stages of the company was my mother."
• In response to requests from schoolteachers, the fee is now waived - $15 a month - for students in their classrooms. More than 1,000 teachers and 10,000 students have enrolled this year, Mr. Scanlon said.

For the one-on-one training at LearningRx, fees are decidedly higher, from about $80 to $90 an hour in Upper Montclair. The students come with learning disabilities, with grades they want to improve in a competitive academic environment, all with hopes of just being sharper.

 

Taylor Webster, 16, trains daily for lacrosse with a personal coach. "She has natural athletic ability," said her mother, Samantha Newman-Webster. "But it's really through her training that she has been able to achieve to the point where she's being sought out by college recruiters." Would brain training, the family wondered, do for her grades what physical training did for her lacrosse game?

 

Ms. Newman-Webster enrolled Taylor, already a B student at the private Montclair Kimberley Academy, at LearningRx in February. "I felt like I wanted to do whatever I could to make her learning easier, faster, deeper," she said. "I knew she was going to be taking the SATs, and they say it will improve whatever you're trying to do."

 

Speaking by cellphone on the way to a lacrosse game, Taylor explained, with a laugh, what it's like: "In the beginning your head is sore. Honestly, I had headaches after going there the first few times. It was kind of tedious and made my brain hurt. But I started getting better and better at it. It kind of became a competition for me to do better each time."

 

She's now studying for the SAT. "It used to take me an hour to memorize 20 words. Now I can learn, like, 40 new words in 20 minutes."

 

Others - a majority, according to LearningRx - seek cognitive training in the hopes of remediating a learning disability.

 

Nathan Veloric had learning issues since elementary school. Last December, he had just graduated from William Paterson University with a degree in communications when his mother heard about LearningRx from a business networking group. His goal was to build up skills. "I've got to keep on bettering myself," said Mr. Veloric, whose first job out of college is as a part-time cashier at a CVS near his home in New Providence, N.J. "I'm happy to have a job in this economy. While looking for something better I'm working my way up at CVS - I'm trying to go full time and then get into their management training program."

 

Of his brain training, he said, "I don't know if it makes you smarter. But when you get to each new level on the math and reading tasks, it definitely builds up your self-confidence."

 

Nick Vecchiarello struggles with attention deficit disorder. "During middle school we had every kind of tutor known to man," said his mother, Diane. "Name it, we've done it" - stimulant medication, sessions with a psychologist. "He never liked anything to do with education." A brochure from LearningRx showed up in the mail, and the scientific aura around the program impressed the Vecchiarellos. They decided to spend $12,000 for a year of visits, one to three times a week.

 

"It has been a financial strain," acknowledged Nick's father, Richard, a fifth-grade teacher in nearby Fair Lawn. "Yes, I think it's made a change in Nick. His grades are better. If it gives him a leg up on life, you can't put a price on that." In September, after six months, Nick and his parents decided he had made enough progress to stop his medication.

 

For all the glowing testimonials, there are postings to be found online from parents of children with learning disabilities, complaining about substantial fees and minimal benefit.

 

Whether the results last beyond the blush of training - indeed, whether I.Q. can truly be bolstered in a meaningful way - are questions on which serious scientists still disagree. Studies have been published in recent years finding that intelligence can be improved through training, but not enough of them are of sufficient scientific quality to convince everyone in the field.

 

One skeptic is Douglas K. Detterman, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University and founding editor of the influential academic journal Intelligence. His research would seem to offer reassurance to college-bound brain trainees, because he has found a close correlation between I.Q. and SAT scores. "All of these tests are pretty much the same thing," he said. "They measure general intelligence."

• The catch, however, is that Dr. Detterman believes that cognitive training only makes people better at taking tests, without improving their underlying intelligence. Dr. Detterman said of brain training, "It's probably not harmful. But I would tell parents: Save your money. Look at the studies the commercial services have done to support their results. You'll find very poorly done studies, with no control groups and all kinds of problems."

Executives at traditional tutoring and test-prep services tend to share Dr. Detterman's view - perhaps not surprisingly, because some of the brain training programs pitch themselves in direct contrast to standard tutoring. ("Brain Training vs. Tutoring," says the headline of a LearningRx brochure. "Is tutoring what your child really needs?") Bror Saxberg, chief learning officer of Kaplan Inc., questions whether improving performance on an intelligence test will translate directly to improved grades and test scores.

 

"I keep looking for good studies that show how math performance or an ability to write an essay or some other really important set of skills have been dramatically enhanced for normal kids," Dr. Saxberg said. "What you care about is not an intelligence test score, but whether your ability to do an important task has really improved. That's a chain of evidence that would be really great to have. I haven't seen it." Dr. Saxberg, by the way, holds a master's in mathematics from Oxford University, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

 

Still, a new and growing body of scientific evidence indicates that cognitive training can be effective, including that offered by commercial services.

• Oliver W. Hill Jr., a professor of psychology at Virginia State University in Petersburg, recently completed a $1 million study, yet to be published, financed by the National Science Foundation to test the effects of LearningRx.
• He looked at 340 middle-school students who spent two hours a week for a semester using LearningRx exercises in their schools' computer labs and an equal number of students who received no such training.
• Those who played the online games, Dr. Hill found, not only improved significantly on measures of cognitive abilities compared to their peers, but also on Virginia's annual Standards of Learning exam.

He's now conducting a follow-up study of college students in Texas and, he said, sees even stronger gains when the training is offered one on one.

 

Michael Merzenich, who spent years conducting brain plasticity research in animals as a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, started Posit Science to make the results of his research more widely available. "This is medicine," he insisted. "It is driving changes in the brain."

 

The programs offered by Posit, Lumosity and Cogmed are now being used by psychologists not affiliated with the companies to help people with diagnosed cognitive disorders, including traumatic brain injury, A.D.H.D., and the aftereffect of chemotherapy.

• Kristina K. Hardy, a neuropsychologist at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, is testing the use of Cogmed with childhood cancer survivors, whose ability to learn is sometimes significantly reduced after chemotherapy and radiation. Founded by a Swedish neuroscientist, Cogmed was bought in 2010 by Pearson, the largest provider of testing and teaching materials, and is offered via psychologists and other clinical specialists.

"I entered this work with some skepticism that just doing some computer work at home could help anybody," she said. "I thought we wouldn't be able to move the needle on their cognitive abilities. And not everybody has been able to make gains. But I've had some kids who not only reported that they had very big changes in the classroom, but when we bring them back in the laboratory to do neuropsychological testing, we also see great changes. They show increases that would be highly unlikely to happen just by chance."

• Julie Schweitzer, director of the A.D.H.D. Program at the University of California, Davis, published a study in July finding that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who used Cogmed for 25 days were significantly better able to stay on task and to perform on a test of working memory - the ability to not just hold but to juggle items in the mind despite brief distractions.

"We got positive results, but it was a very small study," she said. It involved just 26 children. Even so, she said: "In general, I'm cautiously optimistic about the potential for cognitive training. I'm concerned that some of the studies out there have not had the rigor that ought to be there. But I think the potential is there."

 

At Lumosity's headquarters on the sixth floor of a rehabbed building in downtown San Francisco, bicycles line a wall, the meeting room has foosball, and the intensely focused young employees tap at their computers in a sprawling room without cubicles. It could be mistaken for a satellite office of Google. Except, oh, wait a minute, that guy who won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament five times in a row? He actually quit Google last year to work here.

 

"I looked around for a place that would get me closer to the kinds of games and puzzles I enjoy," said Tyler Hinman, who is now a software developer and game designer at Lumosity. "But where crosswords and Sudoku are intended to be a diversion, the games here give that same kind of reward, only they're designed to improve your brain, your memory, your problem-solving skills."

 

More than 40 games are offered by Lumosity. One, the N-back, is based on a task developed decades ago by psychologists. Created to test working memory, the N-back challenges users to keep track of a continuously updated list and remember which item appeared "n" times ago. Practice on the N-back has been shown in some studies to lead to significant increases in fluid intelligence. Unlike crystallized intelligence, the mental storehouse of knowledge and procedures, fluid intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems, to see patterns and understand complex relationships - to find order in the chaos.

 

Not all the exercises offered by the commercial services carry the scientific pedigree of the N-back. Some offered by LearningRx exude an undeniable whiff of the theatrical, like having trainers shout and clap to help students learn to ignore distractions.

 

Perhaps that reflects the company's origins. Whereas the founders of Posit, Cogmed and Lumosity all have advanced degrees in psychology and neuroscience, the founder of LearningRx obtained his Ph.D. in pediatric optometry.

 

"Largely my focus was on visual training," Dr. Gibson said. Treating children with problems involving focusing or eye movement, he developed an interest in dyslexia and other learning disorders. "I realized I could help those who had eyes crossed, but I wasn't helping very much with their academic performance," he said. "I started reading the literature about training abilities of every skill, not just visual, but auditory and memory and speed of processing."

 

Dr. Gibson is self-taught in the field of psychology; his confidence in his program, he said, comes from the gains students make on I.Q. tests. Trainers and franchise owners must be college graduates but need not have expertise - beyond the training given to them by LearningRx. Ms. Duch and Ms. Maia, the Montclair trainers, have B.A.'s in psychology.

 

"This has been a process since 1986," Dr. Gibson said. "We have so systematized the program that the educational background of the trainers and franchise owners is not an issue. I don't come from the perspective of an academic. We're not part of Duke University or Harvard. We have to get results to justify the fees that we charge and get referrals."

 

Back at the franchise in Upper Montclair, Nathan Veloric is trying to do his "speed numbers" exercise just a bit faster, in 45 seconds rather than 50, still without missing a single pair of numbers that add up to nine. Four times in a row he goes down a list, each time missing just one of the pairs.

 

"O.K., try it again," says Ms. Duch. "I know you're getting tired. Just give me two more tries." And again she starts the timer.

 

~~~~~~~~

 

New York NY/ OPINION: Are Computers Alone Enough to Educate Children?

 

By Nick Clayton

Wall Street Journal

November 1, 2012

 

Illiterate children in remote Ethiopia learned to use apps, play games and even hack the Android operating system on Motorola Xoom tablets when given the devices and no other instructions. They were simply left to get on with it.

• The children, aged between four and eleven years, in two rural villages had never seen printed materials, road signs or even packaging with words on. However within seven months they were using an average of 47 apps.
• One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word "Lion."

The scheme is part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is to help educate the 100 million first-grade-aged children who have no access to school.

 

With the support of many commercial organizations and under the chairmanship of Nicholas Negroponte, chairman emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Media Lab, the non-profit body has been responsible for the distribution of millions of portable computers.

 

The OLPC foundation has also been involved in a number of research projects to see how technology can be used most effectively in children's education. MIT Technology Review reports on an experiment involving children in two rural Ethiopian villages who had reportedly never seen printed materials, road signs or even packaging with words on.

 

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. "I thought the kids would play with the boxes.

• Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch ... powered it up.
• Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day.
• Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and
• within five months, they had hacked Android," Negroponte said.

 "Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android."

 

Elaborating later on Negroponte's hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC's chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC's effort to freeze desktop settings. "The kids had completely customized the desktop-so every kids' tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that," McNierney said. "And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning."

 

This report seems to suggest there has been a breakthrough, except for the teachers who have been left out of the equation. But it comes a week after an article in ReadWrite that pulls together analyses from The Economist and the Inter-American Bank to put the OLPC on its "DeathWatch" list.

 

It also describes laptops being handed without support.

 

According to Jeff Patzer, a former OLPC intern, that's precisely what they did in Peru.

• Hardware degraded faster than expected, and O
• LPC allowed Peru to build its own branch of the system software that was incompatible with patches.
• Interns were not prepared to educate teachers, and
• teachers were not prepared to use the XO to teach students.
•  

"The only thing that happens is the laptops get opened, turned on, kids and teachers get frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don't understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner." Patzer explained.

 

Of course in Peru the children were given laptops and in Ethiopia they received tablets. But it sounds as if there were very different results.

 

Sugata Mitra: Child-driven education

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

 

Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity and peer interest.

 

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html