TED talks - my favorites

Alice Goffman: How we're priming some kids for college — and others for prison

Dame Stephanie Shirley - Why ambitious women have flat heads

Anand Giridharadas: A tale of two Americas....

Not as good...
Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model.

Dillard Elementary School

One of the things that I like best about my job (I run an edtech company) is that I feel that I have a front row seat to history. I'm watching and participating in a historic review and shift of the American educational system. Long considered the best in the world, we have been trying to recreate it and it's very interesting.

Last year, I got very involved in helping Dillard, a local elementary school. Basically, it's a school with a tough challenge. With a 100% of their students qualifying for free or reduced lunch, the probability is that it should be an F school just like all the other Broward elementary schools with that demographic.

But Dillard Elementary School, led by Principal Angela Brown, is defying the odds. She's in her third year of leading the school with a determined and innovative approach. Last year, it counted as a C school and if it hadn't been for her 5th graders (who had only been with her for 2 years), she would have had an even better rating. How does she do it?

Well, it's a very interesting story.  Here's a few pictures of what her classrooms look like. Notice how different they are from conventional views of a classroom?

There's a lot more to the story of her approach.  For instance, she believes that the weekly lesson planning for the following week should start with the standards. That's right, she has each group of teachers take the time to have a close reading of the standards that they are supposed to cover the next week.  She doesn't start with curriculm and she doesn't have lead teachers explain the standards to others.

The teachers collaboratively read and try to unpack the standards breaking them into four Depths of Knowledge

She also expects her teachers, after having analyzed the standards, to come up with three new ways to teach them which are essentially kinesthetic and collaborative and which address each of the different levels of Depth of Knowledge.

Oddly, she has been there three years and her staff, who was initially very very resistant to her ideas, has become a big fan. She has had very low turnover. It's a huge school, over 800 elementary students.

As you would expect, Angela Brown won Principal of the Year for Broward County!

Symbaloo in Elementary Education

Symbaloo's popularity is really amazing, it's done great in education. 

Teachers and students in elementary school love it.

They put webmixes on webpages, desktops, and in newsletters.

Here's how it works. You create collections of weblinks which is a webmix. Each weblink is a tile. Once you've created one, others can use it. Or you can use others. Here's a collection by grade level.   Enjoy. And pass them on...

Kindergarten free educational resources
1st Grade free educational resources
2nd Grade free educational resources
3rd grade free educational resources
4th grade free educational resources
5th grade free educational resources
Elementary Science
Vocabulary Spelling Games

Adaptive learning - Am I the Only Skeptic?

I've been working in edtech for over a decade and I have heard vendors talk about personalize learning paths, individualized learning, and adaptive learning for the entire period.

I have services that support millions of K12 students. So far:

- I AM a believer in student paced. Students should be able to proceed through digital content at their own pace.  I am a believer in letting students repeat lessons and exercises when they want to.

- I am NOT a believer in any of the adaptive learning systems that I've seen.

Why?

Here's an anecdote but it's from a major player. They visited us a month ago and were pitching their adaptive learning platform.  At the heart of the pitch, they had a slide up with a student entering an antonym exercise and various paths coming out. It sounded good. He spoke well. He was the senior product director.

I asked: "So what would be an example of an antonym question?" His example was was a standard multiple choice question such as, 'Which of these is the best antonym for "hot"?'   A. Warm, B. Cold C. Cooking  D. Ice.

I asked, and if they get it wrong, where does that take them, what would be an easier question that would scaffold them into that question.  No answer other than, well, this might not be the best example. I was polite and didn't really insist on hearing a good example.

I just watched a video about MetaCog. It belongs to Victory and it provides a much better link between recommendation engines (Knewton, Dreambox, Area9, Declara) and content. Rather than use the simple data of right/wrong and time on task, it gathers much more data by gathering data of how they do things online.

It assumes that interactive learning activities and assessments can be instrumented to get more info on how the student behaved. Then, Metacog's platform aggregates, analyzes, and recommends along with visualization tools for the teacher to understand.

Here's again the weakpoint, what content actually allows such data to be gathered?

I do see the mechanisms behind many adaptive elearning platforms and they all seem to make simplifying assumptions about content such as:

a. Vocabulary can be sequenced, easy to hard. All of it.
b. Grammar can be sequences,    easy to hard. All of it.

More later....

How Do We Teach US History: Myths or History

In Oklahoma, there's a brouhaha over whether the AP US History exam should be banned because it's not respectful enough of US History.

More broadly, there's decades of battles of how we should tell the story of US history in K12. Is it a collection of inspirational stories to make us proud?  Is it a stab at teaching the real complexity of history of our peoples so today's students have a real inkling of how things came to be the way they are?

I'm by coincidence, reading two books that directly relate to this debate. I'll circle back to the references at the end.

Let me start by pointing out that in Russia, the history books are written as a way to justify their current policies and politics. History is an extension of their propaganda policy which is part of the control system used to deceive, confuse, and manipulate the public.

 I'm pleased to live in the USA, land of the free, home of the brave. I am proud of our history but not of all of it.



 As an American, I expect the history books to tell real history, not Russian-style propaganda myths. We are a free country with a proud but blemished history. Lets not further tarnish ourselves by not being frank about what's happened.

The two books that I'm reading:

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev.  It's an amusing book told in the first person by a Brit who worked inside the new Russia.

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen.  This is the second version of an analysis of high school American textbooks and how they tell a version of US history that has to be totally unlearned by students who study history at the college level.  He covers the changes since the first version of his book came out.

Teaching history is part of the crazy culture wars in this country.  Here's one example from the book. Most of us were brought up on cowboy movies which tell one history of the frontier.  

 It doesn't tell say that the frontier was much like the Berlin Wall, meant to keep people from escaping to the freedom of living with the Native Americans. The slaves were trying to escape to freedom. Many free blacks were also trying to escape the racist European society. And, many Europeans wanted to go live with the Native Americans but according to many colonial and then state laws, it was illegal. This is an untold but real history of much of our frontier.

Information Text: Golden Books & Common Core

The Common Core makes a big point that students should become better readers not just of literature but also of informational text. It seems that students, as they look for work, are generally not hired to read stories with plots, themes, characters, foreshadow, and other literary devices.  They are hired to work on non-fictional issues and so they need to be able to read articles about the real world. For instance, in the last week, I've had people read articles about new trends in search engine algorithms, social media marketing platforms, technologies, and markets.

This sort of reading is about informational texts and it's considered to be a very modern idea.  Many of the people who oppose things, like conservatives and high school English teachers, seem to feel that this is a bad change.

I myself was brought up in my early years on Little Golden Books.   This back cover of a Golden Book is the one used on informational text, not a story.  I've tried to find out what percent of hte books were informational versus story and so far, no answer.

I did discover that the Pokey Little Puppy was by far the best selling Golden Book of all time. I remember it well. In fact, I had the record of it and I remember it very well.

Wings & Roots, Baby

Wings and Roots, Baby....

Sometimes I ask my cousin for guidance on parenting. He's a good parent and full of advice. I always thinks about it and rarely follow it.  I do remember asking him once about how much responsibility should I be placing on my teenage daughter.  It had something to do with high school or a high school summer. What I do remember is his answer: "Wings and Roots, Baby."

"Huh?" I said.

He points me towards a famous poem that said that the two most valuable things that a parent can give to their children are wings and roots. Roots of basic values, knowing that they are loved no matter what, that they have people who will do anything for them, and all that a family can give to a child to make them feel grounded and know from whence they come.

Wings is the freedom and aspiration to move beyond their heritage.  To have the courage and vision to know that they are an individual with a life that can be lived in so many ways.  They should be free to soar.

This complements one of my other favorite ideas about parenting. It's the idea that the best gifts a parent can give to children are the ones that they can swim away from a shipwreck with.

Here's the poem.

Wings & Roots, By Denis Waitley

If I had two wishes, I know what they would be

I'd wish for Roots to cling to, and Wings to set me free;

 

Roots of inner values, like rings within a tree;

and Wings of independence to seek my destiny.

 

Roots to hold forever to keep me safe and strong,

To let me know you love me, when I've done something wrong;

 

To show me by example, and helps me learn to choose,

To take those actions every day to win instead of lose.

 

Just be there when I need you, to tell me it's all right,

To face my fear of falling when I test my wings in  flight;

 

Don't make my life too easy, it's better if I try,

And fail and get back up myself, so I can learn to fly.

 

If I had two wishes, and two were all I had,

And they could just be granted, by my Mom and Dad;

 

I wouldn't ask for money or any store-bought things.

The greatest gifts I'd ask for are simply Roots and Wings.