Six years ago we got a hard time for getting our students to create little snippets of audio for each other and the wider world - using iPods for learning was seen as expensive and gimmicky. "Who has those devices? We couldn't possibly purchase devices for children. They're far too expensive for them to own them any time soon."
Six years on Abdul Chohan was getting the same feedback at his school, the Essa Academy. At the Learning Without Frontiers conference he recounts how he had seen iPod Touches, the next generation of device from our low-fi iPods of 2004, as the key to untapping new learning landscapes for his learners.
With a seamless wifi setup in the school students never lost touch with the web through their mobile devices. Polish students, recently arrived at the school, were able to decipher English-language physics lessons by backing up their learning with the Polish language version of the theme's wikipedia entry.
Above all, teachers could stop judging what students should or could be doing based "on their date of manufacture" (or, as some might add, on their sell-by date). Youngsters were able to extend or support their own learning as they saw fit, when they saw fit.
Students overnight had knowledge at their fingertips (and in their pockets) in text, on the web and in podcasts (boys in particular were amongst those downloading 900 or so GCSE Pods to revise for the examinations).
Edmodo provided a learning social network through which teachers and learners could send messages, manage their learning, set tasks, ask for help.
This film about the Essa Academy iPod Touch project from Newsround sums up more of the impact on the school:
The £40,000 ($80,000) leasing bill for printers will, as a result, be greatly reduced as the amount of paper being used is reduced significantly.
The cost of the devices themselves, even with a refresh rate of 18p/35c per day included, is therefore relatively affordable.
The results? Where, a year or two before, the school had been set for closure by the Government watchdog for having a pass rate never above 30%, examinations results coming in after this mobile investment, at Grades A*-C, were running at 99%.
When we believe that youngsters are capable of anything and, vitally, provide the human and virtual help and support to make that potential a possible, there's nothing that can hold them back.
Dr. William Rankin is an associate professor of English and Director of Educational Innovation at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. He describes an amazing learning tool, a virtual learning environment so successful its engagement levels can be tranched as follows:
And the name of this learning platform?
Mobile allows us to have a lens on the world. Word lens lets you translate cothes tags, menus, any written text on the fly, using your cameraphone, as this video shows:
When teachers ask Karen Cator "when is all this technological change going to happen" she gives a tongue-in-cheek answer: August 2012. From the urgency in the US Education Department technology director's speech at London's Learning Without Frontiers Conference, you can tell she'd like to see it happen a lot quicker.
She compares the hunger of the 150,000 innovators from all over the world who came to CES in Las Vegas to what is going on in educaton. Consumer electronics is a world of massive change: in 2010 there wasn't one tablet on the lips of those innovation-hungry folk, this year there were more than 50 being trialled and talked about. There were 150,000 professional learners getting themselves gen-ed up.
Education, meanwhile, seems to currently lack that scalable innovation that the world of touch electronics and wireless mobile has achieved. Is there a way for us to create more scalable, higher quality learning in schools? Is there a way to instil in every teacher the notion that they are a lifelong learner, with a portfolio of learning and repertoire of their contributions to the learning of the profession? Cator, to put no fine a point on it, wants every teacher in America - and beyond - to a) learn how to teach better, b) share that learning with the world, online, in public, and c) ratchet up the professionalism of teachers by removing the ties that keep their hands behind their back as they try to teach. By this, she means moving teachers to a digital learning environment where educators have every technology and tool they need at their disposal. Mobile phones, the super computers in every child's pocket, she says, must be switched on.
The School of One is one example upon which Cator pulls to show how technology can help us do more than simply tinker with curriculum or assessment:
School of One re-imagines the traditional classroom model. Instead of one teacher and 25-30 students in a classroom, each student participates in multiple instructional modalities, including a combination of teacher-led instruction, one-on-one tutoring, independent learning, and work with virtual tutors.
To organize this type of learning, each student receives a unique daily schedule based on his or her academic strengths and needs. As a result, students within the same school or even the same classroom can receive profoundly different instruction as each student’s schedule is tailored to the skills they need and the ways they best learn. Teachers acquire data about student achievement each day and then adapt their live instructional lessons accordingly.
By leveraging technology to play a more essential role in planning instruction, teachers have more time to focus on doing what they do best - delivering quality instruction and insuring that all students learn.
But in order for this model of learning to scale we need to find ways of harnessing technology - multiplying the investment in people that made School of One possible is not going to work for the many. What needs constructed in order to make learning as engaging as a video game and as effective as a face-to-face tutor? How can feedback loops be improved?
Teachers need to be more widely connected to each other, and to expertise in the field. And they need access to resources just-in-time. We need to ratchet up the teaching profession.
Productivity is more or less guaranteed by activity pitched at the right level, at the right time for each individual student. We cannot expect this competency-based learning, at such an individual level, to succeed unless we have a Mission Critical infrastructure. And that includes the cell phones in every child's and teacher's pocket.
In Long Island administrators are seeking to reduce textbook costs by replacing their purchase of paper with the iPad, reports the New York Times. Perhaps some quick maths with the iPad's oversized calculator would have shown the folly of justifying a luxury personal slate on cost grounds.
Update: This post now generating some conversation on The Huffington Post, too.
At an outlay of $56,250 for 70 iPads with textbook savings coming in at $7,200 a year, the idea is that the purchase pays for itself in just under eight years. By this time, the technology will be out of date and the students will be graduating from University.
Crucially, the applications that are really required to revolutionalise learning have a) yet to be built, b) will be designed by professional learning companies, who will c) charge healthy sums for them. Whose iTunes account on the student iPads will pay for this? A modest $2.99 education app for each of four school terms, for every student in a trial comes to around half the annual textbook costs.
It's not just on dubious cost grounds alone, of course, that the justification is being made. Teachers love the iPad, they say, because it allows them to move learning beyond the four walls of the classroom. Teacher Larry Reiff now publishes all his lessons online.
But this isn't thanks to the iPad.
This is thanks to the internet, and millions of educators already publish their courses online through learning environments or their personal sites. You don't need an iPad per se to do this, you need any device, including the much cheaper and more likely student-owned smartphones that, increasingly every holiday season, we see our youngsters hiding at the bottom of their school bags.
Where the iPad - or any light weight slate such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab - can make a difference is opening up the web to those working in schools who are on the move. Principals, teachers making classroom observations and students out doing fieldwork may find them hitting a spot that laptops (with their slow startup times and clamshell) and smartphones (whose screens are a little to small to permit long-form typing or writing) fail to.
I liked Chris Lehmann's instinct to use his (personal) iPad and a Google Form to provide instant feedback on classroom observations as he does his rounds at Philladelphia's Science Leadership Academy.
I admire the work that Steve Beard and colleagues in Shropshire, England, have done to get students designing their own iOS (the operating system for iPhones and iPads) applications, and then testing them out for real. This is the kind of cross-curricular learning that cannot happen in any other way than through the requisite hardware.
But spending $750 to only harness the free apps limits the use of any device. You need to have significant budget to invest in the high quality learning apps that exist and will exist in the future, and a clear means of getting those funds to students. The iPad is not any old computing device - it's a personal computing device. The most disheartening practice I've seen is a return to the computing lab, something we realised a long time ago is not an effective means to integrate technology into learning:
Pinnacle Peak School in Scottsdale, Ariz., converted an empty classroom into a lab with 36 iPads — named the iMaginarium — that has become the centerpiece of the school because, as the principal put it, “of all the devices out there, the iPad has the most star power with kids.”
You cannot get the most out of an iPad without letting the student own it, and harness their personal accounts, tastes and media for some creative learning. Putting it in a lab like this takes away from the iPads principle boon: it helps us move further away from the office metaphor of learning and into new, personalised, anytime anywhere learning metaphors.
The iPad itself is a great device - I love mine and it's changed the nature of computing on our couch. It is the ultimate in personal computing; it is not, as my wife and I have discovered, very good at being a shareable device despite the efforts of crack designers BERG London to make it a non-personal computer. It has helped me read more in a casual manner (rather than feeling I have to carve out a time, place and tome to 'get some reading done'), and this would be a welcome side-effect in any schooling environment. The collaborative annotation of literature has been eye-opening and allowed me to understand some texts I've read before in a new light.
But educators should not get confused between what the iPad offers and what it represents might offer us. Jump on the personal computing bandwagon pronto, for sure. The educational benefits are there (despite what the NYT might claim) and the iPad is still the most beautiful, most appealing and most app-laden device to try it out with.
Some of those experimentations are about the right size - a few classes or a whole small school filling up their boots with iPads makes sense, provided some sturdy action research is taking place alongside. They should learn from those who've been there already, such as Ian Stuart and the students of Islay High School who've been using Ultra Mobile (personal) computers for the past few years with interesting results.
Above all, they should use the internet (through their iPad or maybe just on a plain old PC) to share what they get up to, the impact it really has and, if it has no impact at all, or if the impact is proving hard to decipher, they should let us know that, too. And we can do that without the New York Times.
Pic from, of course, the New York Times.
Most people seem to acknowledge that while rote learning for standardised tests will help keep countries and cities at the top of the PISA rankings for reading, science and maths, it's not the best formula for happy, fulfilled, creative and entrepreneurial children. But what would happen if we got children to design the standardised tests in the first place?
At The Education Project, Bahrain, I ran a workshop session with Jeff Utecht, Tinkering School's Gever Tulley and Indian edu-entrepreneur Sudhir Ghodke where participants such as Charles Leadbeater, the Bahraini education quality improvement team and Cisco's senior management designed practical solutions to some of their biggest policy and practice headaches.
I can't remember from which group this suggestion came, but finding it once more makes me think that we might indeed have a compelling, design-thinking and student-centred means of making something constructive out of the standardised test:
"Have the students collaborate on designing a standardised test to assess their collaborative learning program. Then they will learn / assess what can / cannot be assessed via standardised tests and collaborative to design an alternative assessment for collaborative learning, metacognition..."
I've sat for just a little bit this afternoon marvelling at the velocity of shared links, blog posts penned, conversations raging on the Twitterverse about all manner of things: the future of education, coding hacks, social media marketing, Google analytics. And I once more leave the iPhone aside with a feeling that either
There are so many people thinking about some great things in great ways, so many giving their local angle, and their world view, so many options to consider, that there must come a point where we stop thinking, stop speaking and take actions.
So that's my 2011 resolution, and one I'm going to enjoy keeping. I'm going to swallow more of my own advice, and that of Dr John Hunter, and not think so hard, just try the experiment.
From Euan a quote that sums up the urgency I feel to abandon the torrential streams flowing on this holiday of holidays:
I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat these words each hour, each day, everyday, until the words become as much a habit as my breathing, and the action which follows becomes as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids. With these words I can condition my mind to perform every action necessary for my success. I will act now. I will repeat these words again and again and again. I will walk where failures fear to walk. I will work when failures seek rest. I will act now for now is all I have. Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor of the lazy. I am not lazy. Tomorrow is the day when the failure will succeed. I am not a failure. I will act now. Success will not wait. If I delay, success will become wed to another and lost to me forever. This is the time. This is the place. I am the person. - Og Mandino
Pic of people really doing stuff, in the Loony Dook, from Gareth Harper.
It made me smile. I hope 2010 has been as good to you as it has been to the McIntosh Family. Best wishes to you all from a freezing Edinburgh, and see you for some more exciting projects, inspiring encounters and new friends in 2011!
A year ago yesterday I started NoTosh Limited, a to-the-point, action-based consultancy for digital media and education arenas, which has proven far more successful than I had hoped. Here's hoping 2011 is just as successful (actually, no, our target is to double revenues with some new stars on our team).
Crucial to this velocity has been the acceptance of overseas clients (thank you all so much!) to take a risk and have us over to inspire, cajole or troubleshoot. Plenty of their stories will appear on a new NoTosh.com site in the New Year. Exporting our skills makes up around 65% of revenue.
But this has also meant a fair level of travel; the last quarter of the working year saw me personally undertake 56 flights, covering the world two and a half times. This year, I've travelled 106,372 miles on Seat 53F (big, modern aircraft), compared to a much more tiring 41,902 miles of Extreme Commuting that I did while working for Channel 4 in 2009 (on seat 23C -smaller aircraft, less efficient, more carbon). The nature of that travel wasn't easy to handle, and noted when I was leaving the company last year. 2008, back when I was doing more educational stuff, saw some 82,000 miles.
A colleague told me that every time you do a transatlantic flip you experience the same radiation as a chest x-ray, so neither I nor my current or future colleagues leave our families and jump on a plane lightly. We do so because we believe in our work, that it will make a difference to thousands of students lives and that this will far outweight the environmental impact we're having.
Not content with that, though, we're announcing a pro bono project in the New Year which will more than make up for our own airmiles (and probably all of yours, too, dear readers). Planting trees with Carbon Credits doesn't solve the problems we're creating today at all - it's going to take 20 years for their impact to be felt. So we're planning something far more here-and-now, that will take the edge of all those miles.
Until the New Year, and notwithstanding a blog post or two inbetween, best wishes for the festive season from a thankfully Edinburgh-based, airline-free Ewan!
Over the past year I've been sharing techniques, ideas, examples and resources that help educators move from a content-based, curriculum-focussed world to one where we pass more control over to students to lead with their passions. Whether it's Gever Tulley's Tinkering School model, the Albany Senior High model of Impact Projects or one of the many examples in my talk at the Global Education Conference, I'm convinced that the only way we can encourage a generation to be more entrepreneurial in their learning habits throughout life is to indulge their passions throughout formal education.
Derek Robertson asked Marc Prensky at the Qatar WISE conference how it can be possible to teach to 30 different passions sat in front of you. Other recordings and transcripts are over on the Consolarium blog:
I thought Marc's response was a good starting point for the discussion, one with which no educator, hand on heart, could disagree:
If you don't know what the passions of those in front of you are then you'll never know how to teach the people in front of you.
If you don’t know what your students passions are then you basically don’t know who is sitting in front of you and that makes teaching at a really deep level, I think difficult. Its never 30 separate passions its typically clusters of passions so one thing that you can do is to put people into clusters
There ought to be times in a day, maybe the days that a substitute teacher comes in when what you say to kids is ‘your job today, is to just learn more about what you are passionate in’ and it may have nothing to do with our curriculum but it is still important because you are going to find it valuable.
...
If every teacher tomorrow or the next school day takes twenty minutes out of the day and says to every student ‘what are you passionate about?’ and writes it down and then thinks about it in the back of their mind how they can use that, education will be much improved overnight.
All too often I get asked at events and roundtable discussions whether I have any evidence for what I'm sharing. The answer is: "Of course, here it is...". When I turn the tables and ask school or university leaders what evidence they have for their decision-making, on the other hand, one is repeatedly reminded that most institutions don't do enough talking with and listening to their constituents. My favourite doubting question after any presentation is: "what about the students who don't own smartphones or laptops?". My response - "have you asked them if they own them?" - is normally met with slightly annoyed silence (and occassionally an excited: "let's do that tomorrow!")
The same goes for passions as for equipment. We cannot spend enough time asking our students what they have, what makes them tick, what they think of their learning and what they need help with.
Tinkering School Laughs picture from Gever Tulley.
Two-and-a-half years ago I joined award-winning ISO Design, as their Commissioner at Channel 4, in developing an creative art, film and photography network, Central Station. It was the hardest sell of my entire time at Channel 4: those who got it, totally got it. Those who didn't, never would. You can read and view a video about Central Station on the site.
18 months in the network has proven über successful, connecting artists from the UK with those in Berlin, the Netherlands, Spain, the US and the Far East. It has continued to reflect a quality mark that most other networks could never claim: its initial members, joining through curiosity and choice, were Turner-prize winners and hotshots of the art world.
Through some incredibly careful planning about how that mix of social network, exclusive-yet-approachable, high quality but not "up itself" vibe could be reached, the team have pulled off an incredible feat, as a browse through the Collections and Portfolios shows. The Community is throbbing.
As part of its first full year in operation, I wrote an essay for a celebratory book, which I've reproduced below:
Star Alliance Art
When I started writing and publishing audio stories on my own blog I was convinced that it would be a great way to connect with people from far-off lands from the comfort of my own proverbial sofa. Half a million airmiles later I realise I couldn't have been more wrong. The growth in our online connections has in the past five years led to only one related phenomenon: in as much as we enjoy connecting virtually to people, art and artefacts, we want to connect as much with the analogue, physical elements we discover online.
For me, the highlight of this analogue-digital playoff in 2010 must be Joanna Basford's Twitter art projects. They've captured our imaginations: send a tweet, the most transient of our digital photons, and a real living artist will transcribe those binaries into a new sort of artistic physical binary of the black and white linear for which she has become so well known. You can see what she's up to - digitally - through the 24 hour welcome. 100 special customers pay top dollar to get hold of the limited edition - analogue - prints before sharing them in all their - digital - beauty on photosharing websites like Flickr.com.
Or maybe this tension between analogue and digital is best expressed through BakerTweet, designed by London-based Poke as a means of getting their local baker to broadcast when the croissants were fresh out the oven. A constructed, physical object with a mobile transmitter stashed inside, BakerTweet represents all that is artisanal and ambiently intimate in this digital age.
As we watch less television and participate more in virtual networks of real acquaintances, friends and Friends (there is a notable difference), we have gained, as journalist and sociologist Clay Shirky puts it, "cognitive surplus". With limitless choice in the virtual world we have more mental bandwidth than we've had since before the birth of television to do with what we please. That would include hanging on the every tweet of a baker's oven, or assisting in the creation of a new artwork by an artist hundreds of miles away.
The digital world lets us find these physical products more easily and we can attempt to experience them through photograph, visualisation, video or audio. But when it comes to the physical, the tangible and the experiential of the physical world, there is still a sense of scarcity, especially if the product is one of a creative or artisanal hand.
Central Station really is the meeting place of these two worlds. Behind almost every pixel is that scarcity of the physical piece. Behind every piece the even more scarce creator and maker. This community has managed to weave these two worlds together, and has managed to do so while both celebrating the real world of art, film and making stuff, and harnessing the best of the slightly transient, virtual world of click here, type there.
We can all be in each other's pockets digitally if we want, but, frankly, when the bread comes out the oven or the artwork receives its final stroke of the pen, we want to feel, meet, eat or see the physical, real, tangible product of their craft. As an artist, that's incredibly reassuring. As a bystander, it's exciting to know that the digital world will only help me get closer to the things I didn't already know I wanted to experience first hand.
Prints, above, from KavanStudio. View their portfolio.
Since getting my iPad this summer I've been frustrated at the lack of apps designed for me to use with my three year old daughter, so I'm delighted that we've managed to launch FunFelt just in time for Christmas. Remember fuzzy felt when you were a kid? This is the 21st Century equivalent for iPad.
Fun Felt has a beautiful user interface, 50 delightful realistic felt shapes, colours and sounds that help you to easily produce the pictures you (or your toddler) want.
You can save your creations to iPhoto and share them via email. You can also save your artwork to the Felt Board library to continue working on it later. The FunFelt letters allow you to start spelling out words.
Don't be surprised, then, this year if your email Christmas card comes in the form of a FunFelt creation!
You can download the app now from the Apple Store.
FunFelt is one more app from the world's first iPad Fund that I kicked off in January with Northern Film & Media, based in Newcastle. It's also the second in a series of 'retro' games that we've brought up to 2010 for the iPad. Check out the first one we launched, Pitch N Toss and Pitch N Toss Lite.
Chris Chatterton, Producer, Fun Felt puts the development this way: “The Fun Felt app has been a labour of love. I have a background in graphic design, so the user experience and the interface were very important to me. Throughout development we tested the app on a focus group made up of children of different ages. This helped us to find out what worked and what didn’t, meaning that the final version has a clean layout and is easy to use. "
