Alfred Thompson

Where Are The Men (in education)

AlfredTwo — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:45:00 GMT

I'm from an education family. My mother was a teacher and my wife is a teacher. But in my family teaching is not just a women thing. I have a male cousin who is a kindergarten teacher. My son teaches special education students in an elementary school. And while I taught high school for 8 years I also taught in a couple of middle/elementary schools for a year. In one school I was the only adult male in the building. Many of my students had never seen a male teacher before.
So I can relate to this article. The number of male teachers is at a 40 year low. The last time the numbers went up at all there was a draft on and some men entered teaching to escape going to war. No such luck today. Why is this a problem?
In part this is a problem because young boys need role models. With so many children growing up in single parent homes many young men, especially in poor areas where education is most needed and least appreciated, do not have an adult male showing them by example that education is important. To many young men education and learning is "a girl thing."
In an ideal world kids and adults alike would be gender blind. Let me know if you find a world like that.
There article points out some of the problems. Low starting pay is one of course. But there are other systemic problems. We have a society that looks funny at male teachers. Trust me I have seen that first hand. A male teacher has to watch himself every second of the day in ways that women do not.
When a little first grader runs up to a teacher to give them a hug a male teacher knows from day one to look around to make sure someone can see that they are doing nothing improper. While you may want to return the hug your first thought is "how will it look if I touch a child?" It takes a lot of the joy out of the experience.
Now to be sure there have been men (and women too) who have taken advantage of children. But all the data shows that kids are at many times the risk of abuse at home than at school. But, well, no one wants to think about that. Better to beware the stranger.
We need more teachers but especially we need more male teachers. I'm not sure many understand that there is a problem though.

Teaching to Learn

AlfredTwo — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:11:00 GMT

I read a very interesting take on the Teach For America program today. (Article here) Briefly Teach for America recruits some of the top US university graduates and gets them to make a 2 year commitment to teaching in resource poor schools. Most of them do rather well but leave teaching after two years. While some see this as a failure others see the two years not as an attempt to recruit career teachers but to allow these "best and brightest" to learn about education from the inside so that they can and will better support it as they go on to other careers. I see some real merit to this idea.
As someone who have been in industry and been in the classroom one thing I have noticed is that a lot of people in industry have no real idea of how education works. Oh they value it a great deal and they are well aware of the problems with the education's systems output. But they have little understanding of the process itself. That does not stop them for making suggestions of course. This goes in spades for elected officials, most of whom have legal not education backgrounds.
Business people tend to think that all organizations are the same. If one can manage a soft drink company one can manage a computer company. If one can manage a company or a military organization one can manage a school system. Well that isn't as true as people would like to think. It is less true, much less, that one can transfer business knowledge to running a school as a business.
Having more people in business and government who have actually spent time in the front lines of education can only help in the long run. As more and more Teach For America "corp members" move up through government and industry we may well see changes in how they interact with education. This seems like a good thing to me.

Department of Learning Prevention

AlfredTwo — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:05:00 GMT

Earlier today (on my Computer Science Education blog) I reported on a teacher who was seeing some interesting and positive results by letting students use tools (computer software tools) that are often blocked or banned in schools. As the day wore on though I heard about the other side of this coin.

Ben Chun reports in his blog how his attempt to demonstrate how DNS works to translate domain names to IP addresses was foiled by the fact that his students are locked out of the command prompt. This is a pretty typical lock down I have found. Anyone know "a DNS/reverse-DNS lookup utility that is free, doesn’t require administrative privileges to install (and preferably doesn’t need to be installed), and can do both forward and reverse DNS lookups." If so drop by his blog and leave him a comment.

On a related note a friend of mine told me about a school local to him where they are using very old software to teach C++ programming. The tech people are afraid that if they allow students to learn how to program on the modern computers that are attached to the network students will "hack into the OS core and do evil things." Yeah, sure, ok. Can I get their resumes? Thanks!

What has happened that we are so afraid to teach students things that are useful and powerful? Are schools dropping machine shop out of fear that students will make knives and zip guns? Are we dropping baseball out of fear that students will use the bats to beat each other senseless? Are we dropping chemistry for fear that kids will open their own Meth labs?

And yet somehow schools feel the need to place a governor on the learning of technology. I have to wonder - who is the problem? Is it the students who want to learn or is it adults who don't want to learn?

Getting Kids to Think About Their Internet Identity

AlfredTwo — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:44:00 GMT

The job of schools, in my opinion, is to educate and to enable. So I don't like a lot of rules especially when they consist largely of lists of things not to do. Rules all too often prevent thinking. Telling students "don't do" is the opposite of enabling them to actually do things. Unfortunately a lot of what passes for Internet Safety training is all lists of "don't do this." So I struggle with how to do it right.

Yesterday I read a post by Vinnie Vrotny, the Director of Academic Technology at a small private preK-12 school in Winnetka, Illinois, that seems like a huge step in the right direction.

Vinnie struggles with some of the same issues I have and has decided to try a new tactic this year. Explaining the Internet user policy and talking about Internet safety falls in his lap at his school and he is tired of focusing on the negative messages. So he is going to talk to students about how they appear on the Internet.

What will people find when they look up the student in a search engine for example. And he is going to talk about consequences and try to get the students to think about what they are doing. As Vinnie says:

I am hoping that this gets students understand that everything that they do has a consequence. Some are trivial, but others may be more long term and potentially damaging to their reputations and meeting goals that they have set for themselves. I am trying to develop a message that is sticky, that students will hear and remember, and hopefully take seriously.

Explaining things to students and trying to get them to think! Sounds like a great idea to me.

Note: Crossposted from my personal blog at MSN Spaces

The Line Between Play and Learning

AlfredTwo — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:37:00 GMT

At this morning's NECC keynote discussion Elizabeth Streb noted that students who come to her workshops have time to play before the lessons start but that the line between when play ends and learning begins is very often blurred.
Mitchel Resnick at the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten talks about the same thing - for example what kindergarten children learn playing with blocks.
And yet it seems as though all too often we try to suck all the fun and play out of education. We act as if learning only happens when we are serious and that it is almost better if "learning" is painful and boring. And then we wonder why kids just can't wait to get out of school. Am I one of the few who sees a problem here?

Technorati tags: necc, n07s755, education, necc07, necc2007

what goes on in school stays in school

AlfredTwo — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:03:00 GMT

I spent today at EduBloggerCon - a pre-unconference at NECC. At one of the sessions I made that comment that "what goes on in school stays in school”. What I mean by that is that students think that what they learn (or at least what teachers are teaching) doesn't matter outside of school.That may be the reason that so many students object to homework - they don't want to bring school home.

This is part of a bigger problem in that too many students are in school, not to learn, but to pass on to the next level. Elementary school students want to get into middle school, middle school into high school, high school into college and college into work. They don't see the connection between acquaring knowledge in the process. All they see is moving through steps.

The trick is getting students to see that they need the knowledge and that the knowledge matters outside of school.

Technorati Tags: technology education necc07 edubloggercon07 ebc07fs

We are not here to entertain, but to teach

AlfredTwo — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 03:18:00 GMT

The title of this post is a statement I have heard from teachers, in one form or another, more often than I can count. Often times it feels like people say it to justify boring students out of their minds. Not always of course. And just as often those same teachers do use entertaining techniques, projects and tools in their class. It is just that they resist new methods or techniques that are different or that appear to be somehow too entertaining. One almost wonders if some teachers feel "it was hard (or boring) for me to learn it should be hard (or boring) for my students."

I've always found that I learn the most from teachers who love what they teach. I would also have to say that most of the teachers who love their subject and love teaching it are almost by definition entertaining. They communicate their enthusiasm in a way that is, as a side product, entertaining. These are the teachers who have the best (most interesting, most amusing, most relevant) stories to use as examples. These are the teachers who bounce around the room getting kids excited. And most of all these are the teachers who get creative and find ways to make the subject interesting to their students.

Is making the material interesting the same as entertainment? If not I am not sure what the difference is. Of course the priority is teaching. Even if not every student finds the material or the teacher interesting the student still has to learn. At the same time to more students are interested and the more interested they are the more they learn. Is a teaching technique that presents the material in a stale and boring fashion somehow better, more pure that a technique that entertains as it teaches the same material? Please tell me no. Isn't the picking between entertaining and teaching a false dichotomy to some extent? Shouldn't a teacher who loves teaching their subject at least be animated and interesting?

My opinion is that a teacher should be judged on their results. Do their students enjoy learning more? Do more students continue on to advanced classes? Do more sign up for a class and stick with it? Do the students learn as much or more with the more "entertaining" class/course format? If the answer is "yes" then where is the bad in students being a bit "entertained?"

Educational Uses for Microsoft Surface

AlfredTwo — Wed, 30 May 2007 17:10:00 GMT

You know every so often someone writes a simple blog post that when you read it makes you want to hit your head and say "how in the world did I not think of that?" Vicki A Davis did that today in her Cool Cat Teacher blog. No wonder she is one of the most linked to education blogs around. Vicki talks about the educational potential of Microsoft Surface. As Vicki says

The applications here for education are incredible! How about a word wall that changes depending on the class that is in your room. Think about the manipulatives potentials -- use them but NO clean up -- just a little Windex and wipe off the fingerprints!

Think about collaborative work as several students sort objects. Very little children sorting letters or words or images of shapes. Older students organizing individual images to create storyboards. OR maybe taking note cards and placing them in order for a presentation or the outline for a paper. Or perhaps interactively drawing lines to show relationships. Or annotating geometric shapes. Sure you can do some of that with a Tablet PC today but working collaboratively is going to be so much easier with these Surface devices.

I'm thinking that the potential in special education is also going to be interesting. Lots of special education students have either physical or processing differences that make traditional devices difficult. This new tool should allow them to visualize and manipulate things in powerful ways.

While the initial costs are high for educational uses that will change over time and then watch out.

Heaven forbid that Catholic Schools Help the Poor

AlfredTwo — Tue, 29 May 2007 16:11:00 GMT

I found a facinating article on the sucees and struggles of a Catholic high school in Harlem today. Rice High School spends less than half per student as the city's public schools and yet:

A public high school principal who lifts the minority graduation rate above 50 percent will win accolades for his genius. If Rice’s graduation rate ever dipped much beneath 90 percent, the school would consider itself a failure.

Study after study shows that Catholic schools do a better job at educating minorities and the poor and yet somehow people seem happy to see these schools fade by the wayside. Failures to help these schools with any public money are hailed as wins for seperation of church and state. Suggestions that voucher plans might be put into place are rejected as evil attacks on public education. Somehow it is seen as better for minority students to fail in droves than for Catholic (or any other religious) schools be given a fair chance to help with public money. The common good apparently does not include successful programs when public funded failures are available.

Personally I find it hard to understand how using public money to increase the graduation rates of minorities and the poor is a bad thing for society. But then I used to teach at a Catholic school so I must be biased.

Celebrating Smarts

AlfredTwo — Tue, 29 May 2007 01:45:00 GMT

The other week I attended a good sized programming competition at St Joseph's College in Patchogue New York. It was a great event and very well run. There were over 100 high school students in 34 teams representing about 16-18 high schools. I'd love to point you to an online news article about it but guess what? There aren't any. The event "wasn't news worthy" according to all of the news companies who were invited.

Now can you picture a sporting event of that size not being "news worthy?" Of course not. That many kids? Rival high schools in the same town? High tension over if the school that won the previous year could repeat with a new "coach?" Come on as a sporting event that would all be high drama and grist not only for news articles but for columnist musings. You know it would. But that was programming. It was students competing with their minds! Who cares about students who can think? No, we're all about students who can bash a baseball with a bat, toss a ball down field to be whipped into a net by a lacrosse stick, or perhaps tennis balls back and forth until someone missing one.

There are high school and college level programming competitions held all the time. TCEA in Texas runs a huge state-wide programming competition on a scale that matches any state-wide sporting event in the country. I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find out how a local school did in it from the local newspaper, TV or radio news broadcast though.

One of the things the FIRST organization does so well is to bring the sports metaphor into their robotics competition in a way that pretty much demands attention from the media. They create an event that is almost as much a show, good theatre, as it is a true competition. And competition it is - make no mistake about that! They have a great model and it gets some media attention. Still not enough though.

Why is it that the media doesn't care about students competing in "smarts?" Could that be part of the problem with the educational system? That society doesn't appreciate it when it works? A society gets what they reward. Where are the rewards (grades don't count) for the incremental improvements and demonstrations of educational success?

[Note: Cross posted from http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2007/05/29/celebrating-smarts.aspx]

Are smaller schools really the answer?

AlfredTwo — Wed, 09 May 2007 20:23:00 GMT

A couple of posts by Cal Teacher (here, here and here) have gotten me moved me to write about something I have been thinking about for a while - making high schools smaller either by a school within a school model or splitting them up. The Gates Foundation among other groups have been pushing this idea for a while. It sounds good to a lot of people but I'm not so sure about it.

Oh I agree that it many of today's large high schools it is easy to lose students. But small schools are too limited in their options for students. What do you do if there is a poor fit between a student and teacher (it happens) but there is no choice but for that student to have that teacher for a course they need or are interested in? What do you do if a student wants to try something, stretch themselves a bit, but that course is not offered at the school they are at? Transfer? Not always an option.

I went to a very large (over 5000 students) high school a long time ago in a city far far away. But I was never lost even though I was painfully shy and quiet. Why? Because the school had majors or concentrations. I traveled to some key courses (shop, drawing, and science courses tuned to my major) with a smaller cohort. I was at an engineering magnet so we all had shop and drawing classes but they were specific to out major course of studies after our second year. We split up, to some extent but not completely, for other courses like math, English and social studies. So we were a part of the wider school community while maintaining a membership in a smaller community of interest. It worked and worked well.

I think this model could be made to work in schools that are not magnets or special purpose schools as well. Perhaps the focus could be around sports? Or maybe vocational technical programs? Vo-tech students today need and take largely the same math, English and social studies courses other students take. They need to math for example. Perhaps music or performing arts could be a focus. Perhaps, as Cal Teacher suggests, they could be special advisory classes that keep the same students and teacher together for four years. There must be many more ways to build community in a school. The key is to make sure that everyone gets to be a part of a community that knows and values them. Somewhere where as the song goes "everyone knows your name."

Teacher Review Boards

AlfredTwo — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:18:00 GMT

Sometimes, all too often it seems, school administrators and teachers act too much like the children they are supposed to be mentoring. The worst of it is when the rush to judge students harshly. One expects children to jump to conclusions, do inadequate "research" and judge people based on what they want to believe about a person (stereotypes) rather than on their actions. One sees a lot of kids who get into trouble all time because the adults "know" those are the kids who do what ever wrong is done. Likewise one sees other kids get away with things because after all everyone "knows" they are good kids.

I have heard a teacher say things like "they are a B student just give them a B." without any real consideration for the work the student actually did. Likewise I have seem students get detention without any evidence other than that they were in the room when something happened. It's really embarrassing to be part of those situations. Well I found it embarrassing. Others apparently do not.

The worst jumping to conclusions I have heard about recently is the case of Cody Webb who was suspended and jailed for 12 days for making a bomb threat that he didn't make. The principal didn't bother to take the switch to daylight savings time into account and "determined" that Cody's call into an information line was at the same time a bomb threat came into the school. Having determined that Cody was guilty any explanations he made were clearly lies because he was "a criminal."

I wish I was surprised by any of this but I am not. While there are many outstanding administrators who are open-minded, thorough and fair there are always a few who make the rest look bad. I'm not sure what we do about it though. Privacy laws designed to protect children generally prevent independent review of administrative punishments. Appeal is generally limited to going to the school board and boards have a vested interest in protecting their administrators.

I wonder if an independent review board might not be a good idea. Perhaps these boards could be regional in areas where school districts are small. It is unlikely that ever decision or even many decisions would need a review. But for those potentially high profile or very serious incidents and those cases where one student seems to be punished much more than the average these review boards would be useful. I don't actually expect most or even many decisions to be overturned. What I do expect is that an appeal to an independent body would increase the credibility of decisions, increase the perception of fairness, and that students who are truly getting a raw deal would have a reasonable outlet for justice.

What are they teaching teachers?

AlfredTwo — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:17:00 GMT

Chris Higgins has a great post about all the things he is learning during his first year of teaching that they didn't teach him when he was studying to become a teacher. One of the things he doesn't talk about but that I hear a lot about is that teachers are not taught to use technology. They are not taught about how to use it for personal productivity and they are not taught how to use it as a teaching tool.
Oh I am sure there are some education programs that do this (please allow me to believe that) but as far as I can tell those programs/courses are few and far between. I have heard of a few university programs that train professors to use various tools, including technology, to teach at the university level. That's great as far as it goes. But honestly there are a lot of departments who pay little more than lipservice to quality of teaching and put a lot more on quality of research.
For K-12 teachers there is some in-service training going on but the quantity and quality of that training seems to be hit or miss. Given how our students are growing up in a computer and media driven world this seems like a real problem. Schools can't fix it themselves. Schools of education can't fix it themselves either because there has to be local support for new teachers. But you'd think they'd at least include some technology training as a required part of the curriculum. Perhaps if states started requiring a bit more training in technology for certification and accrediting agencies started requiring a demonstration that technology was being used it would help.
But really it has to start somewhere and training new teachers seems like the best way to me.

Keeping Languages Around

AlfredTwo — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:14:00 GMT

I ran into an interesting article today about struggles keeping the Romansch language alive in Switzerland. Romansch is one of the four official languages of that country but the population of native speakers is on a decline. One of the problems is that there are several written dialects and that causes educational problems. For example which dialect do you write your textbook in?
The solution is to standardize the language and in fact that is what is happening. They are standardizing around the version that is built into Microsoft Office. What? Yes, that's right. Microsoft has worked with linguists from Switzerland to incorporate a stardard dialect of Romansch into the spellchecker and dictionary for Office.
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer is the son of a man born and raised in Switzerland and no doubt family tied feed into this process. But what ever the reason it is clear that having computer tools in a language can go a long way towards reductingthe need to move away from a language with a rich cultural history. The article notes that Google has a Romansch translation for their search engine as well. Large companies have the resources to make this kind of support available in their products even though there is not money to be made doing so. Sometimes contributing to the culture in which they operate is just the right thing to do.

Who Should Be Allowed On The School Board

AlfredTwo — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:31:00 GMT

South Carolina is looking at passing a law allowing teachers to be members of the school boards for charter schools where they teach. In some states teachers can be on the boards of schools in other school districts but in general teachers are not allowed to serve on the school boards of districts in which they work.

Those sorts of rules seem obvious because of conflicts of interests but you have to wonder who doesn't have a conflict of interest on a school board? Parents do. People without children in the district do. Who's left?

I've served on a school board (for a private Catholic school) and have seen some of this in action. Parents often look at how policies are going to impact their own children and pocketbooks. I remember one parent who opposed a measure because it would cost him tuition money in the short term but the plan would not be completed in time for his children to take full advantage of it. I've known others (especially involved in public schools were I served on a district budget committee) who looked at everything in a way to minimize their tax bill regardless of educational value. And of course many of us have read/heard about people who get elected to school boards to push a specific religious or philosophic agenda.

As a teacher I sometimes worried about how to handle problems with children of school board members. At a private school with no tenure one could get into trouble if one had a weak administration and a strong school board member who was a parent. But what about none parents with less of a vested interest in the quality of education? Might they not decide that they would be better off finding ways to fire older higher prices teachers even if they have a lot of good experience and replace them with young less expensive teachers? One can always find excuses to fire people. This are of course some reasons that public schools have tenure in the first place.

Do as many people as we'd hope really join school boards because of altruistic motives? Surely many do. I like to think that is why I served on a school board. The question becomes how do you weed out the biased people?

Many school boards of private schools and colleges have boards made up mostly of alumni. These are people with a long term vested interest in the school and a desire to see it continue into the future. Even when these people have children in the school they (in theory at least) have the school's interests at heart and a goal of a long future for the school. You can't limit public school boards to alumni though as it would never pass Constitutional muster. In some communities (especially those with poor schools) you would be seriously limiting the quality and size of the pool of board members.

At some point you have to trust people and judge them on their actions. Perhaps term limits are one potential help although voters who pay attention couldn't hurt. But if we are going to keep teachers off of boards where they work how about keeping parents off as well?

[Link found at the Education Wonks]

Who Cares What Steve Jobs Says About Education?

AlfredTwo — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:11:00 GMT

Steve Jobs was talking about education the other day and it hit the tech blogosphere hard. Among others Don Dodge, Robert Scoble and I all wrote about it. When Scoble linked to my blog traffic and comments soared. Don expressed a little surprise at how interested tech bloggers are in education but clearly it is a hot topic among tech people. Steve Jobs brought the discussion up front and caused a lot of frank talk on the part of tech bloggers.
How about among education bloggers? Well there are about 75 education bloggers in my RSS subscription list and out of that list none of them talked about Jobs' comments. Not a one. Did they just not get the message that Steve Jobs - hero to millions of techies was making comments about education? Or did they just not care because they think he is clueless? I'm not really sure but it is an interesting observation to me.
Techies are talking to techies and educators are talking to educators. There is probably not enough talking between the two groups. In fact I would argue that there is not enough talking between educators and any other group. To be fair there are a lot of "stovepipes" - groups that talk only amongst themselves. But at the same time education is so important this is not something we can really afford.
Like so many things this has to happen on a local level. Schools need to start reaching out to their local communities and starting conversations. They need to let people know they are listening. Of course for some in education listening to the community will be a new thing as that has historically been a problem. It has to start somewhere though. I do think that blogs can help there. I think that online discussion forums can help as well. Dialogue rather than one way information has to be the way things are done. And of course those outside of education have to be willing to listen and understand how things are from the point of view of those in education.
Change is hard and it will take everyone. While it is all well and good for Steve Jobs (and Alfred Thompson) to take shots at education real change comes from dialogue and from action at the local level.

When Text is More Than Letters on Paper

AlfredTwo — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:50:00 GMT

I just found this wonderful video by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Dr. Wesch is creating a Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University "to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction." The video is a fascinating look at what happens when text moves from paper to computer and when tags and tools make it so much more than just words on a page.

We hardly make full use of this power in the computer industry and I don't think we have even begun to scratch the surface of what this means in education. I wonder though if today's generation, growing up in a multi-media, computer generated social environment will make more of it. Or will they find themselves closed in by "we've always done it this way" when they try to become educators themselves. I can hope for different. But how do we tilt the odds in favor of change?

Can tools like Scratch and Alice take story telling to new more interactive heights? Can we go beyond PowerPoint the way PowerPoint goes beyond plastic transparencies and white boards? Can we start teaching kids now to use computational thinking to change the way they teach their peers? There is a lot of potential to take things from the computer lab and place them into daily life and perhaps more importantly into the way we teach everything else. Who is leading the way towards doing that?

Scratching the Programming Itch

AlfredTwo — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 07:11:00 GMT

Friday and Saturday I was at MIT (specifically the famous Media Lab) learning about a programming platform/language for young people. The language is called Scratch and I may have blogged about it before. This weekend was the first time I really got into it in any depth though. Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Research Group. Now is that an interesting project name or what? This is the same group, lead by Mitchel Resnick, who developed the programmable brick that is at the heart of the Lego Mindstorms system. They know about mixing education and fun. I think they really have a great idea about learning though design and doing things rather than sitting passively while someone talks in the front of the room.

Attending the workshop were about a dozen teachers and instructors from schools and after school programs around the US. Microsoft sponsored several of the teacher's travel expenses to the workshop and I was invited along to learn as well. I have to say that I really liked meeting and learning with these educators. These are all people who were willing to give up their time (including a Saturday) and travel across thousands of miles and several timezones to learn about a tool that might be a new way to teach.

The Scratch training team which included Mitch Resnick, his staff and graduate students, were great hosts and great teachers. They had us all developing projects that used the letters that make up our names initially. This turns out to be an interesting way to experiment with the graphic tools, sound tools and of course the programming structures. Several of the teachers in the workshop had very limited programming backgrounds but were still able to easily create interesting projects. I've taught a lot of teacher workshops over the last several years and I have never seen teachers be able to do projects as complicated as these in this short of time. That alone is impressive.

The people in the workshop will be working with high school or middle school students (figure ages 11 through 18) when they return home. I am hoping to hear more about how this software works with their students. I'm also interested in seeing what sort of projects their students develop. Young people have less fear and more creativity than most adults.

Scratch is one of a number of new tools for teaching programming concepts to young people in fun and interesting ways. Even better than that is the potential to use these tools for learning other subjects. Using computers to learn other things rather than just for teaching about computers seems to me the best way to make use of computer technology in the classroom.

[Cross posted from my high school computer science blog]

How long the school day?

AlfredTwo — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:46:00 GMT

Several years ago I was in a meeting at school. It was probably a department chairs meeting but it could have been a faculty meeting - I'm not sure. But the topic of discussion was the length of the school day. Several people wanted to make it longer. More teaching time and perhaps more time between periods so that students would not be out of breath when they arrived at classes after moving the lenght of the building.
No one disagreed that longer days would be a good idea. The point of contention was should the day be made longer by starting earlier or ending later. Seems simple doesn't it? But it is not.
The down side of starting earlier is that high school students don't function very well early in the morning. Some of it is a function of them staying up too late working, playing or doing what ever else young people do. But part of it is that this is just the way teens bodies work. Younger children work better earlier; teens later. You may notice that most school districts start high school earlier in the day than elementary school even though the research pretty much suggests the other way around would be better. It's not about the kids - it's about what is easier for parents.
So if starting earlier is not a good idea educationally what about ending later? Easy right? Well not quite. You see if school ends later it causes all sorts of programs for sports teams, especially those who compete outdoors. We can't have that now can we?
And that dear readers is why the school day is too short.

Why Passion is Important for Teachers

AlfredTwo — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:08:00 GMT

A recent blog post at the NCWIT blog reminded me why it is so very important for students to have teachers who are passionate about what they are teaching. Teachers with passion inspire students. They get students interested and even excited about what they are learning. Passion is what makes students decide to study more.

I observed a teacher for a while who taught both math (which he loved) and computer science (which he was not so enthusiastic about). The difference in the level of success between students in those different courses was amazing. Same teacher. Same brilliant mind. But a different level of enthusiasm meant different levels of results.

Too many high school teachers in CS (but not just in CS) are teaching about things they are not passionate about. Passion can not be faked. The reality is that many teachers are going to be forced to teach things that are outside their core interests. That doesn't mean the course has to be a failure though.

Good teachers will find a way to get more interested in what they are teaching and to make things more interesting for their students. It requires a little more work, a little more imagination, and maybe even a little acting ability. The best teachers make learning interesting, exciting and important. The teachers who do that well deserve our support and most of all our gratitude.

Looking for the top education blogs?

AlfredTwo — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:52:00 GMT

Scott McCleod at the Dangerously Irrelevant blog has a post that shows the Technorati ranking of the 30 top ranked education blogs. And no, none of mine are listed to no ones surprise. :-)
Even more useful then the top 30 list is an Excell spreadsheet that lists those 30 and a good number more including their name, URL and Technorati information. So if you are looking to add some more education related blogs to your blog roll or OPML file head on over and pick up some good links.

Why Education Computer Programs Fail

AlfredTwo — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:28:00 GMT

The other day I mentioned to a friend and former student that I thought we needed to change the way we taught teachers how to teach. Specifically I said that teachers do not leave college understanding how to teach with technology. His reply was that the college he'd attended (a very prestigious school known for its engineering and technology including computer science) had requires students to buy laptops. Unfortunately the laptops had been banned from classrooms because the professors didn't know how to make good use of them for teaching and learning. Ah ha! My point exactly.

The problem with many, perhaps most, laptop programs is that they start with the idea "give students a laptop and miracles will happen." That is in fact my big objection to Nick Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program for the developing world. It makes lots of sense if you are ignorant of how computers work in the real world (i.e. anywhere but MIT). But in fact the numbers of students who figure out some amazing thing on their own is pretty small. Teachers and software are key.

The successful laptop and even computer lap programs start with knowing what software is going to be used, what subject are going to be taught with them and teachers all being trained to use them. There is some really interesting stuff going on at UMass for example in the school of business. The use Conference XP in the classroom and SharePoint Server for handling of data that follows students from one course to another. I've seen it in action and it is amazing. But the people in charge of the program know technology and have thought about how to make it work as a learning tool. You can read about their virtual cross-Atlantic classroom here.

What I mean when I say teachers don't know enough is that they are not using the tools to teach. Presentation software is much more powerful than a white board. Teachers could use a spreadsheet to do a much better job of helping students understand tables, graphs and how to really use and analyze data then they can by having them draw graphs with crayons. Science teachers using probes attached to computers sending data directly into spreadsheets
or other software lets students see more and more accurate data for lab reports. English teachers can do fantastic editing using the commenting and markup features of a tool like Word. Even spellchecking makes it easier for students to find the right spelling of words. I've seen dictionary software that lets a student press a function key to receive a definition of a word they don't know. Getting information easier makes learning easier. Games and simulations can also be a huge help to understanding.

For example at Brown they are using a tool called ChemPad to help chemistry students visualize molecules in 3D. They appear to be having good success helping students who have trouble visualizing on their own and getting those students to have much more success with the course it is used with.

But it all requires trained and motivated teachers with good software and good strategies to use the technology to improve teaching. I think that has to start in schools of education. Then it has to be supported by school districts as part of on-going training. Even teachers need to be taught.

Kentucky program creates online learning plans for all students

AlfredTwo — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:50:00 GMT

Kentucky has a program to help middle school students starting in grade 6 think about their school careers and beyond. One of the things we hear more and more these days is that students in middle school are starting to make career decisions that will impact their high school careers to make college either posssible or impossible. By getting kids to think long term maybe Kentucky will help more of their students make better decisions.
An online program like Kentucky's seems like a good idea to me in part because it is online. The article in eSchool News calls it "MySpace meets Monster" and that sounds about right. Students are already used to sharing information online and that should (in theory) make students more comfortable about using the system. And of course from an administrative/teacher point of view it makes it easier for schools to record, track and use the information to guide students.
This program is not required by the way and parents can see what their kids are up to. In fact I wonder if parents might not be helped the most by this system as they learn what their children aspire to. Some will want to encourage their kids in new directions and others will see that their kids are already aiming high and be supportive. Well we can hope.

The Dirty Secret of American Education

AlfredTwo — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:58:00 GMT

It’s budget season in most American school districts. Actually the budget season is pretty long. For a lot of people it starts in the late fall as they start to think about their wish list for the next school year. Teachers pass things up to department or group heads who pass things from below and for the department on to the principal. The principals pass things on to the superintendent. Special education goes through a similar process as does plant and building maintenance. Quotes are taken from bus companies and if need be there are negotiations over additional busses or routes. All of the needs and wants are passed up the chain. This is the time of year that it starts to become public as the schools prepare to put their budgets to the voters.

In New Hampshire there are elected budget committees who take all of this information and use it to create a budget that will be sent to the voters. The school board is separate but they will put in their opinions as well. People will discuss what is needed; what is wanted; what is required by law; what is required by contracts and on and on.

There are many ways to look at the budget but ultimately the one filter that weighs more than any other is “how much money will the voters approve?” The general opinion is usually that the voters will not pay for all the “I’d like to have” items. Sometimes the opinion is that the voters will not fund anything but what is required. And sometimes even what is required is a tough sell.

Everyone in the system thinks and talks about what they can do better if only they can have x. X may be smaller classes, an after school tutoring program, perhaps books that are less than 20 years old, or any of a thousand other things. But if the voters will not pay for them no one is going to get them. And that is where the problems start.

California is the poster child for this these days though Oregon is in the running for sure. In California they passed a law a number of years ago that limits tax increases for education. I’m sure it seemed wonderful at the time and a lot of people voted for it (obviously since it passed.) But in reality it means that if costs go up faster than the allowed rate of increase a district is in trouble. That is of course what happened.

Perhaps you’ve bought fuel or paid an electric bill in the last few years. Noticed the rate of increase there? Schools have to be heated and cooled and light up. There really isn’t an option there. Kids don’t learn very well when they are shivering in the cold, sweating in the heat or sitting in dark rooms. How about health care costs? They’ve gone up quite a bit as well. Special education costs are also up. There have been increases in the detection and diagnosis of several difficult conditions – Autism being one that has jumped in recent years. The Federal government has laws and regulations in place to make sure those kids get adequate education. They are good laws and rightly protect citizens who need and deserve help. Congress does not send enough money to pay for these programs though so the states and local districts have to find the money. Oh and have you looked at housing prices in California? How would you like to have to buy enough land for a new school building? Oh yeah that would be fun and cheap.

Not surprisingly California schools have lost the high rankings they used to have. Sure it is fun for a lot of people to pick on California but they are not the only example of a state in trouble. I think it would be harder to find a state that is spending all that it should on education. The debates that focus on “how much can we get” rather than “how much do we need” are going on all over the country. The dirty secret of American education is that while people say they want a good education for everyone they don’t really want to put their money where their mouth is.

How do we get good teachers into the classroom?

AlfredTwo — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 17:56:00 GMT

The natural other question is of course how do we get bad teachers out of the classroom? The next question is how do you tell who is a good or a bad teacher. (Did you ever notice that the important issues lead from one question to another and then another and on and on?)
The situation is that we have great teachers, bad teachers and every kind in between and they all pretty much get paid the same amount of money. Why would you work hard, learn new things and bring innovation into your classroom when the teacher who has his students read magazines all class long is going to get paid as well as you? Where is the incentive to improve? How do you keep your energy level high when you know that others are not working much at all.
If you are a principal and you have teachers who hardly know their subject or who are poor communicators how do you get rid of them once they have tenure? How do you motivate good teachers to try new things and improve? Oh sure you can make teachers attend great workshops but that is not the same as getting them to use what they learn. What is the "hammer" or "carrot" you can use?
Tenure is only part of the problem of course. Unions are another problem. Both can be serious obstacles to removing teachers who are not performing. (Admittedly they can also be highly valuable in protecting good teachers from school politics.)

Of course even if you can get rid of a poorly performing teachers how can you recruit good ones? Money is seldom an option. Job satisfaction is one drawing card. The reason that senior and high performing teachers so often wind up at schools in affluent areas is not money. It's also not race. (There are economically depressed areas of all races and they all have a hard time attracting great teachers.) The issue is that students in affluent areas are often better behaved and more motivated than those in economically depressed areas. It's cultural not racial although there are racial/ethnic groups that are highly interested in education and schools in those areas attract great teachers regardless of economic status. A number of magnet schools in poor, under represented minority areas attract great teachers based on an outstanding school culture.

Building a great school culture involves something of a chicken and eggs problem though. One needs great teachers to create a great culture but you cannot often attract those great teachers without a great culture. The reason some charter schools are able to succeed is that they attract teachers who want to help build a culture from scratch. Closing all the existing schools and replacing them with new schools from the ground (in terms of personnel) up is hardly practical though. If one could put great principals, people with vision and the ability to replace teachers, one could (in theory at least) start to replace teachers and rebuild a culture. This would of course involve getting some buy-in from the community. Unless parents support the cultural and behavioral ideas of a school it will likely fail.

There is no easy answer here. Money is one way to attract great (knowledgeable, energetic, good communicators) teachers but that is hard to come by. Getting rid of teachers is difficult because of unions, contracts and the very real need to protect people from arbitrary and capricious principals (who do exist). The focus on public school reform seems to have gotten down in short term solutions that revolve around teaching to specific high stakes tests. The focus around identifying good teachers is focused on paper work and tests that often have little real connection to classroom results.

Changing the rules is difficult. This explains why charter schools and often private schools are able to create and maintain high standards of teaching. Is there a willingness to make big changes in public schools that allows large scale replacement of teachers and rebuilding of culture? Somehow I think not. I wish it were otherwise.