From the Teacher Network Blog on The Guardian:
Twenty years ago our blogger lost one of his pupils on the London Underground and didn’t even report the incident to the child’s mother or his headteacher… fast forward to the present day and it’s a very different story
A little old in Internet-time, but I just got around to reading it, and it’s a fun read with a very insightful conclusion that’s not “OMG look at kids and parents nowadays ughhhh”.
When I first read the title, though, I thought it was “the day I lost a child on YouTube”. THE HORROR
Wired Educator (not Wired/Educator, though, judging from the terrible logo) on the AppleTV instead of a projector (or worse, interactive whiteboard):
Using my iPad and AirPlay, I can wirelessly mirror any content on my iPad to the screen at the front of the room. The real advantage is evident during collaborative activities. Students can use their own iOS devices to connect to the AppleTV to share their work with the rest of the class. I can be anywhere in the room and still run my lesson. I can pull up sound and video clips on my iPad and instantly share them with my class without being attached to any particular location in the room.
There’s so much potential here, especially with AirPlay support for Macs in Mountain Lion. TVs are cheaper and higher-resolution than most projectors, too.
(Aside: the AppleTV has become one of my favourite Apple devices in recent memory. So great.)
An interesting argument: that calculating devices are now ubiquitous, and math should focus on computational problem-solving instead of drilling and memorisation. An example the author cites:
Computer languages allow students to transform ideas into action. Here is a simple rule that a math teacher might describe to her students:
If the number is greater than 9, carry the 10′s place; otherwise add the number to the bottom row.
The solution for this can be expressed as a simple if/else statement:
if (number > 9)
carry += number / 10;
else
bottom += number;
There are, as expected, plenty of opposing views in the comments, but it’s good food for thought. Also noteworthy: the comments aren’t completely stupid. Not-completely-stupid comments! On the Internet! WHAT IS THIS WORLD WE’RE LIVING IN
Interesting piece on protecting teachers from destructive management through data-driven evaluation, with corollaries to how programmers are evaluated:
Bill Gates is making the same crusade he made for developers — protection from the type of overly simplified management incentives that destroy your ability to focus on the tasks at hand when working in a complex, creative profession.
Related: Confessions of a ‘Bad’ Teacher, in today’s New York Times. This teacher, who received an “unsatisfactory” rating wasn’t even evaluated on any automated effectiveness metrics, though, which speaks of how tough a problem this is.
From the blog behind the “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” book:
“[For] the casually interested or schoolchildren with several activities competing for their attention, programming concepts like variables and loops and data types aren’t interesting in themselves. They don’t want to learn how to program just for the sake of programming. They don’t want to learn about algorithm complexity or implicit casting. They want to make Super Mario or Twitter or Angry Birds.”
We’ve actually found that our students are usually quite happy to spend lots of time making silly console-output programs, like printing a pyramid of asterisks. However, the intro programming courses we’ve conducted have been for a fairly self-selected bunch.
The book is available online for free, and it certainly looks like a great instructional resource.
From the New York Times, via The Loop from a while ago:
“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”
As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.
Fascinating look at how they did it: job cuts, larger class sizes, leased MacBook Airs, self-paced learning. Noteworthy, too, that it’s for an entire school district (5000 students… the size of one of our “integrated programme” schools here).
Fraser Speirs provides a great overview of iTunes U, and why he’s excited about it. As previously noted, it’s not quite a complete learning management system –
There are two sides to digital workflow in school. There’s the information distribution and communication side and there’s the submission, grading and feedback side.
It’s important to understand that iTunes U only attacks the first part: information distribution and communication. It is not a test-taking, file submission and grading system. Neither does it track student progress through a course.
(Emphasis mine)
– but it does go a long way in solving teachers’ problems in digitally communicating with students and distributing course materials, neither of which are adequately served by many LMSes. That’s in a uniformly-iOS school environment, of course.
An overview of the new iTunes U Course Manager works. This was news to me (emphasis mine):
The overall course design provides a nice bit of organization for a class, but you’re not going to run everything from within iTunes U. In particular, there’s no feedback from students, so you’re not going to use this for tests or grading. This is a one-way broadcast of information.
I’m not sure why, but I’d previously gotten the impression from Apple’s iTunes U page that it would support student submissions and progress tracking (e.g. seeing what the latest video each student has watched). It seems this isn’t the case at all, and it makes sense if Apple expects most courses to be publicly available (and hence not graded by the instructor), rather than targetted at individual classes.
I’m left more than a little disappointed by this realisation; consider my excitement over iTunes U greatly tempered now. With student tracking functionality, iTunes U could have been a great way for teachers everywhere to conduct their own “flipped classrooms” — it’d be like using Khan Academy’s coaching tools for instructors, but allowing teachers to consolidate their own videos and materials. I suppose the good news, though, is that innovation in this space is only just beginning, and there’s a lot more that will be done. (Anyone who takes this chance to say that “the education industry is ripe for disruption”, though, will be smacked on the head with a ruler.)
January 27, 2012 |
Tags: Programming, Teaching | ♦
On his blog, Kent from Anideo has started writing about transitioning from PHP/Rails programming to developing iOS apps. He writes very candidly and it’s a great read, both for web developers looking to dive into iOS, and for anyone teaching introductory programming.
I say the latter because Kent’s perspectives on compiled languages really surprised me (and, perhaps, other programmers who didn’t start with web programming). In this post, he tells us how, prior to doing iOS development, he had no idea what header and implementation files were. Worse, he couldn’t find much helpful information on the web, even on Stack Overflow.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing — many computer science majors before Kent probably cut their teeth entirely on compiled languages, and transitioning to web programming should have come pretty naturally to these folks. Going the other way, however, could seem very strange, even to a seasoned web programmer like Kent. (This could also explain the paucity of good information on SO, assuming that most contributors there are old and cranky enough to be all “WTF? You don’t know what .h files are?”.)
This trend doesn’t look like it’s going away, what with Codecademy, CS101-class and John Resig at Khan Academy all pushing JavaScript as an introductory language. I can’t really tell what Udacity is teaching first, but their CS101 topic, “Building A Search Engine”, seems to hint it’s probably not C (unless they’re really asking students to build Google from scratch, in which case sign up now!).
What do these developments mean? Probably not much to the field — “native” programming isn’t going away, and many more like Kent will figure their way into it — but for programming education, teachers may need to adjust quite a few assumptions about “what students already know” and “what to teach first”. There could also be a market for web-to-compiled textbooks. Oooh. (Watch as I proceed to fire up iBooks Author, fully aware that I’ll close an empty document in a few days.)