Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.
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The last sentence is important. You don’t have to make super-easy courses to get people passed. Give them enough time and feedback and they will learn your material over time.
(via efficiency)
1. A culture of critical collaboration
2. Interdisciplinary problem solving, every day
3. Tinkering with solutions and reclaiming failure
4. The shared power of the pencil and pixel
This is so true. If we just change these things in our own classes, all the other issues would start to be worked out.
How to Create Your Own Textbook — With or Without Apple
3 Steps and questions to ponder if you’re thinking of getting into creating your own books, with iBooks2 or without! Great resources here!
Google is finally coming around to supporting faculty by gathering resources and lessons with google.com/edu.
Adam Truitt (aka @moutainteacher) recently contacted me with an epublication that I think will be handy for school administrators. 21st Century Walkthrough is a ten page guide to using Google Docs Forms and an iPhone or iPod Touch to record and analyze school or classroom walkthrough data. The guide provides directions with screen images for setting up a form, setting up your iPhone, and analyzing the data collected.
Great free resource over here!
Four great places for vintage photographs.
“Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.
He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said.
(Source: jtotheizzoe)
Mmmmm! This is delightful.
.pdf file with some interesting ideas.
Easy-to-use, media-rich ebook creation app launching today in the Mac App Store!
High School text books at no more than $14.99. Students retain a copy forever on any of their devices. They’re updated like apps (from what I’m reading).
Hmm. If my school had iPads you better believe I’d be creating a textbook for both my classes this summer.
I’m sort of amazed that traditional textbook companies, with decades of a head start in this arena, have been so slow to adopt digital and interactive textbook development. From Ars Technica:
Apple is slated to announce the fruits of its labor on improving the use of technology in education at its special media event on Thursday, January 19. While speculation has so far centered on digital textbooks, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Ars that Apple will announce tools to help create interactive e-books—the “GarageBand for e-books,” so to speak—and expand its current platform to distribute them to iPhone and iPad users.
The fact that today’s science (and all students, really) are still primarily staring at drawings on paper while in school and completely immersive digital environments pretty much all the rest of the time is absurd. If you have stock in tree publishers, I’d sell it today, before Apple’s announcement tomorrow.
Also, digital education revolutionaries, please hire me when I finish my PhD this year.
One Sunday morning, shortly before I was born, President Ronald Reagan stormed into the Oval Office with a copy of The Washington Post. “Can someone please explain to me how we have close to 10% unemployment, yet there are ten pages of job openings in the help wanted section? Jobs problem? There is no jobs problem.” His advisors politely informed him that the issue was that there weren’t enough people with the requisite skills for those open positions.1 Sound familiar?
Highly-skilled, creative, problem solvers have the luxury of deciding which of their suitors they will work with. The rest find themselves struggling to find gainful employment as their jobs hop on boats to places where someone is willing to do the same job for half the compensation. We are at a crossroads. We can bellyache about how the world has passed us by as we sat still in front of our 96-inch plasmas or we can take action and decide how to tackle the tough question: How do we create top-shelf talent and keep our competitive edge?
A New Hope
Last Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new high school focused on teaching students the fundamentals of software engineering, the Academy for Software Engineering. For a skilled software engineer, an entry level salary approaching $100,000 a year is not uncommon and, according to a recent report by Jacques Mattheij, engineers in their late-twenties at Google enjoy compensation packages just shy of a quarter of a million dollars annually.
It is fair, however, to approach this new endeavor with a healthy dose of skepticism. There are a myriad of schools with ambitious names in the Department of Education and, often, the name is just that. I went to a school in New Jersey called High Tech High School. Their pride and joy? Musical theatre. I don’t think employed single teacher who could program their way out of a paper bag.
The Academy for Software Engineering will be different. The initial idea came from Stuyvesant High School computer science teacher, Mike Zamansky, who has championed the importance of software design in the curriculum for over ten years. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures—the fine people who’ve invested in services I rely on regularly, such as Foursquare, Codecademy2, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and Twitter—is providing some of the initial financial capital needed to get the school off the ground as well helping to raise funds from the technology community at-large. In addition, Evan Korth, the faculty liaison for technology entrepreneurship at New York University, will be leading and advisory board, which includes Joel Spolsky of the venerable Fog Creek Software, Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai, and Anil Dash as well as seasoned educators from around the city.
The Academy for Software Design will not skim off the top. Grades, state test scores, and attendance records do not play a role in the admissions process. Instead, students will be admitted based on their passion for programming and technology. As a result, students across the city will have a fair shot in pursuing their interests and benefitting the City of New York by contributing to its pool of highly-skilled, creative engineers. Imagine if more schools in the city revolved around their students’ entusiasm?
This school will change how the game is played.
Significance
How do we prepare middle school students fot the Academy for Software Engineering? How do we reach the small pockets of students in each and every school who have a passion for programming but no opportunities to capitalize on that interest?
The Academy for Software Engineering is exciting in its own right, but—serving just under 500 students once fully operations—it’s only the first step in a larger movement. The school already has a lot of talent and brainpower behind it and, over the next few years, I predict that it’s programs will become a much needed blueprint for schools throughout the city who want to integrate best practices and cutting-edge technology software engineering programs into their curriculum.
Anyone who reads this site regularly can correctly assume that I’m beyond excited to see such an innovative endeavor in my school district and I will be looking to help the Academy for Software Engineering in anyway possible. I strongly encourage you to do the same.
Obviously, the jobs problem is a bit more nuanced than a simple cross-comparison between help wanted ads and the unemployment rate as John Pease and Lee Martin at the University of Maryland at College Park point out. ↩
I’ve already asked you once to sign up for Code Year. Don’t make me ask you again. ↩
We can’t just refresh the library of the twentieth century anymore. There is so much more going on now,” says Bruijnzeels. “We think we need a new kind of public library, a new process for public libraries. We need something completely different. What it is, we don’t know for sure, but let’s have a try.
- Creating the Library of Tomorrow from the Ground Up | MindShift (via infoneer-pulse)
Can These Simple Cartoons Help Redesign Education?
If you’ve ever wondered “What’s Joe’s motivation in life, and this whole Tumblr science blog thing he does?” … this would be a good place to start.
We owe it to ourselves to do more with to unlock the immense potential that currently sits in our classrooms. I’m old and boring, but adolescence is one of the most creative periods in life, we are hard-wired to test our limits during that time in our lives. So why stifle that in regimented, standardized classroom settings? I’m sure we can do better.
Were you bored in school? Guess what, so was Einstein! Does that make you a genius, too? Not likely, but according to a new project called Born to Learn, it does suggest that our educational practices might need a rethink. The project’s main thrust is a series of short, simple animations aimed at raising awareness about how the minds of young humans are “born to learn”—but not necessarily “be taught.”
“Your brain is the planet’s most powerful learning machine. But our current systems of education aren’t doing enough to unlock our true potential. This is what Born to Learn is all about,” the site proclaims. The short films (there are two so far) “sum up over 20 years of rigorous and complex research” culled from history and evolutionary psychology. The main thrust seems to be that a) contrary to what Fight Club says, you are a beautiful and unique snowflake; and b) everything would be better if we taught kids by doing instead of memorizing, and trained them to see connections and “the big picture” rather than isolated pieces of problems with no clear purpose.
“Adolescence is not a problem, it’s an opportunity.”
(via Co.Design)
Prof. Samson has also created LectureTools Inc. an enterprise dedicated to revolutionizing delivery, function and format of integrated learning environments (http://www.lecturetools.com).
In this post he talks about how he uses SplashTop Remote Desktop and his lecture tools to teach using his iPad.
At my school we are teaching students to blog, design apps for mobile devices in groups and creating screen mock-ups. We are teaching students how smart phones, tablets and many more technologies work. We are using students to help teach HTML coding to their peers. This is just a small selection of what we deliver to our students. Schools across the country are doing the same, it just seems to go unrecognised.
- Matt Britland on Michael Gove’s changes to the teaching of ICT in schools. Matt is head of ICT at Kingston Grammar School. He has been teaching for just over six years and taught in both state and independent schools. Follow him on Twitter @mattbritland. (via guardian)
