A few days ago, I returned from a trip. Traveling on an actual airplane!
Now, this was no exotic adventure. Simply a relatively short hop to see family in the wilds of southwestern Ohio and attend a wedding.
Tag: experiment
President Obama for a second time converted the White House public rooms into a science fair on Tuesday, and announced new federal and private-sector initiatives to encourage “a nation of tinkerers and dreamers” in so-called STEM education in science, technology, engineering and math.
Very nice.
Except for the fact that the education policies of the Obama administration don’t allow for “tinkering”, and certainly there’s precious little room for dreaming.
For the vast majority of students in this country, the instructional emphasis is on learning to get the right answer on the standardized test. Period.
Not on experimentation and tinkering, trial and failure, playing and reflecting, all of which should be at the core of what we do.
I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this space – and in a few 140-word Twitter rantlets – about the test we’re about to run using the iPod Touch here in the overly-large school district.
For those interested in details, here are a few.
Right after spring break (which is next week around here), we will be giving a set of Touch devices to students in six classes (the teachers already have theirs) in six different schools for the remainder of the year.
While our planning group insists on calling this a “field assessment”, that sounds a little too corporate/military for my taste.
I prefer to call this an experiment. One in which we control for a few variables and then step back and see what happens.
Anyway, the devices will be spread into a variety of classrooms in two high schools (English and Tech Ed), two middle (English and Tech Ed), and two elementary (5th grade and ESL).
We’ll also be providing lots of support including tools to help the teachers and the school tech team manage the devices in a classroom setting.
While syncing one iPod to a computer is a snap, as you might imagine, syncing 25+ of them to one computer is a little more challenging. Plus all the other “what-ifs” that have been tossed around at our planning meetings.
Although some in our planning group would like to have the Touches locked down and cloned the way we do with student laptops, Apple offers no way to do that.
Probably because they designed the Touch to be a very personal communications tool.
However, the most important unknown is what are teachers planning to do with the units in their classes?
That was a major topic during a half-day meeting we held last week with the teachers, principals, and tech teams from the schools involved.
Lots of great ideas were discussed but I’m not sure anyone left knowing how these devices are going to be used. Certainly I expect the kids will surprise us.
Frankly, at this point we have many more questions than answers.
Maybe in eight weeks we will have at least a little better idea of whether and how the iPod Touch and similar handheld communications devices can be used in education. Or not.
In the meantime, as our experiment continues, I’ll offer a few updates and observations around here if you’d like to follow along. And if you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.