Category Archives: Teaching

P.A.C.E. yourself

Hardware, Teaching, Workflow

P.A.C.E. yourself

by Richard White

2013-02-16

Spend any time on survival or disaster blogs—for the record, I don’t—and you’ll stumble upon the PACE acronym, which describes strategies or plans that you might develop for particularly mission-critical plans.

“PACE” stands for your
* Primary Plan
* Alternate Plan (to be implemented when the Primary fails)
* Contingency Plan (to be implemented if Alternate Plan fails)
* Emergency Plan (for serious uh-oh situations)

I used to work at a school that asked teachers to submit an “Emergency Lesson” plan that presumably could be taught by a substitute teacher called in at the last minute to replace you, in the event that one had an unplanned absence. That’s the right idea, and probably sufficient for the purpose.

Let’s look a a technology example though, familiar to anyone who’s ever had to teach in a room with a flaky Internet connection. You’ve a visiting teacher at a school and you’ve got that perfect YouTube video inserted in a presentation, and it’s go time. You head to the site, and… nothing. YouTube has been blocked at the school.

Not to worry. You’re ready, with multiple strategies for showing that video.

1. Primary Plan – Visit YouTube to show video

2. Alternate Plan – Show local copy of video that you downloaded using KeepVid.com

But that file appears to be corrupted… or maybe you can’t find it, or… well, no matter. You go to

3. Contingency Plan – Use a VNC client to connect to your home computer…

… but it turns out the wireless is down, or perhaps the whole school network! You turn to the last option, which in all likelihood is going to be more trouble than its worth, but dammit, this video is critical!

4. Emergency Plan – You pop out your Verizon iPhone and set up tethering on your machine, connecting to YouTube’s servers via a cell connection.

Now what are the odds that you’re going to have that many failures? Pretty low, and let’s face it, any teacher worth his or her stuff really shouldn’t be relying on YouTube *that* heavily for their lesson. But you get the idea. Really important stuff deserves not just a backup plan, but several layers of backup plans.

Another example. Aaron and I were heading to Monterey to give a talk at a conference, and we’d spent a fair amount of time working on our presentation deck. We wanted to leave nothing to chance, so we headed up with:
1. The presentation on one of our laptops.
2. A backup copy of the presentation on the other’s laptop.
3. A USB drive with a copy of the presentation there.
4. A copy of the presentation on each of our servers where we could pull it down if needed.
5. A PDF copy of the slides on another USB drive that we could scroll through on even a borrowed Linux machine in the unlikely event that everything else went down.

We didn’t need any of those backups, thank goodness, but the fact that we knew we had them gave us a certain peace of mind during our travels.

PACE yourself. Because I’m not really interested in your backup plan.

I want to know what happens when your backup plan *fails*. :)

Cheating with Homework Solutions

Distance-learning, MOOC, Teaching

CHEATING WITH HOMEWORK SOLUTIONS
by Richard White
2012-02-01

A funny thing happened on the way to me trying to help my students.

For my AP Physics students, who on any given night are going to be working on some pretty challenging homework problems, I’ve made answers or complete solutions available online for a few years now. It all started when I realized that students when getting stuck (like they do), and finding themselves unable to proceed past a certain point without the assistance of a just-in-time nudge in the right direction. We were spending time the next day in class, too, going over problems that, often as not, were just based on a simple misunderstanding that could have been easily diagnosed by the student him or herself, if only they’d had the solution to see.

The first year I made solutions available, the percentage of students completing homework assignments jumped up, of course. Better, though, was the fact that test scores increased as well, indicating perhaps that the “just-in-time” assistance was having its desired effect, and people were able to make better progress in picking up the material.

This year, with a new text and no solutions that I have any right to publish online, I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing up my own solutions to the homework problems for posting online. It’s time that I’d like to think has the benefits already discussed. Here is my solution for problem #39, an electric field diagram for a positively-charged rod.

instructor_solution_incorrect

It’s a pretty good diagram, with one problem—the rod, as described by the problem in the book, should have a negative charge.

It’s the kind of careless mistake that can happen to anyone once in a while. But what are the odds that 13 of 28 of my students made the exact same mistake that I did? What are the odds that 13 of 28 misread the problem, just as I did?

“Infinitely small” is the correct answer.

What are the odds that most if not all of the 13 simply copied my answer without even looking at the problem in the book?

“Much higher.” Right again.

And here we have the conundrum: how do we make solutions available to students “just in time,” but not “too soon?” How do we create conditions such that a student has to struggle just the right amount for the answer to a problem is revealed?

I’m not sure there is a way, or at least not a good one. I’ve taken online training courses in which the presentation of text was timed so that the reader couldn’t move on to the next topic until some pre-set amount of time had passed, which became an extremely frustrating experience for me (I read pretty quickly, or at least more quickly than whomever set up the time delays).

This question of trying to create conditions for maximal learning are more important than ever with the increased interest in Massive Open Online Courses. These courses, with enrollments in the tens of thousands, rely on students being able to manage their own progress through the content.

As more and more of our learning moves into an online format, I think one of our challenges is to teach students how to resist the temptation to look too quickly at the solution for a problem. There is value in wrestling with a problem for a bit before moving on to seeing the solution, and I’ve experienced firsthand the frustrations of physics students who reveal: “I can understand how YOU solve the problems, Mr. White. I just can’t do them myself.”

And that’s just it: following someone else’s work is not the same as doing the work on one’s own, and at some point, the skill in question—solving physics problems, writing a computer program, writing an essay—has to be developed. Copying down someone else’s answer is obviously not the same as arriving at the answer on one’s own, and my students all know that, and acted appropriately guilty when I called them on their “cheat.” They all clearly knew that they had taken a useless shortcut in blindly copying down the answer.

They’re under the same pressure that we all are, though—they occasionally simply don’t have time to do everything that is required of them. And I can sympathize. I’ve lost track of the times that I’ve been double- or triple-booked for meetings through no fault of my own. But there simply are no shortcuts for this kind of thing. The synapses between our neurons require training and practice for true learning to take place.

“Training and practice.” There are no shortcuts.

“Back of the Book” Answers

Distance-learning, Education reform, Teaching

“Back of the Book” Answers

by Richard White

2012-10-04

Welcome back to the new school year!

One of the very first things I did when I started incorporating technology into my teaching was to put homework answers online for my physics students. I was relatively new to teaching physics, and what I learned pretty quickly was that my students, in attempting to solve a problem that could involve understanding how to apply multiple problem-solving steps in sequence, often found themselves getting stuck by one concept that they found especially challenging. Whether that one difficult concept occured at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the problem, they didn’t have the chance to work on anything else in the problem that occurred after that–they were stuck and couldn’t move on.

For simple problems, having access to the correct answer for an odd-numbered problem in the back of the book sometimes gave them enough of a clue that they could work their way backwards from that answer, and realize where they had made a mistake. But for more complex problems, they were dead in the water without a bit more in the way of hints on which direction they should proceed.

College textbook authors are aware of this problem, and most college-level chemistry and physics texts now offer some form of Student Solutions Manual that students can purchase (at considerable expense) for just such help. These student manuals usually cover some subset of all the problems in a textbook. Complete solutions manuals to these texts are also sometimes available, usually only to professors, and these are accompanied by dire warnings about the possible unintended consequences of sharing the contents with the young’uns.

This whole concept of gatekeeping information, or parsing it out to students on a “need to know” basis, runs completely counter to the idea of life-long learning, fostering self-guided discovery, and the current revolution in online learning.

Will Richardson, an educational reformer, famously supported his daughter learning how to play a Journey song on the piano by following a tutorial on the Internet, even when her piano teacher objected, saying that she wasn’t advanced enough to learn the song. I applaud Will’s sensibilities on most things, but even he occasionally gets it wrong, as when he posted this tweet on September 6.

It *is* good to see all of Tucker’s homework answer posted online. This information regarding the question of whether or not he’s making the progress he needs to make is just-in-time feedback that Tucker can use to step over the stumbling blocks that would otherwise require that he try to ask the question during class, or go to school early to talk to the teacher, or stay late after school. Why make him wait? Why hold his progress in completing homework hostage?

The obvious concern is that many students–perhaps even good students–may fall into the habit of taking the easy way out. If the solutions are posted, then students may be tempted to simply copy them, which is a double whammy against him or her: not only are they getting credit for work that they haven’t done (and getting reinforcement for cheating in the process), they’ve managed to temporarily avoid acquiring the very skills that those homework problems were meant to foster.

These are the perils of always-on access to information, and I’m afraid the obvious benefits come with some risks, and managing those risks becomes part of what we need to teach our children.

Perhaps part of teaching children to be lifelong learners is teaching them not only WHAT to learn–readin’, writin’, ‘rithmetic, social skills, expository writing, critical thinking, etc.–but HOW to learn. That necessarily requires presenting them with content, and with strategies on how to access that content and use it best to their advantage.

It will be up to Will (and his son Tucker) to find a way to best manage learning in the new world, and that process will almost certainly involve a few potholes along the road. In the meantime, however, Mr. Richardson is far brighter and forward thinking than this one errant tweet might lead one to believe. I encourage you to read his blog.

Bringing things back around to my own classroom, my AP Physics classes are using a new text this year, and those homework problems aren’t easy. A significant part of my prep time for class is now devoted to writing up solutions to the homework problems that I’ve assigned, and making those available to my students online where they have access to them. The reality of the situation is that I’m going to have to go over those problems with them at some point, perhaps writing out the solutions in class (wasting additional face time with them, after they’ve wasted time struggling with the problems at home), or writing the solutions out in advance so that they can get the help they need when they need it, and not later.

It’s a good thing that I enjoy solving physics problems, because I’ve got a couple of hundred of them that I’m doing this year…!

Back to School Route Map

Teaching, Workflow

BACK TO SCHOOL ROUTE MAP
2012-08-21
by Richard White

It’s August, and most of the teachers I know are easing out of the summer vacation and into getting ready for the new school year. If you haven’t busted out your planner (or perhaps you’re using a spreadsheet, or a Google calendar, for your planning?), you’d better get on it. Labor Day is just around the corner!

There’s a whole lot of insanity that happens during the school year, and it seems like we’re often living day-to-day, with the grading, and the writing emails to parents, and the meetings. Often, there just doesn’t seem to be time to step back and take a look at the Big Picture of the school year. There’s a lot to be said for bringing a scrappy, seat-of-your-pants renegade enthusiasm to your work—Middle School teachers practically thrive under those conditions, God bless ’em—but it’s valuable to be able to maintain some sort of overview of things, even in the midst of the trauma of daily life.

Have you considered a route map?

I had the good fortune to do a 3-day rockclimb up the sheer face of Washington Column, a “big wall” that faces Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. This is one of those climbs that you hear about on National Geographic Explorer, with the loads of gear, and the sleeping on hammocks, and cracked lips and blistered fingers. A former student of mine led me up “The Prow,” and it was awesome.

We had a route map for the climb, a copy for each of us, laminated and clipped to our harnesses where we could access it at a moment’s notice. It wasn’t a step-by-step guide or anything. We had 1100 feet of vertical climbing to do, and there was no way the little map could give us enough information—we ascended the rock with shoes and handjams, ropes and camming units—but as a small-scale guide to significant features, landmarks, and ledges, it was invaluable.

Many textbooks provide students with a route map for their course of study. Chapters and sections are where the work gets done, but we all agree that an overview of the year gives students a valuable context into which they can place their learning.

In the same way, having a route map for your school year is a great way to maintain an overview of where you are and where you’re going this school year. A piece of paper with some goals or deadlines or milestones is a nice way of keeping your perspective, even as the day-to-day grind grabs most of your attention.

It doesn’t even have to be a separate document, although that can be a nice way of keeping the route map from getting lost. You can mark milestones on a daily calendar if you like, although again, those items risk getting lost in the large-scale of a daily schedule. Some people use Project Planning software, although that seems to involve levels of infrastructure that fall far beyond the needs of most classroom teachers I know.

Some of the items I include on my own School Year Route Map:
* August – Order lab materials for new school year.
* August – Get course website up and running one week before school starts.
* September – Welcome email to all students and parents, with online grade info
* September – Photos and assignments ready for Back-to-School night.
* November – Write comments for First Quarter grades.
* December – Create/post first semester Extra Credit assignment.
* January – Materials prepped for second semester elective
* January – All grades completed ahead of semester end
* January – Server available for second semester programming class?
* January – Classroom workstations available for second semester programming class.
* January – Meet w/ school director to coordinate second semester field trip

Again, it’s not like any of these are a surprise to me when I sit down to think about it. But the route map keeps me oriented, and reminds me that I need to take care of these items—they will all, at some point or another, find their way onto my daily schedule.

Best wishes for the coming school year!

Bee Venom & Training Devices

Education reform, Teaching

Bee Venom & Training Devices
2012-08-18
by Richard White

I’m allergic to bee venom.

It wasn’t always that way. Growing up, I got stung by my share of bees, and hornets, and yellowjackets. I recall one particular time when I was riding down the road on my motorcycle when I happened to catch a bee in the neck of my t-shirt, and a sudden sharp sting on my back. I pulled over at a rest area, went in to the bathroom, and took off my shirt to see in the mirror the bee’s barb, and the little venom sac dangling at the end of it. I’d been stung, but it wasn’t more than a slight, painful swelling.

I’m not sure when I developed an allergy–I’m told that repeated exposures to venom can precipitate this–but when a bee sting, over the course of a couple of hours, turned my hand into a big round softball, I knew something had happened. I walked away from the emergency room with a shot of antihistamine and a prescription for an epi-pen, which one can use to administer a quick dose of epinephrine in the event of a sting.

Cool.

You have to get a new epi-pen every couple of years. This last time there was an extra pen in the pack, which turned out NOT be a “limited time, two-for-one” offer, but rather a “training device.”

This thing is amazing. It looks just like a real epi-pen, from the shape and coloring to the little blue cap you have to pull off before jamming the thing into your thigh. Now I’ve actually used an epi-pen before, and it’s not hard to do, but it’s true, there’s a little bit of trepidation going in the first time you try it. Part of it’s the idea of a needle going in to your body—”that’s not going to be fun,” you think—but a good part of is more of a general anxiety: “Am I doing this right?” How hard should you swing the pen so that it works right? I mean, I saw Pulp Fiction, and everybody knows you have to swing pretty hard to pierce that area over the heart, right?

So this training device is a little bit of genius. It gives you a way to practice administering the injection in a non-threatening context, and lets you get used to the idea of this thing that otherwise might be kind of scary. That’s awesome.

You probably already know where we’re going with this, right? Just as the Training Device acts as a model for that Authentic Assessment that shows up in the form of a bee sting, it’s important for us to provide Training and Models for our students.

In particular, technology-based delivery of materials can be of enormous benefit to kids who are desperately trying to figure out just exactly what it is that we’re asking of them.

Whether its a rubric that lets kids know how they’re going to be evaluated, or a practice test [PDF download] that gives them an idea of the format of questions, examples of acceptable work from previous students, or a quiz that gives them a low-grade stress situation that they need to manage, Practice Makes Perfect. It’s our job as teachers to provide students with opportunities to practice, as well as giving them ridiculously clear instructions on what our expectations are for an assignment.

Otherwise, how are they to know?

How to Flip Your Classroom

Distance-learning, Education reform, Teaching, Uncategorized, Workflow

HOW TO FLIP YOUR CLASSROOM

2012-06-30

by Richard White

Flipping a classroom consists of off-loading (usually to the Internet) some of the non-interactive aspects of one’s classroom, in favor of using time in-class for activities that take advantage of the teacher’s immediate presence.

Perhaps the most obvious example might be this:

At school At home
Standard classroom Student listens to teacher introduce new math topic Student goes home and tries to do homework, often unsuccessfully and without the opportunity to get questions answered in a timely manner.
At home At school
Flipped classroom Student watches brief video explanation of new topic online, or reads new material to be discussed in class the next day. Student works on “homework” problems, with teacher answering questions or providing clarifying follow-up as necessary.

Pretty straightforward, right? It’s a good idea, and there’s lots to recommend it. In fact, you may already be implementing some aspects of the flipped model, even if nobody has ever referred to it by that name before. Some teachers give students time in class to read a chapter in novel, and then discuss it in the remaining class time. Others choose to assign the reading as homework, leaving more time in class for re-reading passages, interpreting what the author has written, or general discussion.

If you’ve done something like this, congratulations—you’re officially part of the most recent trend in education, and you should feel free to strut around saying things like, “‘Inverted learning?’ Honey, I’ve been flipping my class for years…”

If you haven’t tried this yet, or you’re just looking for a few ideas on how to get started trying this out, let’s take a look at the stops involved in doing such a thing. And then read below for some specific bits of advice regarding the process of converting to a flipped classroom.

Things to think about:

Start with a single day, or a single week, or a single unit.

You don’t need to reorganize your entire semester to begin trying out a flipped model. A day or two will give you a chance to see what the benefits and challenges are, and give you some good ideas on how to go about designing a flipped model on a larger scale.

Be patient with the students.

It may take them a little time to adjust to this at first. Under the traditional model, it’s easy for a teacher to ascertain whether a student has turned in a homework assignment, and easy for students to recognize something tangible like the piece of paper with their writing on it. A flipped instruction model is going to ask them do something rather than make something—watch a video, read this section, interview their parents about something—and this is a little different from what they ordinarily do for homework.

What can you flip in your class?

We all teach different subjects, in different ways, so it’s a uniquely personal challenge, figuring out what you can try flipping in your own class.

Here are some ideas to get you started, following the same format listed above.

The French Revolution

At school At home
Standard classroom Teacher lectures on the the origins of the French Revolution Student goes home and does a worksheet or write answers to problems from a textbook.
At home At school
Flipped classroom Student at home watches a Khan Academy introduction to the French Revolution, and is asked to take notes on that presentation. Student comes in to class with notes prepared for a discussion. Students are asked to take additional notes as the discussion proceeds, and teacher collects notes at the end of class for evaluation.

Adding Fractions

At school At home
Standard classroom Teacher presents the idea of adding fractions with different denominators, and does an example. Student goes home and does homework problems from his or her textbook.
At home At school
Flipped classroom Student at home watches a YouTube video on adding fractions, and is asked to do attempt two different practice problems at home. Student comes in to class with practice problems completed (or not), and instructor gives an additional 15 problems of varying degrees of difficulty to reinforce the skill.

You get the idea.

Think about assessment.

When students walk into class the next morning, how are you going to know whether or not the students have done their flipped-style homework from the night before? A warm-up activity? A quiz? A discussion in which each student is monitored for participation? My own students tend to try to get away with doing less rather than more, so you’ll need to identify a means for checking that they’re doing their new homework.

Allow for varying access to technology.

If students don’t have some sort of comparable access to technology, you’ll need to develop strategies for managing those differences. If a video lesson is being watched online, a teacher might send home a DVD that the student can watch at home. At-school access to the video, in the library perhaps, can be arranged for during other times of the school day. These factors can complicate your efforts to flip the classroom, but it’s important that all students be accommodated in one way or another.

Create your own resources.

Ultimately, there will come a point at which you’ll find that what you need your students to see doesn’t yet exist, or maybe you’ll be inspired to develop something unique and personalized for them. Creating and uploading videos to YouTube is a relatively easy thing to do with the webcam that’s probably already included in your laptop computer. If you want a higher production value, or you want to capture your computer screen while showing a PowerPoint presentation, you’ll almost certainly have to buy some software that will allow you to experiment with that process. TechSmith’s Camtasia for both PC and Mac, and Telestream’s Screenflow for the Mac, are currently popular and powerful screen capture utilities. If you run Linux, you can do a $ sudo apt-get install xvidcap to install XVidCap, a live screen capture utility that’s very good, but lacks some of the high-end editing capabilities built into Camtasia and Screenflow.

Make your materials available on a website.

Google’s YouTube is a powerful means of delivering videos, but it can be a distracting place to send a student for flipped homework assignments. At some point you’ll almost certainly want to create a webpage or website that will give students a one-stop shop for finding materials used in your course. Your school may offer the means of putting up a course webpage, but if not, you can certainly create your own. The quickest, easiest, and certainly cheapest way to do this is to use Google’s Sites feature, available with any Google account. Once you’ve got your page set up, you can use it to easily deliver flipped assignments to your students.

When you look at all of that up there, it seems like it’s a lot of work, but you certainly don’t have to jump into this all at once. Begin at the beginning, and move forward as your time and teaching assignment allow.

For more resources on Flipped Classrooms, see:

Notes On the Flipped Classroom

Distance-learning, Education reform, Google, Teaching, Uncategorized, ,

NOTES ON THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM

by Richard White

2012-06-27

Okay, the singularity has arrived. My friend Sharon, an outstanding English teacher who has remained, to this point, a very traditional and non-technology-based instructor, just texted me from an ed conference she’s at, and she wants to try out this whole “flipped classroom” thing.

She wants to know how to go about doing that.

Let’s take care of some terminology first.

What’s a ‘hybrid classroom?’

A “hybrid classroom” or “blended classroom” (the terms are synonymous) is one in which, in addition to meeting in a physical classroom on a regular basis, some significant amount of the work for a course is conducted, or at least available, online.

This is typically something more than just a single online assignment. A course in which students regularly work online—perhaps via a discussion board, a wiki, or blogging—or a where content is delivered online, or assignments submitted online… these are all aspects of a hybrid course. (It should be noted that historically, non-online activities might be part of a blended course as well, but today, nearly all references to hybrid courses refer to Internet-mediated work.)

Traditional Activity Online Equivalent
Watching/listening to a classroom lecture from the teacher. Watching/listening to the teacher in a pre-recorded podcast or video.
Participating in a classroom discussion Reading an online Discussion Board and contributing one’s own ideas to a topic of conversation
Asking the teacher or other students for clarification, or help on an assignment Emailing, texting, online chatting, or videoconferencing with the teacher or classmates
Taking a quiz in class Taking an online quiz (via Google Forms, for example)
Writing an essay on paper Writing an essay on Google docs
Turning in papers in class. Turning in papers via email, Dropbox, or by sharing the document with the teacher
Collaborative projects in class Online collaborations via shared documents
Classroom presentations to students Online presentations—websites, wikis, videos—to the world

You can read about people’s experiences with, and the ideas behind, hybrid or blended learning here, and here, and here.

What’s a ‘flipped classroom,’ then?

A flipped classroom is simply a type of hybrid classroom in which activities traditionally conducted in class are shifted to an out-of-class time, allowing for valuable face-to-face class time to be used for other work.

Most commonly, this currently consists of teachers recording short videos of material that would have been presented in class, so that students can watch that presentation at home. The idea, then, is that students can do their “homework”—working on problems, asking questions of the teacher—in class, where the teacher is available to assist.

Why Would I Want to Consider Changing What I Do?

There are lots of reasons why you might want (or might not want) to change the way you look at how you teach. There’s no question that students find technology-mediated experiences more interesting, and teachers interested in exploring new possibilities tend to be enthusiastic about these ideas, which has a positive effect on their teaching.

Many teachers, and I count myself among them, also feel that we should not only be teaching content, but process; having students learning to use technology is critical to preparing them for their future.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, teachers who have shifted to a flipped classroom model feel that that model actually allows them to make better use of the time they have with their students. Why have students work on their homework at home where the teacher is unavailable to answer any questions they might have? Why have students sit in class listening to a presentation when they can just as easily do that at home, on the computer?

What are the Challenges Associated with Hybrid Classrooms and Flipped Learning?

  1. Time
    It takes time to make these changes. Teachers will have to spend time reorganizing their courses, recording video for flipped classrooms, developing and maintaining the website, communicating new processes and expectations with students and parents…

    This isn’t meant to dissuade you from taking on the process, but for teachers who already occasionally feel overworked, it’s important to acknowledge this at the start. A good strategy is to make small, incremental changes, rather than trying to re-do your entire course at one time. See the follow-up post on one strategy that you can use.

  2. Student Access to Technology
    It may well be the case that not all of your students have access to a computer connected to the Internet, which is obviously going to have an effect on how a teacher or a school chooses to approach these strategies. Some schools already require technology experiences for students via a 1-to-1 or Bring Your Own Device program, some provide financial or hardware support for students-in-need, some teachers will provide non-technology-based alternatives, and some teachers/schools will restrict new learning strategies unless every student can be provided with the same experience.
  3. Not Enough Research Yet on Learning Improvements
    If you’re an evidence-based guy or gal (as I am), and you’re looking for data that suggests all of this improves learning or test scores, I’m afraid that the jury is still out on that.

    From the U.S. Department of Education’s Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-analysis and review of online learning studies:

    …Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education).

    This doesn’t mean that a flipped classroom isn’t worthy of exploration. On the contrary, interested and enthusiastic teachers are encouraged to consider new ways of looking at how they teach, and implementing new instructional strategies that they feel might be of benefit to their students.

Okay. So how do I get started?

If it turns out that you’re interested in taking some steps towards making your course more hybrid, and in particular you’d like to play around with the idea of flipping your class a bit, the next post will give you one possible path.

See you then!

Celebrity Smackdown: iPad vs. Laptop

Apple, Computers, Hardware, Teaching

Celebrity Smackdown: iPad vs. Laptop

2012-05-29

by Richard White

It’s a simple question, really. You’re a forward-thinking guy or gal, and you’re thinking about updating the hardware at your school, or perhaps even getting into a 1-to-1 program, or a Bring Your Down Device agreement with your student body.

What do you do: go with iPads, or laptops?

Before we break this down, let me give you my qualifications, in case you were worried. I have a tendency to favor Apple-based solutions for many situations, both for the high-build quality of their hardware and the relative stability, reliability, and ease-of-use of their software. I have a MacBook Pro that I run OS X on, although I’ve also run Windows 7 on that machine as well. I have a PC desktop at home running Ubuntu, and a Lenovo netbook (x100e, no CD/DVD drive) that I run Windows 7 and Ubuntu on. My cellphone is an iPhone 4, and I waited in line for the original iPad, and purchased the “iPad 3” when it came out.

Another point of reference: I work at a school that officially supports both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X machines. That same school currently uses classroom carts of machines–PCs, Macs, and iPads–to give students access to computers on an as-needed basis.

I’ve been accused of being an Apple fan-boy, and am somewhat guilty as charged. But what about this iPad vs. laptops showdown? If you only had one device to buy, which would it be?

  iPad laptop/netbook
Time to wake from sleep ~ 1 second 3-10 seconds
Battery life ~ 10 hours 1 – 4 hours
Availability of applications Many, most modified to run on the iPad. Available only through iTunes. Many, with availability of certain titles dependent on operating system
Interface usability Touch interface, not suitable for extended typing. External keyboards available. Keyboard and trackpad, with usability dependent on keyboard size, manufacturer.
File management No access to file system. Apps may have some ability to share files, but third-party solutions (Dropbox, Air Sharing, etc.) necessary to move files around. Organizing and moving files done with operating system.
Cost Base model: $499 Varies depending on manufacturer, model. (Lenovo G570, 15.6″ screen, i5 processor, 8G RAM, 750G HDD, Windows 7 Home Premium = $569 sale price)
Security Applications heavily policed by Apple, Inc and sandboxed. No user access to filesystem. OS X relatively safe, Windows typically requires running anti-virus software.
Strengths Near instantaneous wake from sleep and outstanding battery life. Listening to music, surfing the Internet, reading PDFs, are all dead easy straight out of the box. Does everything, conforms to current paradigm of computing. Easily customizable. Runs Flash and Java applications.
Weaknesses No “real” keyboard. Programs limited in availability (Microsoft Office suite not currently available) or function (Photoshop Touch doesn’t have full feature set). Doesn’t allow access to file system. Can’t display Flash files or run Java applications. Relatively limited battery life. Use requires knowing how to navigate the operating system, manage files.

Does that clear things up? At my school, for some teachers the iPads have literally transformed the way they conduct their classes, with students reading course handouts on them, writing papers on them, uploading them to the instructor via Dropbox, and the instructor annotating their work and returning it to them via email.

For other teachers, the iPad is a non-starter. The Physics classes are unable to run Java-based animations, and the programming class is unable to launch a Terminal or write Python programs.

My recommendation for teachers is that use cases be examined very carefully. For all the talk of a “post-PC world” with “cloud-based storage,” we’re not there yet. As an educator who, in addition to teaching subject-area content is also helping students master the technological tools that they’ll use in college and in business, I strongly feel that there’s so much more to technology than pointing and tapping. Students who are unable to right-click, or “Save As…”, or create a new folder for organizing their files, haven’t been well served.

iPads satisfy some needs for some teachers, it’s clear, and may be part of the educational technology equation for some schools. For an institution with limited resources, however, money will be better spent on laptops. And for schools considering a “one device to one child” program, committing to the iPad–the device du jour–is, in my opinion, short-sighted.

Udacity

Distance-learning, Education reform, MOOC, Teaching

Late night provisions for Computer Science homework session at Udacity

UDACITY

by Richard White

2012-04-03

Today I finished the first online course that I’ve ever taken, thanks to my professor David Evans and Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun… and the experience has changed my life.

If you haven’t heard about Udacity you might consider a) going to udacity.com to wander about the website, or b) reading the excellent writeup in Wired magazine. But the upshot of it all is this: education is never going to be the same.

MIT’s OpenCourseWare offerings were a fine way to get the online education experience started—who can argue with access to top-notch professors at a world-class university? And Sal Khan’s Khan Academy offers increased granularity in bite-sized chunks at the secondary school level.

What makes Udacity so amazing, though, is the platform that they’ve developed to deliver and manage true online learning. Thrun identified nine components that he considered essential for education at the university level:

  • admissions
  • lectures
  • peer interaction
  • professor interaction
  • problem-solving
  • assignments
  • exams
  • deadlines
  • certification

While Udacity hasn’t completely solved every one of these problems yet, it is well on its way. I greatly enjoyed taking the inaugural CS101 Intro to Computer Science course, a seven-week curriculum that used the context of “building a search engine” as a vehicle for presenting core computer science concepts.

I’ll admit right now that I was well-acquainted with the subject matter—I teach an Intro to Computer Science course myself—but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t find most of the assignments entertaining, and some of them quite challenging.

If you haven’t had a chance to try out an online course yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. Both Udacity and Coursera have plenty of fine offerings in a wide variety of fields.

It’ll change the way you look at education.

It’s All About the Process

Teaching

It’s All About the Process

2011-11-29

by Richard White


Back in the day, “Project-Based Learning” was one small but powerful attempt at reforming some of what was wrong with some of our K-12 educational thinking. The general idea was that larger term projects—hopefully projects with some relevance in the Real World—were a better context for student learning, as opposed to a series of smaller and often disconnected-seeming homework assignments or worksheets.

We also had “Authentic Assessment,” in which the tasks students were asked to perform and be assessed on were “either replicas of or analogous to the kinds of problems faced by adult citizens and consumers or professionals in the field.” (Wiggins, G. P. 1993. Assessing student performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.) The typical product of an authentic assessment-based assignment would be a product that students could market at the school or community level, or a presentation to a gathering of community leaders regarding some local issue.

I’m actually a big fan of both movements, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that for our students, now more than ever, the end product is less relevant than the process by which one arrives there.

It’s a concept that bears repeating. For K-12 instruction, process is everything. The final product is less important.

Here’s why.

You’ve no doubt heard how quickly things are changing in our Western Hemisphere, technology-driven, North American world. One of the devices that I use most frequently during the course of the day, my iPhone, didn’t even exist five years ago. The web browser I use, Google’s Chrome, is one of Google’s famously beta releases that was released for the Mac less than two years ago. If your students are using technology in any way as part of their work in your class—and they absolutely should be!—then you need to be teaching them knowing that the technology is going to change.

This philosophy extends even to non-technology situations. In the AP Physics course I teach, it’s common knowledge that I don’t care much about the right answers. Hell, I’ve given them all the right answers by making the solutions available to them. What I’m interested in is the answer to this question: “Do you know how to ‘think’ physics?” Have you acquired the processing skills that will allow you to analyze a situation, develop a problem-solving approach, and execute that approach in order to arrive at an answer?

In the computer programming class I teach, when I given them an assignment to code a database-driven Address Book program, I don’t have any great need for one of those programs—there are dozens of commercially-available ones, most of them better written than something that my students will be able to come up with. But it’s the process of thinking about User Interaction, efficient coding, validating input, sanitizing input, designing and interacting with a database, that they will go on to use at some point in the future. In the meantime, the Address Book project is simply a context that allows them to explore those topics.

Do I want an Address Book program? No. Do I want them to know how to write an Address Book program? Absolutely.

It occasionally happens that a student of mine—typically a very bright and perceptive student, what teachers sometimes refer to as a “quick study”—will complain about the fact that I’ve docked them points for missing homework assignments, even though they’ve scored exceedingly well on the exam for that topic. “Come on, Mr. White. I obviously know this stuff!” This typically happens during the first semester when the topics of study—Newton’s Laws, conservation of energy—are ideas that are already familiar to them, or at least somewhat intuitive.

Second semester it’s a different story, when concepts like “charge density” and “magnetic flux” aren’t quite so easy to grasp. Students who have developed a system for working through the material are able to apply that system to the new material, while the “bright” student, for the first time finding that the material isn’t coming as easily as he’d thought it might, flounders about and wonders what went wrong.

It’s in our students interest to learn processes, ways of thinking, and ways of learning. Facts are important, of course—it’s a serious impediment to one’s study of chemistry if can’t immediately recall that the sulfate ion is SO42-—but it’s also important to know how to evaluate an oxidation-reduction reaction. That’s a process that can be used to analyze a whole series of different reactions.

Most of the teachers I know do this almost as a matter of instinct now, but it never hurts to go back and reflect on what we’re doing, especially for assignments that we’ve developed and been giving to students for years. In our Conceptual Physics class this year, we’ve eliminated the discussion on photo-sharing on Flickr—students do their own photo-sharing on Facebook and other sites all the time now, and don’t need formal instruction in that area any more—in favor of expanding our instruction on using Excel to process and analyze the data from their experiments.

Is Excel important? Somewhat. Is knowing how to create and manipulate a spreadsheet? Absolutely!

The Process. It’s everything.