Barbara Lindsey's List: Web2.0

• The results of this year's survey were unveiled in a Congressional briefing Tuesday morning sponsored by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California, an advocate of technology in education.

• Among students, more than half said they would "use technology more easily at school if they could use their own laptop, cell phone or mobile device to work on projects, access related software applications and the Internet, and communicate with classmates,"
• Here are the top-3 technologies teachers and administrators chose to equip the "ultimate school for 21st century learners."
• Most high school students (67 percent) and middle school students (52 percent) have cell phones. And 75 percent of middle and high school students have a digital media player.

• he lowest for administrators were "unlimited student access to the Internet" (12%) and "games/virtual simulations" (15%).

   

  The lowest for teachers were Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs and wikis (10%) and unlimited student access to the Internet (11%).
• The Speak Up survey is conducted annually to assess views on current issues in education, and results are shared with state and federal policy leaders.
• for the first time this year, administrators have participated in the survey. The group had expected about 325,000 individuals to participate in Speak Up 2007, a goal that was exceeded by some 42,000 participants, which included 319,223 students, 25,544 teachers, 19,726 parents, and 3,263 administrators.

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• a large portion of students say teachers and school IT departments are doing just that: throwing up barriers to learning with the very technology that's supposed to facilitate it. And teachers, administrators, and parents seem to be largely unaware of this, according to the results of the 2007 Speak Up survey released Tuesday by Project Tomorrow.
• Among middle and high school students, 40 percent indicated that teachers are limiting their use of technology in schools, and 45 percent said that school "security" practices, such as Web filtering, were limiting their ability to take advantage of technology for learning

• both district leaders and parents are open to believing that social networking could be such a tool--as long as there are reasonable parameters of use in place. Moreover, social networking is increasingly used as a communications and collaboration tool of choice in businesses and higher education. As such, it would be wise for schools, whose responsibility it is to prepare students to transition to adult life with the skills they need to succeed in both arenas, to reckon with it."
• he majority of middle and high school students (51 percent of students in grades 6 through 12) indicated that "games make it easier to understand difficult concepts.
• Teachers
• 65 percent indicated that they thought educational gaming would be an effective tool for students with different learning styles and would help engage students in coursework.
• some 46 percent said they would "like to receive specific professional development on how to effectively integrate gaming technologies into curriculum

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• educational game
• Students, teachers, and administrators also expressed interest in online learning. Forty-three percent of high school students said they were interested in it for earning college credit, and 39 percent of middle school students said they were interested in it as a way to get "extra help in a subject.
• "More than 33 percent of high school students, 24 percent of middle school students, and 19 percent of [students in grades 3 through 5] with no previous online class experience stated said they would like to take an online class, with girls having a slightly stronger interest than boys.
• About a third of teachers said they've :explored" methods for integrating online learning into their instruction. And, furthermore, a third also said they were interested in online learning for teacher professional development, and more than a quarter (26 percent) said that online learning is actually their preferred method for receiving training.
• As for school and district administrators, 45 percent said they viewed online learning "as a way to boost student engagement."
• Among teachers, parents, and school administrators, 52 percent said they think mobile technologies can help engage students in learning. They also agreed that mobile devices can help extend learning beyond the school day (43 percent) and help prepare students for work (42 percent).

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• hybrid class that incorporated instructional technology with in-class lectures scored a letter grade higher on average than their counterparts who took the same class in a more traditional format.
• the hybrid class met once a week for traditional 90-minute lectures augmented with in-class response after doing 90 minutes of online work, which included a quiz that could be taken twice.
• Students who attended the hybrid course received final grades that were 10% higher than those who attended the traditional class, which translated to a full letter grade increase.
  
  "Presumably, this increase is due to the fact that students were able to increase their exposure to course content via access to material on WebCT," McFarlin writes in his report,

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• “One of the things that we do need is to have students in the online environment,” said Ruben Puentedura, a founder and president of educational consulting firm Hippasus. “Aside from the specific possibilities for a given course, it’s a very real factor of the world they’re going to be moving into. They may find themselves working with someone who’s not sitting next to them in the same office or the next cubicle. It might be someone across country or across the world. One of the things that people assume is that the experiences students are getting from places like MySpace, Facebook, etc. are suffice enough. MySpace and Facebook are all very valuable tools in terms of students developing a whole set of social interaction tools. But they are focused in arenas that aren’t necessarily oriented toward the academic or work world.”
• As the conversations continued, several key themes floated to the surface. Students shouldn’t be passive participants in their learning, several noted, but active constructors of knowledge, collaborating with their peers and engaging with discipline-specific tools and real data sets. Learning should be “messy,” forcing students to seek help from their peers and outside resources.  And the physical space should reflect the course culture, offering moveable furniture to create collaborative spaces and using lighting and spaces to create different zones for reflection and engagement.
• collaborative project to create a blueprint for the “classroom” of the future -- realizing, of course, that it may not be a classroom at all.
• Comments will be used to construct simulated course environments, starting with easy-to-implement solutions for rethinking the traditional lecture format and scaling to “blue sky” initiatives that include global collaboration and opportunities to “learn by doing.
• “Learning for Life 2.0” challenges us to think of the ways that IT and innovative pedagogy might support collaborative, experiential learning that extends outside the walls of campus and empowers learning styles across the spectrum. In the final wiki, our “Innovation Playground,” we hope you’ll contribute any ideas that might fall outside these descriptions. It’s a place to toss out ideas that might extend beyond our current technological capabilities

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• This should guide our new classroom spaces and our media lab in particular. - Barbara Lindsey on 2008-04-07

• If I were designing a learning environment for those students], it would really have to be like an ecology,” Dede said. “It would have to have a lot of different niches in it because from one day to the next, any one particular student may want a different kind of niche. And different types of students might want different kinds of niches… It’s a very different framework from what people typically use in instructional design.
• If it’s one size fits all, some of my students are going to be empowered, some of my students are going to be disenfranchised.”
• I think the classes I remember are the ones where I learned in context… To this day, my favorite period of art is Impressionism because I learned in context and was able to remember it.”
• “One of the things that we do need is to have students in the online environment,” said Ruben Puentedura, a founder and president of educational consulting firm Hippasus. “Aside from the specific possibilities for a given course, it’s a very real factor of the world they’re going to be moving into. They may find themselves working with someone who’s not sitting next to them in the same office or the next cubicle. It might be someone across country or across the world. One of the things that people assume is that the experiences students are getting from places like MySpace, Facebook, etc. are suffice enough. MySpace and Facebook are all very valuable tools in terms of students developing a whole set of social interaction tools. But they are focused in arenas that aren’t necessarily oriented toward the academic or work world.”
• Students shouldn’t be passive participants in their learning, several noted, but active constructors of knowledge, collaborating with their peers and engaging with discipline-specific tools and real data sets. Learning should be “messy,” forcing students to seek help from their peers and outside resources.  And the physical space should reflect the course culture, offering moveable furniture to create collaborative spaces and using lighting and spaces to create different zones for reflection and engagement.
• A community collaboration
• We’ve created three wikis to start the conversation. The first, “Lecture 2.0,” is a space to rethink the traditional lecture course. The second, “Learning for Life 2.0” challenges us to think of the ways that IT and innovative pedagogy might support collaborative, experiential learning that extends outside the walls of campus and empowers learning styles across the spectrum. In the final wiki, our “Innovation Playground,” we hope you’ll contribute any ideas that might fall outside these descriptions. It’s a place to toss out ideas that might extend beyond our current technological capabilities.

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• The World Simulation is a radical experiment in learning
• The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It all takes place in large room where all of the "cultures" interact with one another with props for currencies, natural resources, and other elements that recreate the world system. I will explain this in more detail in a future post, but essentially we attempt to simulate (not "act out") world history in an attempt to understand the underlying social and cultural processes that interconnect us all. The ultimate goal is to allow students to actually experience how the world system works and explore some of the most important questions now facing humanity such as those of global inequality, globalization, culture loss, environmental degradation, and in the worst case scenario, genocide.
• We find ourselves as co-creators of our world, and the future is up to us. It is in this environment that even the worst questions take on all the characteristics of the best: What do we need to know for this test?

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