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  • New York’s School of One: good or evil?

    I met Christina Jenkins at a Futurelab event last week, and she pointed me to the School of One pilot project:

    

    School of One encapsulates a lot of the stuff I’ve been ranting about for years – freeing teachers up to actually teach, breaking out of the class-of-30 mindset, using computers to do what they are good at. So thumbs up, right?

    Well, mabye not. Christina, who is certainly no Luddite, strongly disagrees with the programme. She told me

    The trouble I have with [School of One] is that it seems to me to be an extremely efficient way of delivering math worksheets. It doesn’t have much in common with authentic problem solving, mathematical thinking, etc; I don’t know that it possibly can, given the algorithm’s need for very precise, measurable indicators of understanding. I did a program called Kumon when I was growing up because my parents wanted me to have a more solid foundation in math; I can now multiply very quickly, but I’m not sure that it did anything else for me.

    I think the So1 is great for certain things (perhaps multiplying quickly, or converting fractions to decimals), but I think it places the computer/algorithm at the center of a student’s learning, and in so doing 1) limits his/her possibilities (what if he/she wants/needs to go further than the program allows?) and 2) kind of ‘solidifies’ this idea that math instruction should look like worksheets instead of building/making things, as I think students in all subjects ought to be doing.

    It seems that Christina and So1’s progentinors are starting from different formulations of the issue. Is our aim to to have a society in which a high level of numeracy (and other core skills) can be taken for granted, or one in which we maximise the number of creative problem-solvers?

    Would you welcome School of One in your school?

  • Justin Bieber brings elearing into your classroom, even if you don’t have computers

    Three years ago, I predicted that the iPhone, and phones like it, would soon become everyday educational tools. Where are we up to with that? Having spotted this on the Orange website, I’d say we are now only a year away.

    If Justin Bieber is endorsing a phone, then it must be cheap enough to appeal to the teenage demographic. Where this gets interesting is that this phone has a nice big touch screen and runs the iPhone’s open-source cousin, Android.

    From September, then, you can expect an increasing proportion of your students to be carrying these powerful, permanently-connected computers in their pockets.

    How will you respond?

    • Will you feel threatened and try to suppress their use?
    • Or will you see a great way to get around the resource limitation of not enough computers in the school, and embrace the possibilities?

  • More on controlled assessments

    Following Aidan’s excellent instructions on how to manage your controlled assessments through Yacapaca, Daniel Needlestone has written a very thorough and well-contextualised overview of different ways to skin the same cat. Recommended reading.

  • Good riddance to “Building Schools of the Future”

    So the Schools of the Future building programme has its head on the block. Good. It was a total misallocation of educational funds, that actually aimed to build 19th Century schools dressed up to look vaguely modern. Like a horse and cart with go-faster stripes. The really frustrating thing is that the real educational needs of the 21st Century could have been addressed for a small proportion of what has already been spent. For reference, the total cost of building Yacapaca has been of the order of 70p per registered member.

    I have been kicking this idiotic programme since 2004. If you are interested in my view of why it would have been actively bad for the nation’s children, you could read:

    Update: the axe has fallen. Here’s the list, from the Grauniad.

  • Quite close for a five-year prediction

    In the end it was called the iPad, not the iPrint. But I think I pretty much nailed it.

    The iPrint leads to paperless schools (13/07/2005)