Project Tomorrow Report

Project Tomorrow is a national K-12 education research group whose mission is to "ensure that today’s students are well prepared to be tomorrow’s innovators, leaders and engaged citizens of the world," which they hope to achive by encouraging innovative uses of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) to help students "develop the critical thinking, problem solving and creativity skills needed to compete and thrive in the 21st century".

Each fall they survey hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, administrators, and parents about the uses of and hopes for educational technology in the "Speak Up National Research Project". From the data released in 2011 (full report here: http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/pdfs/SU10_3EofEducation(Students).pdf), they identified 3 key trends:

• Mobile Learning: Educational experiences that are enabled by mobile devices and applications provide a multitude of untethered opportunities for students to be more engaged in learning and extend the learning process beyond the classroom
• Online / Blended Learning: Online and blended learning enables a greater personalization of the learning process and facilitates opportunities for students to collaborate with peers and experts, thus empowering a new sense of personal ownership of the learning process by the student.
• e-Textbooks / Digital Content: The use of e-textbooks and other digitally rich content engages students by providing a real world context for the learning process and allowing learning to extend beyond the classroom walls.

Lawrenceville is doing a number of things which are in line with these: our pilot programs with iPads and Androids are a perfect fit for the first two, and our association with the 8 Schools in a blended learning project addresses the second.

Elon University / Pew Internet Project report on Millennial's Cognition

A new 36 page report from Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/2012survey/) states that the Millennial Generation (born between 1982 and 2002) will both "benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives".
The groups surveyed over 1,000 thought leaders (and critics) from industry, government, and education, and asked them to consider how exposure to the Internet and digital media are changing the cognitive functioning of today's students. The results showed a fairly even split between positive and negative opinions.
Earlier work by Pew had shown that 95% of teens ages 12-17 are online, as are 96% of those ages 18-29. Given that level of penetration, the participants were asked to consider possible scenarios for 2020 based on the statement "In 2020, the brains of multitasking teens and young adults are 'wired' differently from those over age 35". Two major themes surfaced:

• constantly connected teens and young adults will thirst for instant gratification and often make quick, shallow choices
• major education reform is required to emphasize new skills and literacies to better prepare students for the world they will live in

Some of major skills needed for future success were determined to be:

• public problem-solving through cooperative work (crowd-sourcing);
• the ability to search effectively for information online and to be able to discern the quality and veracity of that information, and then communicate these findings well (digital literacy); 
• being able to bring together details from many sources (synthesizing); 
• ability to concentrate; 
• the ability to distinguish between the "noise" and the message in the ever-growing sea of information

One of the most telling quotes comes from Microsoft researcher and teen expert danah boyd (yes, no caps) about what may be the next social divide:

"Concentrated focus takes discipline, but it's not something everyone needs to do," she wrote, "unfortunately, it is what is expected of much of the working-class labor force. I suspect we're going to see an increased class division around labor and skills and attention."

The web introduction to the report echos that concern:

"There is a palpable concern among these experts that new social and economic divisions will emerge as those who are motivated and well-schooled reap rewards that are not matched by those who fail to master new media and tech literacies. 

Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century - MacArthur Foundation

The MacArthur Foundation has gathered some great research on how learning needs to change to adapt to the 21st Century, based around these three questions:

• How are young people changing as a result of constant exposure to digital media?
• How should learning institutions change?
• How should learning environments change?

In the Director's message (http://goo.gl/963bO), Connie Yowell explains how the foundation shifted their focus from " traditional school reform" to "learning," and lays out the results from over 106 studies they funded:

Through our work to date, we understand that at least three key shifts must occur if the educational system is to transform from the current 19th-century paradigm (based largely on paper-and-pencil tests) to a 21st-century vision:

• A shift from education to learning. Education is what institutions do, learning is what people do. Digital media enable learning anywhere, anytime; formal learning must also be mobile and just in time.
• A shift from consumption of information to participatory learning. A new system of learning must be peer-based and organized around learners' interests, enabling them to create as well as consume information.
• A shift from institutions to networks. In the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks, not institutions such as schools, which are a node on a young person's network of learning opportunities. People learn across institutions, so an entire learning network must be supported.
  . . .

Connected learning is not about technology. The principles of connected learning weren't born in the digital age, but they are extraordinarily well-suited to it.
Connected learning is not about turning our backs on teachers and schools. Thousands of teachers and educators across the U.S. are working hard, often in the face of adversity, to reimagine learning for the next generation.
Connected learning is also not about throwing out traditional literacy skills. The importance of reading, writing and critical thinking are as important as ever. But so are new literacies like advanced problem-solving and collaboration that will be critical in the increasingly interconnected world we dwell in.
Connected learning also is tuned to the reality that technology and the networked era is threatening to stretch the already-wide equity gap in education unless there is decisive intervention and a strong public agenda. In a world so full of knowledge and an abundance of learning possibilities, isn't it our responsibility to work as hard as we can to see that every child has a chance to unlock his or her potential? (from http://goo.gl/efdyN)

The main Re-Imagining Learning page is here: http://goo.gl/EdNd2

They have set up two other sites which describe the connected learning principles, the emerging community, and ongoing research:

• http://connectedlearning.tv/
• http://clrn.dmlhub.net/

New Media Consortium's Top 10 'Metatrends' Shaping Educational Technology

The New Media Consortium is well known for their annual Horizon Report which looks at "emerging technologies for teaching, learning, research, creative inquiry, and information management": http://www.nmc.org/horizon-project

At the end of January, 2012, they gathered 100 educational thought leaders to mark the tenth anniversary of the Horizon Project, and asked the question "what will be the role of technology in the next decade?"
 http://www.nmc.org/news/download-communique-horizon-project-retreat

The top 10 items were:

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.
2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to.Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and ereader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices. 
3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network — and already is at its edges. Mobithinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85% of new devices can access the mobile web. 
4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.
5. Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information — is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media. 
6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry. 
7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments —but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa. 
8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount. 
9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia — and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.
10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.

The Future of Technology?

Microsoft released a video earlier this month entitled Productivity Future Vision - it is 6 minutes long but worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0

Placed 5-10 years in the future, much of the video looks quite fanciful. However, many have pointed out that 10 years ago there was no YouTube, no Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Docs, no Skype, Facebook or MySpace, and certainly no iPhone, iPad, or Android tablets. Think how we might have viewed a video chat on a wifi tablet to an iPhone in 2001 - conducted by two Form II students.

An earlier "vision" video from 2009 begins with some interesting ideas about international collaboration in the classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5X2PxtvMsU

Wireless, always connected, built for collaboration, and touch surface interfaces both large and small dominate these visions of the future.

Five characteristics of an effective 21st-century educator

Just in time for the start of the new school year, eSchoolNews has a list, generated by their readers, of the five most important characteristic for 21st Century educators: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/09/09/five-characteristics-of-an-effective-21st-century-educator/

1. Anticipates the future.
2. Is a lifelong learner.
3. Fosters relationships.
4. Can teach and assess all levels of learners.
5. Is able to discern effective vs. non-effective technology.

It's good that there are no software-specific goals here: laundry lists of "Knows PowerPoint"- or "Knows Twitter"-type of goals are extremely short sighted.

Perhaps it's related to #2, but I would add something about the ability to find, assess, and use information. As the role of the classroom teacher includes more and more individualized instruction, and as the world's knowledge-base continues to grow at a rapid pace, this will become more important. One of our teachers recently described guiding a student through an independent study, and how the student was finding and referencing the latest research and publications in the subject area. Much of this information did not exist when the teacher was completing his PhD, so this was really a new area for both the student and the teacher.

Dean of Faculty Kevin Mattingly places emphasis on making Lawrenceville a place where teachers can learn. This may be the most important characteristic for a 21st Century educator.

Report has good blended learning advice

An August, 2011 report from the management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group titled Unleashing the Potential of Technology in Education calls for the creation of a "closed loop instructional system" to best employ technology in education.
The report focuses a great deal on the economics of edtech, but also offers these steps:

• Establish educational objectives focused on twenty-first century skills
• Develop relevant curriculum offerings by using opensource content (provided by higher education institutions, among others)
• Deliver [some] instruction virtually
• Embed frequent [formative] assessments with real-time, continuous feedback
• Provide appropriate intervention with immediacy and customization (based on the assessments)
• Track outcomes through data-management systems

The full report can be read here: http://www.bcg.com/expertise_impact/PublicationDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-81207

New report questions students' grasp of technology

We've mentioned the concept of a "digital native" before - a student who has grown up immersed in technology in all different forms. For many, there is a tendency to think that because they are "natives," our students really understand technology and put it to good use.
A new report that questions this assumption was released this week by the Education Development Center (http://www.edc.org/) and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation (http://www.edviewpoints.org/). The report, titled Integrating Technology with Student-Centered Learning, covers a number of topics, including the use of technology to individualize education (a theme in the book Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen), but also draws the conclusion that many students are underprepared to utilize technology in their post-high school experience. One telling statistic: 43 percent of the surveyed students felt unprepared to use technology in their college and work lives.
Better used, the report concludes, there are three very important roles for educational technology in today's schools:

• Help diagnose and address individual learning needs.
• Develop the skills essential for life in a 21st century global society.
• Provide a more active learning experience, including transferring some responsibility for learning to the student.

The full report is available here: http://www.nmefdn.org/uploads/Integrating%20Tech%20with%20SCL.pdf

State Educational Technology Directors Report Released

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) in the professional group for public school technology leaders in all 50 states. Earlier this month they released their 8th annual report on educational technology trends, subtitled State Leaders Leveraging Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning. A quick synopsis is here: http://www.setda.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=6&name=DLFE-1313.pdf

They have 4 primary areas of focus in the report, with links to examples of innovative programs around the country:

• Preparing All Students for College and 21st Century Careers
• Developing and Scaling Innovative Learning Models (including online and blended learning)
• Supporting Educator Effectiveness (including Professional Learning Communities/Communities of Practice and Technology Coaches/Mentors)
• Building a 21st Century Infrastructure for Equity, Innovation, and Improvement (including data system interoperability)

The full report is here: http://www.setda.org/web/guest/2011nationaltrends

Thoughts About Tomorrow's Tech & Today's Skills

After Saturday's session at Alumni Weekend, an alum sent me this post from Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine (I've been a subscriber since issue 1.03) and author of the New Rules for the New Economy: http://www.kk.org/kk/

Some great ideas here about considering technological skills as a continuum, and not a specific program or device to be mastered. But in particular his statement that "You will be newbie forever" speaks to the need for life-long learning skills. Some of his points:

If you are in school today the technologies you will use as an adult tomorrow have not been invented yet. Therefore, the life skill you need most is not the mastery of specific technologies, but mastery of the technium as a whole -- how technology in general works. I like to think of this ability to deal with any type of new technology as techno-literacy. To be at ease with the flux of technology in modern-day life you'll need to speak the language of the technium, and to master the the following principles:

• Anything you buy, you must maintain. Each tool you use requires time to learn how to use, to install, to upgrade, or to fix. A purchase is just the beginning. You can expect to devote as much energy/money/time in maintaining a technology as you did in acquiring it.
• Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything until 5 minutes before you need it. Get comfortable with the fact that anything you buy is already obsolete. Therefore acquire at the last possible moment. 
• You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliticting help, and helping others with what you learn (the best way to learn yourself).
• Often learning a new tool requires unlearning the old one. The habits of using a land line phone don't work in email or cell phone. The habits of email don't work in twitter. The habits of twitter won't work in what is next.
• Take sabbaticals. Once a week let go of your tools. Once a year leave it behind. Once in your life step back completely. You'll return with renewed enthusiasm and perspective.
• Tools are metaphors that shape how you think. What embedded assumptions does the new tool make? Does it assume right-handedness, or literacy, or a password, or a place to throw it away? Where the defaults are set can reflect a tool's bias.
• What do you give up? This one has taken me a long time to learn. The only way to take up a new technology is to reduce an old one in my life already. Twitter must come at the expense of something else I was doing -- even if it just daydreaming.
• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.
• The risks of a new technology must be compared to the risks of the old technology, or no technology. The risks of a new dental MRI must be compared to the risks of an x-ray, and the risks of dental x-rays must be compared to the risks of no x-ray and cavities. 
• The proper response to a stupid technology is to make a better one yourself, just as the proper response to a stupid idea is not to outlaw it but to replace it with a better idea.
• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. To evaluate don't think, try.
• The older the technology, the more likely it will continue to be useful.

The Future of the Textbook

This is something that we've mentioned before, but here are three good videos showing different options for the 21st Century textbook:

IDEO, the famed design company offers three ideas about how textbooks could change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLSdzGDxqVU

Inkling has a number of "books" out now, and in March received funding from McGraw-Hill and Pearsons, two of the largest textbook publishers, as well as a number of venture capital companies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKYyd4Ne5uQ

Push Pop Press garnered a lot of buzz after this presentation at TED, and just released their version of Our Choice by Al Gore: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html

What Year are we Preparing our students for?

An excellent and thought provoking question posed at TEDxNYED last month by Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Executive Director of the Curriculum Mapping Institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsUgj9_ltN8

TED talks are short by design, this one is about 16 minutes long and worth watching. Some of her statements:

• Most schools are preparing kids for 1991.
• We have a new type of learner, we need a new type of classroom.
• We can do dumb things with a Smartboard.
• We need new forms of school.

She argues for "upgrades," strategic replacements of "dated content, skills, and assessments." But the perquisite will be the development of rubrics for assessing blogs, podcasts, wikis, and other digital media.

Unplugging from Tech - What Happens?

Amherst College did a brief "unplug" earlier this month, urging their students to take a least a little time away from their constant immersion in media: https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2011/03/node/305293

Similary, there was a "World Unplugged" study involving 1,000 students in ten countries on five continents:   http://theworldunplugged.wordpress.com/

Some interesting results from their study:

• A clear majority in every country admitted outright failure in their efforts to go unplugged for just 24 hours.
• Media "addiction" may not be a clinically diagnosed afflication, but students reported cravings, anxiety and depression duirng this period.
• Being tethered to digital technology 24/7 is not just a habit, it is essential to the way they construct and manage their friendships and social lives. For many of them, going without media for 24 hours "ripped back the curtain on their hidden loneliness."
• Mobile phones function both as this generation’s Swiss Army knife AND its security blanket. Students wrote that mobile phones are at the literal center of their lives: going without made it seem like they had "lost part of themselves."
• Across the world, students depend on personally programmed music to actively regulate their moods.
• Students chose from a variety of communications mediums based on their audiance: Facebook and texting to communicate with friends, email for their professors and jobs.

Perhaps most imprtantly, many students admitted that they were not really aware of how much time they actually spent on to social networking, and how poorly they actually were able to multi-task. If nothing else, such self-awareness is probably the most important gain from an experiment such as this.

More Mobile on Campus

EduCause is the international professional association for IT in higher education. The focus of the latest edition of the Educause Quarterly is on mobile computing and its impact(s) on colleges: http://educause.informz.net/educause/archives/archive_1404284.html

We expect a growing demand for mobile support in every area, from our applications to our infrastructure.

Three steps we have taken recently to address these demands are:

• Our switch to Gmail for students, which has very strong support for a wide range of mobile devices;
• Doubling of campus bandwidth (not without remaining issues) to better support the growing number of mobile devices and their "always on" nature;
• Expansion of our wireless network coverage to all floors in the Circle and Crescent houses this summer. (The 5th Form houses were done last summer. All Houses have had wireless on the first floor common areas for several years, as have all floors in academic buildings.)

As one of the authors writes, "Individuals have had access to 'portable learning devices' since the advent of the printing press; we call them books." But there are many who believe that the growing power and ubiquity of network-enabled smartphones will probably bring the greatest technological changes since the general availability of the Internet - if we use them correctly, not just as content delivery devices. As others have said, "this changes everything." How will it change Lawrenceville?

Personal Learning Networks

A lot has been said recently about the idea of Personal Learning Networks, or PLNs. Wikipedia has a good explanation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Learning_Networks

One of the key elements that the Powerful Learning Practice program (http://plpnetwork.com/) that several Lawrenceville teachers and administrators took part in was about the importance of and tools used in the creation of a PLN. We all had experiences where even our nascent PLN became a source of high quality information and guidance on a variety of subjects during this process.

It can be argued that PLNs are nothing new. 20 years ago, the depth and breadth of your Rolodex often indicated the strength of your PLN. Today's tools just make it easier to connect with colleagues and experts from around the world.

Now, Facebook is entering the PLN world by allowing you to ask questions of your friends, and friends of friends, through their new Questions tool: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150110059982131
Given the huge amount of time that our students (and teenagers in general) spend on Facebook, this might be a good way to have them develop PLNs.

However, for this to truly be useful, it means that adults, experts, educators, etc. need to be on Facebook and "visible" enough to be found in the questioning process.

-->Are there ways that you use a PLN in your work or for hobbies that could be transferred to how we educate students here?

Want to try a PLN or learn more? Educational technologist David Warlick has some good information and links on his site: http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.TheArtAmpTechniqueOfCultivatingYourPersonalLearningNetwork

More on eBooks

Two interesting data points recently about eBooks in schools.

UK trade publishers surveyed by Publishing Technology predict that 2012 will be the year that eBook revenue surpasses the "tipping point" for physical book revenue: http://blog.publishingtechnology.com/blogs/uk-trade-publishers-predict-2012-revenue-tipping-point-e-books/
Interesting, on the textbook side, they state "one in four UK academic publishers were already seeing 10% of their total book revenue coming from e-books in 2011, with double that predicting this would be the case in 2012".

Last week, Henrico County (VA) Public Schools uperintendent Patrick Russo said "We made a commitment pretty much we are not buying more textbooks." The district has had a 1:1 laptop program for approximately 10 years, and currently supplies laptops to over 25,000 high school and middle school students and almost 4,000 teachers through the county.

EdWeek's Technology Counts 2010 Released

Education Week has released their 14th annual report on the state of educational technology: http://www.edweek.org/media/ew/tc/2011/digital/Education_Week_Technology_Counts_2011.pdf

While once simply a tally of hardware and Internet connections, the report now explains why technology matters in education and points to trends and trend setters.

One of the major themes this year is the use of technology to provide a more personalized learning experience for each student. Interestingly, it is one of the advertisements that sums up the need to technology in this area:

To teach exactly what every student needs each day, you'd need an insomniac, genius sidekick.

While it is possible to differentiate the instruction for each and every student using traditional methods, proper use of technology can help, not only with the instruction, but with the assessment that leads to that instruction.

What do students want from online learning?

We've been thinking about what role an online experience would have in a Lawrenceville education. We turned to SpeakUp, a group which surveys over 2.2 million students, parents and educators annually to get their thoughts about technology in education: http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/

In last year's survey, they asked students about what they wanted from an online learning experience:

Click to enlarge

The dark green line represents students who have taken an online class; the lighter green line is students who want online learning as a must have in their "ultimate" school.

The report infers that students value online learning because it gives them more control over their learning experience: "today’s students are increasingly taking their educational destiny into their own hands by seeking out learning opportunities outside of school and leveraging technology tools and applications to customize the learning process to meet their specific needs".

National Education Technology Plan

Called "Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," the US plan was released 2010. It lists goals and recommendations for the following areas:

• Learning
• Assessment
• Teaching
• Infrastructure
• Productivity

While one of the primary goals of this plan is college preparedness and increased college enrollment, there are some sections applicable to Lawrenceville:

The challenging and rapidly changing demands of our global economy tell us what people need to know and who needs to learn. Advances in learning sciences show us how people learn. Technology makes it possible for us to act on this knowledge and understanding.

The full plan, as well as an executive summary, is available here: http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010

Digital Textbooks

But digital textbooks must be more than just the same words, but on a screen instead of paper.
E.O. Wilson and the MIT Media lab are working on a great science text which shows some of the possibilities: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/wilson-free-biology-textbook

IDEO the design company has some great ideas here, especially about the social sharing aspect offered by digital texts: http://vimeo.com/15142335

The Inkling app on iPad is also showing great potential: http://www.inkling.com/

How does having a textbook which quizzes your students and adaptively provides different content to each student based on their response change the way we teach?