Hottest Product Category at ISTE 2012!

I'm launching a new theme for this blog: mobile education.  My focus is on the creating and marketing of it.  I was just at the ISTE 2012 conference in San Diego. My observation is that the hot new product on the floor was....(drum roll please).....Ipad covers and protection devices. There must have been a dozen booths selling covers and protectors and what not. One booth had little rubber balls that go on each corner of the IPAD and protects them when they fall.

Here's what amuses me. Actually, it make me cry.  The schools were apparently acquiring these covers in bulk. Some were $5 per Ipad, some were $25.  But, when I talk to them about educational content for their Ipads, they all answered the same way:

This year we are only using free Apps. THIS YEAR WE ARE ONLY USING FREE APPS!  Great, instead of having a team of people slaving over educational content, I should be importing rubber balls with slits in them to put onto the corners of Ipads at $20 per shot.  

Teaching Phonics, Phonemic & Elkonin Boxes

Elkonin boxes can be used to teach phonemic awareness.

What are they?

Elkonin boxes are worksheets with have a spot to physically segment  words into phonemes.  

 So, using the word "phonemes" as an example, students would be asked to put it into its five sounds or phonemes by having a horizontal triangle split into five spaces.

f O - n E m

More later on how to deal with digraphs, long and short vowels, syllables, spacing, and methodology.

Three college level courses that I'd like to take

  

In making kids online education, these materials would be good.  But alas, I might have neither the time nor the background.  Still, here I am bookmarking them!!!

Computer Science
- Game Theory http://www.game-theory-class.org/

- Natural Language Processing http://www.nlp-class.org/

- Human-Computer Interaction http://www.hci-class.org/

Here's my latest game design. I think it could be better, especially the scoring.

VSC WordFind is a fun way to study your spelling and vocabulary words while searching for new words. How many words can you make using the letters in each word on your list? The more words you find and the faster you find them, the higher your score will be! You may even be ranked on the high score table!

WordFind Instructions: The box on the left of this word game tells you how many words you need to find (in addition to your spelling/vocabulary word) in order to advance. To create words, click and drag the letters into the boxes. Once you have created a new word, click the Submit button. To shuffle the letters, click the round button with the arrows. To clear the boxes, click the Clear button. If you need a hint to figure out some words, click the Hint button. Click Hint Type to alternate between definitions and sentences.

Once you have found enough words to advance, you can click on the Next button to move forward and start your word search all over again with the next word. You can also continue finding words until you have found all possible words to boost your score. As an extra challenge, see if you can find any anagrams for your words! Anagrams are words that are formed by using all of the letters in a given word, but in a different order - like "vase" and "save".

To play with colors.

The Ipad, Flash, and whats good for education

When Steve Jobs, years ago, declared the Iphone would not run Flash, he claimed that it was to protect users from a mediocre user experience. It would run slow and sloppy. We believed him.

However, I just watched my site, VocabularySpellingCity.com, run on an Android phone, the Nook (Android) tablet, the Chrome book, and a set of other tablets.  It plays great. 

My conclusion: Apple refuses to run Flash not for any valid concern over quality of user experience but as a business tactic to force developers and publishers to go through the Apple App store and give Apple 30% and control.

I don't understand why the school systems are agreeing to this.  They should make, as a condition of buying tablets, that they are open systems and run Flash. 

My Kids' Global Citizen Class

At dinner this week, my daughter asked me if the adults were into Kony 2012.  I admitted that I had never heard about Kony 2012. It turns out the effort was introduced to them through their global citizen class at school.

This morning, I saw Kony 2012 on Facebook and so I took half an hour to watch a very powerful video. My initial impetus was just to keep up with youth culture.  But by the end of it, I was thinking about my overall priorities and how I might make some adjustments in my life.  If you haven't watched Kony  yet, you should. I am sixty millionth viewer, more or less.  You should be the next one.

Being a RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who lived in West Africa for over two years, I feel more of a connection than those of you who might never have left the country, I was in Cameroon which is just two countries over to the northwest from Uganda.

I have read and contributed to such causes before. In the last few years, I've backed 

Books for Cameroon - From Wendy, the Peace Corps Volunteer who organized the Books for Cameroon Project: Wendy wrote about her time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroon... I began teaching English at the 4-room primary school by my house. Through my interaction with the children, I realized they can't read, at all. Even at a 5th grade level, many of the kids can't read. And then I realized most of these kids have never even seen a story book in their life. I thought how differently my childhood and life would be if my mom hadn't dropped me off at the library during her errands and busy afternoons. Most of us take the ability to read for granted. But being here allow me to see the harsh reality that in fact, a lot of people have trouble reading. Even the adults in my business classes. While they can read, they can't read at ease. Hardly anyone in village ever read for leisure. I wanted to change this, and I thought it would be the easiest to begin at the schools. Bring books into the country, and then provide training so people know what a library is and how to utilize it. I never imagined that I would be building 30 libraries…

Grassroot Soccer: Founded by former professional soccer players in 2002, Grassroot Soccer (GRS) trains African soccer stars, coaches, teachers, and peer educators in the world’s most HIV-affected countries to deliver an interactive HIV prevention and life skills curriculum to youth. Thinking more broadly, I'm  I'm embarrassed to admit how little I've done in this area in the last decade. I use to be involved lending support and writing letters to help focus attention.  I let my Amnesty International and ACLU memberships lapse many years awhile ago. I wonder if they are still the best civil rights advocates in the world.   I have  done some reading on these topics in the last few years and I think after having finished those books, I made a point of passing them on and contributing to their recommended charities. I'd recommend two books: Sold. By Patricia McCormick. This novel documents how a girl ends up as a sex slave in Calcutta. She, like the boy soldier slave in A Long Way Gone, is rescued by American aid worker. A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. By Ishmael Beah. This book, heavily promoted by Starbucks, tells the story of child in Rwanda who when the civil war hits, becomes a refugee and then, is forced to be a soldier. Given drugs, he fights and kills for years before being rescued by the UN and ending up in the US. Not a pretty story but very real. BTW, this kid was rescued by UNICEF. And while the UN has many many many problems, the grassroots projects that they support in many of the most needy places on earth make our world, in my view, a more humane place.

Facebook for Teachers & Students

Fort Lauderdale, FL. March 6, 2012 - VocabularySpellingCity is proud to announce support for Edmodo’s social collaboration platform and app store.
“Edmodo and VocabularySpellingCity share a belief that teachers should learn from each other and work with their students using modern technology and methods. Edmodo is the most popular implementation of social media technology focused on K12 education,” said John Edelson, the Founder and Mayor of VocabularySpellingCity.


“Edmodo is thrilled to welcome VocabSpellingCity as a featured partner in the Edmodo Store,” said Nic Borg, CEO and co-founder ofEdmodo. “As an established publisher in the education community we believe their innovative applications will be a great addition to theEdmodo platform and classrooms across the globe.”VocabularySpellingCity's mission is to facilitate vocabulary development, phonics, and writing skills through a word study tool that allows for differentiated instruction while working with vocabulary and spelling word lists. The site has been particularly useful in engaging struggling students, facilitating English language vocabulary skills with ESL students, building a school-home link, and simplifying teachers' and parents' administrative work.

The most popular learning activities are unscramble, wordsearch, hangman,and  crossword puzzle.

Back to the Future

I'm fresh back from a cyberlearning science conference in which games was one of the hot buzzwords. Games for education! Wouldn't it be great if we could harness the energy that goes into playing games for purposes of work and education? What's amazing to me is that people address this question as if it were new uncharted territory.

People have been playing for a long time. Playing hard. My parents warned me when I went off to college about how many of their friends at college got hooked on Bridge to the point where they practically flunked out of college.  In my case, there was soccer and then some stupid hallway version of soccer with a fluffy ball that we played a lot. I mean a lot. We dreamed up incredibly clever rules and strategies and we worked out butts off.

Today, researchers are documenting that games are intellectual, that they light up and stimulate the brain, and that after the excitement and camaraderie of competitive games, people have trouble coming back to the hum drum of daily life.  My point is that this is not new, it is an age-old phenomenon that the pure social and intellectual and adrenlin thrill of games is hard-to-match.  Of course, with computers, these games can more indepth, are available 24/7, and they freak out a lot of people....more later.....

 

References: http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Broken-Games-Better-Change/dp/1594202850 - Jane McGonigal 

Girl Scout Cookies - Another Teachable Moment

I was walking through the mall this morning with my son and there were girl scouts selling Girl Scout Cookies. We went up to the booth and asked and learned the following (these are mostly the answers of a mom and daughter in a mall, they are not necessarily proper spokepeople or even right and regional differences are probable):

Q - Are they made with real girl scouts?  A - Huh?

Q - Why do you sell cookies? A - To raise funds.

Q - For what?   A - For a trip to Georgia.

Q - How much money do you make on each box (they sell for $4).  A - $0.71

Q - Do you feel that the annual stuffing of cookies into everyone's hands greatly contributes to the problem of obesity?  A - Huh? Probably not, we only sell them for three weeks.  And mostly they're all eaten in a month.

Q - Whats the quota per girl scout?  A - 200 boxes

Q - Who else makes money on the cookies? Who sells them to you? - A ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers. 

Q - What cute sounding companies. Are they really independents or just clever brand names for people like P&G, General Mills, or Nabisco? . A - Don't know.  (I looked it up and their website appears to be one of a little company but they don't say one way or another if they are independent or not).

Q - How much?  A - $4.00 a box (we took two)

Q - How many boxes of cookies get sold every year? A. Don't know. Our troop sells 2,000 boxes.

Q - Well how many igrl scout troops are there? Don't know.

I googled the question and wikipedia cites an estimate of 200 million boxes per year.  At retail, this would be $800 million.  I also saw this on the authoritative GirlScout.org site: The $700 million Girl Scout Cookie Program is the largest girl-led business in the country....

It was fun learning about the economics of the 

Nag a Ram

Nag a ram.  Do you need to nag a ram? Probably not. Probably, if you arrived by search, you arrived since Google has put a little "search Easter Egg" or joke so that if you search for anagram, Google suggests that you might have wanted nag a ram.  An anagram of course is a word or phrase that can be made from the original by rearranging the letters.

Some popular anagrams.

Dog, rearranged, spells god. Many animists and dog-lovers would see great meaning in this.

Other pairs:

pea, ape

arm, ram

looped, poodle

coal, salt

fries, fires

team, meat

soil, oils

FL- Highschool students must be online to graduate

This is cool and a new rule for education. I'm trying to research this new law and not finding much.

I found Florida’s Guide to Public High School Graduation For Students Entering Ninth Grade in 2010–2011. It doesn't mention it but it is one year out of date. It does highlight how many choices and types of high school programs and diplomas there are. Three year or four year, normal diploma or IB.  And I don't think it even talked about the different special needs ones.

I also found this interesting report on Florida Virtual Education but I can't find the part about normal high school students being required to take a course to graduate. There is lots on FLVS move to be a school district (is this again?) and the sanctioning of virtual FL charter schools.  I'll read it more closely later today.

BTW, what an impressive but mysterious site this is: Liberating Learning. No about us, no contact info, no way to even see what cover and what they don't? Virtual? Charter? Homeschool? Magnets? Private?  Who are these people?

VocabSpellingCity Aug Newsletter - My Favorite Site

Welcome Back! August 2011 Summer has been busy around here. Just in time for Back-to-School, you'll find dozens of enhancements throughout VocabularySpellingCity. Here are just a few: Multiple Meaning Words for K-12 Upgraded servers to handle millions of new users A brand new Crossword Puzzle The ability to set student assignments (details coming next week) We are particularly proud of our interactive crossword puzzle game. It is available to all users with any of ourTeacher Resources Lists. If you are a Premium Member, you can use the Crossword Puzzle with your own lists. Try it now! John, Mayor of VocabularySpellingCity info@spellingcity.com

VocabularySpellingCity.com

I think this site (which I am affiliated with) should be on every parents and teachers lists of sites to use with their kids!  Here's why:

Put any word list up on VocabularySpellingCity.com (for free!) and you get immediate access to use the words in engaging games such as Word Search, Word Unscramble, Hangman, and Handwriting Printables.

If you ante up for a $25 annual premium membership, you'll also get access to vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles, and Speedy Speller!

 Go to the teacher resources section and you'll find lists ready to use for an amazing set of idtems:

Analogies - New!
Capitonyms
Compound Words - New!
Contractions
Dolch - Sight Words
Geography Lists
Homophones, Homonyms, etc.
Literature Based Word Lists
Math Vocabulary - Most Popular!
Monthly Holiday Lists
Multiple Meaning Words - New!
Phonics & Sight Word Curriculum
Possessive Nouns
Sample Lists By Grade
Science Vocabulary - New!
Sequential Spelling Program
Sound Alike Words
Syllables - New!
Word Abbreviations

Retro Educational Technology

I'm involved in another blog which is one of may favorities, its about my collection of old educational technology.

I've been collecting for awhile. It started whne I brought the typewrite that I used in highschool into the office. I wondered at the time if it would useful for envelopes or something. As it turns out, its a huge conversation piece. Most of my colleagues had never used a real manual typewriter.  Just to complete blow their minds, I bought some carbon paper which turns out to be another discovery for al of them. 

Since then, the collection has grown, check it out. Tell your friends!
A few of the items featured so far:

• Slide rules
• typewriters
• film strip projectors
• record players

BTW, I'm looking for a mimeograph mahcine (circa 1960s or 760s) to compete the collection.  Can you help me get a lead on one?

Tiger Mothering

Amy Chua's book, a rebuttal of the politically correct gentle rearing of children in most American homes, serves as a wake-up call to parents who have smugly assumed that their kids need support, not challenges. They need encouragement, not a fear of failure. As some review said, Chinese parenting assumes children have strength that can be tested and grown, not fragility that needs nurturing. Quite simply, she demonstrates the power of a swift kick to the backside as a standard approach to child-raising.  

OK, I made that last sentence up. In fact, while I've read several articles and listened to NPR's discussion of the book, I haven't yet read it. I do intend, as soon as I finish this post, to get download it on my Ipad.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about the parenting styles that I see around me.

1. Parent as partner. I know some kids whose mom is their partner in learning. At the end of the school day, each subject is reviewed along with upcoming assignments, projects, and assessments.  The parent helps organize the homework plan and often with studying.  The homework and approach to school is a daily partnership with the parent playing the role of organizing and supervising.

2. Parent as resource. This is where I tend to hangout.  When the kids ask for help, I try to provide it. I often ask them about their homework but it's more episodic than systematic.

3. Parents uninvolved.  Many parents just don't have the time or really focus on the kids grades and school work.  When kids ask for help, their response is that they already got through school, it's now the kids turn.

4.Parents who focus on grades.  There's a lot of this and it overlaps the others. Grades are considered by many parents to be the purpose of schools, its about getting credentials, particularly once you hit high school. Many parents consider (sometimes rightfully) to be the lessons taught in school to be irrelevant to "real life" and they equate getting good grades to "pleasing your boss" and something that kids need to learn to be successful. 

I'm just starting to think about this area.  Any help for me? What sort of parenting do you see in this regards?

Teaching: The Flight of a Butterfly or a Bullet?

Wow, I just read a great article by Larry Cuban. I'll share some of it here:

The Flight of a Butterfly” or “The Flight of a Bullet”: The Impossible Dream of Transforming Teaching into a Science

According to many policymakers and researchers, teaching should be more like the “flight of a bullet” rather than the “flight of a butterfly.”*  Using the latest social science findings, they are determined to re-engineer teaching to make it more efficient, less wasteful, and far more effective than ever before.  Behind the current passion among policymakers and politicians for using test scores to evaluate teacher performance (and pay higher salaries) is the current “science” of value-added measures (VAM) that leans heavily upon the work of William Sanders. But these smart officials have ignored the long march that researchers have slogged through in the past century.

Before William Sanders, there was Franklin Bobbitt in the 1920s, Ralph Tyler and Benjamin Bloom in the 1950s, Nathaniel Gage in the 1970s and 1980s, and many other researchers.  These scholars believed that teaching can be rational and predictable through scientifically engineering classrooms; they rejected the notion that teaching can be unpredictable and uncertain–”the flight of a butterfly.”

In How To Make a Curriculum (1924),Franklin Bobbitt listed 160 “educational objectives”  that teachers should pursue in teaching children such as “the ability to use language …required for proper and effective participation in community life.” Colleagues in math listed 300 for teachers in grades 1-6 and nearly 900 for social studies. This scientific movement to graft “educational objectives” onto daily classroom lessons collapsed of its own weight by the 1940s, and largely ignored by teachers. Elliot Eisner told that story well.  For the rest....