Thursday, October 31, 2002

Happy Halloween! Here are some interesting jack-o-lanterns, along with instructions for how to make your own fancy-schmancy designs. 11:08:37 AM     I've started to use NetNewsWire Lite to more easily track breaking news. It's great for handling sites that support RSS syndication, but doesn't help me handle sites that don't, like Ed Week and the Chronicle. It's be nice to see NetNewsWire let me package both frequently read URLs and RSS feeds in one place. 10:46:28 AM     Hey, Arts and Letters Daily is back! Kudos to the Chronicle for rescuing a great resource for thought-provoking writing. 10:42:28 AM

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

LESTER (Learning Science and Technology Repository) is an online community and information space focused on innovations in learning science and technology. It's somewhat similar in intent to the CILT Knowledge Network. 8:38:24 AM     Apple is offering any K-12 teacher a free copy of Mac OS X 10.2. 8:34:51 AM

Monday, October 14, 2002

Conference announcement: Designing for User Experiences (DUX) 2003, San Francisco, 5-7 June 2003. ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, and AIGA Experience Design are pleased and excited to offer an unprecedented joint conference: DUX2003. DUX2003 will gather together designers of all kinds from our intersecting communities who deliver user-centered designs for the digital age. (Submissions due 1 Feb 2003.) 3:36:09 PM     ISTE publishes Palm(TM) Handheld Computers -- A Complete Resource for Classroom Teachers. 3:33:29 PM

Monday, October 7, 2002

Massachusetts Sued Over Graduation Tests. Education Week reports on the suit, on behalf of students who did not pass the state's high stakes graduation tests, that attacks the validity of the assessments. 4:05:50 PM     New Palm handhelds break the $100 price point.. This means you can get a Palm (albeit with only 2M of RAM, and probably not upgradeable) for slightly more than the cost of a TI-82 graphing calculator, and significantly less than a TI-92. 3:49:14 PM     Webcams in space! The upcoming Atlantis flight will include a live video feed. 3:43:54 PM

Tuesday, October 1, 2002

NY Times: Teacher Shortages Vanish When the Price Is Right. It's pretty simple when you get right down to it. 12:20:42 PM

Monday, September 30, 2002

The next round of solicitations for MSPs is up at the NSF web site. "The Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program supports innovative partnership-driven projects developed to improve K-12 student achievement in mathematics and science. As overall student achievement rises, MSP projects are expected to significantly reduce achievement gaps in the mathematics and science performance of diverse student populations. Successful MSP projects will serve as models that can be widely replicated in educational practice to improve the mathematics and science achievement of all the Nation's students." 3:05:12 PM     An article in the Boston Globe raises questions about Maine's huge investment in laptops for every seventh and eighth grader, pointing to a study that claims that a similar technology investment in Israel led to a decline in mathematics performance. The article makes a good point that when assessing the impact of large investments in technology, we should consider the opportunity cost of spending the money on other things. The researchers cited in the piece suggest that the money spent in Israel, and also in Maine, would have been better spent on a proven benefit like reduced class sizes. That's a legitimate attack; here in the Seattle area, there have been several teachers strikes this fall, and one of the (many) issues that arose was that teachers saw their district spending lots of money to replace two- to three- year old laptops -- which still worked just fine -- instead of raising teacher salaries. However, I have two major concerns with studies that try to assess technology impact on this scale. First, evaluating the impact of technology investment without looking closely at how it is used makes no sense. Unless we know how the computers were used (or not used), we can't really understand whether the investment made sense. Was suitable software available? Did teachers have the opportunity to learn about effective ways to use the computers? Any study of the impact of technology really needs to look closely at these issues, rather than making blanket statements about the impact of computers. Second, technology changes of this scope need time before they are evaluated. Often it's assumed that as long as we give teachers an inservice day to learn about computers, we've provided enough training, and we can look at what teachers do during that academic year as the litmus test for the impact of technology. That's ridiculous. Researchers who work closely with teachers on innovative uses of technology have documented that it often takes two to three years for teachers to reach a comfort level with technology, and that learning continues to improve over that period. Even if teachers receive suitable up-front training with the technology, everything they do that first year is going to be new to them -- throughout the year, they will be figuring out how the technology relates to where they are in the curriculum right now. It is only in their second year that they have sufficient experience to start integrating technology use into their teaching practice more effectively. This suggests that any examination of the role of technology in learning needs to look closely at the specific nature of its use, and to study that use for more than one year. 9:51:49 AM

Friday, September 27, 2002

Ed Week has a good summary of the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act, including several links of further analysis and news stories. 9:02:56 AM

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