This is a follow-up to my comments from yesterday. My professional tech interests do not extend to preschool learners, but my wife added this resource from the National Association for the Education of Young Children to my list.
The youngest learners
My wife retired from her position as a technology facilitator in the local school district a few years ago and now spends her time serving a similar function with faculty in the education college. Her gift is in suggesting ways in which educators can help students use technology to learn. She seems to have some database of ideas in her head cross referencing instructional approaches, content areas, and technology tools. Watching her work “live” is like watching a jazz musician – she seems to be able to accept a starting point from an educator and then she improvises multiple suggestions for activities and tools using core principles she promotes.
This afternoon she is speaking to the early elementary faculty. They asked that she schedule a couple of hours to present technology ideas for “the youngest learners”. There is a reason she owns multiple iPads (three I think). She really never has to start from scratch when it comes to this kind of request. I collect scholarly references. She collects software and one iPad simply does not have enough storage capacity. She starts listing the various things she could demonstrate and have the faculty members explore.
This is an interesting topic that I understand more as a grandparent than a researcher (see image above – there are the older, younger ones). It is somehow mind boggling to watch a child unable to talk to me demonstrate how to scroll through pictures on my phone searching for himself or people he recognizes. He cannot understand when I have something on the screen that will not scroll in response to his touch and he keeps trying to get the boring stuff to change.
My kids (not my grandkids) are very sensitive to the issue of “screen time”. It is one of those phrases I never used as a parent that my kids use all of the time. My wife and I discuss how we ever raised kids given our lack of insight into parenting practices. Our favorite parenting expression at present is “use your words” which seems to translate as “do not hit your brother, tell him you are upset”. The younger generation is evidently far more advanced than we were.
Anyway, once sensitized to the issue of tech devices and very young learners, I started seeing references to this age group everywhere. It may be tech and young children month or something. Here are some links I have noticed in the last couple of days:
Power Wash
I could not get my Chromebook Pixel to connect. It was working at the coffee shop and then it would not connect at home. I tried everything.
I am posting from the Pixel so I did locate a fix. There is a reset option that sets everything back to the “factory settings”. It is one of those multi-key (use two hands and hold all down) functions – Ctrl-Alt-Shift-R. It is called a Power Wash.
You do start from scratch, but this is not a big deal because the Pixel is really just a browser anyway. Once, I identified myself to Google, my apps gradually were downloaded again.
This experience made me nervous and the files I had saved were gone on the device were gone (no big deal), but it was nice to see well the system recovered. If there is a lesson here, it is likely that there is a lot of useful information on the Internet. Do not panic.
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Microsoft not impressed by free iWorks
Microsoft responds after the recent Apple announcement arguing that iWorks is not software for serious work. I suppose, but I would suggest that Word is kind of a tweener – not really necessary for writing and not robust enough for page layout or serious epub configuration.
I see iWork as more of a competitor for Google docs. I pretty much write for a living (with Google docs) and for me I would need to be convinced to move away from docs.
I do prefer a keyboard and I am certain this is the case for those of us generating long form content. It can be handy to do minor edits on a tablet and it is certainly handy to be able to work on a document from multiple devices, but a keyboard still is necessary for easy input. I see devices as complimentary rather than as alternatives. Most of us who use devices for work have probably now gone to some combination of devices so this either/or argument is not valid.
iWork is interesting because it is free and allows collaboration. Why would anyone in a school setting spend money for writing software? Use Google docs or iWork Pages.
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Half way there
I was able to download the new Mavericks OS to my old desktop Mac and it seems to work fine. I know it was risky to try this on release day, but I have options in case I encountered problems.
One thing that intrigues me about the new OS and I was eager to try is the availability of iBooks on the desktop. We have a book we offer through Amazon and Kindle and we have considered reworking the content in iBooks Author because of the multimedia options the Apple product makes available. The downside of iBooks has been the limited options for reading the content; i.e., the ipad. The new Mac OS now makes iBooks available on Apple desktops and laptops. There may be some additional opportunities here, but what I really would like to see is the iBook equivalent of iTunes which is more platform independent. As a matter of general principle because I believe options are good, I resist being locked in to one way of doing anything. Half way there!
[Mavericks features – scroll down for features of iBooks]
Rhee approach may work
File this under “this should rile things up” and “I am willing to present both views”.
The NYTimes offers a summary of recent data on the approached advocated by controversial administrator Michelle Rhee while attempting to address problems of the D.C. school system. The following passage summaries the findings:
“High-powered incentives linked to multiple indicators of teacher performance can substantially improve the measured performance of the teaching work force,” conclude the researchers, Thomas Dee of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and James Wyckoff of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Evaluation programs, they add, can bring “substantive and long-term educational and economic benefits” both by “avoiding the career-long retention of the lowest-performing teachers and through broad increases in teacher performance.”
The study has not yet undergone peer review. It is being published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Cambridge, Mass., group run by some of the country’s top academic economists.
I happen to be reading “Reign of Error” at this time. The policies of Michelle Rhee – specifically the use of testing results to evaluate teachers – are strongly criticized in this book. It will be interesting to see how the newest findings are critiqued.
Note the present study by economists Dee & Wykoff operationalized teacher performance using structured observational measures in addition to student performance.
My guess after reading the description is that the study will be criticized for generating data by comparing teachers near the extremes rather than determining the magnitude of the continuous relationship between the predictor and dependent variables. This is an unusual approach comparing those near, but not at the cutoffs. I guess the logic is that these individuals would be most sensitive to reinforcement and punishment. There is an interpretive challenge here – all teachers are influenced by conditions of employment and an analysis system focused on what might be described as the most sensitive may have very different consequences for the rest of the group. What does it mean if studies evaluating the overall consequences (the most common existing research approach) showed far weaker consequences? The fact is that the evaluation model is applied to everyone and how do you reconcile the outcomes of the studies based on the entire sample with a study based on a selected subset? I am also guessing that the interpretation that “under performing and lower rated teachers leave the field” is open to challenge perhaps because those in situations with under performing students are working in the most challenging and frustrating settings. I wonder, for example, if known correlates of student performance such as SES are first statistically removed, whether the observed relationship at the extremes holds. I could not tell from the abstract of the unpublished and unreviewed study.
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