Learn from the Web while waiting for Superman

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Posted on 23rd March 2011 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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Waiting for Superman is a GREAT movie. But something should be added!! While waiting and working for super schools with super teachers, we can do this immediately: show every kid how to learn everything known by humankind through the device they already have.

I saw Waiting for Superman this afternoon for the first time. In thinking about it afterward, I realized I could remember no mobile devices being used by any of the kids. This is both archaic and inaccurate. I can remember way back in 1999 being at a mentor meeting attended by a dozen students from New York City public high schools. We were sitting around a conference table at a business office in Manhattan. Just out of curiosity, I asked them how many were carrying cellphones. They ALL had them, and that was twelve years ago.

It is uncertain that very many more American students are truly going to have the great schools and teachers the movie longs for. It is very certain that essentially every school-age American will carry a Web browsing mobile device — and probably already are. While we are working for the great schools with great teachers, why not also work to show youngsters how to handschool themselves.

I knew a brilliant black woman from New York City who had a Ph.D from Columbia University. She gave up her other careers to work as a first grade teacher in one of the worst schools in Harlem. She explained to me: “If I can get them at that age and teach them to read, they will be okay.”

We should do all the things suggested and implied in Waiting for Superman. We should do one more thing: Teach individual students how to learn everything known through the mobile Web. That is another way to help them to be okay.

UPDATE: This Handschooling post from a year ago gives more on how learning can be done with individual devices:
Ignoring intertwingularity was education’s shark jump

T-Paw issues Call of Duty to fix education

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Posted on 11th March 2011 by Judy Breck in Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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At last, a Presidential candidate has leapfrogged the Blob to point out that Economics 101 will be learned from the sort of technology that makes games like Call of Duty compelling. Half way through the Des Moines Register article about T-Paw’s statement, the writer switched from her reporter role to media opinionist, concluding her story with snide dismissal of Governor Pawlenty’s suggestion.

Today’s Politico reports the excitement Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer is trying to create over the use of Game technology: Ballmer: Game technology is the future for the energy industry. Ballmer declines his Call of Duty (in my view) to push game technology for education. Ballmer does not mention education in the Politico report. But then who ever does?

The day that T-Paw’s suggestion becomes a reality, all the education minions who write textbooks, prepare curricula, teach courses, grade papers for Economic 101 — all will be essentially obsolete. Students everywhere will download Economics 101 from iTunes and learn at least a great deal about the subject on their own.

In spite of what the Des Moines Register reporter writes, economics students can still have seminars, and yes, they can play football too.

An old priest of education and online learning

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Posted on 29th November 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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Thomas H. Kean’ article about higher education in today’s Washington Post does not mention online learning. Referring to the Federal Department of Education, Kean writes about the Fed’s moves to regulate career college loans:

The department’s current approach is risky and illogical. Instead of focusing on crucial U.S. higher education assets – community colleges, career colleges, traditional four-year colleges and universities – it is singling out one segment. Yet this segment – career colleges – provides access for many students who might otherwise not attend college.

Tom Kean is a year older than I am, so I am not disrespectful in calling him an old priest here when he uses his respected reputation to comment on education and leaves out virtual learning. Online learning provides potential access for essentially all the world’s students to a college education and life long learning.

Please, not another education reform wave!

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Posted on 3rd November 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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This morning politicians are peppering their purported plans for the post-election with doing something about the public (government) education at local, state, and federal level that is failing yet another generation of children. These promises are look-good, feel-good for politicians, but they never work because they keep trying to make relevant something obsolete.

Remember some of the older main waves? George H.W. Bush proclaimed himself “The Education President.” Reagan launched the private sector partnerships initiative, Clinton issued his Call to Action for American Education, and then G.W. Bush implemented No Child Left Behind. Obama is calling his program to save schooling The Race to the Top.

Certainly, enormous good will and deep concern go into these efforts, but do be wary of wasting such things down this frustrating path. Anyone considering becoming a post-2010 edu-reformer should read this WaPo article titled School reform’s meager results, written by Robert J. Samuelson when school started this year. The article gives lots of facts like these:

Since the 1960s, waves of “reform” haven’t produced meaningful achievement gains. The most reliable tests are given by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The reading and math tests, graded on a 0-500 scale, measure 9-year-olds, 13-year-olds and 17-year-olds. In 1971, the initial year for the reading test, the average score for 17-year-olds was 285; in 2008, the average score was 286. The math test started in 1973, when 17-year-olds averaged 304; in 2008, the average was 306.

Another wave of reform efforts toward established education will sputter away as well.

The extremely good news is that a new way for a learner to individually engage knowledge is about to replace the traditional education establishment role of doling out what they are supposed to learn. Children will enter schools having mastered their 3Rs using smart mobile apps. Cardboard arithmetic flash cards will seem silly to them next to what the touch screen in their pocket offers. The internet browser an older student carries will access superior subject knowledge to that watered down for school textbooks, and do so connected to full cognitive context. The college student uses his browser to connect to the best version anywhere of anything he needs or wants to know. The effect of this knowledge emerging to an individual browser is that the student learns the most authentic, recent, and complete version of that knowledge anywhere — because of the golden swamp effect. Education will finally be doing the same thing Amazon.com does to place the item you want front and center on your screen.

If you feel like making education better today, avoid getting sidetracked by political promisers. Instead, start working on some of these steps that boost the next generation of kids to their ride on the real learning wave of the future — that is about to break over failed analog education and deliver youngsters into the global golden age of learning:

Get individual mobile devices to the kids in your family, and in your town. Make sure the devices are controlled by the student and not a school.

Provide learning apps for little kids

Make sure the older ones have devices with internet browsers

Support projects that paint your locality, and the planet, with wireless

There will be more steps presented here soon, and in my new eBook, which I hope to have online before Thanksgiving. Working title: The Golden Swamp Effect

Fix the schools? “We need to help Daisy”

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Posted on 10th October 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Next | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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A Washington Post Opinion piece this morning makes two things plain: the leaders of massive failing USA public schools have no new ideas, and any kid can tell you what is really needed.

This WaPo featured article is actually titled: “How to fix our schools,” and signed by the top individuals running the biggest districts where 2.5 million children attend and school failures are rampant. We are getting here, a “manifesto” from the heads of school districts in New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston and others.

If you are the parent of young children whose schooling will play out over the next decade, how could you read this article and fail be crushed by what it means for your kids? There is nothing new suggested. What is suggested has been tried and proven virtually impossible to accomplish. The theme is we need to get rid of bad teachers and attract good teachers. There is no whisper of blame for the bureaucratic and vested interests who control the schools (and control the jobs of the authors of the article).

The video interview embedded above of Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the D.C. Public School system, accompanies the article. Extremely revealing, in the interview at 3.40, is her description of taking her daughters, ages 8 and 11, to see the “Waiting for Superman” movie about American public schools. Rhee says that after seeing the movie — which features five students combatting problems with public schools — the Rhee daughters reacted by worrying about the specific kids, not the system. They kept saying, their mother reports: “What are we going to do about Daisy? Can somebody help Daisy?” Rhee tried, she goes on to say, to explain to her daughters that each individual child in the movie represents millions of real kids. How does that answer her daughter’s question?

Out of the mouths of babes: “Why not help Daisy?”

The theme of this blog is to advocate that Daisy take schooling into her own hands. Here is how to help Daisy right now:

1. Get her a mobile browser that is her own device and that has 24/7 wireless connectivity to the internet. A laptop, tablet, or smart phone accomplish this step.

2. Give her some assistance on learning how to use the open online websites and networks to learn real knowledge. Force her school to let her use her mobile as she wishes at school, as long as it is not disruptive.

These two steps are something we could actually accomplish very quickly and cheaply for millions of kids — while those power people at the schools go around the teachers-need-to-be-better circle once again. It is even possible that the pressure of having students able to learn using sources outside of school may actually pressure the education establishment into making real changes.

Slave ships and awful schools

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Posted on 22nd September 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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Nearly seven million people have watched this video on YouTube. It is inspirational in many ways, most powerfully for me in its haunting echos of those trapped below the decks of slave ships. The video radiates creativity and beauty of the music that emerged from the black slaves and their descendants in early America.

There is a specter from those days that haunts us once again: the increasing servitude and dependency being spun out of public schools that are mainly black and broadly inferior to schools for other kinds of kids. To great fanfare the Obama administration promises to spend billions of dollars making some failing schools better. But is that anything more than cleaning up the slave ships a bit? We will continue to have one kind of school that turns out minimally employable descendants of slaves and the other kind of school that turns out the competent class — unless fundamental educational reconfiguring takes place.

A way is now increasingly effective for jumping ship from the limitations of awful public schools. It is possible learn whatever these schools teach very easily online — and to learn online a very great deal more. And as posted here yesterday, online learning does not know if the hand clicking in is black, white, or even Neptune green.

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