School administrators: goodbye netbook, hello tablet

Schools across Australia are buying thousands of netbooks (lower-capacity laptops) under their Digital Education Revolution money. This has been a logical step because the Netbooks do most tasks quite well and they are very cheap and portable. However, a interesting report in the New York Times says that while netbooks have had a rapid rise, it looks as though they will be overtaken in the near future by tablets like the iPad.

A number of schools have already purchased hundreds of iPads for students and I think it very likely that next year there will be large scale take-up in schools of iPads and other tablet computers.

The debut of the second generation tablet, the iPad, has been remarkably. Imagine what will happen when a the competition gets its iPad-like devices into the marketplace this year.

The convenience and portability of tablets will make integration of ICT into the classroom a lot easier.

What to talk about over Christmas: Australian schools doing very well

The highly reputed Pisa tests for 2009 were published this week and despite what you hear in the media, Australia continues to do very well. The overall results for Reading, Mathematics and Science show the pattern. The chart results on the left are just the overall mark for Reading for the top 26 countries, and light blue indicates 'significantly above average performance' of the 60 or so countries and darker blue is 'average'. Australia is clearly in the top league, and well above Britain, USA, France, Germany. For the full summary results, see here. For links to all the reports, see here.

This is what all chalkies should berate their relative with over Christmas. Last time I told some friends that Australia performs well in international terms, I was met with disbelief. After I yelled at them about actual tests, such as Pisa, they thought for a while, and then said, "You education people have clearly done a poor job of promoting school achievements." The press coverage has largely been along the lines of: 'Australia beaten by countries x, y and z, and Australia slips in Reading.'

Pisa is highly respected because it pays due attention to how student use knowledge, and apply it. The common belief that Asian students mainly learn by rote is clearly wrong.

How school systems get better - Minister, please read!

McKinsey have just released a follow up report for the OECD titled How the world's most improved school systems keep get better. Their 2007 report How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top was widely respected. In the new report they they did not just look at school systems at the highest levels, but good performers at each of the stages of development. For example, a school system in West Cape, South Africa is just moving out of basic standards of schooling in a very poor community.

McKinsey found that there are six common interventions that all good systems undertake.
"Our research suggests that six interventions are common to all performance stages across the entire improvement journey:

• building the instructional skills of teachers and management skills of principals,
• assessing students,
  
• improving data systems,
• facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws,
  
• revising standards and curriculum,
• ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure for teachers and principals.

Though these interventions occur at all performance stages, they manifest differently at each stage."

The most interesting thing to me about this report is what they say next; that the in building a basic system, central control with a strictly managed curriculum is appropriate, and when a system is moving from Good to Excellent, this central control should give way to schools and teachers having more autonomy. And this is for a very believable reason, that when a system is at the 'good' level, teachers have the necessary skills to be more autonomous.

Their message for Australia is clear, Minister, that we are at the middle to advanced levels overall, so it is not appropriate for rigid testing and comparisons of schools to be in the forefront. We should have some of that, but be focusing on building the professionalism of teachers.

The also found that spending lots of money is not necessarily a pathway to system improvement.

On the link above there is an executive report and the full report.

By they way, how well have we done the 6 steps in my experience, in SA?

• building the instructional skills of teachers and management skills of principals - not in a systematic way, except for the occasional splurge
  
• assessing students - not in a systematic way in primary schools, until the last few years, and still focused too much on basic skills; rarely in a way that links back to item 1.
  
• improving data systems - improving in recent years, but needs much more work.
  
• facilitating improvement through the introduction of policy documents and education laws - quite a bit of this; got lots of policies
  
• revising standards and curriculum - not much in measurable standards, but the national curriculum is heading there, maybe?
• ensuring an appropriate reward and remuneration structure for teachers and principals - very little reward for teachers and principals based on actual student performance.

Technology (video) rescues teacher improvement

There is a very interesting story in the NY Times about a major initiative in the US, funded by the Gates Foundation, to use video extensively in observing and improving classroom teaching. Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher There is a considerable likelihood that the initiative will be ruined by too much focus on policing and not enough on professionalism, but here's hoping. Digital video might be coming to the rescue of a very sad history of teacher observation and self improvement. It can allow observation to be relatively unobtrusive, and provide an objective record of what happens in a class. Video is relatively cheap now, and small cameras can record vast amounts of vision and sound, all with precise time tracking. A problem is that single camera covering a whole room does not provide the ability to focus in on detail as a human viewer can do. This means that an effective system is relatively expensive. But then so is ineffective teaching.

iPads and the business of reading

I am a news nut and so have been waiting eagerly for the arrival of the great ipad newspaper apps that make news worth paying for. The experience has been interesting.

In the beginning there was the New York Times with its standard web site. (All of the images are from an iPad.) A very good newspaper site. It looks a bit like a traditional newspaper, but each story has just a headline and a few sentences to provide an introduction. Lots of stories on one screen, and lots of small images and some video.

I like the way the home screen has a large number of stories on it, and there are also section headings, so you can scroll down the long home page and browse, or you can go to sections.
Then came the long anticipated iPad app and I find it boring, sterile and without much life at all. there are only a few images and an awful lot of text. There is a section menu that can be opened and the same material is there as on the original web site.

This is the front page of the Top Stories section, like a front page, but I find it dead. Maybe they are going to launch an attractive and interactive app early next year when they ask readers to start paying.

The Sydney Morning Herald has taken a very different approach, pending Fairfax's launch of its 'proper' iPad app. They charge 65 c a day for this version, and it is simply a page by page view of the print edition. It has been overwhelmingly condemned by the reviewers because it is not a real iPad app, with different layout, links and nifty navigation. I love it, and read it from front to middle every morning.

The iPad view is sufficient to read the headlines and some of the text, and to get a clear sense of what the main stories are, and how the editor has placed them regarding prominence. You get the result of a hundred years of experience in laying out a newspaper, and slightly less experience as a reader. To read a story in detail, simply pinch out on the page and you zoom in to normal size text. [right] The images look great. The experience is very similar to reading the paper version, but a little more convenient.

My next experience is of the Economist magazine which is an A4 size news magazine which looks very similar on the iPad. This has been my most satisfying experience of reading on the iPad. The view is very similar to the paper product but with the advantage of better navigation, illumination and clarity, and it is reproduced on one's iPhone almost as well. A major bonus is that the whole magazine is available in audio, so the reader can jump from reading to listening at the press of a button. This is particularly useful for iPhone users. It has proved surprisingly useful because it you read or listen depending on what you are doing. I prefer to read because i concentrate better, but if doing a menial chore, I can just keep 'reading'.

The cost difference is striking. An annual subscription to The Economist is $345 for 52 editions, but the iPad version is only $135, and it arrives three days earlier.













I don't think there is any doubt that eReaders are going to be as common as mobile phones in the near future. In fact, many of them will BE mobiles. But it is clearly going to be a difficult learning experience for publishers and readers to work out what format and presentation type suits them. The biggest surprise for me has been to discover the attractiveness of switching so easily from print to audio in one product. And I am a regular podcast listener, but it had not occurred to me that it is so appealing to switch back and forth. I expect there will be lots of surprises for all of us.

Wired for distraction

There is a very good feature article in the New York Times title Wired for Distraction that reasonably - without hysteria, outlines problems some students are experiencing in balancing their online lives. It describes how some students are almost obsessed with maintaining frequent contacts with friends via Twitter and Facebook or games to the point that they cannot focus on other tasks that are not so immediately fulfilling. Unlike many popular press articles on this topic, they point out that this only affects a minority of young people, but is nevertheless a significant issue. For those involved with secondary students in particular, it is a good read.

The answer, it seems, is that teachers (and parents) need to help students find balance and manage their priorities. Surprise! Who would have thunk it?

Google Apps in education: widespread, simple, powerful, cheap

Some indications of the take-up of Google Apps and other cloud computing services in education.

• "10 million Apps users in education" Oct 2010 [source]
• "New York City, today [1/11/10] announced that it's moving to "Google Apps for Education," providing cloud-based email and collaboration tools to the entire university community. This announcement comes just weeks after New York State created an initiative to bring Google Apps for Education to their K-12 schools. With students and faculty across New York now using Google Apps, it looks like the Empire State has fully embraced the cloud." [Source]
• In Australia, a struggle is underway for university cloud computing between Microsoft's Live@edu and Gmail. Many universities have switched, with Live@edu ahead at this stage. Gmail has 1.5 million student users in NSW DET schools. [source]
  

Universities and schools are finding that the predictions in the Horizon Report that 2010 - 11 is the time when 'cloud' computing will have a major impact, is being borne out. One factor is cost. Another is that the cloud systems come with lots of very appealing ancillary tools, like the ability to collaboratively edit files from any location.

The occasional voices of paranoia that used to be heard are being overtaken by a more realistic perspective. The fear that the FBI can monitor email under the US Patriot Act is one of these. Why schools should fear this is not clear to me. Australian intelligence agencies have similar powers, as they do over intercepting mail or tapping phones. Universities which deal with serious issues of intellectual property and research have apparently been satisfied that their data is appropriately secure. Why a police agency would target student online projects or the staff meeting minutes escapes me.

Real threats to student and staff security are much closer to home. The most real threats are much more mundane: careless forwarding of private information, insecure passwords, contacting strangers and bullying.