With a flurry of touch-screen taps, she explored the “energy dashboard” of Discovery Elementary in Arlington, Virginia. She swiped through 360-degree views of her school, inside and out. She clicked on icons embedded in the virtual classroom to learn about energy-saving features such as LED lights and super-insulated exterior walls made of concrete-filled foam blocks. Exploring the virtual school kitchen, she could read that the lack of a deep fryer means less energy is needed for venting grease from the air. Another swipe whisked her up to the school’s roof, where about 1,700 solar panels spread out before her.

After a few minutes, she looked up from her computer to explain her progress in a confident voice that rose above the second-grade din.  “I learned that our solar panels rotate,” she said. “So, wherever the sun moves, the panels go, too.”

In addition to this virtual tour, Discovery’s dashboard displays, in real time, the school’s energy generation. And in colorful bar graphs and pie charts, it tracks energy use – broken down by lighting, plug load, kitchen and HVAC. The tally reveals that Discovery generates more energy through its solar array than it uses over the course of the year.

Buildings that make at least as much energy as they use are called “net-zero” (and “net positive” if they make more than they need). Nationwide, K-12 schools are leading a fledgling “net-zero” building boom that has grown from a few proof-of-concept structures a decade ago to hundreds of buildings completed or under construction.

Dozens of these ultra-green schools are going up in every sort of district – urban and rural, affluent and lower income, blue state and red state. Much of the advocacy for net-zero buildings has focused on environmental and economic incentives. K-12 schools run up a $6 billion energy tab every year, the Department of Energy reports – more than they spend on textbooks and computers combined, and second only to the cost of teacher salaries.

But the K-12 schools leading the net-zero charge are uncovering major educational benefits as well.

While Discovery’s second-graders scoured their school for light and heat energy, a group of third-graders huddled around a table to brainstorm fraction “story problems” using the school’s energy data, pulling their numerators and denominators from the dashboard.

They suggested using fractions to find out how much of yesterday’s solar energy was used up by the school, to compare one hour’s solar energy to the whole day, and to show how much of the school’s energy use came from lighting. On other days, they brainstorm math problems using information from the many placards lining Discovery’s hallways, offering scientific facts about native songbirds, the ecology of Virginia’s forests, the ocean or the galaxy.

“Everywhere you walk through this building, you can learn from it,” said Discovery’s principal, Erin Russo. There’s a large-screen energy dashboard by the school’s main entrance, and the building’s mechanical systems, including the geothermal pumps and the solar inverters that change direct current to alternating current, are prominently displayed behind large glass windows in the hallway.

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Learning about the behavior of light, Discovery’s fifth-graders have visited the schools’ rooftop solar lab (a handful of adjustable panels that are metered separately) to see how angling the panels changes their power production.

“Energy is normally so invisible,” said a fifth-grade science teacher, Andrew Bridges. “But the kids can see these solar panels right outside their window. They can see the energy production dipping on cloudy days.”

Bridges’ students also looked for patterns of electricity use and tried to deduce why it was so much heavier on Saturdays than Sundays or why it spiked at 5 a.m.

“I didn’t give them energy-dashboard tests, because that’s not what we’re after,” said Bridges. “My goal as a teacher is to grow good critical thinkers, and I think the energy dashboard opens their eyes to something most people don’t think too much about.”

Still, Discovery’s teachers do need to cover the Virginia state learning standards, and matching these standards with dashboard lessons can be tricky. At one point, third-graders were set to learn graphing with the school’s daily energy tally, but the plan was scrapped because the dashboard gives that data in bar graphs. Virginia’s third-grade standards call for using line graphs to track change over time.

Discovery’s math coach, Angela Torpy, and technology coach, Keith Reeves, help teachers weave the building’s data into standards-based lessons. Students learn the statistical measures of mean, median, and mode using the school’s energy consumption numbers, or demonstrate transparency, translucency, and opacity by covering solar panels with different materials and predicting the energy production.

Besides aligning with state standards, Discovery teachers must also contend with the dashboard’s occasional technical glitches – it tends to conk out due to server strain if too many kids are working on it. Teachers usually have students team up or rotate, so one group hops on the dashboard while the rest of the class works on other tasks. Or they simply distribute screen grabs of dashboard data.

Still, according to Torpy, the upside of students learning from their own building outweighs these challenges. “You can see their level of excitement when they bring up the energy dashboard, and they’re making their own word problems with real data about their own school,” Torpy said of the students. “It’s empowering to them.”

The authenticity of these lessons is reinforced by a schoolwide focus on sustainability. In lieu of a student council, Discovery has an Eco-Action club whose members do annual audits of the school’s energy use, trash, food waste, water consumption and other metrics. They did the school energy audit early in the school year, explained a fifth-grade Eco-Action member named Charlie Dantzker. “Basically, we walked into every classroom, counted the lights, checked to see what was plugged in, and looked for vampires,” Dantzker said. A vampire, he explained, is a device that draws power even when it’s turned off but still plugged into the wall.

But the students didn’t find a lot of waste in the audit: Discovery is already ultra-energy efficient. The school’s “energy use index,” a measure of power use per square foot, is about a third of the average for district elementary schools. The district plans to build on that success.

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Arlington is a fast-growing district, and Discovery Elementary opened in 2015 as part of an ongoing school-building program (it shares a campus with a middle school with a trailer park to accommodate its overflowing student population). Below the schools’ shared athletic fields are geothermal wells that use a groundwater loop to provide cooling in summer and heat in winter.

The district had not set out to build a net-zero school, but the Charlottesville architecture firm VMDO told them it could be done below their budget. Cathy Lin, the energy manager for Arlington Public Schools, regularly leads tours of Discovery, including a rooftop viewing of its 500-kilowatt solar array (1,700 panels). Another net-zero elementary school, also designed by VMDO, is to open in 2019. And as the district keeps growing, Lin is pushing for more.

“I tell the board [of education] if I had all Discoveries, I would spend less than $1 million [a year] on utilities. Now, we spend close to $7 million a year,” she said.

This calculus increasingly makes sense to growing public school districts, according to Ralph DiNola, CEO of the New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit that promotes and verifies net-zero buildings. Because schools are designed to be used by the same owner over many decades, there is plenty of time for energy savings to surpass the extra upfront expenditures, which in any case have plummeted in the past decade. The cost of solar power is way down, and, according to DiNola, the necessary energy efficiency “doesn’t require bleeding-edge technology. You can use standard building materials that are commonplace in the market today.”

Comparing the initial cost of building a net-zero school to that of a standard school is tough, because construction costs vary widely, as do the energy-efficiency challenges between climates. One constant, though, is that the priciest piece of a net-zero building is the solar array. For instance, Discovery’s construction cost for the building and the solar array came to about $316 per square foot, but the building alone cost $262 per square foot, according to VMDO architect Wyck Knox, who led the project design team (numbers don’t include the cost of the school’s two turf soccer fields). Often, districts will opt to build ultra-energy-efficient “net-zero-ready” schools that could become net-zero if and when the municipality raises additional money to add the solar power.

According to a March 2018 NBI report, there are 89 verified or “emerging” net-zero schools (emerging means under construction or too new to have been verified yet). And school buildings are the leading type of non-residential net-zero building, representing 37 percent of all projects tracked by NBI. Supporting these efforts, the Department of Energy published a how-to report on building net-zero K-12 schools in 2016 and created a “Zero-Energy Schools Accelerator” program to give districts technical guidance.

While the net-zero school trend is still relatively small, it has taken hold in districts of every geographic and socioeconomic description.  The school district of Horry County, South Carolina, which counts the majority of its 43,800 students as impoverished, opened three net-zero schools in 2017, one in 2018 and has one more under construction. In San Francisco Unified, where half the students receive free and reduced-price lunch and a quarter are English language learners, the district is building three net-zero schools, including one retrofit of an existing elementary school. At Sandy Grove Middle School, a net-positive building in Hoke County, North Carolina, where nearly 60 percent of students are low-income, the grade levels face off in friendly energy-saving competitions. Meanwhile, at New York City’s first net-zero school, the Kathleen Grimm School for Leadership and Sustainability (P.S. 62) on Staten Island, rows of yellow stationary bikes, both indoors and on the playground, generate pedal power displayed on a big screen.

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Although online energy dashboards are a popular way to turn these buildings into teaching tools, they’re not necessary. Oregon’s Hood River Middle Schoolcreated a food and conservation science program several years ago after it added a net-zero science and music building that includes a 1,000-square-foot greenhouse. Hood River students engineer and build net-zero heating and cooling systems for the greenhouse, such as solar heat collectors made of foam boxes lined with soda cans spray-painted black, and a solar-powered “climate battery” that pulls super-heated summer air into layers of dense rocks that gradually radiate the heat back into the greenhouse as the weather cools.

In addition to maintaining an aquaculture system and growing fruit trees, grapes, tea and other crops, the Hood River students have a perennial challenge from their teacher Michael Becker: to grow tomatoes year-round. They haven’t quite succeeded, but they’re getting close. Last year, they had tomatoes ripening on the vine well into December.

“My lesson plan is: Here’s a problem. Solve it,” said Becker. “We are hyper-aware of our net-zero energy budget, so the kids have to become super-sharp engineers and find nontraditional solutions.”

Back at Discovery, educational strategies are expanding, too. Last year’s school management plan included the expectation that teachers give at least one sustainability-focused lesson every quarter—but several teachers described that as a low bar.

“We’re shooting for sustainability to be taught every day,” said Bridges, the fifth-grade teacher. To bolster those efforts, Reeves is making changes to the energy dashboard, trying to add in student-collected data on the school’s trash production, water use and transportation. The teachers would also like to make it easier for students to get the raw data that feeds the existing dashboard, so that they could make their own, customized dashboards, possibly in conjunction with Virginia’s new K-12 computer science standards.

In the spring of 2018, Discovery staff began a more comprehensive effort to craft standards-based sustainability lessons, by working with Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network (GSNN). Discovery will join its recently-formed “Catalyst Network” – about 100 schools that are meant to showcase the best practices in sustainability education and to jump-start studies into how it stacks up against traditional schooling for student learning.

“Right now, we have a lot of anecdotes,” said Seydel, “but the gold-standard research is not there.”

Starting in 2019, the plan is for all Discovery students to do sustainability audits, not just the Eco-Action club. Each grade level will use their audits to identify problems and issues they can confront with collaborative mastery projects using the problem-solving steps of “design thinking.”

Discovery art teacher Maria Burke has already led her students through several design-thinking projects, such as creating outdoor sculptures with the right mix of shapes and colors to attract pollinators back to a school garden that fell victim to overzealous pruning.

“We want to give students the skills to be innovators, to find solutions,” said Burke. “We want to them to be thinkers for the future and to collaborate and innovate with the world in mind.”

This story about environmental education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

The post Schools Lead the Way to Zero-Energy Buildings, and Use Them for Student Learning appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“The kids were jumping back from those bags dropping at their feet,” recalled Cayne Letizia, the teacher who used immersive virtual reality (VR) to transport his class into this emergency food drop featured in the New York Times 360-degree video series about refugees. Count Letizia among VR’s burgeoning fan base in education, where the spread of high-quality contentand more-affordable hardware (especially Google’s $15 Cardboard Viewer) gives students myriad ways to briefly inhabit what they’re learning—from wandering the streets of ancient Rome to touring the International Space Station.

Education researchers caution that immersive VR, like any technology, may be perfect for some kinds of learning and superfluous, or even counterproductive, for others. Studies of immersive classroom VR are still scarce. But emerging evidence suggests that one of VR’s biggest strengths is its ability to tap student emotions, notably empathy and the can-do confidence known as self-efficacy.

The power of VR to stoke empathy is the focus of research at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, led by communications professor Jeremy Bailenson. In the lab’s “Empathy at Scale” studies, people who inhabit avatars of a different race in a virtual world later score lower in tests of subconscious racial bias, and young people who “wear” an elderly avatar are then more inclined to save for retirement. Charities, including the International Red Cross, have made VR films to counteract “compassion fatigue” and boost donations.

Empathy isn’t a subject in most schools and it’s not an explicit part of the Common Core standards, noted Letizia, an English teacher who parlayed the emotional connections of immersion into reading and writing lessons in the power of narrative and authorial point of view. Still, he thinks empathy needs to be taught, especially (and perhaps ironically) due to how much time we spend interacting digitally.

“My students live and die by their phones. They ‘like’ somebody’s Snapchat and move on. It’s so temporary and removed,” he said. “So much of the technology our kids use removes empathy. But in this case, by placing kids in the moment, [VR] breaks that distance down.”

Another middle-school teacher who dropped his students into the virtual lives of refugees was Charles Herzog in Londonderry, Vermont, whose class tried VR last December near the end of a unit about forced migration. The Google Cardboard viewers that Herzog’s students used were bought by his partner in the project, the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at the University of Vermont.  According to Tarrant’s professional development coordinator, Rachel Mark, empathy education fits into Vermont’s required “Transferable Skills,” specifically “Responsible and Involved Citizenship,” which includes the ability to “demonstrate ethical behavior and the moral courage to sustain it.”

Mark’s blog post about teaching empathymentions both the refugee VR video and one about the lives of police in Flint, Michigan. “In other forms of media, people may see conflicts as black and white,” she said.  “By bringing in the perspective of human beings living through this, it might make you, as a fellow human being, reconsider the topic through someone else’s eyes.”

That’s the idea behind a new VR-based curriculum called “One World, Many Stories” by the nonprofit Global Nomads Group, which produced a series of 360-degree autobiographical videos from the perspective of a boy in eastern Kentucky, a young man in Amman, Jordan, and a young African-American woman in New York City.

Last fall, when Daniel Gross, a sixth-grade teacher in Los Altos, California, heard about “One World, Many Voices,” he jumped at the chance to pilot it. “We discuss current events on a weekly basis,” said Gross, “and inevitably that ends up with us talking about perspective-taking and empathizing with others.”

The four-minute dips into the lives of these young people are interwoven with paper-and-pencil class activities and discussions about the mix of individual and communal identities and the importance of perspective. A post-VR worksheet, for instance, asks students what preconceived ideas they had about the people in each video that were either bolstered or changed after being immersed in their worlds. Finally, students storyboard the scenes that they would include in their own 360-degree videos.

“We have always used technology to help connect young people who would otherwise not have a way to connect, to promote global awareness, curiosity and critical thinking,” said Abigail Finck, the marketing manager for Global Nomads. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has fostered discussions between young people from different cultures via webcasts, and one of these—a 2015 exchange between teenagers in South Los Angeles and Syrian refugees living in Amman, Jordan—first showed the potential of VR to further Global Nomad’s mission. Before the two groups met online, the kids from Los Angeles visited the lab of VR pioneer Nonny de la Peña to walk a mile through a simulation of war-torn Aleppo, Syria.

When the students finally did sit for their web chat, along with translators, the two groups of young people soon felt comfortable enough with each other that the discussion moved from the violence afflicting Syria to the “food deserts” of the inner-city neighborhood where the Los Angeles students lived.

“The refugees asked, ‘Why don’t you have a garden?’ ” Finck recalled. “ ‘We don’t have a home, but of course we have a garden, because that’s how we survive.’ ” Soon after, the students from Los Angeles started a community garden at their school.

In addition to sparking connections with others, there is evidence to suggest that embodying a VR avatar can change a student’s self-perception as well.

“I believe that immersion is very important and powerful, which is why I started working in it 25 years ago,” said Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who is editing a book about VR and learning. “But VR isn’t magic. It’s a very specialized tool.”

Dede’s research focuses on both VR and less-immersive augmented reality (AR) for science learning. On the fully immersive end of the spectrum, Dede and his team created a VR science game called ecoMUVE, in which students are immersed in a pond or forest ecosystem where they have to solve the mystery of a species collapse. Studies of ecoMUVE indicate that spending time working as a scientist in a virtual world may bolster a student’s confidence in her ability to be a scientist in the real world.

“We’re not just interested in what students are learning intellectually, but also in their degree of engagement and self-efficacy, so when the going gets tough, they will have confidence in themselves and keep trying,” said Dede. “In our virtual ecosystems, we want to help students believe that they, too, can be ecosystem scientists.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter to get a weekly update on blended learning.

The post Can Virtual Reality ‘Teach’ Empathy? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Teachers use the Desmos “Activity Builder” tool to create a series of self-paced math challenges using an online graphing calculator. There was just one problem, said Dan Meyer, Desmos’s chief academic officer: With each student deeply engaged in a different part of the lesson, “teachers were having trouble starting class discussions.”

The hush was troubling, because students learn a lot from debating ideas, sharing feedback and collectively exploring big questions. So, this fall, the company added three new features, dubbed the “Classroom Conversation Toolset,” to let teachers pause the app classroom-wide, snap every computer to a particular screen, and cloak student identity to anonymously share answers with the entire class. In doing so, Desmos joined a handful of other startups using tech to boost student interaction and class discussion, so that in the rush to personalize learning we don’t lose the benefits of learning together.

It can be tricky to find the right mix, admits Heather Kohn, a high school math teacher in Marlborough, Massachusetts, who uses the Desmos app a few times a month. “I want to give my students the freedom to explore on their own,” she said – except of course, when she wants their undivided attention.

Before the Conversation Toolset, when Kohn wanted students to take a break from individual work for a class discussion, she had to make them close their laptops – far enough that they could no longer see the screen, but not so far as to shut down the program. Kohn called the maneuver “Pac-Manning,” because the frequent laptop closings and re-openings evoked the video-game creature. “Now, I just click pause,” she said.

One recent morning, Kohn used the Desmos app to teach a ninth-grade algebra class about graphing simple functions. Working in pairs, the students tackled progressively more challenging problems in the app. Kohn monitored everybody’s work from a dashboard on her tablet computer as she circulated around the room, helping those who struggled and checking to make sure the high fliers weren’t missing anything by moving too fast.

“I like to focus on the outliers,” Kohn said. She soon noticed that several students were making the same mistake on multiple challenges. So she clicked pause, which elicited good-natured moaning and groaning. “I know,” she said. “Can I have all eyes on me for a minute?”

Kohn then snapped every computer to one of the early challenges, where the tricky concept first appeared. She projected that screen on a whiteboard, and displayed every student’s answer – but only after clicking the “anonymizer,” which swapped student names with the names of famous mathematicians.

“What do you notice about these graphs?” Kohn asked. “Are they exactly the same shape? What is different about them?”

After a five-minute discussion about shifting functions by tweaking equations, and after jotting a few examples on the whiteboard, Kohn un-paused the app and let the students return to self-paced work.

While personalized-learning software can generate rapid, individualized feedback, reaching students who are truly struggling requires a human connection that no algorithm can replicate, according to Andrew Rowland, co-founder and CEO of Classkick, another ed tech startup geared to social learning.

“Teaching will be one of the last jobs taken away by the robots,” said Rowland, “because software will never be the same as a human who is thinking about what you’re thinking and can use that understanding to say, `here, let me unlock this for you.’”

Launched in 2013, Classkick’s app lets teachers with iPads or Chromebooks create lessons for any subject. When students log on, they can submit answers by typing, writing on a touchscreen, snapping a photograph or making a voice recording, based on the instructions. Teachers see every screen from their computers, and can send students quick feedback using a messaging function. And when a student has a hard time, he can click a button to virtually and anonymously raise his hand, creating a class-wide prompt that can be answered by a peer or by the teacher. The basic version of the app is free, while the  “pro” version with a few more bells and whistles costs $11.99 a month.

Amy Roediger, a high-school chemistry teacher in Mentor, Ohio, outside Cleveland who uses the Classkick app, said she was “pleasantly shocked” by how readily students helped each other.

“It’s like a team-building exercise in the context of a chemistry lesson,” said Roediger.

Another Classkick user, Douglas Ragan, who teaches chemistry in Hudsonville, Michigan, said students are far more comfortable showing their work when he projects their screens, compared to doing the same task at the chalkboard.

“It’s a different dynamic when they don’t have get up in front of the whole class,” he said. “A whole level of nervousness is just eliminated.”

Sharing answers and the thinking behind them is also the goal of a third social-learning tool, called Pear Deck, launched in 2014 by former teachers in Iowa City.  Teachers put questions about any subject onto Pear Deck slides, accessed with a class login code (cost ranges from $99 for a class account to $1,499 to sign up an entire school). When students respond – by typing, drawing, dragging markers around a map or graph, or multiple choice – their answers appear collectively, and anonymously, on the teacher’s projected screen.

It isn’t always about finding the right answer, noted Michal Eynon-Lynch, Pear Deck’s co-founder and chief operating officer; it’s also about, “seeing other people’s ideas, understanding that there are different ways of thinking that have value, and learning how to talk about those differences in a respectful way.”

That said, Pear Deck is now working on more options to personalize lessons in the app. Earlier this fall, for instance, user feedback led them to add a student-paced mode that teachers can toggle to as they see fit.

“A teacher might decide in the moment to help students who are really stuck while letting other students move ahead,” said Eynon-Lynch. “We want to give teachers that flexibility, without going completely down the rabbit hole of personalized learning where everybody is just doing their own thing. We’re still trying to find that balance.”

As Kohn’s algebra students understand, learning isn’t a race to the finish line. Two students who sped through more challenges than their peers – Ian Minier and Harrison Paul – said the first class discussion led them back to a function they’d already shifted along the Y-axis, to experiment with moving it along the X-axis as well.

“When she hits pause, maybe we’re on a roll, and so at first we’re like, ah man!” said Minier. “But, it kind of forces everyone to pay attention, and we always learn something different.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Blended Learning.

The post Pump Up the Volume! More Talking in Class, Please! appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last December, when Amal Abdi found out she’d gotten into Yale early with a full scholarship, the first thing she did was call her parents, who had fled war-torn Somalia in the 1990s to start a new life in Columbus, Ohio. The next thing she did was text Chloe Collins, a young woman in Minnesota whom she’d never met—but who had been her guidance counselor, confidante and occasional nudge, throughout the college application process.

“I was so ecstatic,” Abdi recalled. “I told her, ‘I can’t believe I got in!’ ”

Collins, however, had no trouble believing it. Abdi was at the top of her class, and Collins had worked with about 200 students like her in a new virtual advising program by College Possible, a nonprofit founded in 2000. College Possible is one of many college advocacy groups hoping that technology will jumpstart the slow growth of low-income students in higher education. The last couple years have brought a renaissance in virtual guidance counseling—both new services and existing ones upping their game with mobile, social media and data analytics. It’s e-counseling 2.0.

The American School Counselor Association recommends no more than 250 students per guidance counselor, but the nationwide average is nearly twice that. For years, College Possible has tried to bridge the counseling gap for low-income students with two-hours of after-school college prep, held twice a week at partner schools and led by recent college graduates from AmeriCorps. They’ve had success, but doing everything on-site limited their reach.

“After years of working at this, and serving tens of thousands of kids each year, it still felt like we were touching far too small a piece of the problem,” said Jim McCorkell, College Possible’s founder and CEO. “We wanted to help hundreds of thousands of kids.”

So, in 2014, they launched CollegePoint, a virtual version of the after-school workshop—emailing students timely information and tips about everything from financial aid to homesickness in their freshman year, followed by a phone call or a web chat with a trained counselor at least once a month and more frequently if the student needed it.

Besides editing Abdi’s essays and helping her navigate financial aid applications, Collins was a ready source of moral support. Early on, when Abdi assembled her “balance list” of potential colleges, the low acceptance rates and sky-high average SATs of the most selective colleges left her feeling inadequate and intimidated.

“Whenever I had doubts, I would text Chloe,” Abdi said of Collins. “She would reassure me that I was a strong candidate and that even if these schools didn’t accept me, that I would do fine and be a success.”

Studies of college advising and mentoring programs have shown them to be effective in getting low-income kids to and through college. Despite a proliferation of such efforts in recent years, however, their scope remains dwarfed by the need. Between 1970 and 2013, the percentage of Americans in the lowest income quartile with a college degree by age 24 rose from 6 to 9 percent, according to the 2015 Indicators report by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

“Some see hope in those numbers, that we can move the needle on this issue,” said Keith Frome, CEO of College Summit, a nonprofit he co-founded in the early 1990s. “But it’s also incredibly dissatisfying, and bad for the country, and certainly bad for the other 91 percent.”

So, to expand their influence, College Summit has made a decisive turn to the virtual in the past couple years. They digitized the lessons in the textbooks they used to publish offering tips on writing essays, finding scholarships and identifying quality colleges that matched student interests. They ditched the old model of holding grade-specific College Summit classes in schools and launched the PeerForward program, in which teams of high school juniors and seniors, trained over the summer and assisted by a faculty advisor and “remote coaching” Web chats by a College Summit staff member, plan their own activities and workshops to foster a “college-going culture” in their school.

For example, PeerForward students have organized all-school assemblies where they read the personal essays they worked on at College Summit’s summer training and teach their classmates how to craft their own. They have set up FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) booths at school open houses. And they’ve led teachers and counselors in “appathons” where they demonstrate a dozen or so free college-guidance apps that College Summit curates on its new LinkForward website.

Meanwhile, more-established virtual advising programs have been busy revamping their approach. For instance, since 1999, iMentor has matched low-income high school students with professionals in a variety of fields for multi-year mentoring that blends virtual and in-person interactions, increasingly focused on college success. The virtual piece was just email exchanges, until last year when iMentor launched a mobile-device-ready, multimedia platform that incorporates document sharing for writing feedback, as well as videos to prompt real-time conversations and advising.

Last year, another virtual mentoring outfit, iCouldBe, founded in 2000, partnered with DataKind, a nonprofit that crunches data for philanthropic and social-justice groups, to track the interactions on their own online platform and improve students’ engagement with their post-college role models.

For example, the data showed that girls completed more of the activities and used many more words in their written responses to conversation prompts than the boys did, according to Kate Schrauth, executive director of iCouldBe.

“So, maybe if the content was more gameified, then that might more consistently engage the boys,” she ventured. “That’s the kind of thing we are now beginning to test.”

Still, the biggest challenge for any virtual mentor or guidance counselor is replicating the sort of trusting relationships that builds more naturally when meeting face to face. To that end, in 2016, CollegePoint added a summer texting initiative for advisees between junior and senior year.

Jordan Masters, the CollegePoint advisor who led the summer texting, said it was partly to offer friendly reminders about things like registering for the SAT, mulling a “balance list” of colleges or outlining an essay draft before the “mad rush” of school began. But the texts were also meant to offer students reassurance, “that they’re going to be OK, and if they needed anything, somebody from CollegePoint would be there for them.”

Abdi, for one, says she knew she could count on Collins, who spent a lot of time helping her revise her essay in Google Docs.

“She stressed that I should focus less on my test scores and more about who I am as a person and what’s my motivation for going to school,” said Abdi, who wrote her essay about the expectations she felt, as the eldest child of immigrants who had left everything behind to give her the opportunities she now enjoyed. Neither of her parents had gone to college. Her dad worked as a taxi driver and her mom was a package handler for FedEx. They depended on their daughter to help fill out official forms, decipher bills and translate parent-teacher conferences.

Of course, just because Abdi’s parents couldn’t help much with her college applications didn’t mean they didn’t have big dreams for her. When Abdi called them about Yale, they said, “Congratulations! Now, apply to Harvard.” She did and was accepted. She will be heading to Cambridge, Mass., this fall and plans to major in engineering.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Blended Learning.

The post E-Counseling 2.0: Can a New Wave of Virtual Guidance Help? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For many families, reading is as much a part of summer as cookouts and camp. But as the weather warms, math is often banished along with mittens and sweaters.  And that’s a problem.

Studies of “summer math loss” find that the average kid forgets more than two months of math over the break. The numbers are worse for lower-income students, and those losses pile up, contributing to math achievement gaps.

Can education technology help put the brakes on summer backsliding? Early research on summer math-practice apps suggests they come up short. Maybe we’d have better luck using tech that changes how kids and their families relate to math all year round.

That’s Laura Overdeck’s vision. She’s the founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation, which offers a free app to help families “make nightly math as common and beloved as the bedtime story.”

The Bedtime Math app, launched in 2012, spurs family math talk by sending parents daily word problems prefaced by a paragraph of story – about everything from subway-riding dogs to galactic travel – illustrated with a photo or video.

Parents and kids choose from four related math questions that progress in difficulty – from counting and pattern completion to multiplication and division. There’s a “sky’s the limit” challenge question that may tap algebra or geometry, but the app is geared to kids aged three to nine.

The Bedtime Math parents interviewed for this column said they kept using the app because their kids requested it.  “If my wife and I had a date night, or a party, or some other engagement, my daughter would make sure we forwarded the link to our sitter,” said Ajay Shroff of Summit, New Jersey.

“My husband and I love numbers,” said Overdeck, who has a degree in astrophysics and an MBA. Her husband, John, majored in math and statistics.  “Math is like dessert at our house.”

Before Bedtime Math was an app, it was the Overdecks’ nightly routine with their children. When their oldest was two, they started to work numbers into the bedtime stories. They’d count stuffed animal eyes and noses, for instance, and eventually started dropping basic addition and subtraction into playful stories they’d make up on the spot.

“If we talked about ninjas or giraffes at dinner, then the math story that night would be about ninjas or giraffes,” said Overdeck. “It was always off-the-cuff and fun.”

When their second child was two, he started to demand his own math problems when tucked in at night.  Eventually other parents in their community of Short Hills, New Jersey, heard about this, and Overdeck agreed to email them some bedtime math stories they could tell their own kids.

“I emailed ten friends in town, and within a week the list had doubled,” Overdeck said. It grew so fast that she quickly moved from emailing to posting math stories on Facebook, and then Tweeting them, before launching the app, which hundreds of thousands of parents have since downloaded.

Overdeck has kept the app simple. There are no fancy graphics, sound effects, scores, rewards or other gamification gewgaws.

So far, it seems to be working. In a 2015 Science study led by University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, nearly 600 first graders signed up for “Bedtime Learning Together” a disguised version of Overdeck’s app that allowed a portion of families to get literacy questions rather than math problems with their daily stories. After a year, students whose families did math outscored those in the literacy group by an average of nearly three months of math achievement.

Admittedly, this was a school-year study, not a summer one. The other caveat concerns demographics. While the students in the study hailed from diverse backgrounds, they skewed affluent, and the real challenge of summer slide is among lower-income students. A Johns Hopkins University study following nearly 800 Baltimore students for several years found that lower- and middle-income students progressed academically at a similar rate during the school year, but the lower-income kids fell further behind each summer. By ninth grade, about two-thirds of the achievement gap between them and their more affluent classmates could be explained by an accumulation of summer learning loss.

Overdeck and her team have worked to spread Bedtime Math beyond affluent communities. Last fall, she partnered with the Newark, New Jersey, public schools to pilot an introduction of the app to families in six elementary schools via parent-teacher conferences. About 20 percent of those parents downloaded the app, which encouraged Newark superintendent Christopher Cerf to green-light the app’s introduction at parent-teacher conferences in all the city’s elementary schools this fall.

“Once we can link usage stats to individual students, then we can look at things like summer learning loss,” said Cerf. (Individual student data would come from questionnaires; it is not collected by the app.) “But I would be pretty surprised if regular users did not see a greater carryover from year to year of their math progress.”

At last April’s White House Early STEM Symposium, the foundation committed to start similar partnerships with several other districts in the coming academic year.

Educators urge parents to weave more “math talk” into everyday family activities – from setting the table to baking a cake. Still, many people need a nudge to talk about math with their kids. Parents often see math as strictly the school’s domain, and they’d be relieved to keep it there, because math makes them nervous and insecure. Studies suggest that up to 25 percent of college-educated Americans suffer from moderate or severe math anxiety.

Overdeck caught a glimpse of that when several of the parents she first emailed math stories – all successful, college-educated professionals – wrote to ask her to include the answers in the next batch. She did. The answers are provided in the app, too.

Math anxiety loomed large in the Science study. Beilock’s team compared the data from children with more or less math-anxious parents (based on an initial survey). In families with parents low in math anxiety, Bedtime Math didn’t do much for math scores unless it was used at least twice a week. But kids with the most math-anxious parents only had to use the app once a week for math gains equal to half a school year.

To Overdeck, these findings suggest that the app sparked more math talk in these homes all the time, not just with the app itself.  Beilock and her team are still following the children in the Bedtime Math study as they transition from one grade to the next, but she can’t speak about the new data until a paper is prepared for publication.

“If this app is changing how parents interact around math, then you could imagine it could be beneficial at a time when kids are not in school,” Beilock said. “That would just be speculation. But I think it’s fair speculation.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Blended Learning.

The post Mix a Little Math Into That Bedtime Story appeared first on Washington Monthly.

SAN FRANCISCO — A few weeks ago, at the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) near San Francisco, five-year-old Jack Stabenow climbed a step stool to peer into a machine that cuts cardboard with a high-powered laser. The red beam precisely followed a squiggly building design that Jack had just finger-drawn on a tablet computer. Jack’s goal was to make a building that could stand up to the wind of a nearby table fan.

With his cardboard cut, Jack hurried to the assembly area where about two dozen other kids his age labored over teetering, but well-taped, creations. If these first attempts toppled in the breeze, that was to be expected. In fact, back-to-the-drawing-board was kind of the point.

The kids were learning the cycle of design, prototype, test and redesign that’s a hallmark of engineering.

The museum staffers were testing a prototype, too. Last month, the museum launched America’s first early childhood “fab lab” — for fabrication laboratory — a suite of digitally controlled fabrication machinery, such as 3D printers, laser cutters and milling machines.

Long a staple of industry, fab labs have recently been popping up in affluent high schools and middle schools. But the Discovery Museum now wants to bring a fab lab experience to kids as young as three, and to spread that opportunity well beyond the wealthy enclaves. Leaders there see fab labs as a natural extension of their hands-on STEM programs, and a way to infuse creativity rather than passive “screen time” into children’s early encounters with technology.

The museum occupies several squat yellow-brick buildings, the former barracks of historic Fort Baker at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge in the Marin Headlands. It offers a mix of programming for the general public and for school classes from pre-K to third grade, which means that the staff is familiar with skepticism about technology in early childhood education. Indeed, they say they share it.

The museum became STEM-focused several years ago, but a low-tech mindset pervades its exhibits. In one room, kids dig through bins of egg cartons, foil and other recycled materials to make “renewable energy machines.” In another, young visitors learn about earthquakes and build cardboard structures to test on a battery-powered “shake table.”

Outside, kids make wild, colorful art with paint whipped but not blended by salad spinners; don safety goggles and practice hammering nails; and build ramshackle forts with soft, oversized blue blocks.

“We want to be thoughtful about introducing technology to the analog sort of play that kids engage in so naturally and beautifully and get so much out of,” said Rood. “We need to ask, what’s the added value?”

“We want to be thoughtful about introducing technology to the analog sort of play that kids engage in so naturally and beautifully and get so much out of. We need to ask, what’s the added value?” —Elizabeth Rood, vice president of education strategy, Bay Area Discovery Museum

That was also the primary question in January 2015, when Jan Morrison, president and CEO of TIES (Teaching Institute for Excellence in STEM), invited BADM staff along with other early childhood experts, software developers and representatives from MIT’s Fab Foundation to meet in Washington, D.C.

Morrison asked the group if fab labs could reconcile the push for early technology literacy with the desire to let young children tinker and explore with hands-on learning. “In talking to both worlds, it seemed that there was no interface,” said Morrison.

After two days of discussion, the BADM contingent was convinced that an early childhood fab lab was both worthwhile and feasible, and they volunteered to pilot one and to share what they learned via the Fab Foundation.

“In the fab lab concept, we saw this amazing confluence of creativity and STEM that could open up the black box of all this technology around us,” said Rood. While classroom technology usually takes something real and digitizes it, she said, a fab lab turns a digital creation back into something real. A fab lab, for instance, can turn abstract ideas, such as concave versus convex, an object’s center of gravity or the volume of a cube, into something physical and tactile, she said. “So it’s no longer abstract. It helps kids get it and understand the concepts they’re taught in a much deeper way.”

Fab labs also foster a readiness to repeatedly test and improve one’s ideas, an approach they’ve taken to heart at the Discovery Museum as they pilot fab lab programming.

“What comes before beta?” joked the museum’s CEO, Karen Flynn. “That’s kind of where we are.”

The museum’s Fab Lab activities fit on a spectrum from “light to deep touch,” explained Flynn. On the light touch end of the scale, for instance, was a car-building activity (using variously shaped wooden wheels premade at the laser cutter) during a Google-sponsored field trip in early May, when about 1,200 kids and 400 parents and teachers from disadvantaged schools in the Bay Area spent a day exploring the museum. The kids tested their cars on ramps and measured the distances rolled. They could watch the laser cutter making batches of wheels, but they weren’t designing the wheels themselves.

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Deeper touch Fab Lab activities are planned for the museum’s summer camp. Over the course of a week, camp-goers will roam the museum searching for ways to improve the exhibits, operations or architecture, and then design solutions they can prototype in the Fab Lab.

“The 3D printers and laser cutters are very cool. But we also want kids and teachers to engage with technology that would be possible to bring into their own classroom.” —Sara Norris, associate director of STEM and school partnerships, Bay Area Discovery Museum

Public workshops like the wind-resistant building challenge fall somewhere in the middle of the touch depth spectrum. In another planned Fab Lab workshop, kids will make balsa wood gliders by choosing different shapes for wings and fuselages.

Typically, these one-time, 90-minute workshop sessions max out at 15 kids who are preregistered online. The day of Jack Stabenow’s visit was an exception — a special Fab Lab sneak-peek for museum member families. The workshop was shortened to an hour and there were nearly twice the usual number of kids waiting at the laser cutter and then waiting again to test their buildings. Ironically, while fab labs are prized for speeding up the prototyping process, the museum staffers have discovered there’s a lot of downtime, which isn’t easy for little kids.

Public workshops like the wind-resistant building challenge fall somewhere in the middle of the touch depth spectrum. In another planned Fab Lab workshop, kids will make balsa wood gliders by choosing different shapes for wings and fuselages.

“There’s this lag time that doesn’t happen when they’re not using technology,” said Alexis Weiner, the museum’s art and digital design assistant manager, who created the “building in the wind” workshop. As a result, the Fab Lab keeps plenty of precut parts and materials on the assembly table. These can be used either by kids who have no patience for the computer-aided design or by those, like Jack, who want to strengthen their creations without rejoining the line at the laser cutter.

Jack’s first squiggly design prompted so many laser cuts that it shredded his cardboard, except for a jagged sort of arch. He stuck ends of the arch into foam foundations and dubbed it the “dragon building.”  When that structure failed the wind test, Jack propped it up with stick buttresses. That worked; Jack beamed.

Another challenge has been finding computer-aided design software suitable for kindergartners. A touch-screen interface is a must, for instance. As a stopgap, the Discovery Museum Fab Lab uses a touch-screen version of Adobe Illustrator, which has both free-drawing and shape tools.

“The kids have really surprised me with how well they work with Illustrator,” said Amy Eisenmann, associate director of museum experience. “Still, it’s not made for them. It’s a professional designer’s tool.”

Eisenmann has talked with developers at Adobe, headquartered in nearby San Jose, about creating a more kid-friendly version of Illustrator. Meanwhile, the Discovery Museum has partnered with a Boston-based educational media company, FableVision, to adjust their design software Maker Studio, which is currently aimed at grades three to eight.

Related:  Eco-hackers: These kids track pollution with balloons and kites

The go-to fabrication machine for Maker Studio is a digital cutter of paper and cardstock, called a Silhouette printer, which the Discovery Museum plans to bring into its Fab Lab rotation. What paper lacks in glamour it makes up for in being “familiar, friendly, accessible and really fast,” said Peggy Healy Stearns, the software designer who created Maker Studio.

Plus, digital paper cutters cost only about $200, compared to ten times that for a laser cutter or 3D printer. That’s important for the museum as it pursues its goal of Fab Lab outreach beyond wealthy schools. “We want to make this technology accessible to kids and teachers regardless of their background,” said Sara Norris, the museum’s associate director of STEM and school partnerships. “The 3D printers and laser cutters are very cool. But we also want kids and teachers to engage with technology that would be possible to bring into their own classroom.”

The price for the museum’s two 3D printers seems particularly steep, because they are way too slow for little kids. Printing anything sizeable takes hours. So, for now, the printers have been relegated to showpieces. They are still running almost constantly, layering the plastic creations of in-house designer Tristan Schoening, including oversized nuts and bolts and a prosthetic hand with fully articulated fingers.

“A big part of my job is showing off the equipment’s capabilities, to get kids excited, but also show parents and teachers that these things are incredibly useful and not just for trinkets,” said Schoening.

Meanwhile, the museum’s school programs must support the science standards taught by busy elementary school teachers. The Fab Lab’s shadow-puppet challenge, for example, uses laser-cut acrylics to reinforce classroom lessons about transparent, translucent and opaque. For now, the school Fab Lab sessions will be one-time class visits to the museum, but they may soon include more intensive, three-day projects like those used by the museum’s other STEM programs, in which a day at the museum is sandwiched between two visits to a school by museum staff.

In the hope of spawning more hands-on tech in early education, the museum will soon offer Fab Lab-focused professional development to encourage teachers to get more comfortable with the software and tools. They’ll also share their lesson plans online.

To evaluate what kids are actually learning as they design and create, the museum staff will open up the Fab Lab to education researchers from UC Berkeley, Stanford University and Mills College in Oakland, with whom they regularly partner as part of the museum’s Center for Childhood Creativity. An internal study is already underway to see how Fab Lab technology changes parental engagement with kids compared to low-tech programs. The workshops and school programs will also be evaluated by the nonprofit education researcher WestEd. Within a year, the Fab Lab facilitators hope to have collected and analyzed enough data via surveys, observations and interviews to guide Fab Lab improvements and start sharing lessons learned.

Some places aren’t waiting on the research, however. Earlier this year, the Hardesty Center for Fab Lab in Tulsa announced plans to pilot an early childhood program with 100 students from kindergarten through fourth grade. And the Children’s Museum of Cleveland will put fab lab capabilities into a mobile technology lab that will hit city streets this fall. The Discovery Museum plans to launch its own mobile lab next year, which will bring its hands-on engineering activities to less-advantaged communities in the Bay Area. In the meantime, staffers will start up the Fab Lab’s school programs this fall.

“It’s very exciting to be on the forefront of this movement in early childhood and to work with people who are open to accepting whatever we find about what works and doesn’t work,” said the BADM’s Norris. “We’re learning all the time. We’re teaching design thinking, but I feel like we’re living it as well.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Blended Learning.

The post Five-Year Olds and Laser Cutters—Perfect Together? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Meet Root — a robot being beta-tested by its creators at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The Wyss team hopes Root will soon roll into the gap between the growing enthusiasm for K-12 computer science and the lack of qualified teachers.  With Root’s help, they claim, any teacher can become a computer science teacher.

“Root’s job is to celebrate the code you create by bringing it to life,” said Justin Werfel, a senior research scientist at Wyss. Root magnetically clings to whiteboards (most of which are metal-backed) where it acts out programs that students compose on iPads that are wirelessly linked to the robot.

Unlike other educational robots — such as Bee-Bots, Dash & Dot, and Lego Mindstorms — that are geared to a specific age range, Root is meant to span from pre-kindergarten to college. With black sides and a plain white top crossed with LEDs, Root is deliberately un-cuddly and unadorned — a highly functional, sensor-packed box that can draw with a marker inserted in its middle.

“Bringing a really cute robot into your kindergarten classroom is great,” said Zivthan Dubrovsky who heads the robotics group at Wyss. “But then you have to keep buying new robots as the kids get older. There’s all this cost, and the kids have to keep mastering new hardware.”

Root’s flexibility is based in its coding app, called Square, which has three tiers of complexity. In level one, users program with a picture and block-based code that includes very few words. A curving arrow is the command to turn. A purple boomerang will put a loop in your code. Drag in a musical note and select the specific tone from a pop-up keyboard.

Root’s sensors can spot and react to what you’ve drawn on the whiteboard — following a black line, for instance, or stopping at a red one. The robot can also lift up and put down the marker to draw as it moves.

Level two of Square is also block-based, but it introduces more text and numeric variables for things like movement commands. Level three is text-based, JavaScript code. Students can toggle between the levels to translate their block commands into text code or vice versa.

Root grew from two strands of research in the lab of Harvard computer science professor Radhika Nagpal, a Wyss core faculty member. In the summer of 2011, a visiting undergraduate in Nagpal’s lab named Raphael Cherney made a magnetic robot. Cherney, now a Wyss research assistant, pegged his creation as a robotic whiteboard eraser that he called MAG-NEATO.

But when more senior colleagues saw the wall-climbing robot, they knew it was destined for more than cleanup duty, even if they didn’t know exactly what that destiny would be.

The answer crystallized when a post-doc in Nagpal’s lab, Michael Rubenstein, entered a 2012 African Robotics Network challenge for a low-cost educational robot. Rubenstein, now a Northwestern University computer science professor, won first place with the Affordable Education Robot (AERobot), which cost $10 to build.

Like Root, the AERobot was designed to help kids learn to code and had optical sensors that allowed it to turn toward a light or follow a path drawn on a piece of paper. There was immediate and worldwide interest from educators for the AERobot (now licensed by a Chinese company called Seed Studio, which sells them for $19 each, or about $14 a piece for a bulk order).

The AERobot’s success convinced the Wyss researchers that they should develop a whiteboard-climbing robot for the classroom. Plus, AERobot had limitations that they wanted to overcome with Root and its programming interface.

First, AERobot was aimed at middle school students. It was too complicated for younger kids and too limited for more advanced students. Second, it had to be plugged into a computer to upload its programmed instructions, so it was cumbersome to tweak and test changes to student code. Finally, despite being geared to beginning coders, AERobot required at least some technical acumen to teach and troubleshoot in class.

“You’re not going to be able to take a sixth-grade teacher who knows nothing about technology, give them the AERobot, and then walk away and have them be successful,” said Dubrovsky.

It’s a challenge faced by schools everywhere — a push for coding and technology literacy but a shortage of computer science teachers. Earlier this year, the Obama administration proposed $4 billion to states, including $100 million directly to school districts, to re-train teachers as computer science instructors.

“We’re taking a different approach,” said Dubrovsky. “We are making a robot that will work out of the box and that teachers can use immediately. If they can download an app, then they can use the robot to help teach coding.”

The Wyss researchers brought three Root prototypes for last month’s test drive with the third-graders at the Woodward School in Southborough. They started with a few demonstrations, such as programming Root to turn in tandem with the iPad’s accelerometer (an internal sensor that tells the device when it’s being tilted), so that kids could “drive” Root by steering with their iPads. Then, they had Root follow a simple game board and programmed it to flash colored lights and play notes when it reached designated squares. Finally, the children all tried to program Root to draw their first initial, which most of them couldn’t do on the first try.

“There was a lot of trial and error and problem-solving. It was amazing listening to their conversations, and to watch these kids,” said Amy Benford, Woodward’s technology integration specialist. “And when they were successful, their attitude was, look at what I just created!”

The Wyss team is looking for more schools to beta-test Root prototypes this fall. The robot is not yet for sale, but the Wyss team estimates it will cost about $200. That’s ten times more than the AERobot, Dubrovsky admitted, and assumes the school already has iPads. But, he argued, one Root up on a whiteboard can cover a lot more students.

Root’s developers hope to extend the robot’s social reach by creating a website where kids can show off their code and teachers can swap lesson plans.

“Longer term, we’d like there to be that kind of sharing,” said Dubrovsky. “We want Root to help turn learning to code into a social experience.”

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

The post Can a Wall-Climbing Robot Teach Your Kid to Code? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Photo: AP Images

Between kids chattering, bolting from their seats or simply staring out the window, keeping students focused is a constant battle for Alexandra Beckman, a special education teacher of fifth- and sixth-graders in Ozark, Missouri.

“It’s probably how I spend the majority of my day,” Beckman admitted. She recently tried a new approach to claw back time for teaching core subjects – not cajoling or commands, but a simple question: Am I on task?

This query popped up repeatedly on students’ mobile devices, announced by a flashing screen and awaiting a tapped response of “yes” or “no.” Every answer became a nugget of data that an app called I-Connect graphed and made visible to both teacher and student for periodic debriefs.

Beckman is among several teachers to pilot emerging “self-monitoring” applications for students with chronic behavior and attention problems. Self-monitoring students, who are often but not exclusively those with learning disabilities or attention disorders, work with teachers to set classroom comportment goals, such as coming to class prepared 75 percent of the time. Then they track their own progress.

Howard Wills, a research professor in education at the University of Kansas’s Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, leads the development of I-Connect. According to Wills, self-monitoring motivates students, “by making them partners in a strategy for improvement.” Rather than after-the-fact scolding or banishment to the principal’s office, self-monitoring is proactive and gives students much-needed practice in self-control.

Pencil-and-paper self-monitoring has been used for decades. Typically, students fill out photocopied score sheets during class and hand them in for review.  Sometimes, teachers offer a small reward (such as candy or extra free time) for reaching a behavior-improvement goal. Technology is relegated to timers, such as vibrating pagers, that cue students to score their behavior at regular intervals.

Wills spent years helping teachers implement this sort of self-monitoring. It worked, but was cumbersome, potentially drew unwanted attention from classmates and generated data that wasn’t often used beyond a daily tally. Then, Wills bought his first smartphone.

“I was floored by the ability of this thing to keep me organized,” he said. “It had alarms, calendars, checklists and prompts. It could even track my steps.” In short, it seemed perfect for self-monitoring. In 2010, Wills and colleagues at Juniper’s technology innovation lab set out to create I-Connect.

Around the same time, another group of researchers, led by two special education professors, Ted Hasselbring of Vanderbilt and Allison Bruhn of the University of Iowa, began work on Score It. In this app, both student and teacher are frequently prompted to rate the student’s recent behavior, such as being respectful and being ready, on a sliding scale.

Both apps have undergone years of testing with students of various ages and aptitudes. The studies typically include just a few students, because validation requires two trained observers to make detailed notes on each student’s behavior several times a minute – before, during and after the intervention. Score It should be publicly available at the end of May and I-Connect’s creators hope to have it ready within a year.

Howard Wills, left, and Phuong Tran, researchers at the University of Kansas, review the app they are developing to help children monitor their behavior in class. Photo: April Fleming

Meanwhile, the teachers in the pilot studies often keep using the apps after the studies finish, including Kristi Emerson, who piloted Score It with one of her at-risk students at a middle school in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.

“If we can help students realize, ‘Hey, I am in charge of my behaviors and choices,’ then they start gaining confidence,” said Emerson. “They see some success, and that snowballs.”

Beckman, who tried I-Connect for two boys with autism, pointed out one obvious advantage over paper-and-pencil: kids dig devices. “My students really liked the technology piece of it,” including the instant graphing of their progress, “so, they bought into it much faster,” she said.

One of Beckman’s students used the app during math lessons and the other during writing. After about 30 days of the intervention, the student in math (also diagnosed with the developmental disability fragile X syndrome) increased his on-task behavior from 19 percent to 63 percent. The student who self-monitored during writing lessons, meanwhile, improved from 9 percent to 91 percent in on-task behavior. Both students also had substantial academic gains.

Self-monitoring must be precisely targeted. If a student gets engrossed in reading, then he doesn’t need to be pestered by an app every minute. But, if this student can’t focus on math worksheets for more than three minutes at a time, then a little on-task reminder during these lessons every couple minutes could be quite helpful.

The idea is to break up a big behavior challenge into manageable chunks. For some students, the prospect of focusing for an entire school day can seem daunting. Staying focused for the next two minutes, however, until your app checks in again to ask how it’s going, is much easier.

Then there’s the social aspect. Lachelle Clemons, who piloted I-Connect with special-education students at the high school in Stockton, Missouri, said that carrying a mobile device “took away some of the stigma” that could come from a paper checklist on a student’s desk, visible to peers. Nevertheless, the app developers downplayed the role that technology itself has in the success of a self-monitoring intervention.

“There’s still a huge teacher component,” said Hasselbring. “Too often, people expect technology to do everything. But how teachers use it can make a big difference.” What should be rated? How often? How should feedback be dispensed? Should rewards be offered?

Both apps are customizable. They can be set to check in once about punctuality or homework, while prompting self-reflection on a particular behavior every two minutes and on another behavior every five minutes. As students make progress, the goals and frequency of prompts can be adjusted.

The data amassed by the apps should inform those choices, although Bruhn admits that, for now, this usually requires her sitting down with teachers to go over the data together. She and Hasselbring hope to automate recommendations about when students may be ready for a less intensive intervention, using algorithms embedded in the app.

After all, the goal is to hone the ability to focus, organize thoughts and control emotions, to the point where they’re ingrained and motivated by the academic and social rewards they can bring. One of Beckman’s I-Connect students, for instance, has largely transitioned to general education classes, reducing his time in her at-risk classroom from nearly the entire day to just an hour. Still, she added, some level of support may be needed long term.

“This app can help students make these transitions,” she said, “because it can easily go with them wherever they go.”

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

The post “Paying attention?” An App Asks – Helping Kids Monitor Their Own Classroom Behavior appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Brittany Bui (left) and AJ Wheatley, co-presidents of the Moneythink chapter at Chapman University in Orange, California, at last year’s freshman activity fair. Photo: Kara Zucker

In the fall of 2008, Ted Gonder was studying economics at the University of Chicago as the world economy melted down around him.

“We were learning about the collapse in this ivory tower, theoretical, Wall Street Journal context,” Gonder recalled. “But a few blocks from campus was one of the hardest hit inner-city neighborhoods—a bank desert with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country.”

The juxtaposition led Gonder and some classmates to start a financial education program for high school students in schools in low-income communities. Now a nonprofit called Moneythink, it has with 30 university chapters in 10 states, Moneythink takes a blended learning approach, by mixing personalized mentoring with the power of social media.

With Gonder as CEO, Moneythink starts with committed college mentors who meet weekly with small “teams” of juniors and seniors in local high schools to talk about mindful spending, goal-directed saving, and the smart use of credit cards and other financial products. And, since 2014, the nonprofit has been piloting an app called Moneythink Mobile, to push these lessons beyond classroom walls, track their impact, and use “likes” and other social nudges to encourage better real-world money habits.

Typically, several mentors split a class so each works with no more than five students. Before the groups talk money, they just talk — discussing the personal interests and goals that ground Moneythink’s spending and saving exercises.

Each classroom lesson is paired with a financial challenge on Moneythink Mobile, an Instagram-like platform on which students compete between weekly meetings with their mentors. In the “Snaptrack” challenge, for example, students post savings moments—a photo of a packed lunch, the pricey shoes they decided not to buy, or the coupon they used at the grocery store—captioned with a description, a dollar amount and #savings.

Every post earns students points that position them in the app’s “leader board.” Over the course of the pilot, however, Moneythink Mobile’s developers have earned not to push gamification too far.

“A lot of our students are dealing with some very real financial situations. Sometimes, they’re the ones buying the family groceries. They’ve seen parents lose jobs and even lose homes,” said Kelly Carlquist, an analyst at Goldman Sachs who was president of Moneythink’s Northwestern University chapter until she graduated in 2014 and now chairs its young professional’s board. “We don’t want to turn this into too much of a game, which would cannibalize our efforts to bring this into a real-life context.”

Besides, more than points, students seem to crave the little bursts of digital attention and applause that their posts generate. They spice their comments with emoji ranging from a simple thumbs-up of approval to a ninja indicating special savings skills to a smug blue face that looks decidedly unimpressed.

“It helps students think about their purchasing behavior through the lens of delaying gratification by not spending, but getting some likes and comments as instant gratification for doing that,” said Gonder.

To prime the social pump, the app’s developers recently added an “explore” function so that users at one high school can scan and comment on spending and saving posts from around the country. Students need a code to access the app, and mentors monitor posts to quash insults and the sharing of sensitive information such as a legible photo of a new debit card.

So far, about 4,600 students have used Moneythink Mobile, including more than 1,000 in the fall of 2015, collectively posting several thousand dollars in savings. Obviously, mentors can’t verify the figures, nor do they typically add up the dollars students claim to have saved. That’s of secondary importance, according to Brittany Bui, a senior finance major and co-president of the Moneythink chapter at Chapman University in Orange, California. The Chapman mentors work with students at Orange High School, where nearly three quarters of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

“It’s not so much the specifics of the post itself,” said Bui. “It’s getting into the habit of thinking about what they’re buying. Are they saving, or not? Having them take pics and post makes them more mindful spenders.”

With that said, the numbers aren’t completely irrelevant.

“One of my students posted a pic of the coffee her mom made at home that she started drinking instead of making daily runs to Starbucks,” Bui recalled. “We talked about it in class, and three of the girls in my group were drinking Frappuccinos.”

They did the math. Saving just $3 a day by opting for home-brewed coffee over Starbucks for one year adds up to more than $1000.

The Moneythink curriculum encourages students to think of money as a tool to express their values. If travel is more important to you than tasty coffee treats, for example, then the smart choice is to skip the Frappuccinos and use the thousand bucks on a trip. Another Moneythink Mobile challenge called “Follow the Money” spurs these values discussions by asking students to rate each other’s spending posts as a “good spend,“ or a “bad spend.”

Other challenges include “Tap to Save” focused on racking up small savings toward a specific goal, and “Sage Selfie” in which students post a pic of a friend or family member who offered advice about financial products such as checking accounts and credit cards, captioned with the advice received.

The volume of posts and interactions reflect the strength of the mentor-student relationship, according to Moneythink’s product manager Nathan Ranney.
“It drives engagement when mentors really get to know their students, help them set relevant goals and comment on their posts,” said Ranney. “It lets students know that there’s really somebody on the other end of this thing who’s following me, thinking about me, and cares.”

In the future, Gonder hopes Moneythink Mobile will expand the nonprofit’s reach and deliver targeted financial education to places closer to meaningful money choices, such as youth employment agencies and college advisors. Also, because many students live in so-called “bank deserts” dominated by check-cashers and payday loan vendors, Moneythink is starting to talk with banks about how they might partner with the app, perhaps by linking to an account students could use without an adult cosigner.

Wherever the app goes, Gonder stresses that the technology will never take the place of strong mentoring relationships.

“Social media isn’t a fix in itself. It’s just a tool to enhance the human interactions,” he said. “In the next phase we want to crystallize the specific financial behaviors we want to see, to help students get out of the cash economy, save more regularly and meet their goals.”

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

The post Can Social Media Nudge Teens Into Smarter Money Choices? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Audrey Miller, a teacher mentor at Oceanside High School on Long Island, videotapes a lesson in her video production class. The Oceanside district uses an online video-sharing platform to mentor new teachers. Photo: Sattwa Conrad

Nothing in Linda Liptrap’s teacher training prepared her for the pencil onslaught. In 2013, as a novice math teacher at Callaghan Elementary in rural Covington, Virginia, Liptrap was plagued by student requests to sharpen pencils, use the bathroom and other picayune interruptions.

“They were penciling me to death,” Liptrap said. Lessons stalled. Test scores suffered. Callaghan’s principal tried a novel solution to rescue her harried teacher—a virtual coach. A startup called EdConnective matched Liptrap with a veteran teacher in another state trained as an instructional coach. The pair spent six weeks dissecting videos of Liptrap teaching, then plotting classroom strategies in twice-weekly Web chats and reviewing videos of Liptrap practicing those strategies in class.

EdConnective is among a handful of startups and education nonprofits offering virtual coaching, both to new teachers struggling to control their classrooms and to experienced teachers hoping to boost critical thinking and engagement. Virtual coaching’s backers promise teachers a sustained high dose of feedback, personalized action plans for their classrooms and follow-up during implementation, three vital features missing from most professional development according to a parade of recent reports.

As for those pesky pencils, Liptrap followed her coach’s advice and now begins class by announcing that everybody should have two adequately-tipped pencils, because there will be no sharpening during the lesson.

“It didn’t take but one day of that for the kids to get it,” said Liptrap, whose coach helped her cure several other class-management hiccups.

“Teachers don’t get nearly enough good feedback,” said Will Morris, who founded EdConnective in 2013. Multitasking principals can drop by classrooms only occasionally. Many schools, especially in the low-income communities Morris caters to, can’t afford in-house coaches beyond those focused on literacy or math.

But virtual coaches can be anywhere. Their services can be purchased a la carte, and they can observe a class any time a teacher uploads video. In most cases, teachers can make videos with an iPad or similar device with a wide-angle view that lets a coach see both teacher and students—noting how many kids raise their hands or stare out the window.

“We wanted to extend our reach and give teachers more feedback at a classroom level without always having to send in a large team of people,” said Karla Oakley, senior strategist with The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a nonprofit that started offering virtual coaching in 2013, augmenting the in-school support services they have provided for nearly two decades.

TNTP virtual coaches use BloomBoard, an application that lets them insert time-stamped comments and questions alongside teacher videos. Teachers can view, sort and respond to these comments, which include thumbnail links to the corresponding video clips.

Virtual coaching sessions are “very proactive and very action-oriented,” said Lauren Vargas, a virtual coach with EdConnective. For example, if a teacher wants to give clearer and more concise directions to students, Vargas will play back (or read back) the directions the teacher gave in a previous class. Then, she’ll have the teacher practice a new approach “in their teacher voice” until the teacher gets the hang of it, and she’ll follow up in the next session to see how it went in front of actual students.

There’s a stigma that teachers who need coaching aren’t up to snuff, admits Oakley of TNTP, but she counters with an analogy to professional athletes. “They are the best and are paid millions, and they still have a fleet of coaches watching everything they do,” she said.

“I always ask my staff if anyone’s interested. It’s opt in,” said Michael Roth, the principal at Olney Elementary, a Philadelphia public school that uses EdConnective. “My mantra is that I want my teachers to go from good to great.”

Lauren Vargas, a virtual coach with EdConnective, works with a third grade teacher via video, while sitting at her dining room table in Philadelphia. Photo: Lauren Vargas

After several years of teaching, Roth joined a staff of teacher coaches at a charter school, positions made possible by a large federal grant. When Roth started at Olney two years ago, he wanted coaches but didn’t have the funds to hire anyone full-time. EdConnective offers coaching session s of from one to six weeks, ranging in price from $835 to $1500. Roth makes sure teachers know that coaching is not an evaluation and that the sessions are private, a promise enhanced by using coaches who aren’t on staff.

“My coach was almost like a fairy godmother,” said Valerie Amer, a veteran teacher at Olney who wanted to push her third-graders to think more deeply about math. “I could try new things in class and talk about it with her, without worrying that she was reporting back to Mr. Roth.”

Giving teachers ownership of professional development was the main idea behind a virtual coaching platform developed in 2013 by the folks at Teaching Channel, an online catalogue of videos that demonstrate great teaching and lesson planning how-tos. The subscription service, called Teaching Channel Teams, was developed with the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a Chicago nonprofit that pairs newer teachers in Chicago public schools with trained mentor teachers. The centerpiece is a video player that lets viewers insert time-stamped notes and hold online discussions with other teachers. Only team members have access to that content, and even within a team two teachers can keep their exchanges private.

About 50,000 teachers have so far used the platform to coach and be coached, and to collaborate, according to Erika Nielsen Andrew, Teaching Channel’s chief academic officer. Two years ago, Jennifer Wolfe and Erin Gilrein, teachers at Oceanside High School on New York’s Long Island, used Teams to create a teacher-mentoring program. Both Wolfe and Gilrein have been certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, a national nonprofit created in 1987 to recognize the highest standards in K-12 teaching. Now, every novice teacher in the Oceanside district is matched with a National Board Certified teacher who coaches the novice using five classroom videos uploaded over the course of the year.

“Being a good mentor means spending time in the classroom,” said Gilrein, and the only way to do that in a district the size of Oceanside was through technology. She gives district administrators credit for supporting the program while also agreeing that only teachers could access the videos and feedback on the Teams platform.

“We understand the vulnerability that comes from videotaping your practice,” said Gilrein. “It can be nerve-racking for a new teacher.”

Whether virtual coaching can improve student achievement is the key question, of course. For now, there’s little hard data to offer an answer. Two independent studies of Teaching Channel Teams, one funded by the National Science Foundation and another by the Spencer Foundation, are underway but won’t be done for three years. Meanwhile, both EdConnective and TNTP’s virtual coaches have increasingly asked teachers to upload scans of student work, along with teaching videos, to keep tabs on how new classroom strategies affect learning.

“The bottom line for every teacher I’ve worked with is that they care about improving student learning,” said Vargas, the EdConnective coach. “And what’s beautiful about teaching is that there’s always room to grow. Every year is a new crop of kids and a fresh start.”

[Cross-posted at The Hechinger Report]

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