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“Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover”

Today’s math curriculum is teaching students to expect — and excel at — paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. At TEDxNYED, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think.

Dan Meyer asks, “How can we design the ideal learning experience for students?” As a part-time Googler, a provocative blogger and a full-time high-school math teacher, his perspective on curriculum design, teacher education and teacher retention is informed by tech trends and online discourse as much as front-line experience with students.

Meyer has spun off his enlightening message — that teachers “be less helpful” and push their students to formulate the steps to solve math problems — into a nationwide tour-of-duty on the speaking circuit.

“I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it but is forced by law to buy it.” — Dan Meyer

Brian Bridges at CLRN writes in his blog,

With reviews now complete for the 17 books submitted to Phase Two of the Governor’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative, it’s time to collect data again. Last fall, more than 1,000 administrators and educators completed CLRN’s digital textbook survey. Now, in preparation for Phase Three, the Governor’s office has posted an online survey to learn more about how these resources are being implemented. All 1000 district superintendents will receive an invitation to participate, but we welcome you to take part as well.

See more at “Digital Textbook Initiative: Phase 2 Survey”

NYT Opinion: “Some Thoughts About E-Reading” by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

As always, I am reading several books at a time — actually, several stacks. One is the stack of heirloom books by my bed, which begins with the engaging and soon-to-be-published “Camel” by Robert Irwin and works haphazardly outward to Rose Macaulay’s “The Towers of Trebizond” and Bronislaw Malinowski’s “A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term.”

And then there is a virtual stack of e-books. There is Alvin Kernan’s “Crossing the Line,” which I’m reading on my laptop via ebrary. I’m using other e-book software, like Kindle for the Mac and Stanza. My iPad is on its way.

In one way or another, I’ve been reading on a computer ever since it meant looking at green phosphor pixels against a black background. And I love the prospect of e-reading — the immediacy it offers, the increasing wealth of its resources. But I’m discovering, too, a hidden property in printed books, one of the reasons I will always prefer them. They do nothing.

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One of the most appreciated features of digital texts is the ability to
highlight text and add personal notes. Highlighted text and notes are
searchable, making it convenient to find those bits of information at a
later date. But I wonder how many Kindle users realize that their
highlights are being tracked...

Amazon's Kindle site has a fairly new interesting feature, where the highlighting done by users of Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad gets aggregated and reported. According to Amazon, "We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the
passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help
readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number
of people." The passages listed have to be highlighted by at least 3 unique users, but most passages I was looking at had been highlighted hundreds of times, according to the little note underneath each one.  I didn't see anything with more than 2000 highlights, though, which makes me wonder if they are aggregating the highlights of all users, or just specific ones.

I wonder about possible implication for digital textbooks. Might digital textbook publishers find a way to collect this data, and then report it out to students? I always hated buying a used textbook that was all highlighted, because I had no way of knowing if the previous owner was a moron. But if the number of people who highlight a passage is noted, that might add to my confidence that the most relevant bits have been picked out already. 

In case you're interested, Kindle says that Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is the most highlighted book of all time, followed by the Bible. 

http://kindle.amazon.com/popular_highlights

CreativeCommons.org: “Phase 2 Results of the CA Free Digital Textbook Initiative”…

Last Friday, Governor Schwarzenegger announced the results from Phase 2 of the California Free Digital Textbook Initiative. A total of 17 textbooks, including updated versions from Phase 1, were submitted, and 15 have so far been reviewed against California’s academic content standards. Of those fifteen, ten carry a CC license (CC BY-SA or CC BY), two carry a GNU FDL license, and one is in the public domain. All but two of the CC licensed textbooks met 100% of California’s state standards. Major contributors included a number of individuals, in addition to the CK-12 Foundation and Connexions, two OER organizations that have a default CC license (CC BY-SA and CC BY, respectively) on their educational resources.

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See also: Governor’s Press Release

http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/webinars.html

Please join us for an online webinar session to learn more about open textbook strategies. This session will be conducted via Elluminate and all are welcome to attend.

Creative Commons, OER and Open Textbooks

Date/Time: May 6, 2010 at 3:00 – 4:00 PM (Eastern Daylight Time).
Presentors: Timothy Vollmer, CC Open Policy Fellow, and Lila Bailey, CC Counsel
Topic: Mr. Vollmer and Ms. Bailey will discuss:

• the range of CC licenses and where they are used CC’s role in addressing barriers to open resources, such as discovery, language, cultural, and technical issues
• CC within open textbooks
• New CC initiatives

No registration needed. Participate in the webinar: http://vclass.distancelearn.org/join_meeting.html?meetingId=1255635327586

The new Horizon Report focused on education has been released, and it seems to be consistent with the regular Horizon Report that came out in the fall. Cloud computing and collaborative environments are listed as the near-term horizon, with game-based learning and mobiles on the mid-range horizon. Longer term technologies listed as having big impact on education are augmented reality and flexible displays. Flexible display technology wasn't listed in the fall Horizon Report, but could have big implications for education.

You can view the report online or download it at http://www.nmc.org/publications/2010-horizon-k12-report. 

Educators, here is a video of our future students, Please Pay Attention. But of course you will have to watch this at home or on your mobile device. Because it is blocked at your school location.  I will see if I can find it on Teacher Tube and post it later. If you watch the video carefully you will notice that the child is multi-tasking..listening to music and then scrolling through the pictures to show one of the pictures to her parents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVm1qyUuXI0&feature=player_embedded

Sorry the video is not posted on Teacher Tube.  I will check again later this week.

"Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how."

This really takes me back. Slashdot: “Looking Back From the 1980s at Computers In Education”

“As someone who went to high school in the ’80s, this newsletter from 1980 (PDF) is a blast from the past. An interview with Microsoft talks up its BASIC language product and predicts voice control of computers in five years. Advertisements for Compute magazine, which was about to go monthly, and an article about a computer ‘network’ in Minnesota that connects some fax machine-looking terminal to a central computer over telephone lines. Lots of Atari, TI and RadioShack news too. It’s a reminder from 30 years ago that we are still not using technology effectively in education.”