Lightning in a Bottle

There’s so much I love about this story at so many levels! (Warning, though - very slow loading page.)

Amesbury High School has a 3-D computer animation program. Cool! The students work together to create their movie. Very cool! The topic of the movie is suggested by a local elementary school librarian to target their students. Cooler still! The world premiere is held at the elementary school, for kindergarten kids with their 4th-grade buddy classroom, which is, of course, is totally cool.

Cooperation, teamwork, project-based, real audience, cross-age working with cross-age, the list just goes on. All wrapped around a use of technology that allows creativity and storytelling in a way that can’t be done without technology.

I want to go work there. I guess I’d better Google “Amesbury” and find out where that is.

An article Wednesday in the Chicago Sun-Times (as noted in today’s ASCD SmartBrief) reports the Chicago Board of Education has approved their first online charter school. What really caught my eye, though, was that this school will target K-8 students. I see press releases all the time about new online schools, but I don’t recall seeing many for elementary kids.

What was also interesting about this proposal is that it will provide each student with a computer and home internet access. There will also be a facility for students to have face-to-face meetings with their teachers.

I’m more than a little leary of first-grade classes online, but the district emphasizes that this one 600-student school is for those few children that have a particular need for this kind of experience. (This will be just one of 100 new charter schools being started by the district.) Still, I’m all for the overall model that provides the technology infrastructure to the students, so there can be no digital divide that prevents students from participating. I’d like to see more districts take up this approach.

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of essay-grading software such as Criterion by ETS. The software gives provides students with writing prompts, and then scores their papers against stored anchor papers. Feedback is immediate, rather than waiting days (or weeks) for the teacher to score. It’s not meant as a replacement for teacher feedback, but as a supplement. If a teacher can only give deep, meaningful feedback to one writing assignment per week, that can be supplemented with a system such as Criterion, which can handle assignments as fast as students can produce them.

Interestingly enough, America Online has gotten into the act with a product for home use called AOL Writing Wizard. It appears to be not only have the scoring mechanism such as Criterion has, but also has built-in tools for students to outline their work or create simple pre-writing webs.

You’re hard-pressed to find out that info on the promotional site I linked above, however. I tried to watch the demo that you access through the link above, but the various spots in the website that say “click here to see the demo” open up a screen to subscribe to AOL instead. I tried to set up the thirty-day free trial, but it’s one of those things where you have to give your credit card number, and if you don’t cancel in the first 30 days, they automatically start charging you. More disturbing is that nowhere in the sign-up process do they tell you how much that monthly cost will be.

I finally saw the little demo video after I cancelled the registration process for the free trial. It appeared on the second “Are you sure you really want to cancel?” screen. I also found more information at AOL’s Premium Services Page. The demo link still didn’t work, but at least I can tell you it costs $4.95 per month.

So, the product looks promising, but man, somebody really needs to work on their web pages.

I just learned about a new product coming to the market that should be interesting to try out. It’s called the Nova 5000, and it’s a Windows CE device designed specifically for education.

It has a 7.5 inch screen, weighs 1.8 pounds, and variety of other necessary items such as USB 2.0 ports, Compact Flash ports, and others. It’s supposed to come in at a price point in the $500 range.

It looks like sort of a Super PDA. I like the idea of a stripped-down machine that can be used for a lot of core applications, such as word processing and web browsing. The downfall for PDAs has always been that despite being simplified devices, the syncing and other operational chores made them almost as costly to maintain as a full computer. From my perspective, quick and easy syncing will be one of the three make-or-break issues for these little devices.

The other two will be battery life and network connectivity. If they can last most of one day on a charge, and can surf the web with appropriate responsiveness (and the CE version of Internet Explorer is robust enough to handle Flash and other important plug-ins), then it could be a real winner. If it misses on any one of those, it could just be the reincarnation of the NTS Dreamwriter, which should have been a winner, too!

During my lunch break I was able to help my son with his homework. (He has one more day of vacation than I do.) He has a pretty big paper due tomorrow, and he needed some assistance.

Instant messaging made it work. I logged into iChat and reminded him that I wanted it soon. A few minutes later, he messaged me with a few questions that were giving him trouble. I did a quick Google search and found some sites that would help, and sent him the URLs. I also popped a couple of images into the chat that illustrated the answers. Eventually, he sent me the document (again, through the instant messenger), which I read through, and then sent him edits and comments.

The whole process took about an hour and a half, with much of that time being spent doing other things and simply responding to the messages when they came in. In some ways, it was actually easier than if I was there in person. There was less opportunity to get defensive or cranky when we’re eight miles apart, which some might say is the minimum distance to maintain with teenagers. I can see that it would be a very comfortable part of remote teaching, either for students or adults that are comforable with the technology. I actually increasingly find that I prefer it to telephone conversations, particularly with the ability to log and store the conversations.

Today, though, I’m just glad that I have the opportunity to chat with my son during the day - and that his project will be done before I get home!