Lightning in a Bottle

I received an email from Mark Ahlness, who is a teacher at Arbor Heights Elementary School. He uses David Warlick’s Blogmeister tool to host a classroom blogging page for his third-grade students. It’s one of the sites that we visited in our meeting yesterday, and I told our participants that part of the deal was that they had to leave at least one comment in response to a student’s blog.

I received a nice email this morning from Mark, and it read in part:

Conn, thanks so much for sending your participants our way today! There were 9 or 10 comments sent to my classroom. Each comment means so much to them, and they get so motivated to write even more. I have never seen anything
like this in the classroom!

If you get an opportunity to visit Mark’s classroom page, drop a comment to one of the students. If you want to look for other classrooms, if you go to the Blogmeister site linked above, look for a drop-down window in the upper right that lets you select a state and then select a teacher that’s using the tool. We’re pretty early in this classroom blogging thing, but I think it has lots of intriguing potential.

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.

Even though I think that higher ed lagged behind K-12 in ed tech for quite awhile, some of those college folks are really starting to show us a thing or two. The Oct. 17 issue of U.S. News has a another interesting article on tech-rich college classrooms. In addition to classroom response systems, they look at podcasting and in-class online discussions during lectures. One lecture features fourteen screens, with the speaker’s presentation on one screen, live student chats on some screens, and web pages relating to the lecture and chats (pulled up by the designated “Google Jockey”) on other screens.

On the one hand, this sounds really cool. On the other hand, it makes me think I should be investing in whatever pharmaceutical companies make the most popular treatments for Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.

This article really opens my thinking on the use of ePortfolios. It’s written from a higher-ed perspective, and describes a more robust, student-driven kind of system than I have seen so far. (When can we incorporate student weblogs into their portfolios?)

I also like the discussion of teachers maintaining ePortfolios as well - it fits in nicely with the whole professional learning community approach. If you read nothing else, scroll down about 3/4 of the article to read the paragraph about administrators creating and using online portfolios. Now THAT’S radical!

Here is another interesting article on online tutoring outsourced to India. (Just as a total aside, it’s equally fascinating to me that it’s from the Middle East Times. It really is a small world, isn’t it?) It doesn’t offer a lot of new info over previous stories, but it has some interesting comments from the proprietor of one of the companies.

I’m trying to figure out the math in a way that isn’t really cynical, though. The tutors are paid $155 a month (if the article is correct), but the students are paying $20-40 per hour. I know there are software, telecommunications, and other kinds of overhead costs, but if the average tutor is supporting 40 students as stated in the article, then even if they only do a ridiculously low effort of one hour per student per month at the $20 per hour end of the range, that’s still $800 in monthly revenue per tutor. That’s a lot of overhead.

Another article on overseas tutoring appeared today in the Christian Science Monitor. It gives more detail on the practice and some of the companies involved and briefly profiles one student that works live with tutors in India. Because it is offshore, the service costs half that of services based here in the U.S.

The more I think about it, the more reasonable it becomes. Parents spending their money for after-school tutoring are looking for something effective and affordable. If it happens that means working with bright, articulate folks from India (or China or elsewhere) for a lot less money than stateside tutors, then you can be sure it’s going to happen.

An article today in eSchool News reports on a study correlating participation in online field trips with increased reading scores. The study used a sample of 400 students, which is somewhat small (though better than many educational studies.) What I particularly liked was the emphasis on the context of the online field trips. The researchers make a strong point that the effect is dependent on having appropriate activities and instructional resources to make the field trip an interative experience within a larger instructional program. (No silver bullets here. I never trust silver bullets, anyway.)

In any event, it’s nice to see some more research connecting technology to student achievement. Another arrow for the quiver.

It probably shouldn’t be surprising that several online tutoring companies are starting to use tutors from overseas. Some of the more controversial aspects of this practice are discussed in an article from last month in the Times Union. One issue that I hadn’t thought about is that a company using math tutors in India might be providing NCLB-required supplemental services, meaning that federal dollars are in essence being used to hire foreign workers to aid our students. Whether that is good or bad is a matter of debate, but it sure seems outside the box.

Yahoo! has an article about the increasing use of distance education in schools. About one-third of all districts have students using online courses. The report includes videoconference-based classes as “online”, so it includes both synchronous and asynchronous learning options. The main reason sited were to help students access resources the local school couldn’t provide.

Two high schools in the Pittsylvania County Schools (really!) of Virginia have addressed a teacher vacancy in one school by using technology to share a teacher from the second high school. Although the article doesn’t address the technology used (the author keeps using the word “satellite”, but I can’t really believe they are using a satellite broadcasting system), the interesting part is that the teacher and the students seem to have quickly adjusted to the model.

I also thought it interesting that the most difficult problem for continuing into the future was making the schedules work across the two buildings.