Encryption and Coding – 100 Years Before HTML

Interesting how the art of the cryptic language has been something that we humans practiced for a long time. I use this as a preamble to my 5th grade class on coding.

Students could see a broader context of coding when we discuss the following:

• Ciphers (in cryptography)
• Zip Codes
• Morse Code
• Braille
• Short Codes (for SMS)
• Highway Code
• QR Codes
• HTML

There’s a wonderful story of how Thomas Jefferson used to correspond with a friend who wrote to him in code – around the time of the authoring of the Declaration of Independence. Then there’s the predecessor to Braille, which was really a military code (‘night writing’) for soldiers to read messages without light.

And more recently, we have seen the news of how Jeremiah Denton, as a POW, ‘flashed’ a message to the world using his eyes –blinking the word ‘torture’ in Morse.

From Magnets to Circuits – Making it Interactive

During this semester I try to cover a lot more STEM areas with my classes, and have begun engaging students a lot more with activities they could then build on – in documents, presentations, blogs etc.

It doesn’t take much more than a small coil of copper wire, a motor, flashlight bulb, and rudimentary switches to explain how magnetism and circuits work.

After a few hands-on make it/break it sessions, I let my third graders use this web site, Cleo, to try their hand indesigning their own circuit. Cleo is a British web site that promotes the use of rich media and broadband.

Like a white board with wires and batteries –a better description would be an interactive sandbox– it lets a student not just build a circuit, but run it to see if the device works. If it fails, great! Erase. Reconnect. Run.

I let them print out a working circuit and take it home for further discussion.

Cross-posting this from my school blog.

What’s New On Mars? We’ll Find Out On “Mars Day 2013”

Plans are in place for the annual event we started last year – Mars Day.

This is one way to get students all fired up about astronomy, and the science of discovering what’s out there in space.

My students, which means from K through 6th grade (27 classes in all) have been showing tremendous interest in science. Since I started out by incorporating robotics and space into my computer class, the Mars connection seem to fit like a glove. After all, rocket launches, monitoring and navigating spacecraft, and even peering into space via satellites and the Hubble telescope, is nothing without a small army of computer-savvy people behind this.

Mars Day is sort of like peeling back the curtain of humankind’s fascination with the red planet, and helping students make the connection between why they have a computer lab. It is convenient, as I have said before, that the Curiosity Rover, which is one of the most complex robots ever built, is essentially a computer and a science lab on wheels.

So Mars Day is like Science Day, with an extra-terrestrial tilt.

Also appearing at this year’s Mars Day is Commander John Herrington. You may have heard of him in passing. He was the first Native American Astronaut in space!

For my kids on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation, this is a huge opportunity. 

StarLab evokes the big questions from kids

If you cannot visit the planetarium, I’m going to try to bring the planetarium to you, I promised my students in the middle of the school year. With the help of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, that dream came true with the visit of StarLab to Salt River Elementary School last week.

This is how the ‘lab’ arrived.

In less than 30 minutes it would fill the room!

On the inside, Karen Knierman from ASU, setting up for 16 class sessions…

Follow up: This week First Graders in my class had to design and name their own constellations!

Inviting ‘Intel inside’ class

The ‘open’ classroom is often discussed as synonymous with online access. But I like to think of my class as being open in another way –bringing in professionals from the outside world.

I’m particularly lucky, with two mentors who come in on a weekly basis to assist me in robotics: Don Wilde from Intel, and Bill Johnson from Scottsdale Community college. We have an open door policy, literally, in our school for getting experts like them.

I have been following Intel’s push to put science high on the agenda, especially for K-12 education. From former Intel Chairman Craig Barrett’s investment in talent and capital with the Basis charter schools, to its involvement in S-T-E-M-related work.

To get back to Don. Last evening, as this picture shows, he talked to them about programming, specifically the principle of  DRY — ‘Don’t Repeat Yourself‘! He showed them how to use the My Block to create loops and variables. Serious stuff. Some would think this is way above the heads of a 4th or 5th grader. To which I counter, it’s about time we stopped dumbing down our content in our curricula –a la Basis. (I happen to tutor two children from Basis, so I know a thing or two about their tough grading standards and how they challenge students.)

To wrap up the class, I asked my students to surprise Don with a project I had thrown at them. I divvied them up into two three teams and got them to build three complex bots: A Voice-controlled robot, a mini Rover, and a Spider.  I left him to judge the best presentation on how they problem solved the build-out and programming.

If science education is lacking one thing, it is making it relevant to real world problem solving. More on this  and the 3 bots in another post.

MOOC obsession hits fever pitch

It’s impossible to miss the hot topic in education these days, on the MOOCs –the awful acronym for a fascinating innovation in education known as Massive Open Online Courses.

Massive, in term of how they scale into not just tens of thousands, but millions.

Now that Thomas Friedman has weighed in, its official. The MOOC epidemic is more cause of a state of emergency than the flu virus. However, the contra argument is also worth thinking through: that the political economy of MOOCs is too quick to hail it as the next best thing.

• I am more interested in how a new generation of tech-ed entrepreneurs (small-scale ones) might hack the model beyond Higher Ed –for introductory classes, and after-school programs, say.

• I see the value of the MOOC model in its open–ness, not scale. I like the fact that students use the platform to create their own conversations, and local support to weaker students following the class. Friedman cites this one, and there are plenty of these floating around.

“Agarwal of edX tells of a student in Cairo who was taking the circuits course and was having difficulty. In the class’s online forum, where students help each other with homework, he posted that he was dropping out. In response, other students in Cairo in the same class invited him to meet at a teahouse, where they offered to help him stay in the course.”

That these students feel empowered to move their ‘class’ offline (the tea house in this case), speaks to how much the traditional sage-on-stage model is waiting to be tweaked.

When students don’t need to raise their hand and wait until the instructor notices, when conversations in the class could be switched on, not off, that’s where the learning revolution might lie.

That burning E-book question: Will it change teaching?

If you are a fan of the Kindle or the Nook, and wonder what it bodes for education, you should read Jeffrey R. Young’s analysis of the impact of eBooks on teaching in the Chronicle. (The Object Formerly Known as The ‘Textbook)

He makes an important point toward the end,  that textbook companies are morphing into tech companies. I don’t think this is cause for alarm. It’s not just a necessary part of their survival, it’s about moving where the puck is headed.

I’ve got mixed feelings about books vs digital. It’s not an either-or for me. (I’m a teacher, and I also write about the digital space.) I believe that ‘born digital’ content will not only originate from the publisher’s side. Teachers will one day find it so easy to blend their lesson plans and their accumulated wisdom into one space –presentations, hand-outs, hand-made videos etc– that they will use to create the upcoming year’s ‘textbook.’ Or is it Tech-book?

For this two things need to happen:

• Schools will need to empower us teachers to take that leap. Teachers are terrific content creators, even though they don’t think of themselves that way;

• Publishers will begin to partner with those teachers, and (since they have the tech tools/programmers on hand) help them become part of the process. Books embedded with simple jumping off points such as QR Codes and Augmented Reality, with mobile-friendly formats etc could be customized not just to the student but to the incoming class. Jimmy’s showing interest in trigonometry? He’ll have more challenging hand-outs just for him. Kim’s excelling in robotics? She will have her math word-problems oriented around missions and electronics.

It seems like a big leap, but it’s just two removes from what we are doing now, and a quantum leap from the canned literature squeezed into the same old books and piped through the online readers.

It will be a win-win-win for publishers, school budgets and, most importantly, the students who will demand these hybrid knowledge formats… er, books.

So, will digital textbooks change teaching? Yes, in ways we don’t yet know.

What’s a MOOC?

For anyone who’s wondering about the excitement over MOOC’s here’s a simple explanation.

On teaching digital photography to point-and-click set

I included digital photography into my lesson plans for the last two weeks –for  3rd grade students.

I am looking for suggestions from other teachers who may be teaching a photography class to young grades. I know I am up against the point-and-shoot mindset. Cameras now require us to do less and less. I want to show my students that creativity takes a little more time. Those of us who started with film (who remembers that!) know the value of composition and lighting. So here are my questions:

• Does it matter today for young people to understand the subtleties of f-stop and aperture settings?
• Will the apps world turn every photograph into a work of art? The Instagram-ization of digital photography, so to speak

This reflection by Emmy award-winning photographer, Richard Herandez is food for thought:

Photo apps won’t magically give Jane the smartphone photographer a better sense of composition, or lighting, or framing. The apps and filters only change a photo’s look and aesthetic feel. That doesn’t make it a better photo. If you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

But someone needs to teach them the ‘act of magic’ that takes place between selecting one’s subject and clicking the button.

How would you do it? Please leave your comments here. You could also email me your suggestions, or tweet me.

Why schools should upshift to Personalized Learning

If you’re in education you’ve heard how the ‘industrial’ model of teaching is passe, but we as we all know, we still practice it in classrooms designed for a world where mass production worked.

Ken Robinson (that’s Sir Ken), who has worked on projects in Asia, Europe and the US, once said that “education and training are the keys to the future,” but the “key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away…Turn it the other way and you release resources and give people back to themselves.”

With that as a backdrop consider a report on the Future of Learning by the European Commission’s JRC (Joint Research Center) in 2011. It mapped where Europe was headed (this was before it plunged into a recession) and mapped out three learning patterns essential to education, with the evolution of information and Communication technologies.

It said that the core of education needs to incorporate Personalization, Collaboration, and Informalization.

Indeed, it said that mathematical, verbal, scientific and digital literacy would be at the core of these trends but by creating these three movements, its citizens would become more competitive.

I am fascinated by the one trajectory of Personalization. Every class is composed of students at different interest and learning capacities, yet we have incentives and consequences for those who do not fit into one set of expectations. The JRC report calls for a mix of different technologies that support personalization.

I see a slew of technologies that might open these doors, but schools are typically technologically poor, and textbook rich. There has been some movement here in the US for personalized lesson plans, as evidenced by Big Picture Learning schools. But it’s not just the classroom needs to be redesigned, but possibly the school itself. Right now, with such limited funding for education, we are more or less in lock-down mode. Personalized learning will remain a nice-to-have discussed at highfalutin symposia and journals.

I can’t stop thinking of Sir Ken’s admonition: Turn the key the other way and you could release knowledge…