Numbers don’t lie and they’re heralding good news for anyone who believes in technology’s power to increase student achievement. The University of Florida investigated the effects of math computer games on learners’ math achievement and math course motivation and have found that educational video games can improve students’ mathematics understanding and skills and can significantly raise scores on district-wide math benchmark exams.

The focus of the study was on my favorite educational video game, Tabula Digita’s DimensionM, which remains my favorite because it’s fun (yes an educational game really can be fun), directly tied to the curriculum (with detailed standard alignments and implementation strategies), and multiplayer (teamwork, collaboration, role setting, strategizing… 21^st century skills). We’ve been using this game in our district with much success documented by anecdotal reports from teachers, students, and administrators. But as you know, word of mouth recommendations are great but don’t cut the cake when it’s time to prove the effectiveness of your educational strategy especially when you are trying to get funding.

So what did they find? Students who played DimensionM scored significantly higher on the district-wide math exam. Students in the experimental group had a mean increase of 8.07 compared to those in the control group who had a mean increase of 3.74.

“According to the teachers, the games were effective teaching and learning tools because they (a) were experiential in nature, (b) offered an alternative way of teaching and learning, (c) gave the students reasons to learn mathematics to solve the game problems and progress in the games, (d) addressed students’ mathematics phobias and (e) increased time on task.” (from the research brief)

This report is significant because there is a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of educational computer games. On top of that, even fewer studies include true quantitative research incorporating control and experimental groups. The only data that is considered valid for NCLB purposes is quantitative data. So what does this mean for education technology? Another study showing the effectiveness of technology integration toward increased student achievement. What does this mean for students? More reason for your district to fund educational gaming technologies to help you learn.

It comes as no surprise that the contents of text messages can get very personal.  MSNBC has an amusing article about what you might find on the average teen’s SMS/MMS log which includes racy photos and sexually-charged love notes.  Instead of ‘texting’, the kids are calling it ’sexting’.  Very funny. 

So you can imagine if you were a dean at any middle or high school, examining the contents of a cell phone can be very useful.  It’s like looking at the note the children are passing around the room.  Except in NYC schools, cell phones are not permitted.  Most schools will confiscate the phone if it’s seen (in other words you can have it in your bag on silent) and will only release it to the parent. 

A recent federal appeals court ruling intended for business might affect school policies around cell phone investigations.  The June 18th ruling says that employers must have a warrant or the employees permission to view contents of personal cell phones.  This ruling could be a precedent for lawsuits against school officials who search students’ cell phones.  Definitely a problem for the dean. 

While passing through Tweed I had the opportunity to see the student protests protesting the funding reductions that the schools are suffering from. So I quickly grabbed a camera and took a few shots. Of course my gut reaction was why aren’t these kids in school but I was with The Innovative Educator who explained the educational value in participating in an expression of democracy. Very true.

Regarding the reduction in funding, my opinion is the mayor and chancellor made the better choice to spread the funding reductions across the city so that all schools experienced a meager 1.1% reduction instead of a few schools getting hammered. Fact of the matter is we’re entering tough times economically and this mayor has proven his prowess when it comes to managing money. My vote is to trust him on this. I still do appreciate the value in allowing the students to protest.

Rob sent me an interesting article from the New York Sun about how the charter school which is housed in the Department of Education’s own headquarters building (ground floor), is being investigated for test tampering among other things.

First a little about the school — it’s a charter school funded by the multimillionaire philanthropist Courtney Ross and modeled after the school Mrs. Ross runs in the Hamptons. It’s housed on the ground level of the Department of Education’s headquarters building on Chambers street, the Tweed Courthouse. The students wear uniforms to this prestigious school whose mission is to bring high quality teaching and learning to the students of NYC.

So according to the story, the principal (the FIFTH since the school was founded two years ago) asked one of her teachers to make up an answer key to the math state test and took two sets of them home to answer them for the students. Can you imagine the LEVEL of pressure this principal must have felt being in Tweed that she had to resort to methods such as these?

This of course isn’t the only dilemma the school faces: try 100% turn-over rate for teachers who run as fast as they can once they see what’s going on, letters in bulk from parents asking to save their children, and a chaotic environment with a curriculum that is SURPRISINGLY (sarcastic) solely about teaching to the test.

So, for creating a stench under the noses of the bureaucrats that run the Department of Education, Ross Global Academy gets an F and an investigation. On the DOE’s part, for a educational institution that is often accused of employing non-educators to its most important positions, to let this happen in the building where they all work is not flattering. And it doesn’t say much for the charter school approach espoused by this administration — maybe they ARE too hands-off after all.

I first read about Immune Attack in eSchool news and quickly jumped to the homepage of a game that has done what schools need: release an educational game with the supports needed to make it educational. Immune Attack joins the rank of games like Tabula Digita’s DimensionM as it addresses specific curriculum standards in a high-quality interactive environment that is engaging and educational AND supports teaching and learning with a full complement of resources. For 9th and 10th grade general biology students it can be an enrichment activity but for AP Biology classes it addresses specific curriculum standards and goals in an immersive interactive environment. On their website you’ll find a video of an AP Biology teacher that explains everything you want to know about its use and effectiveness in education. You’ll also find standard alignments and a rich toolset of teaching aids: objectives, essential questions, lesson plans, vocabulary, and extension ideas.

How does it play? Well what’s the name of the movie where they shrink themselves and go inside the human body? It’s like that — high quality 3D graphics of you flying through arteries to encounter macrophages, leukocytes and monocytes. Except here you learn about how the immune system operates and digest complex topics painlessly.

There’s power in this medium of gaming — I agree with the prediction that movies will inch closer to interactivity every year until they become playable multi-ending multimedia powerhouses — gaming will stand shoulder to shoulder with the movie industry. In education, the power of simulations is widely embraced in the collegiate academic world, medical, military, and aeronautic industries as keystones of training on complex systems. This simulation is created by the Federation of American Scientists and born out of the Serious Games initiative.

Do you know any innovative high school AP Biology teachers that may want to try a new thing? Looks like this might be a great addition to make the unit plan richer and more differentiated.

The alarm has been sounding for years now –> the business model of education has latched on to standardized test scores as the sole performance indicator and they’re wrong. Not only are they wrong, but they’re wreaking havok on quality teaching and learning experiences by forcing schools to teach to the test and creating a hierarchy of what’s important and what’s not: Math and English are important, Social Studies, Science, Foreign Language, Physical Education, Technology, Art, and Music are not. Don’t believe me? Spend time in ANY school across this nation and you’ll quickly get a sense of what matters. In NYC, principal contracts hinge around performance gains in Math and ELA. For teachers, they want to institute incentive bonuses for Math and ELA standardized test performance. Instead of teaching the love of learning and giving students a rich varied deep learning experience, schools spend September to March teaching to the test.  The good news is…

The good news is that major universities are bucking the trend. The New York Times has an article on how Wake Forest is no longer requiring SAT or ACT scores for college admissions but will rather use high school curriculum and classroom performance, writing ability, extracurricular activities and evidence of character and talent as their criteria for admissions. Revolutionary. The hope is that this culture of valuing what’s important will trickle down and change the way we teach k-12. I’m not against good Math and English scores but as an educator watching the effect of this policy on schools, I am saddened and angered that our kids are missing out on the quality of education we experienced. To those who would respond that the pre-standardized test emphasis days weren’t working — I would ask: Is this working?

I was lucky enough to join my colleagues for a visit to the Science Leadership Academy in Center City, Philadelphia — Chris Lehmann’s school! Chris is recognized by many as one of the most innovative educators of our time, I think I saw a plaque that said one of the top 20 in the nation by the national school board. So I was excited to meet him and see what they were doing down in Philly.

So the school runs like clockwork, the children were happy, and the staff seemed into what they were doing still (which is a feat considering we’re winding up the school year). The principal, Chris Lehmann, is a very down to earth “normal guy” with a deep passion for teaching and learning that inspires him to think of new ways to provide a rich learning experience and communicate a love of learning to his whole staff. So let me tell you a few characteristics that stuck out to me as I viewed this school.

They used what Chris called common language in every class. Standard approaches to inquiry, papers, projects — you don’t need to spend time figuring out each teacher, you spend your time figuring out the content as they’ve collectively agreed on common expectations, goals, and strategies to teaching.

They really mastered the concept of interdisciplinary teaching. For example, one of the 9th grade’s essential questions for the year is “Who am I?”. In health, you are what you eat so they figure out who they are by analyzing diet. In Science, they look at genetics. In Social Studies they do biographies, English autobiographies and memoirs, Performing Arts act those personal memoirs out, and Technology they make podcasts and put their drama onto Youtube. I am so impressed — most essential questions are well-intentioned but ignored all year — this school actually made them into the scaffolding they should be to guide learning all year long.

I also liked Chris’ viewpoint on the 21st century skills emphasis in relation to work readiness. We aren’t here to prepare 21st century workers — we’re here to prepare 21st century citizens — everything we do should not revolve around what corporations expect from their future employees. Work isn’t the only thing we do — we need a rich learning experience that makes us capable of understanding the world and contributing to every aspect, not just our 9-5.

So yes we saw teaching that employed 21st century techniques with online collaboration via Google docs & wikis, project based learning that addresses authentic problems, and technology empowered learning with a Mac 1:1 mobile computing program. But what we really saw was an environment that excited everyone about the potential to make change both locally and globally. By the way, one of the authentic problems addresses the high price of diesel fuel for villages in Guatemala and Ecuador. The solution? A Biodiesel generator that you can make with $150 worth of parts from Home Depot. They’ve patented the idea so if you’re interested, oil company, this idea is RIPE for the picking — imagine the good press you’d get helping villages in Central America with the fruit of the labor of inner city Philadelphia students.

Want the unabridged version of this visit?  Visit my friend, The Innovative Educator’s blog for her thorough coverage of this visit:  http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2008/05/science-leadership-academy-lessons.html

As an advocate of using new communication conduits, I find this article particularly interesting. Before I get into why, let me explain what I mean by communication conduits in relation to school communications. The 20th century provided amazing advances in how schools communicate to parents, students, and teachers with the invention of radio, phone, TV, and the internet. But it’s not done there, and in the last 8 years, we’ve seen how the 21st century is opening new conduits that schools must learn how to use in order to model the effective uses of new communication tools, prevent abuses on them, and construct learning delivery models.

20th century school communication conduits

• print communications: letter home to parents (news, report card, etc), weekly memo to school staff, “rexos” to students (remember that word?), yearbooks
• phone communications: phone calls to parents for follow-up, phone calls to staff for notification chains (remember one person calls another calls another , etc)
• video: broadcasting school events on cable tv, making videos of concerts, producing video yearbooks
• internet: websites, email (which BTW I would say are just BEGINNING to be used by schools and no where near their potential either)

21st century school communication conduits

• SMS / Texting / Instant Messaging — emergency notification, meeting notification, rich chat clients, possibilities are endless really
• Microblogging — a la Twitter — strongly advocated by the ed tech community with a social consciousness emerging from it
• Social Networking — MySpace, Facebook, Ning, etc — the ball has just started rolling as commercial, educational, and organizational uses are being born daily
• Other social tools — photo sharing (flickr), video sharing (youtube), web favorites sharing (delicious, stumbleupon, digg), and almost anything else you can think of.
• Podcasting and Internet Broadcasting — consumer driven television shows being broadcast all over the world
• VoIP — Skype and other voice communication tools
• And the list is growing as we see new strategies for connecting people blossoming online

Do you see the potential in this list? It’s the season to dream because our kids are seeing the potential and running with it too..

With this surge in communication options, schools are going through the growing pains in learning how they can be used in education and the risks in not “getting on board”. A school in Ohio had their standardized test day sabotaged when a message on a social networking site warned students of impending danger if they went to school the next day. Enough students stayed home to cause a snowball effect of testing requirement mayhem. Check it out at: http://www.thejournal.com/articles/22632

So what to do, what to do? The school responded by sending recorded messages to parents phones (20th century conduit). What might have worked to prevent this? If any staff members were on that social networking site they might have known before it happened and sent their message prior to the event. And that message would have been more efficient if they used SMS notifications in conjunction with voice messages.

Moral of the story? It is imperative that schools embrace 21st century communication conduits. Not only can they model the appropriate use of it to our students who are learning the inappropriate use from each other rapidly, but they can learn how to use them to push teaching and learning to new heights and prevent situations like this from happening in the future. Tall order, but every school needs an instructional technologist on staff who is well versed in the communication tools of today.

Social networks are being embraced by educators as a powerful learning tool. The easiest way to understand them is to remember the grand-daddy of social networks –> people getting together in real time. We meet monthly with the technology educators in our locale which is a social network in and of itself. So to continue our communication and provide a venue to learn how social networking can impact the classroom we’ve created a Ning for this group. Now in addition to our real time meetings we have virtual contact with each other. The network is purposed as a place to share best practices as well as network to share resources, ideas, and teaching strategies.

Wanna see? http://computerliaisons.ning.com

You may recall the sad story of cyberbullying at its worst where Megan Meier fell victim to her ex-friend’s mother who masqueraded as a love interest who sowed messages of hate that would eventually wind up in Megan’s suicide. This has brought national attention to the very real danger of cyberbullying and the consequences that it can wreak on a young developing mind.

Well justice is beginning now that the mother has been indicted by a federal grand jury for her role in the cruel hoax that resulted in the death of a 13 year old. Salvador Hernandez from the Los Angeles FBI office said the following of the case:

“The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl’s weaknesses… Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she’s responsible for her actions.”

The large public outcry this case has made brings one point to home: has it caused you to action? Are you including cybersafety lessons in your curriculum? Are you having conversations with your kids about the dangers on the internet? Are you developing a way to get the word out to others in your school and community?

Read about the indictment: Mom indicted in MySpace suicide