למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Let’s start with a video you have no doubt seen, a super-slow-motion video of a bat hitting a baseball. If you slow it down to 10,000 frames per second, you will see something that looks like an optical illusion. You will see that the baseball, which seems pretty solid, compresses like it’s a racquetball hitting a wall. It gets smooshed. And, if you look even more closely, you will see that the bat actually bends, as if made of rubber. Similar things are true when you slow down a football being kicked, a golf ball being driven or even a basketball being dribbled.

There is no possible way we would know this — or even believe it — if the cameras didn’t show it to us. I remember listening to NFL Films’ Steve Sabol marvel about how a kickoff looked when you slowed down the film just enough. Everybody at Films just sat around watching in wonder. “It was,” he said, “like seeing a new star through a telescope.”

But, when dealing with replay — and the ability to slow the game down to 2,000 frames per second — the rabbit hole goes very deep. And you can’t just stop with fixing the bad calls. Because the more you slow it down, the more you see things that the eyes could never see before. And once you see those things — like someone hopping slightly off the bag in a stolen base — you can’t UNSEE them.

And the more we slow down this game, the more we’re going to see stuff like that, silly little stuff that should not matter, but in slow motion does matter. We move away from the spirit of the game, I think.

In large part, what we’ve done is create systems that are designed to make teacher quality irrelevant. Curriculum specialists, sitting in offices at boards of education, design curricula that are “idiot proof,” spelling out in excruciating detail how the lessons should go. The idea, borrowed from Adam Smith, Henry Ford, and F. W. Taylor, is that if you create a smart system, you don’t need smart and dedicated teachers.

On day fifty-three of the school year, Ms. Jabbari joined all the other kindergarten teachers in the Chicago system in teaching the letter B to her students. The binder she used identified the section of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills to which that day’s lesson plan corresponded, and provided step-by-step questions and conversation starters.

Script for Day: 053
TITLE: Reading and enjoying literature/words with “b”
TEXT: The Bath
LECTURE: Assemble students on the rug or reading area. . . . Give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. . . . Say, “Listen very quietly as I read the story.” . . . Say, “Think of other pictures that make the same sound as the sound bath begins with.”

The script Jabbari followed was twice as long as the book she was reading.

When she began her “literacy block” at 11:58 one Wednesday in May, she opened the textbook to Section 1, “Pets Are Special Animals.” Her mentor, veteran teacher Marie Buchanan, was sitting in. When Ms. Moffett got to a line about a boy mischievously drawing on a table, she playfully noted, “Just like some students in here.” Mrs. Buchanan frowned. “You don’t have to say that.” When Ms. Moffett turned to a page that suggested an art project related to the story and started passing out paper, Mrs. Buchanan commented: “You’re not going to have time to complete that.” After the lesson, Mrs. Buchanan pulled her aside. “You have to prepare for these lessons and closely follow your teacher’s guide. We’re going to do this again tomorrow, and you’re not going to wing it.”

Is the digital learning revolution a waste of money?

an earlier study that drew on PISA results and contained data from 250,000 students aged 15 [that] showed that they performed worse at school if they had a computer in their bedroom

In Israel, researchers found performance declined in elementary and middle schools with computers

in Romania it has been reported that poorer children whose families received money to buy a computer performed worse in school than those without computers

On one hand, children in families that received a voucher scored significantly higher on tests of computer skills and cognitive ability than their counterparts without a voucher. On the other hand, children in families that received a voucher had significantly lower school grades in math, English, and Romanian than their counterparts without vouchers. The authors conclude that "providing home computers to low-income children in Romania lowered academic achievement even while it improved their computer skills and cognitive ability.

A comparison between electronic and paper textbooks in Science [that] showed that embedded videos and hyperlinks in the former are a distraction and impede learning.

There is no indication that publishers are investing the time and hard work required to leverage this information into a new generation of electronic textbooks. Rather, it seems that most are taking the pedagogical devices from print books and putting them in digital format, with little evidence that they positively affect learning.

Seriously, can you imagine if a teacher said “my students looked at pictures of Verona through the View-Master and now they have a better understanding of Romeo and Juliet”? We’d scoff, wouldn’t we? Yet that’s precisely the crap I’m hearing about Google Cardboard.

Augmented reality has strong potential to provide both powerful contextual, in situ learning experiences and serendipitous exploration and discovery of the connected nature of information in the real world.

Augmented reality is an active, not a passive technology; students can use it to construct new understanding based on interactions with virtual objects that bring underlying data to life as it responds to user input.

The growing use of AR in education

AR can be used to give mini homework lessons, to put in common reviews or essays made by students, or for social content, such as an interactive photo wall.

The use of augmented reality in educational settings is a disruptive innovation that can deeply alter traditional methods, especially when applied to the primary school environment. An interaction with an iPAD and a recorded teaching session can help involve the child’s participation, as can be seen in this video.

In an era when recess for many students has become limited or non-existent despite the known benefits of physical activity, this is a big deal, and something parents had sought.

In any case, recess coaching is a vastly better solution than eliminating recess in favor of more academics. Not only does recess aid personal development, but studies have found that children who are most physically fit tend to score highest on tests of reading, math and science.

Seattle teachers had said they were not only fighting for pay raises but to make the system better for students. It sounds like they did.