Interactive Gaming for Pre-Literacy Development

I'm starting to focus on studies about the involvement of interactive games for preschool/primary students in the building of pre-literacy and pre-math skills, given some mounting evidence that this is an underutilized area in education.

The latest: THE Journal reports on a study from the Educational Development Center that suggests preschool students learn pre-literacy skills better in an environment with repeated exposure to interactive games. The specific skills were letter recognition, letter naming, letter sounds, and understanding story concepts.

Take this study with a grain of salt. I'm not convinced of the methodology, as the comparison group was a science curriculum, not a literacy curriculum, and it was commissioned by PBS, which while I admire their overall work in helping students learn, they still have a vested interest in seeing a positive correlation.

Best news though is that it is leading to further studies. Given available technology that is more accessible to young students than ever before, this will lead to more purposeful game development for that age, with a better tie-in to the Iowa Core.

ITEC 2009 - David Warlick

Presented twice at this year's ITEC conference, once on the digital curriculum and once on the state of e-learning in Iowa. More about those in another post, but the handouts from those can be found here.

Didn't get to as many workshops as I was hoping to, either. I found myself in many side conversations on the state of technology in Iowa, which actually was a much better thing than attending the sessions or presenting... nothing beats two-way conversation. It was good to visit with many of the people I see only in the Twitter-sphere, such as @AngelaMaiers, @karlhehr, @RussGoerend, @tdejager210, @jamiefath, @beckymather, @acrozier22, @mctownsley, @sethdenney, and @MikeSansone.

Seth, by the way, had the most apropos tweet from the conference.
That was the statement made by David Warlick, which even after hearing before twice, I came away from his keynote very impressed. Not just for the mantra-quality of the statement, which definitely rang true (lots less sessions about how tools work or that are labeled gadgets & gizmos this year). But more so for his way of making what we are working for--improved student learning, not student technology use--so simply put.

His best example of this was a lesson redefining of mathematics literacy. Students took live data from worldwide geological sites of the location of earthquakes. That data was then formatted into a spreadsheet and scatterplotted using Excel (poor ol', 1.0, much-bashed-at-ITEC-in-years-past Excel!).

The result is this.
Which, as Warlick noted, is basically a map of the world. The nature of data to visualize in this method is not only a valuable skill for students to learn, but also clarifies the concept of latitude and longitude in numeric sense, or in other words, literacy of the mathematical concept of coordinate geography. All done with a non-trendy tool to boot. This wasn't about the technology, it was about learning of an essential skill.

And on a tool note, for those who asked me about the presentation application Warlick and others used at ITEC, it is called Prezi, and there is a free online version you can use. Here is Warlick's from ITEC.

My personal opinion though (many of you will want to stop reading here), while I think Warlick did a really good job using the transitions to add to the meaning of his presentation, I do not like the tool. Distracting. Definitely not presentation zen. I know, I know... blasphemy... I'm the only one at ITEC who will say that, so peruse and make your own judgment.

Will Richardson

If you are excited about the new world of technology in education, and you are unfamiliar with the work of Will Richardson, I apologize for not posting this sooner. I've mentioned before that Will Richardson is one of my favorite authors and bloggers, one whose thoughts on the read/write web have had a profound effect on my own classroom.

In the discussion about the concept of literacy, Richardson is one of many to point out that we are facing new literacies in our world. He identifies huge shifts the read/write web is bringing about:

1. Content moving from teacher-controlled to student-controlled
2. Classes moving from 1 teacher and time-slot to many teachers available 24/7.
3. Class structures moving from individual work to collaborative work, even outside of the building walls.
4. Teaching moving from lecture to conversation
5. Skills moving from "know what is important" to "know where to find it"
6. Students moving from readers to contributors
7. The medium for student work moving from paper to electronic forms
8. The format for student work moving from text only to multimedia
9. Mastery moving from the test to the product
10. The goal moving from completion to contribution

When I work with educators or teach graduate courses on technology, one of the crucial things for me is the level of acceptance in the truth of these shifts. I have struggled as a professional development trainer in that I can easily provide teachers the "wow" of technology integration. In fact, I rarely fail, and that doesn't say anything about me... it says everything about the natural draw to human interest that is technology. But, I haven't as easily made this connection, that the world of teaching and learning is fundamentally changing, and we as educators have to change with it. Rare is it that I find a teacher willing to admit that the way they currently teach--which admittedly might be very good--will be completely outmoded in a matter of years.

As sincere as I can be, I say to you that these shifts are real, and I see no way a school without a quality digital curriculum meeting the needs of our students much longer, despite the quality of teacher in the classroom. I have to make my move from "trainer in technology" to "trainer in pedagogy". Or, I too will be outmoded as an educational technology specialist.

Using Wikipedia in the Classroom

A teacher once told me Wikipedia is the McDonalds of the digital world. It suffers from being the biggest fish out there, and because of this, is the victim of misinformation and rumors. And while all of its rivals get a free pass, it continues to thrive.

This analogy didn't work for me to well (I loved Supersize Me) but I see the point. Before I even have this discussion with teachers, I get the "Wikipedia? I won't allow that in my classroom. The information is not credible." The rumors out there are too persistent to trust it.

I've wanted to say something like "are you nuts? That's the one sure-fire way to get them to use the site." I once banned kids from reading John Knowles' A Separate Peace, not because I didn't want them to read the book, but because I wanted them to. For years of offering it as a free-reading choice, I'd have vicious stares from students who felt betrayed into reading something "so boring". When it was banned, however, they had to read it. And you thought reverse psychology only stopped working at age 4.

But, to say that would be a little crass. So, here's what I generally say about it. What site do you trust? What site is beyond the need to be critical of what it says?

The reality is, as Will Richardson points out, we are having a great shift in literacy:

In the era of textbooks and printed resources, we could be pretty sure the content had been checked and edited before being published. Reading, for all its intents, was a fairly passive experience. Today, however, readers cannot assume that what they are reading has been reviewed by someone else with an eye toward truth and accuracy. The Web is now a printing press for the masses, and so readers themselves must learn to be critical consumers of the information they consider.

Thus, all sites are essentially important to the learning process, even those that are marginal in quality, for it gives students a chance to discern bias, reliability, timely information, and embedded opinion.

This is not to say Wikipedia is my resource of choice; it isn't. But it is my student's resource of choice. And therefore, as a teacher, I need to instruct them on its uses and limitations, just like I need to do for Google.

One of my favorite thinkers of education, Wesley Fryer, raises many good points (check out his blog entry for a more thorough explanation of these):

1. Have students follow up on the external links listed in the notation section
2. Have students create their own content to become part of the collaborative process
3. Teach students the proper use of quotations
4. Use it to follow breaking news
5. Use it to explore controversial issues

One teacher I had in a graduate course I taught would have added a sixth. Show how fraudulent the website is with required reading about phony experts and contrived entries, and show students examples from the website that are inaccurate. I thought this was, at least, educating them about the website, rather than straight out banning it with no explanation whatsoever. Unless she was secretly going the Separate Peace route.