The Big Pitch

Image of Wordle built from the U.S. National Educational Technology Plan via drapestakes.blogspot

December’s Edtech conference in New York showcased new educational products and services for the digital age with its Innovation Incubator programme.  Many focused on new tablet and mobile applications, and brought ideas from social media and gaming to their learning design.

Start-ups, university think tanks and old companies with new ideas all competed to pitch their concepts to an audience of educators, publishers, technologists and venture capitalists. Here’s a quick look at seven of the contenders:

1.     The Connected Learning Gateway is an elegant portfolio of solutions designed to automate the building of e-learning environments. It integrates teaching, peer-to-peer learning, and parental communication through a social networking environment similar to Facebook.

2.     Screenchomp is a free app that turns your iPad into a recordable, digital whiteboard that allows teachers and students to work with homework, share a great idea or explain a tricky concept.

3.     Fluidmath is a very cool piece of software that combines hand-writing
recognition with tablets and interactive whiteboards to demonstrate and
deconstruct complex maths and physics problem. This won the audience vote for
Most Innovative Product.

4.     The First 4,000 Words uses game-based techniques and speech recognition
technology to teach the 4,000 most frequently used English words, and assess
listening, reading and comprehension.

5.     Another vocabulary builder, Footsteps2Brilliance  is an early learning
platform that accelerates student achievement by applying features from mobile
gaming with the latest in cognitive research to “bring rich language to language
poor homes”. This won the audience vote for Product Most Likely to Succeed.

6.     The Geodome bills itself as an ‘immersive learning platform” that deploys a
transportable physical dome structure to present data visualisation and a game
like learning experience.

7.     eSpark is an iPad app to help search and find educational apps, creating
customs playlists for students based on their individual learning needs.

It will be interesting to look back in a couple of years’ time and see which of these innovators managed to create a sustainable business from their ideas!

If you come across any particularly impressive piece of educational technology, leave a comment here for others to share.

Never waste a good crisis

Business literature advises that the goals of change management and innovation are often most effectively achieved during a time of crisis. So I’m keenly interested in the major changes going on right now in the US education system, and have been keeping a close eye on some of the new models and thinking that are emerging.

The US is a very different education system to New Zealand, with over 50 times the population, scores of different schooling philosophies and state funding models. Its track record of student achievement compared to New Zealand is pretty poor judged by PISA results (http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/34/60/46619703.pdf). But it's also a highly dynamic and well-researched market, with private providers of professional development and educational resources (including NZ providers like Learning Media) battling it out for market share, multi-million state adoptions and Federal grants.

There are both stunning successes and failures to be observed. One of the most notable developments in recent years has been the increasing adoption of digital education resources.

The economic crisis is now beginning to significantly affect schooling. The President may want every child to be "career and college ready", but 42 states have cut education funding since the recession began as their core revenues from property taxes plummeted.

Take a performance shortfall, an economic crisis, add the promise of digitally enhanced education and then let’s see what new thinking emerges. At this month’s EdTech conference in New York I caught some of the latest ideas:

1. Flip the classroom

The teacher is no longer the sole repository and manager of content in the classroom, rather they should become the educational designer helping deliver personalised pathways. Some would argue that New Zealand has done this for some time, but the argument is that technology now allows the reading and instruction to be pre-consumed, with the classroom now all about projects and problem-solving.

2. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

While some States are subsidising iPads and other mobile devices, the reality is that not all students will benefit, but all will in the future need their own personal learning device. In many cases it will be a mobile phone, so teachers and educational publishers better get used to the idea of designing learning that can operate on screens of all sizes. An extension of this idea is Bring Your Own Data - devices that capture the things you have learned outside school or on holiday or at home etc. so that teachers have an adult informed perspective for differentiated learning.

3. Digital does not replace teachers

It's a false dichotomy to emphasise technology vs teaching. This thinking is in contrast to the recent rapid growth of distance education and e-learning in the US, which is beginning to falter through lack of evidence of learning improvement. As one speaker said "you can't have high tech without high teach".

4. Broadband access changes everything

This is particularly relevant for us as the Government prepares to wire up New Zealand schools. US commentators sees real time, competency-based assessment data emerging as a critical benefit  - an area I would suggest we are perhaps less equipped to exploit. A speaker proposed that "assessment is the currency for the knowledge economy".

5. Immersive learning is on its way

It's obvious to any parent that children are highly engaging by gaming and simulation approaches, but research is beginning to suggest recall is also better when students are mobile and active.  Sensor technology such as Microsoft's Knect has opened up a whole new opportunity to replace the keyboard with natural human interface using gesture and speech. It was also rumoured recently that Apple's new iTV will use Knect gesture technology.

In New Zealand we have less of a sense of crisis than in the US – but perhaps we need to up the ante, and at the same time up our commitment to innovation.

In my next post I'll explore some of the new EdTech products that have caught my attention.