The kinds of learning we saw with Sally, and the kinds of teaching that we saw with Mr. Bacon, represent Education 3.0, a far cry from what most schools are doing now. As we learned from Superintendent Hunter, the process of getting to 3.0 can take several years. And it doesn't happen all at once: students and teachers progress gradually along the path from 2.0 to 3.0. The question for this chapter is, what would Education 2.5 look like? We'll answer with another Day in the Life. Justin is a ninth grader at iZone High School, a hypothetical institution located in a city near you and striving to provide innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Justin is not a model student; far from it, he has struggled since kindergarten with the culture of the school, and especially learning how to read. And Justin's school is at the early phases of transformation, about halfway from 2.0 to 3.0. Let's follow Justin for a day at his new school, where he hopes to move forward toward graduation and success in the world. As you follow Justin, look for illustrations of:
7:00 AM He had set the alarm on his iPod Touch to wake him at this early hour, because he was determined to ace the Regents Living Environments practice exam this afternoon. Justin sits up in bed, picks up the iPod, and pulls up the background material on how cells divide, a topic he knew would be on the test. The third word in the sentence stumps him : mitosis. He taps it to see a definition. He taps again to hear it. "Mitosis," he repeats to himself. "Sounds like a disease." He taps more info, and up pops a podcast that shows some little pieces splitting up, followed by the larger object splitting in two. The voice-over explains what's happening. Justin begins to understand what this concept is all about. Justin and his school understand that in order to make up for lost time, and to cover all that today's students need to know, the time for academic work needs to extend beyond the six hours of the school day. So the school provides every student with a mobile learning device on which the entire curriculum is available, downloaded automatically from the iZone Learning Environment whenever Justin is within the reach of the school's wi-fi network. Once it's on the iPod, Justin can study at home, on the subway, in school, or wherever he finds himself. And the device is programmed to help him overcome his learning disabilities, with explanations, pronunciations, and podcasts available at the tap of a finger. 8:00 AM The science reading starts to make sense now that he understands the basic concept. Like most of the people on the subway this morning, Justin wears white earbuds, but what he listens to is far different -- it's the audio version of the Living Environments text. He listens as he reads the words. A quick tap and the iPod switches into Spanish, then back again. When he reaches the end of the section, he gets a quick quiz, drawn from previous years' Regents questions: If a chemical that interrupts cell division is added to a culture of human liver tissue, which process would stop? (1) meiosis (2) mitosis (3) breakdown of glucose (4) diffusion of nutrients A tap on #2 shows that he has learned something after all. But he's curious, so he taps on answer #1, to learn the difference between mitosis and meiosis. Justin rewards himself for his success by taking some time to sketch a digram of the mitosis process on his iPod Touch. With the curriculum in his pocket, Justin can study no matter where he is. Whenever he has a free moment, he gets back to work. His technology provides him the help he needs to overcome his language difficulties, and to help him track his own progress. Audio, video, animation, self-correction and translation are combined in the online version of the course to enable Justin to learn the key concepts of the subject. And assessment is not a separate and secret activity for Justin: it's built into the online course materials. This reading and practice, which in his old school was done in class during the regular school day, is now accomplished largely outside of school. This enables Justin's teachers to use valuable class time for deeper pursuits challenging problems. 9:00 AM As soon as he enters the school, Justin's attendance is recorded as his iPod comes within range of the wireless network. It's also reflected on the screen of the IP phone on Mr. Marc's desk. In the advisory homeroom, Mr. Marc checks the phone display against the faces in front of him and sends a confirming click to the system. He reminds the students to check their personal schedules for the day, to see if anything's been added; some pull out their iPods, some turn to the computers in the classroom. Justin sees his science meeting in red, his math in class in green, the play rehearsal in yellow. He adds a personal item in blue at 1:15: "Create mitosis animation." He is interrupted by a plaintive "Do I have to go to this study group today?" from a fellow student. "Why do you suppose they sent you there?" asks Mr. Marc. "Maybe because I scored 56 on the last online quiz in math?" asks the student. No reply is necessary. Administrative functions that consumed valuable learning time and expensive paper in Justin's old school take place automatically at iZone High School. In addition, students manage their schedules online, including both school-assigned tasks as well as those they reechoed for themselves. These calendars are kept on their personal iPods, and reflected in the online iZone Learning Environment, where they are available to teachers and parents. The online courses keep track of how students are doing, and automatically assign tutorials and tutoring sessions to students who do not seem to be mastering the materials. 9:20 AM In the lecture hall, Mr. Marc focuses the digital microscope on the cells in the slide. 75 students watch the action on the SmartBoard. The video output is being webcast through the school's network so that students can watch and record the action in real time on their various mobile devices. "Maria, are you seeing this OK?" asks Mr Marc to a wheelchaired student whose elevator is broken today and so she is studying from home. "When you do this yourselves in the lab," warns Mr. Marc, pay attention to the temperature of the culture. The cells will die if they get too cold. They're warm now. What do you see happening?" Justin watches the SmartBoard, but he can see more detail on his laptop. "The mass is getting slowly larger," responds Justin. "Now I've got the chemical ready to add. It's one that blocks chromosomal activity. What do you predict will happen?" On Justin's screen appear four choices. He clicks answer #2, the mass will stay the same size. Looking up to the SmartBoard, he sees that most of the class has chosen answer #3, the mass will shrink. At Mr. Marc's direction, he turns to his neighbor to discuss the reasoning behind their different predictions. By doing this science demonstration with 75 students, Mr. Marc effectively frees up two other teachers to do joint planning or tutor students who need extra help or prepare a special demonstration of their own. By using a digital microscope, he can allow all students to see what's happening, even those at home, and record the results for later analysis. By asking students to observe and predict, he is modeling the scientific method. By collecting their predictions online, and reflecting them back immediately, he is fomenting thinking and discussion. By letting the online course do most of the basic presentation of concepts, Mr. Marc is freed up to develop and conduct demonstrations and labs that go deeper into the topic and inspire students to apply what they've learned online to a real-world problem. 10:00 AM It's Justin's assigned work time, so he finds a comfortable spot in the school to pursue his online coursework. He chooses the library, finds a chair and a table, and connects to the iZone Learning Environment. The iLE suggests that he'd profit from some work on his algebra course this morning, so he clicks into it on the laptop he checked out earlier in the day. The first assignment in section five of the course is a word problem: If a single cell divides in half once each day, how long will it take to increase to a million cells? Justin knows he needs to use x's and y's to find the answer, but he doesn't know where to start. So he consults the online coach that's built into the system. "Write down what you know, " suggests the coach. Justin enters 1,000,000, which is the number of cells he wants to get to. "Now put that into the form of an equation." So Justin puts an equal sign in front of it. And so forth until the problem is solved. Each student at the iZone School is scheduled for work time each day, when they pursue their online course content. The school has set up spaces conducive to this kind of work. And the onion courses are more than simply electronic copies of the old textbook: they include well-designed problems, multimedia tutorials, and online help. While Justin is working independently on math, his math teacher may be teaching a face-to-face class, tutoring a small group of students, or doing curriculum development with other teachers. 11:00 AM In his global history class period, Justin works with four other students around a table to design a response to the plague. They are role-playing the leadership council of a European city in 1325. Justin's task was to find out how much if anything doctors knew of germ theory during that time, so that their group's plan would be historically accurate. He had done his research online, during yesterday's work time at school and last night at home on his iPod. He projected onto the SmartBoard from his iPod a drawing from a 14th-century manuscript that he'd found online, that seemed to show plague germs as expanding cell masses. He could not read the Latin captions, so he wasn't sure what exactly it was. Another student in his group showed him how to translate the Latin on his laptop, and they all learned that Justin's illustration was in fact depicting the expansion of bubbles in rising bread. Teachers at Justin's school work together to plan a curriculum that's coordinated from one subject to another, and that uses a variety of student groupings and teaching methods. They also go out of their way to ensure that these methods take full advantage of online resources and local technologies. At least once each day, each student works in a collaborative group with a highly-structured long-term assignment. This helps them develop the problem-solving and social skills needed for success in the 21st-century college and workplace. Justin's day consists of a careful balance of large group, small group, and individual work, carried out online and in person. 12:00 Noon Justin is way ahead of the rest of his art elective class in basic drawing. He asks his teacher -- who's actually a designer at a studio downtown with whom Justin is doing his credit-bearing field work -- if he can use today's class time to develop an animation of mitosis. They meet together over videoconference every other day. He shows her the sketch he developed earlier in the day. He thinks he can design something that will help other students better understand the key concepts of mitosis. Permission granted, he transfers the sketch he drew earlier from his iPod to the school's multimedia workstation, fires up Photoshop, and goes to work. After consulting the online medical illustration library at the nearby university, as well as the explanations from a half-dozen online texts, and recent Regents exam questions on this topic, his animation faithfully represents the process in just the amount of detail that a student would need to succeed on the test. Justin saves the animation to his portfolio on the school server. Each student at iZone High School takes an elective course that in most cases includes field work and a mentor from the world outside of school. Most of these mentors handle a small group of students. They maintain contact over the network, communicating regularly through video, audio, and images. Justin will get school credit from his animation project, which will be critically evaluated by his science teacher and his art mentor as soon as it's complete and in his online portfolio. And the technology tools that Justin uses to create this work are the same ones used in the real world . 1:00 PM English Language Arts has long been Justin's downfall. He's the first in his family to learn this language, and his test scores have always hovered near the bottom. But this year, it's no so bad. They're reading Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. He's got a copy on his iPod, as well as the printed book. And a podcast version of the film taken at the event itself. Today's lesson is about metaphors; Justin taps the word on his iPod to learn it's meaning, but this is not enough; he asks the teacher to give some examples. On the SmartBoard, she shows a section of the speech as Justin watches and listens, "…and righteousness flows like a mighty stream." A discussion ensues: what's righteousness? Does it flow like water? Can you find another metaphor in the speech? Justin scrolls through the text on his iPod. The student next to him has found an online analysis of the speech. They work together on the sentence, I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. Despite the many words that aren't in his reading vocabulary, Justin with the help of his iPod begins to understand this idea of metaphor… The online curriculum is brought to bear in regular teacher-led classes as well as for independent study at the iZone High School. So are the mobile technologies that help students overcome their disabilities. Through the iZone Learning Environment, teachers have access to video libraries, analytical works, and teaching ideas all keyed to the state standards and to the books they are reading. Justin's teachers have learned to incorporate the classroom technologies and mobile devices and online course materials into everyday teaching and learning in such a way that class sessions are more interesting and go deeper into the core ideas of the curriculum. Even though the students receive much of their instruction online, the teacher maintains a key role in learning. 2:00 PM Justin huddles with his study group just before the practice exam. They share sample test questions and key ideas. They take the test online, some from the library's laptops, some from their iPods. The results from multiple-choice section come back right away: Justin got eight of the ten questions correct, second-best in his group. They'll get the essay portion returns tomorrow. On his way out the door, headed for his internship downtown, Mr. Marc asks Justin if he might submit his mitosis animation to the ILE Living Environments course as a candidate for inclusion in the online curriculum. "I saw it as I was reviewing your online portfolio. Nice work." The online curriculum is not fixed in stone; teachers can modify and update it easily for their own students, and submit improved examples and lessons to a committee of peers who can add them to the official course. In this way the science teachers have formed a community of practitioners who are constantly improving the quality of the coursework -- sometimes with the help of their students.
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