School Innovation Process - Part I

Back in the Spring of 2010, I was asked, along with one of our site principals, to chair a committee of parents, teachers, administrators and community members to begin investigating the future for our school district and which directions the district should be investigating for long term planning. Initial meetings focused on determining the needs of our students, schools and community as we move into the future. We listed and ranked those needs and identified the top needs receiving the highest rankings. The highest scoring main categories were: Student Communication, School to Home/Home to School Communication, Improving Instructional Program, Technology, School Culture, and Professional Development. Under each of these main categories were specific needs that were submitted and ranked high by committee members. Once those needs were identified, the committee began to research how other schools around the country and world, were addressing those same or similar needs. The results of that research were shared with the committee on subsequent dates. Not surprising, one common thread that appeared through each of the main categories was the use of technology to address the needs.

The committee also interviewed students, adults who were products of the school district, and members of the local community to gain insight as to what they felt was good about their educational experience and what they felt could have improved their educational experience. Our guests had varying experiences with the educational system, primarily due each of their unique life experiences. One idea that shared some commonality was the importance of cultivating caring relationships. This idea of relationships is important because in points at an obvious fact, we are all different. Strong relationships are built upon one to one, honest, personable contact. I’m going to take a little liberty here and stretch an idea, if students feel relationships are important, and yet all students are unique and different, how should be we addressing our approach to teaching and learning when we have 30 students in the classroom?

The answer to that question is designing instruction that is unique to each student. That is only possible when you have fostered a strong relationship with each of your students, clearly identified each of their learning needs, and possess an instruction strategies supply that you can use to pull out tools specific to their needs. At best, what we have been doing up to this point, is grouping our students together (i.e. grade levels, reading levels, pre algebra, algebra, etc. etc.) with what we feel are similar needs and using our “bag” of strategies to address those similarly grouped student needs. Does this strategy work? Sure, up to a point. Could we do better? Of course.

Our school innovation committee is at the point now where we would like to take some recommendations to our school board. These recommendation will focus on what we feel the next steps should be in preparing our schools for the future. I, being a member of that committee, have some thoughts on this and have developed a recommendation I will share at the next meeting. I will explain my idea in a future post. But I will finish with two recordings and a reference to one of my last posts.

Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn have written a book titled, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns . In his recent interview on TheFutureofEducation, Mr. Horn explains the main themes behind his book and their recent updates to the book. I have excerpted out a section of that interview below with the section relevant to my idea. The full recording of his interview is available here: http://www.learncentral.org/event/132741



The second recording excerpt below is from Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. In this recording she shares the 2010 National Education Technology Plan and responds to a question related to why innovation is only found in pockets across our educational system. The full recording of her interview is available here: http://www.learncentral.org/node/131618



Finally, my post here, http://edutonica.blogspot.com/2011/01/big-target-goal-digital-delivery-fo.html gets to the big idea I will be sharing in more depth in a future post.

Feedback encouraged...What do you think?

(image courtesy of wwworks on flickr.com)

Creating With Computers (Part VI) - The Student Reading Recorder Example

The fundamental design concept behind all of the Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter and Facebook are very similar to my simple Student Reading Recorder application. What you see on your computer screen when you are looking at Twitter or Facebook is the same thing that every single person on the planet sees, at least in respect to the layout of the elements on the screen. What is different is the content that fills in those little elements of space on your screen. The way Facebook and Twitter determines what to put in those little boxes within the layout is based on information that you generated and they store in their database. In Twitter for example, every person with an account that has selected me as someone to follow has an entry in the Twitter database that identifies my account as one that they want to follow. When I add a new tweet, that action initiates a query through the twitter database looking for all accounts that have marked my account as one that they are following. When the query locates my unique account information in somebody else's list of people they are following, it pulls my last tweet out of the database and puts it into the list of tweets of the for that individual. At least that's how I imagine it. I don't work for Twitter or Facebook, but my hunch is probably pretty close. My little reading application works the same way.


My database consists of four tables. The first table holds information about the teacher. The second table holds information about the students. The third table in the database holds information about the assessments and the last table holds information about the individual student assessment results.

The first screen of the student application pulls information from the database out of three of the tables. The start button initiates a call to the database that queries the database to retrieve the unique identification number for the specific teacher that the students types in to the "class" field. This identification number is then used to generate a drop down list of every student that has that teacher's unique identification number saved into their student record. When the student selects their name from the drop down list, a second call to the database is initiated and uses the student's unique identification number to retrieve the students current reading assessment activity. In addition, it uses the student's unique identification number to retrieve their avatar icon for the upper right of the screen. The avatar icons are titled with the student's unique identification number.

The remaining icons on the screen consists of two buttons. The red circle button begins a recording session. This recording session works with Apple's Quicktime technology and requires that the QuickTime player is installed on the student's workstation. The sound recording is actually saved to the local "recordings" folder on the student workstation. (This works in the same fashion for both the Macintosh platform and the MS Windows platform. The Linux platform does not have an Apple QuickTime player so it records audio a little different. I will describe the Linux version in a separate post.)

In order to provide the teacher with the ability to evaluate the student's reading recording from any networked computer, the green triangle button, which is used by the student to navigate between the screens, also uploads a copy of the student recording to the remote server via an FTP process.

A copy of this application is linked at the bottom of this post. One important fact, this tool has not been designed for commercial release. This is an in house tool designed for a specific goal and in a specific environment. The environment that this application is running is very robust and latency issues at home over a DSL speed connection are not experienced in the classroom.

The remaining student screens provide students with additional focus on thinking about their reading using the recording that they created in screen one. This second screen prompts the student to listen to their recording and count the number of words that they read. They can strike the space bar on the keyboard to help them count the number of words that they read aloud during the recording.



The third screen simply has them rank how well they felt they read the paragraph and allows them to drag a marker on a line to identify their rating.







The fourth screen allows the student to listen to the recording again and identify one word that they thought was particularly difficult to read aloud.







The fifth screen provides a ranking which is actually just a number that increments by five each time they do an recording activity. The screen is particularly vague as I am interested in how the students that use this tool would describe what this number represents. Obviously the more times they do an activity the more obvious it will be that the number increases.


Remember, even thought this application is functional, it primarily serves as an example of what can be done with these types of rapid application development tools. Revolution is a great tool development tool and seeing how they provide a free version and educational pricing on more complete versions there is only a small investment in time to get started.

Download Examples
Examples of the Macintosh and Windows Student Applications Available Here

In part VII I will share the teacher management components of this example application and show off some of the other features of Revolution that helps make developing tools with this product much easier than traditional programming languages.

Creating With Computers (Part V) - The Tools

As I mentioned in Part II, my early interest in computers and education was launched when I first discovered HyperCard in the mid 1980s. The ease at which you could quickly create a custom application to do what you wanted it to do and to address a specific task was very enticing. The continued development of HyperCard by Apple lead to more and more possibilities including the ability to incorporate multimedia into custom applications. In my opinion, Hypercard was the ideal computer development tool for the classroom teacher and allowed for the development of instructional materials tailored to the needs of individual students. HyperCard eventually was retired by Apple, but other companies picked up where Apple had left off. Development tools such as SuperCard, ToolBook, and Metacard continued to evolve the HyperCard development model. This model of application development based on objects and events began to gain more and more popularity to the extent that one such tool, HyperStudio, became very popular with students and teachers. Though this tool was similar in design, it is targeted more toward students and is not as versatile as the previously mentioned software tools. However, it provides an excellent starting place for students to understand many of the important concepts of application development.

In 2003 Runtime Revolution purchased Metacard and used it to develop Revolution. RunRev, as they are now known, has developed mutliple versions of Revolution and address the needs of the wide range of users. RunRev produces versions of Revolution that run and compile on all three major operating systems, Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. Applications developed in Revolution can also be deployed as browser plug-ins similar to Adobe Flash applications. One attractive feature of Revolution is projects designed and developed in one operating system, such as Mac OSX can be compiled and deployed as standalone applications on Windows and Linux operating system. Future versions of Revolution are in the works that will provide deployment on mobile operating systems such as Google's Android.

Developing in Revolution is done by dragging objects from palettes to your window and then programing those objects using Revolution's Transcript programming language. Transcript is very similar to HyperCard's HyperTalk programming language and uses very English language like commands. The following example should help to better illustrate this description:



In Part VI I will begin to tie the conversation back to my example, the student reading tool, and share the necessary steps of connecting the student tool to a remote database.

Creating With Computers (Part III)

Revolution is like a software Erector set. With a little bit of familiarity with the language, it is very easy to quickly create custom applications. I began the process of developing this tool by thinking about the ultimate goal, a software tool that students would use to hopefully improve their reading. I started with the ultimate goal in mind, and then worked back to components that would make that goal successful. The following is a list of features that I determined the student component should incorporate:

• Simple student log-in a first grader could master.
• The ability for a student to easily record themselves reading a passage of text.
• The ability for a student to easily play back their recorded audio file.
• A strategy to allow students to concentrate on what they read by providing them with a tool to count the number of words they read within the time limit.
• A simple scale that allows students to rate how well they feel they read the passage.
• The ability to identify at least one word that they felt was the most difficult to read.
• A number presented at the end of the activity that represents their ranking/total score.

My hunch is that these described activities would help to improve a student's reading ability by steering them to think more acutely about their reading. Research has shown that special needs students actually do quite well working in a student-computer environment. The computer is often less threatening and students are less likely to be nervous or suffer from performance anxiety when in front of a computer as opposed to in front of their teacher. This I thought would hold true for all students. I envision this student tool being used in a center or independent group activity where students have 15-20 minutes at each activity.

After defining the components of the student software, it was time to decide on how it would be designed. I knew that I would want to be able to retrieve student work so that the students' teachers would be able to evaluate their students' work post activity. In order to do this, all student input would have to be stored in a database. Fortunately for me, Revolution provides this ability quite easily and I will be describing this process in a later section.

As I continued to work backward from the student activity component, my planning resulted in three supporting components. The first is the main administrator tool for creating teacher accounts. The second component is the teacher tool. The teacher tool should allow for the creation of individual student reports based on the students' activities. In addition, teachers should be able to create, edit, and delete students accounts. Finally, teachers should be able to create and edit new assessments/activities and assign assessments/activities to students in their class.

All these components require the storing of their data in a database. The creation of the database and the resulting tables in the database will be described in a later blog post.
(image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/2765597758/)

The Beginning...

This is the first post to this new blog I have titled Edutonica. Edutonica will be dedicated to the sharing of information related to the creative use of technology and education. When looking up "tonica" on line, I found a definition of "tone" or "keynote." (I also like that it sounded close to electronica which is digital or electronic music, thus, electronic tone.) So this site is going to be about educational tone, or keynotes.

Stay "tuned" for more...