KM in Education

Free PDA Simulations from MIT

MIT's Teacher Education Program (TEP) has developed some free PDA simulation games based on undergraduate research projects. The games with descriptive names like Big Fish-Little Fish or Virus provide students with experiential lessons in genetics, economics, evolution, and game theory.

Also don't miss TEP's links to other interesting projects, such as their indoor and outdoor augmented reality simulations that link real-world experiences to information supplied by handhelds. Mystery @ The Museum is a futuristic simulation that resembles the old-fashioned board game Clue.

Sharing instruction through curriculum mapping

While speaking with a charter school start-up today, I learned of their recent selection of a curriculum mapping tool to enable collaboration and sharing of instruction planning and assessment among teachers and administration. I decided to learn more about curriculum mapping and have summarized below what I found.

Curriculum mapping appears to have grown out of the pioneering ideas in Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' book, Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum and Assessment K–12. In her first chaper, she writes:

With so little real-time data available, we find two polarized tendencies. One is to become rigid and lock step with curriculum guides, giving the impression that all is under control. The second is to become so loose and vague that no one seems to have a clue as to what is going on.

To make sense of our students' experiences over time, we need two lenses: a zoom lens into this year's curriculum for a particular grade and a wide-angle lens to see the K–12 perspective. The classroom (or micro) level is dependent on the site and district level (a macro view)....We need to change the process used in making curriculum decisions because most curriculum committees are ineffective at actually producing work that directly affects student performance.

What Dr. Jacobs proposes is a method that transforms curriculum planning into a vehicle for communication, collaboration and ongoing dynamic review of instructional planning. She also introduces the novel approach of taking a student's perspective in looking at the curriculum holistically and longitudinally to identify redundancies or gaps.

The first two chapters of Dr. Jacobs book provide a good overview of the process and reasons behind curriculum mapping. For a good primer on curriculum maps and different models, consult Least Tern's presentation.

The market for curriculum mapping is fast evolving, as many sites list outdated names and links. The major players all make reference to Dr. Jacobs' methodology as the basis for their design.

Among the more recognized curriculum mapping tools, I found:
AEL's Curriculum Creator - Curriculum Mapping & Design Tool
Atlas Curriculum Management System
Techpaths
WestJam's Curriculum Mapper

Additional players include:
Scantron's Curriculum Designer
Schoolution's MyLessonBuilder and CurrMapper

Beyond these vendors, many organizations such as NCREL and individuals offer consulting services for curriculum mapping.

Dr. Jacobs' site for curriculum design offers further resources.

Capturing that whiteboard

Have you ever wished you could just whisk your whiteboard notes into a computer? I saw it done once with a handy device a client pulled out of his briefcase a few years ago. Then I forgot all about it until I stumbled across this.

Introducing Virtual Ink's Mimio. Mimio is a portable device that attaches to a whiteboard and enables you digitally record, copy and print anything you write or draw in that blank space. I'm not very familiar with the market, but am frankly surprised it hasn't taken off faster. Perhaps it's that $799 price tag that they refer to as low-cost on their website.

That hefty price tag is probably one reason that Virtual Ink has sponsored a monthly giveaway contest. They are giving away one Mimio free every month to the educator, student or administrator who submits the most creative, innovative idea for how to use the Mimio. Not a bad approach for conducting direct market research and generating innovative ideas pretty cheaply!

Teaching with Tablet PCs

The New York Times recently published an article on tablet PC's that suggested:

the most promising area so far is in the classroom, a setting in which portable devices with handwriting capabilities would seem to make sense.

While the classroom may seem to be an area of promise, considering the price differential and relatively similar functionality to handhelds, it is hard for me to see tablet PC's becoming a mainstream trend in education. The price is currently prohibitive to most schools running from $1350 to almost $2000 per device. Other than its handwriting capabilities, the tablet PC's offer few additional features compared to handhelds. Handhelds offer the same functions for taking notes, reading, integration into curricula, internet access, student polling and collaboration. While a handful of private schools are buying up tablet PCs, public schools and districts are exploring the handheld world more deeply.

If tablet PC technology really wants to take off in education, it will need to first make some major changes to its price point and functionality before mainstream educators choose it over handhelds.

Classroom web logs

Today's New York Times article on blogs raises some interesting points. I challenge why some disappointing blogging results have:

led some teachers who are critical of blogs to question whether the technology has actually done anything to interest students in writing. Critics also worry that the casual nature of writing on the Web may encourage bad habits that are hard to break, like e-mail-style abbreviations, bad grammar and poor spelling.

Technology has never been a solution for learning and should not be relied upon for motivating students to learn. It is rather the content or process of the lesson that should be interesting, and further facilitated by collaborative technologies such as web logs!

iPods on Campus

In less than 2 weeks, Duke University incoming freshmen will be receiving iPods in a one-year pilot program between Duke and Apple. Most people recognize the iPod devices as a pocket-size digital music player popular among teens.

According to its press release, Duke is now adopting this latest hot technology to facilitate education innovation on campus. iPods will bring students creative course content, from language lessons to, of course, music to complement curricula. By preloading material, Duke will also provide students with an easily accessible resource for all the orientation information they may need, including their academic calendar and their school fight song. It is also hoped that students will also discover new ways to use iPods in education and campus life.

The initial price tag for the program: $500,000. Given the flurry of media attention it attracted, this first university experiment of its kind will be closely watched over the next year.

Educators Sharing with Multimedia

One challenge for sharing knowledge among educators is finding the best way to capture the complexity of teaching. It is exactly what the Knowledge Media Laboratory (KML) at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning intends to address with its research and development efforts to "explore and create distinct forms and models that help faculty capture, represent, and reflect on some of the critical aspects of their teaching and student learning."

KML has developed a free, web-based KEEP toolkit (Tools for Knowledge Exchange, Exhibition, and Presentation) to enable teachers and students to organize, create, reflect on and share succinct web-based representations of their classroom experiences. Sixteen creative K-12 examples using video and web technologies are profiled in The Gallery of Teaching and Learning. I particularly like the content from Emily Wolk's Pio Pico Researchers Participatory Action Research and the format of Irma Lyons' Harlem Renaissance project. Some great classroom ideas and techniques can be propagated with this tool. KML is currently working on a second generation of the KEEP toolkit with peer review and collective knowledge exchange capabilities.

The next challenge will be helping teachers locate the best idea among this growing mass of collective knowledge.

Handhelds in the Classroom

Handhelds offer portable, cheap, easy access to information. These benefits have propelled handheld devices to become a standard in some organizations, from helping salespeople access their customer's information on Palms to enabling executives to check their e-mail on Blackberries.

I have been curious to learn more about the future and current uses for handhelds in schools and classrooms, as they have far more potential than PC's to become ubiquitous learning devices. I share some findings below.

The Next Generation Mobile Classroom, a project funded by the iCampus alliance between Microsoft Research and MIT, is exploring how mobile devices such as handhelds can help promote learning and interactivity in the classroom of the future. The project's target audience is higher education, but many of the features could also be applied to K-12 classrooms. For example, students can unobtrusively ask questions via a handheld without interrupting the flow of a teacher's class, permitting the teacher to also gauge how well students absorbed the current lesson.

In schools today, students, teachers, and administrators are already using handhelds for a variety of functions. The Intel Innovation in Education initiative provides a good overview of educational uses for handhelds. With these devices, students can collaborate on projects, archive information, or simply manage their personal schedules. Teachers use them to quickly retrieve curriculum standards, notes, and student information while preparing lessons or working with a student. School adminstrators find handhelds useful for easily accessing student data in a meeting or simply sharing information with other school staff.

I will provide a list of resources for handhelds in education in my next posting.

The Promise of Wikis

For years collaborative tools have promised to transform the workplace. I recall how privileged my class felt to receive complimentary copies of Lotus Notes as students in Professor Tom Malone's MIT Sloan class. We thought Notes was the wave of the future, just as others have expected Groove, Sharepoint, or other technologies to take off. But none of these tools have come close to changing how we work as much as e-mail has.

Until now.

Wikis may very well become the next technology to change how organizations operate because they offer an easy, cheap, no-nonsense way to capture organizational memory. A wiki, for the uninitiated, is open-source software that allows individuals to create and edit content on a web page. For more context, Bill Ives provides a good introduction to wikis. To get a quick feel for wikis, take a one-minute crash course and then go visit the WikiWikiSandbox to try it out yourself.

Once you recognize the power of the wiki, it's easy to see why trust is frequently mentioned in the same breath as wikis. Wikis will only take off where the culture and process already incorporate an element of trust that can foster collaboration. Ironically, e-mail saturation in organizations has created an opportunity for wikis. Group e-mails or distribution lists assumed to include people who all trust each other can easily be replaced by wikis, with the added advantage of capturing the content history for future reference.

The potential for the application of wikis in education is enormous and is yet to be tapped. It can enable collaborative student projects such as one college seminar project at Bowdoin College. It could also enable facilitation of curriculum design or discussion of best practices across schools. The same could also be said for blogging, but the wiki offers the additional bonus of a collaborative experience for creating a shared product. Whereas blogs ensure the integrity of each voice, wikis arguably promote the integrity of the product at the expense of contributors. It is where the education community trusts it is working toward the same shared objectives that wikis will have the most impact in education.

Managing personal knowledge

Imagine if we could take all the knowledge we come across in a day and store it where it could be easily accessed.

That vision is becoming more real for students as applications such as BrainX offer individuals the possibility of capturing printed or digital content to be retrieved for future review. With BrainX, students can highlight key concepts on a website, in a book, or on a printed document to be stored and organized for later retrieval. The application then helps them review the information and test themselves on the content to prepare for exams.

This form of knowledge organizer is a promising first step toward helping transform personal learning and development with KM. However, there are still many gaps to fill. For example, this particular application does not address tacit knowledge that resides in people's heads or individual experiences. How revolutionary it would be to easily capture and categorize the key concepts from a professor's lecture with the highlights from an associated lab experiment! It also remains to be seen if any application successfully helps students synthesize all the knowledge they accumulate over time and across subjects.

Given the overwhelming amounts of information available today, it would not be surprising if more students move toward some form of personal KM to help them organize their learnings. The more challenging next step for all learners will be to use KM to apply what they are learning.