June 22, 2008 - June 28, 2008 Archives

Technology is playing an increasing hand in education today, from the way districts communicate with families to how kids exercise.

Should it be any surprise then that technology is altering that most venerable of educational icons: the textbook? That hardbound hallmark is going the way of the chalkboard, and, like its classroom counterpart, is being replaced by a much more interactive tool.

The electronic textbook or electronically delivered instructional materials -- as savvy educators and industry types prefer to call it -- is revolutionizing the way learning occurs in the classroom.

As you can imagine, the technology takes the subject matter to a whole different level, which, presented in simple print and paper, is static. But online, the material can come alive through sound, images, and interactivity.

“If you go to a sixth-grade science book and you look at tigers, they might have a few pages,” says Tom Greaves, chairman of the Greaves Group, which provides consultation services to educators on technology.

“On the Internet, if you typed in pictures of tigers, you’d get a million. The information available on the Internet is a million times more than what is in the textbook and that’s important,” Greaves insists, “because every kid is an individual, they may be interested in a different level of material, they may speak a different language, and it’s very difficult for a single page of paper to hit all those interests.”

To learn more about electronic textbooks, the advantages and drawbacks, as well as which school districts are utilizing it and what they’ve discovered, read ASBJ’s July’s cover story, now available online.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor

There was so much bad news in St Louis over the weekend that it wouldn’t all fit on the front page.

Above the fold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Saturday was a photo of the swollen Mississippi River, still roiling after it breached levies near the towns of Foley and Winfield, and threatened Clarksville and the River City itself.

Threatened also, was one of St. Louis’ proudest industries, Anheuser-Busch, the target of a hostile takeover attempt by the Belgium brewing giant, InBev.

And did I mention the public schools? You had to go to Section B to read about them. The story, in Sunday’s paper, was titled: “In St. Louis, the 4th R is Reform.”

If that sounds like déjà vu, you are an astute (and longtime) reader of ASBJ. I’ve written about reform attempts in my hometown twice: in December 2003, when the district was being run by management firm and again in July 2006, when an energetic new superintendent was brought in from Philadelphia. We barely got the issue out before he was ousted by a bitterly divided school board.

Rough times have continued since then. For the past year the troubled -- and shrinking -- school district has been run by state-appointed Special Administrative Board.

The new board’s first job, the Post said, was to stabilize the district. Now it’s faced with closing 15 to 20 underutilized schools (on top of the 31 closed since 2003), finding a superintendent, and operating the schools on a budget that is 4.5 percent leaner than the one before.

On a more promising note: This new board, whatever its provenance, seems serious about improving student achievement for the long term, and it’s doing its best to weed out ineffective teachers. One promising reform is its introduction of The Toledo Plan for peer evaluation of teachers.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

Nteido Etuk has one of those cool jobs many people fantasize about.

He’s a video game developer with a twist: His games are designed for classrooms and feature mathematical equations that must be solved to continue to the next level. The concept, which is catching on in schools across the country, gives students an engaging, familiar format to learn mathematical and other concepts instead of the typical drill-and-kill methods.

Etuk, who goes by “NT,” is a native of Nigeria who grew up playing video games. He came to the U.S. to attend Cornell University and majored in electrical engineering. But he lost interest in that field when his first- and second-year courses centered on lectures and discussions about theory—NT just wanted to practice what he was learning.

He began envisioning the concept for Tabula Digita when he volunteered to be a math tutor for the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. From that experience, he realized how difficult it is to teach math and motivate students to memorize basic tables and concepts. He wrote the business plan for Tabula Digita as a class project while working on his MBA at Columbia University, and after graduation he founded the company with friend who was a high school math teacher.

Tabula Digita quickly earned a devoted following, and has held virtual tournaments between classrooms and even brought national winners to Atlanta last year for its first tournament using its Dimension M line of games.

“The response has been phenomenal,” NT says. “There’s no question this is actually about learning style and the way students want information to be presented to them.”

Students also love the “social networking” aspect of competing against one another, he says. Most teachers, on the other hand, are wary of having video games in the classroom, but he says he’s gotten positive feedback from some that have integrated it into their curriculum. For instance, he said, some teachers have used it for an hour and a half each Friday and found that their classes suddenly became captive audiences.

So far, Tabula Digita has focused on middle school math, but NT says they soon plan to expand their product line to include games for elementary and high school math classes and science lessons, too. Read more about NT’s thoughts on the future of educational gaming in the classroom in this month’s ASBJ.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

Yesterday the Pew Hispanic Center released a study (do these people ever sleep?) that examined the particular role schools play in the achievement gap among students with limited English skills, otherwise known as English language learners.

After analyzing the test results of public schools in Arizona, California, Florida, New York, and Texas, which collectively educate more that 70 percent of the country’s ELL students, the report revealed: nothing really new. At least not to me.

Among their key findings: The schools in which ELL students are the most concentrated, tend to be in urban areas, have higher enrollments, higher student-to-teacher ratios, and higher poverty levels.

I could have told them that. This is a generalization, of course, but non-English speaking families typically will migrate to areas where there are more opportunities to land a job, secure housing, obtain social services, and be part of a familiar community. All things that, because of historical trends and sheer numbers, are most likely to be found in central cities.

Unfortunately, that kind of concentration or cultural and linguistic isolation has some unintended and harmful outcomes as the report pointed out, including lagging academic achievement among ELL students, especially when they occupy a majority of the school, and interestingly enough, poor performance for other minorities and even white students when both are outnumbered by ELL student population.

While ELL students’ language skills clearly represent a challenge for many educators, especially when it comes to standardized tests, the bigger factor, in my opinion, is the high percentage of lower income students in many of these schools, as poverty is a proven predictor of student and school success. Add to that large class sizes and overwhelmed teachers and, well, you get the picture.

And to me, the picture shouldn’t be so much about what these schools look like and have in common, but how we can change the focus to create a new image.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor