Pearson shmearson

Ardsley is the district whose Cambridge Pre-U class I visited:

ARDSLEY -- The group of seventh-graders is hunched around a MacBook in English teacher Cameron Brindise’s classroom, calling out rapid-fire directions to the boy wielding the keyboard with the intensity of any tech startup entrepreneur.

Using the video-editing software program iMovie, they’re piecing together a documentary called “Growing Up Digital,” which they will present to their “corporate bosses” at the Pearson Education company in a couple of weeks.

[snip]

Ardsley is one of five districts in the country that have signed on and pay a per-student fee to participate in a one-year iPad pilot program with Pearson Education Inc. Through the winter and spring, nine teachers at the high school, middle school and elementary level have been using iPads loaded with Pearson’s new app, the Common Core System of Courses.

The idea is to have the schools provide feedback to Pearson before the company makes the final version of the app available to the public. As the pilot year is nearing its end, educators say it’s been, for the most part, a valuable experience.

“What’s it done for the teachers who’ve been part of it, it’s shown how easy it is to push their curriculum outside the four walls of their classroom,” said Layne Hudes, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.

Teachers modified the lesson plans to accommodate their students’ needs and have written their own iPad lessons along the way. They’ve also found new educational apps they can integrate into their teaching.

“I like the idea of grabbing onto what I can connect with and what I think my kids can connect with,” Brindise said.

[snip]

Pernicone and her group will measure students’ social media use in their favorite apps -- like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter -- and display their findings on the iPhone replica in the “museum exhibit” Brindise has organized as the capstone of the iPad unit.

Class Notes: Ardsley's test drive of new Common Core app delivers mixed results
Mareesa Nicosia, mnicosia@lohud.com 1:51 p.m. EDT May 5, 2014

My district is joined at the hip with Ardsley (apparently in part because our curriculum director is close with an administrator there, who used to work here -- so I've been told).

In any event, our curriculum director is "passionate" about "technology" (which means iPads & Chromebooks), and the district's goal is to make technology as "ubiquitous as pencil and paper in our classrooms."

So I'm sure our central administrators are plotting to bring Pearson's Common Core app to the district, along with the requisite iPads and Chromebooks.

That said, it's possible parents are sufficiently alerted to the possibility that administrators will think twice. (I need to find out whether the board OK'ed that grant .... )

In fact, I hadn't seen this article until a parent posted it on Facebook this morning, accompanied by the observation that the program sounds like c***.

I second the emotion.

have iPad apps solved the page riffling problem?

A friend bought me an iPad a couple of weeks ago, and it is amazing.

I've been skeptical of 'technology' in education, mostly because nothing I've tried (online learning, educational software, educational CDs & DVDs, educational audio CDs for the car, the Kindle) has worked well for me. ALEKS came closest, but I would only use ALEKS for review, and I probably wouldn't do that, either. I found the need to look back and forth from the computer screen to my paper-and-pencil notebook tedious.

The iPad is the first form of technology that I can imagine changing the way people read and study.

First off, the 'content' apps I've looked at so far (Wall Street Journal & The Economist) format articles so that video and interviews really are "integrated" in a way that CDs tucked unto the backs of textbooks can't be.

More importantly - and this is a fantastic innovation -- the graphic design of the content apps potentially gives readers a workable substitute for page riffling.

The inability to riffle pages is the huge drawback of reading on a Kindle; I would never buy a Kindle edition of a textbook or a cookbook for that reason. On Kindle, reading is a strictly linear affair.

The iPad apps potentially change that. The mobile versions of WSJ and The Economist places content inside two rectangles: a big rectangle containing the article you're reading, and a much smaller, scrollable rectangle containing all the article titles in that section of the paper or magazine.

This would be a terrific feature in a textbook, where you need to grasp the structure of the subject, not just the content on the page you're reading. Each chapter could (and should) have a scrollable list of all the chapter's subject headings flanking the page you're reading.

Having all of the subheads directly at hand would let you riffle. For example, I'm working my way through Greg Mankiw's economics textbook, and I need to constantly flip back to previous sections to remind myself, say, why the aggregate demand curve slopes downward. Doing that on the Kindle is next to impossible. Yes, you can use the search function to find content elsewhere in the text, but it takes forever, and gives you too many hits. If I could read the Mankiw text formatted like the WSJ app, I would be able to click on "The Downward Slope of the Aggregate-Demand Curve" and instantly be where I need to be.

Then, after re-reading the material on AG, I would be able to click on the subject heading of the section I had been working on before I returned to the AG section.

(It would also be incredibly helpful to be able to ask the book to give me the numbered explanations of the graphs illustrating long-term-vs-short-term effects in sequence instead of having all of the "Point As" and "Point Bs" and "Point Cs" visible at all times.)

I doubt any textbooks have adopted this structure as yet, but they should.

Ed is writing a textbook for Oxford, and I'm telling him they need to include author interviews -- interviews, not lectures -- in the electronic edition. I'm going to push the idea of a scrollable column of subsection heads, too.