Reuters has this article up about a middle school in Boston that has stopped using textbooks, paper and pencils in favor of laptops. The laptops are handed out to every student at the beginning of the school day, the kids use them all day for math, reading, etc., and hand them back in at the end of the day. The school library is still standing and stocks lots of fiction in book form, so I suppose I can support the idea of computers replacing all tree-based implements of learning in the classroom. (Really, I think it’s that I can see the inevitable age of laptops-for-every-human and no-more-trees-left-for-paper coming down the pike, so I may as well give up and step out of the way.)

I adore pencils and paper (Ticonderoga #2’s and college ruled) and books that are bound and I will probably never give them up completely, regardless of mankind’s technological advancements. However, as much as I prefer words in print to their computer-screen counterparts, I do understand that technological evolution, progress, and advancement (blah blah blah) is forward motion and that is usually a positive thing.

I’m not terribly fond of the increased amount of screen time elementary and middle school kids will be adding to their daily tally if laptops are to be used all day in the classroom, but I’m sure that back when someone started writing on paper, there was my cave-writing counterpart bitching about how mankind’s technological advancements into paper making were going to ruin everyone’s eyesight. The symbols can be bigger on the walls, you jackasses! We’ll all go blind if you start writing small on that clay tablet crap! I am crotchety and I fear change no matter which epoch I’m residing in.

Further Reading:

Testing with Tech: The Role of Technology in Supporting and Enhancing Assessment

Technology Integration

Technology Not Being Used Effectively in Schools

NEA Survey Results on Technology in Public Schools and Classrooms

State Leadership in Technology For Schools: Trends in access, use and capacity

Technology Literacy and the MYSpace Generation

Posted by Alexa Harrington

PrepPoint, a test prep, academic tutoring, and college advising group, has a great list of books and resources for students in the pre-college phase of their existence. The list is long enough that I won’t regurgitate it here, but it includes several resources in the following four categories:

Academic Performance
Test Prep
College Admissions
Online Resources

Posted by Alexa Harrington

When I was a college student, the courses I always felt I learned the most from, took the most away from, and enjoyed the most while I was in them were the lab courses: chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, etc. Witnessing the tangible proof of the information the professors and the books had been spewing set that knowledge solidly into my grey matter.

Non-lab courses always seemed to me as if I read gallons of information, sat through endless talking-only lectures, and I had to just take everyone’s word for everything. The math courses were somewhere in the middle of those two extremes; no actual lab work, but everything was provable. Plus, once I understood how to do the problem in question, it was incredibly satisfying on some deep-seated, wing-nut level in my brain to sit for hours and obsessively solve equations. I’m such a freak—it’s making me all warm and zennish and deeply calm just thinking about calculus, trig and algebra. Does math affect everyone else that way or does it just do that to me?

As part of MIT’s OpenCourseWare site, anyone can access course materials from pretty much every undergraduate and graduate course taught at MIT (there are currently 1800 of them available). It’s free and it kicks ass and physics geeks like me can watch Professor Walter Lewin’s totally entertaining lectures/circus performances.

If physics isn’t your thing, here’s a list of all the other courses with audio/video components.

Here are the courses geared toward high school students and teachers, including AP biology, calculus and physics.

Here’s the course list in its entirety. Dang. It just makes you want to learn shit for the rest of your life. It’s a total time-suck and you can do it all in the name of education.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

And now here’s some good news (and some super cheerful flower pictures) to balance out the bad news of the previous post (and my constant ranting about the SAT). The San Francisco Chronicle had a happy story about Carolyn Barnes, a young woman who grew up with way more reality to deal with than any kid should. (The complicated childhood isn’t the happy part). After high school she attended Virginia Tech on a full scholarship, graduated in three years at the top of her class, and is now twenty years old and about to begin her five-year fellowship at the University of Michigan. (This is pretty happy, but it gets better).

All of that would be good and wonderful enough. But in addition to using her brain to move herself in a happier direction, she’s planning on using her educational acquisitions (that full noggin of hers) to help ‘empower the poor.’ She’ll be working toward her doctorate in political science and public policy when she starts at the Univ. of Michigan, and wants to use her understanding of the subject matter — on both a personal and an intellectual level—to ‘become an expert on social welfare policy.’ See? Good and happy news. Someone with a kind soul who is using her powers to help her fellow humans.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I freely admit to not being (wo)man enough to allow my two-year-old son to play with items 2 and 6 on the list of things Gever Tulley of the Tinkering School says we should let our kids play with. I do, however, absolutely agree with what he says about letting our kids explore their world and that risk-taking is an important part of the learning process. Watching the video (see below) of Tulley’s talk at TED.com will help any parent understand why their kids should be allowed to engage in the following activities:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
5. Break the DMCA
6. Drive a car

Open Education’s article about Tulley’s philosophy on risk-taking segues from a paper published a few years ago about how risk is viewed in our society: Understanding the Effect of Risk Aversion on Risk. None is somehow considered best, but what does that mean for society later on down the road? What will our kids have learned if they’ve never been allowed to explore and take risks? How are they supposed to figure out how to move through the world if they’re so padded and coddled that they effectively go through childhood with fuzzy blinders on and are never aware of their surrounding and how to make good decisions?

I don’t let my kids play in traffic, and I’m a huge fan of the seat belt, and as much as I want my kids to be safe in the world, even I am reduced to head-shaking disgust and disappointment when I go to the park and all the playground equipment has warning labels worthy of a recently-sued fast food franchise.

Yes, I get it already: if my kid falls off of this particular piece of equipment, he may very well sustain bodily injuries that could result in death; I get it that it’s my choice to let him play on said equipment; and I also get it that apparently, because you’ve slapped a humongous yellow warning label on your big plastic slide, it will be tougher for me to sue you.

Sometimes I want to go back in time, find some primordial ooze, and apologize profusely to any and all single-celled creatures I can scoop up for humanity having evolved into the warning-label freaks we are today. I’m not going to sue a playground equipment company. Good grief. I’m just happy they put wood chips under the equipment these days. Although, who knows what that’s doing to the gene pool.

Anyway, Tulley has a good philosophy about how to teach our children independence and awareness of themselves and of their surroundings. Watching his talk is pretty convincing; afterwards I was ready to teach my six-year-old to build stuff using something more powerful than a hammer and nails.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The AMD Foundation has come up with an awesome way to teach middle and high school kids the skills they’ll need to successfully graduate from high school and go on to college: creating video games. What kid doesn’t love gaming? The program’s official name is AMD Changing the Game.

Along with their partner organizations, Girlstart, Science Buddies, Global Kids, Institute for Urban Game Design, and the 5th Annual Games for Change Festival, they teach the program participants STEM skills: science, technology, engineering and math.

Because the games the kids design have socially-relevant themes, like how to deal with the effects of a natural disaster, the students are made aware of their fellow humans and how important it is for everyone to look out for more than just themselves. “Global concerns such as poverty, hunger, climate change, and the genocide crisis in Darfur have already been addressed in games that help players understand the complexities involved and explore creative solutions.”

Further Reading:

Girlstart
Science Buddies
Global Kids
Institute for Urban Game Design
Games for Change
AMD Foundation Press Release

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Education doesn’t stop, even after you’ve finished that last final exam and have turned in that last paper. Fruit flies have an average life span of only 37 days, their brains are minuscule, and they still have to endure learning experiences every damn day. So, comparatively speaking, humans have thousands more learning opportunities in our lifetimes.

Not news you want to hear right after graduation, I realize. Please don’t kill the messenger. I recall hollering with glee, ”I’m never reading anything but fiction again!” after what I thought would be my last final for a while. And then I went back to school because I just couldn’t get enough.

To help you with the learning part of life, and to hopefully avoid the painful mistakes, I have an awesomely simplified resource for post-college adult responsibility that will help you to understand the grown-up world of money, even if you’re in your twenties and are pretty sure you don’t need to know about something you don’t have yet.

Most college graduates are pretty new to the concept of money coming in, even if it’s at a trickle. Ramit Sethi’s site, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has a huge number of articles, resources and advice on how to deal with the having (or not, as the case may be) of money. Sethi explains the hell out of retirement planning; a two-year-old could understand it (and find it necessary). He’s also got great information on simple stuff college students can use, like how to use a separate debit card for an enveloping system, or more complicated topics like personal entrepreneurship or investing.

Go learn something and try not to screw up your finances at a young age.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I wrote a post a few weeks ago applauding a Seattle middle school teacher who protested the No Child Left Behind-infused standardized tests by refusing to administer them to his students. I loathe the NCLB act and all the destruction and misery it has wrought. It is evil and no good has (or will) come of it. Tom Chapin managed to make a little cup of sarcastic lemonade out of all the politicians-screwing-up-education lemons.

Posted by Alexa Harrington