Education

Tech Education: Take a Look, It's In a Book

 

Earlier this year, Kunta Kinte aka Geordi La Forge aka Levar Burton secured the @ReadingRainbow twitter account. He promised that a "disruptive reading initiative" would be arriving soon. It's arrived as an iPad app. And ... it's pretty good.

The app serves as a library of interactive books.  The app itself is free, as well as one book download and introductory videos to the service. For additional content, users can subscribe for $10 every month or $30 every 6 months.  I originally balked at the price, but the content is intuitively suited for a device such as an iPad - lots of sounds, videos, interative games, and much more beyond just a scanned PDF. It's basically like an enhanced version of Highlights for Children. The high level of quality makes it worth the price.

One big negative is the file size. It weighs in at just over 100MB, and can feel a little sluggish during operation.  Since it's geared towards younger children, I don't see this being much of a problem. But for techies like myself, I'd prefer something a bit more slimmed down and speedier.

One improvement that I hope is in the works is interaction with physical libraries.  Imagine if I could "check in" at the my local library with a service similar to Foursquare that's integrated into the Reading Rainbow app, and that results in extra awards or stickers.  Even better: what if I could scan the bar codes of books that I read for other awards in the app? The possibilities are endless.

If you have an iPad, check it out by downloading here!

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Tech & Politics: Melissa Harris-Perry

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Many TV shows are using Facebook and Twitter to further engage their audience. One great example is the Melissa Harris-Perry show, which airs 10am - 12pm on MSNBC on Saturdays and Sundays. The political show is very active on Twitter with its own hashtag #nerdland. Also, video of the show is available on the website soon after it airs - and it's iPad friendly!

She recently had a fantastic section on technology and how it's affected the political process. The panel talks about a recent Federal Elections Committee decision to allow donating to political campaigns via text message, the fact that women only account for 24% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) jobs, and the wonderful organization Black Girls Code by Kimberly Bryant. Please support their Summer of Code fundraiser, which has a goal of teaching computer programming to more than 300 boys and girls from underrepresented communities, in 90 days, in more than 7 cities across the United States.

Check out the video of the and fantastic discussions below!



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Tech Networking: Science Bloggers, Tweeters, and Writers

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I'm happy to say that I've been included in Scientific American's list of African American Science Bloggers, Tweeters, and Writers. I'm honored to be included on a list of amazing folk like Dr. Ainissa Ramirez and the Spelman Robotics team. I encourage everyone to use this list as a way to network with different people in the social space that are fighting the good fight to spread news about science throughout the internet. Thank you DNLee and the Urban Scientist blog, and be sure to check out the rest of the folks on the list!

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Online Courses for Free and Customized Educational Videos

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Yup, it's me. High school was awesome.


I've been a huge fan of MIT's online OpenCourseWare initiative. For 10 years, MIT has made several of its engineering courses (and a few others in the Sloan business school) available online free of charge. Impressively, it was more than just a few PDFs - there was lecture videos, lab notes, problem sets, and exams.  It was truly an interactive way to learn for those of us proactive enough to seek out information online.

Now, Harvard and MIT are teaming up to offer free online courses. Similarly, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michiganan are also planning to offer free online courses. The two groups are using different companies, which will bring the competition needed to truly flesh out the best way to offer information online.  The best thing about these efforts is that they will be actual courses, which will be graded either by professors, peers or crowdsourcing.  While I doubt that you'd be able to use these for any actual course credit outside of the involves university, it's still a great idea.  Just think about what this can look like a generation from now. 

Hopefully, universities will be as inventive as TED, an educational video site, is when it comes to interactive educational video. They've just unveiled a great way to mix and match segments of videos as well as add annotations, quizzes, and other parts to create a product customized for a specific audience. This is great because sometimes it can be a pain to send someone a video and mention what part they should pay attention to - with this solution, the video itself can be as brief and contain the relevant text itself.  Cool stuff!

Here's to using technology to help improve education! And for free!

 

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Flipping Education On Its Head

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Its common knowledge that the United States education system needs some work.  But too often people throw technology at the problem without a plan.  Dumping a bunch of iPads on a school without a process on how to utilize it is an expensive recipe for disaster.

Thankfully, Arizona is doing the opposite. They are taking advantage of online lectures on sites such as YouTube and Khan Academy to create a "flipped classroom".  Learning a concept in class and applying it at home is flipped into learning the concept at home (using the online tools listed above) and turning class time into a large group workshop to apply that concept.  Fittingly, the idea began in Colorado and has spread via social networking to schools across the country.

This is a new concept that has many challenges. For example:

The biggest criticism of the flipped classroom is that some students don't have access to high-speed Internet.

To overcome this, some schools leave their computer labs open during lunch hours and after school. Others direct students to public libraries within walking distance.

Flipped classrooms are more likely to be in private schools, where more families can easily afford computers and high-speed Internet, some superintendents said.

As this teaching style gets tested, challenged, and improved, I hope that it can reach kids regardless of what school and socioeconomic background they are. Our schools need to get a little crazy and nontraditional to be able to break out of mediocrity.

Speaking of nontraditional, some enterprising students at Vanderbilt are developing a custom tablet that allows blind people to understand algebraic concepts using touch and vibration.  The video is so great that I can't really do it justice - check it out below!