How to Turn Your Classroom into an Idea Factory

Brightworks School

Students building a cafe at Brightworks School in San Francisco.

By Suzie Boss

The following suggestions for turning K-12 classrooms into innovation spaces come from Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World, published in July by Solution Tree.

How can we prepare today’s students to become tomorrow’s innovators? It’s an urgent challenge, repeated by President Obama, corporate CEOs, and global education experts like Yong Zhao and Tony Wagner. Virtually every discussion of 21^st-century learning puts innovation and its close cousin, creativity, atop the list of skills students must have for the future.

If we’re serious about preparing students to become innovators, educators have some hard work ahead. Getting students ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges means helping them develop a new set of skills and fresh ways of thinking that they won’t acquire through textbook-driven instruction. Students need opportunities to practice these skills on right-sized projects, with supports in place to scaffold learning. They need to persist and learn from setbacks. That’s how they’ll develop the confidence to tackle difficult problems.

How do we fill the gap between saying we must encourage innovation and teaching students how to actually generate and execute original ideas? The answers are emerging from classrooms across the country where pioneering teachers are making innovation a priority. Their strategies vary widely, from tinkering workshops and design studios to digital gaming and global challenges. By emphasizing problem solving and creativity in the core curriculum, these advance scouts are demonstrating that innovation is both powerful and teachable.

Across disparate fields, from engineering and technology to the social and environmental sectors, innovators use a common problem-solving process. They frame problems carefully, looking at issues from all sides to find opportunity gaps. They may generate many possible solutions before focusing their efforts. They refine solutions through iterative cycles, learning from failure along with success. When they hit on worthy ideas, innovators network with others and share results widely.

In the classroom, this same process corresponds neatly with the stages of project-based learning. In PBL, students investigate intriguing questions that lead them to learn important academic content. They apply their learning to create something new, demonstrate their understanding, or teach others about the issue they have explored. By emphasizing key thinking skills throughout the PBL process, teachers can guide students to operate the same way that innovators do in all kinds of settings.

Here are eight tips to borrow from classrooms where teachers are reinventing yesterday’s schools as tomorrow’s idea factories.

1.   WELCOME AUTHENTIC QUESTIONS.

Good projects start with good questions. Listen closely to students to find out what makes them curious. Instead of presenting them with ready-made assignments, invite student feedback when you are designing projects. Make sure your driving questions for projects involve real-world issues that students care about investigating.

2.   ENCOURAGE EFFECTIVE TEAMWORK.

Projects offer an ideal context to develop students’ collaboration skills, but make sure teamwork doesn’t feel contrived. If projects are too big for any one student to manage alone, team members will have a real reason to rely on each other’s contributions. Teach students how to break a big project into manageable pieces and bring out the best ideas from everyone on the team. Offer them examples of innovations (from the Mars rover to the iPad) that wouldn’t have been possible without team efforts.

3.   BE READY TO GO BIG.

Innovators have a tendency to think big. They know how to use social networking tools to make a worthy idea go viral. Encourage students to share their projects with audiences beyond the classroom, using digital tools like YouTube or online publishing sites. Help them build networks to exchange ideas with peers and learn from experts around the globe.

4.   BUILD EMPATHY.

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Innovators who have empathy can step outside their own perspective and see issues from multiple viewpoints. Approaching a problem this way leads to better solutions. Teach students strategies for making field observations, conducting focus groups or user interviews, or gathering stories that offer insights into others’ perspectives.

5.   UNCOVER PASSION.

Passion is what keeps innovators motivated to persist despite long odds and flawed first efforts. Find out what drives students’ interests during out-of-school time, and look for opportunities to connect these pursuits with school projects. Ask students: When you feel most creative, what are you doing? What tools or technologies are you using? Their answers should set the stage for more engaging projects.

6.   AMPLIFY WORTHY IDEAS.

In today’s flat world, where access to information is ubiquitous, innovation can happen anywhere. Opportunities to support good ideas are also getting flattened. Philanthropy and venture funding, once reserved for the wealthy, have been crowdsourced with online platforms like Kiva (www.kiva.org) and Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com). To participate fully in the culture of innovation, students need to be able to do more than generate their own ideas. They also need to know how to critically evaluate others’ brainstorms and decide which ones are worth supporting. Develop classroom protocols for students to critically evaluate each other’s ideas. They may decide to throw their collective energy behind one promising idea or pull components from multiple teams into a final project.

7.   KNOW WHEN TO SAY NO.

Being a critical thinker also means being able to spot ideas that aren’t ready for prime time. Bold new ideas may have bugs that need to be worked out. An approach that appears to be a game-changer may be too expensive for the benefits it affords or may have unanticipated consequences. Give students opportunities to look for potential pitfalls and know when to say no.

8.   ENCOURAGE BREAKTHROUGHS.

Will students come up with breakthrough ideas in every project? Probably not, but you can encourage them to stretch their thinking by setting ambitious goals. What would students be able to do or demonstrate if they were truly operating as innovators?  Provide them with real-world examples by sharing stories of innovators from many fields, including social innovators who tackle wicked problems like poverty or illiteracy. Share the back stories of breakthroughs to show how much effort went into each inspired idea. Let students know they can’t expect to reach breakthrough solutions to every problem they tackle. Finding out what doesn’t work can be a useful outcome, too. Genuine innovation is indeed rare—but worth recognizing and celebrating when it happens.

Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market

In my opinion this is the beginning of the

end if this happens…..education is for the

masses not to be “privatized” to make

money for the few.

By Stephanie Simon

NEW YORK, Aug 1 (Reuters) – The investors gathered in a tony private club in Manhattan were eager to hear about the next big thing, and education consultant Rob Lytle was happy to oblige.

Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards for public schools, he urged the crowd. If they’re as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.

“You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up,” said Lytle, a partner at The Parthenon Group, a Boston consulting firm. “It could get really, really big.”

Indeed, investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education.

The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.

Traditionally, public education has been a tough market for private firms to break into — fraught with politics, tangled in bureaucracy and fragmented into tens of thousands of individual schools and school districts from coast to coast.

Now investors are signaling optimism that a golden moment has arrived. They’re pouring private equity and venture capital into scores of companies that aim to profit by taking over broad swaths of public education.

The conference last week at the University Club, billed as a how-to on “private equity investing in for-profit education companies,” drew a full house of about 100.

OUTSOURCING BASICS

In the venture capital world, transactions in the K-12 education sector soared to a record $389 million last year, up from $13 million in 2005. That includes major investments from some of the most respected venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, according to GSV Advisors, an investment firm in Chicago that specializes in education.

The goal: an education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards, said Michael Moe, the founder of GSV.

“It’s time,” Moe said. “Everybody’s excited about it.”

Not quite everyone.

The push to privatize has alarmed some parents and teachers, as well as union leaders who fear their members will lose their jobs or their autonomy in the classroom.

Many of these protesters have rallied behind education historian Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University, who blogs and tweets a steady stream of alarms about corporate profiteers invading public schools.

Ravitch argues that schools have, in effect, been set up by a bipartisan education reform movement that places an enormous emphasis on standardized test scores, labels poor performers as “failing” schools and relentlessly pushes local districts to transform low-ranked schools by firing the staff and turning the building over to private management.

President Barack Obama and both Democratic and Republican policymakers in the states have embraced those principles. Local school districts from Memphis to Philadelphia to Dallas, meanwhile, have hired private consultants to advise them on improving education; the strategists typically call for a broader role for private companies in public schools.

“This is a new frontier,” Ravitch said. “The private equity guys and the hedge fund guys are circling public education.”

Some of the products and services offered by private vendors may well be good for kids and schools, Ravitch said. But she has no confidence in their overall quality because “the bottom line is that they’re seeking profit first.”

Vendors looking for a toehold in public schools often donate generously to local politicians and spend big on marketing, so even companies with dismal academic results can rack up contracts and rake in tax dollars, Ravitch said.

“They’re taking education, which ought to be in a different sphere where we’re constantly concerned about raising quality, and they’re applying a business metric: How do we cut costs?” Ravitch said.

BUDGET PRESSURES

Investors retort that public school districts are compelled to use that metric anyway because of reduced funding from states and the soaring cost of teacher pensions and health benefits. Public schools struggling to balance budgets have fired teachers, slashed course offerings and imposed a long list of fees, charging students to ride the bus, to sing in the chorus, even to take honors English.

The time is ripe, they say, for schools to try something new — like turning to the private sector for help.

“Education is behind healthcare and other sectors that have utilized outsourcing to become more efficient,” private equity investor Larry Shagrin said in the keynote address to the New York conference.

He credited the reform movement with forcing public schools to catch up. “There’s more receptivity to change than ever before,” said Shagrin, a partner with Brockway Moran & Partners Inc, in Boca Raton, Florida. “That creates opportunity.”

Speakers at the conference identified several promising arenas for privatization.

Education entrepreneur John Katzman urged investors to look for companies developing software that can replace teachers for segments of the school day, driving down labor costs.

“How do we use technology so that we require fewer highly qualified teachers?” asked Katzman, who founded the Princeton Review test-prep company and now focuses on online learning.

Such businesses already have been drawing significant interest. Venture capital firms have bet more than $9 million on Schoology, an online learning platform that promises to take over the dreary jobs of writing and grading quizzes, giving students feedback about their progress and generating report cards.

DreamBox Learning has received $18 million from investors to refine and promote software that drills students in math. The software is billed as “adaptive,” meaning it analyzes responses to problems and then poses follow-up questions precisely pitched to a student’s abilities.

The charter school chain Rocketship, a nonprofit based in San Jose, California, turns kids over to DreamBox for two hours a day. The chain boasts that it pays its teachers more because it needs fewer of them, thanks to such programs. Last year, Rocketship commissioned a study that showed students who used DreamBox heavily for 16 weeks scored on average 2.3 points higher on a standardized math test than their peers.

SPECIAL ED AS A GROWTH MARKET

Another niche spotlighted at the private equity conference: special education.

Mark Claypool, president of Educational Services of America, told the crowd his company has enjoyed three straight years of 15 percent to 20 percent growth as more and more school districts have hired him to run their special-needs programs.

Autism in particular, he said, is a growth market, with school districts seeking better, cheaper ways to serve the growing number of students struggling with that disorder.

ESA, which is based in Nashville, Tennessee, now serves 12,000 students with learning disabilities or behavioral problems in 250 school districts nationwide.

“The knee-jerk reaction [to private providers like ESA] is, ‘You’re just in this to make money. The profit motive is going to trump quality,’ ” Claypool said. “That’s crazy, because frankly, there are really a whole lot easier ways to make a living.” Claypool, a former social worker, said he got into the field out of frustration over what he saw as limited options for children with learning disabilities.

Claypool and others point out that private firms have always made money off public education; they have constructed the schools, provided the buses and processed the burgers served at lunch. Big publishers such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have made hundreds of millions of dollars selling public school districts textbooks and standardized tests.

Critics see the newest rush to private vendors as more worrisome because school districts are outsourcing not just supplies but the very core of education: the daily interaction between student and teacher, the presentation of new material, the quick checks to see which kids have risen to the challenge and which are hopelessly confused.

At the more than 5,500 charter schools nationwide, private management companies — some of them for-profit — are in full control of running public schools with public dollars.

“I look around the world and I don’t see any country doing this but us,” Ravitch said. “Why is that?”

Six Scaffolding Strategies to use with YOUR students.

Video gaming in art galleries Atari and Game Boys find love and appreciation outside of vintage and junk shops

In one corner of the Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts in Winnipeg, a brown plaid sofa set on a shaggy brown rug faces a cathode-ray tube TV, which is hooked up to a vintage Atari game console. Gallery goers are invited to sit down and play A Slow Year, designed by video game poet Ian Bogost, who is also director of the digital media program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It hearkens back to a simpler time, when consoles didn’t have much memory to work with, so the games weren’t as frenetic as today’s. The game takes the player through the year in a meditative manner: in winter, you use the joystick to sip a cup of coffee while the sun rises outside. In summer, you take a nap under fluffy clouds and try to predict where a log floating downriver will be when you open your eyes.

“It draws its inspiration from poetry, from haiku and imagism, the idea of precision in the image,” explains Bogost, one of six artists whose work is on display at the small Winnipeg gallery until July 28. “When you program with the Atari, you have to program within these very stringent technical constraints, and I saw a connection with the material constraints of poetry.” When he takes A Slow Year to gamer conferences, players ask if it’s a real Atari. At museums, gallery-goers are reluctant to sit down and actually touch the joystick.

At Platform, the focus of the Reset: Post-Consumer Gamer Culture exhibit is on vintage consoles. Along with the blaring beeps and blips of the music, it inspires nostalgia in those who remember a childhood spent in video arcades or their best friend’s basement. “It’s contemporary art with vintage technology,” explains guest curator Skot Deeming.

After 40 years of existence, video games are ripe for artistic evaluation. In the exhibition The Art of Video Games, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington celebrates commercial gaming, including iconic devices like the ColecoVision and the Commodore 64, along with the Xbox and PlayStation 3. Visitors get to play five games selected for their influence on the gaming industry: Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst and Flower.

“Within games, you’ll find illustration, painting, narrative and orchestral music. You have all of these things that we view as traditional arts, and when they’re combined, they’re greater than the whole,” explains the exhibit’s curator, Chris Melissinos.

Game-art exhibits also draw a different crowd than traditional art shows, a boon to galleries and museums trying to attract new audiences. At the Smithsonian, fans dressed as their favourite game character for the exhibit’s kickoff. Both gamers and the city’s artistic set have come out to the show in Winnipeg’s downtown core.

At Platform, Deeming (a.k.a. mrghosty), a graduate student at Toronto’s York University who studies video game development and art, seems tired of the debate over the artistic merits of the medium. “I don’t think the question is, can they be art, but how? What qualifies them as art? Where is the artistry coming from, what is the context?”

Deeming says not every mass-produced commercial game has artistic value, the same way not every Hollywood blockbuster is a masterpiece of cinematography. “There are some contemporary 3D realistic games that are striking and gorgeous. But if your interaction is limited to guns and bullets, where is the artistry?”

The gallery also features digital prints by California artist Max Capacity, who modified crude, low-resolution images from 1980s video games to create pixelated cityscapes. And Winnipeg video artist Clint Enns made a cheeky homage to Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film about the Empire State Building, but his lasts less than 15 minutes and uses footage of an art deco skyscraper from Grand Theft Auto IV.

Enns grew up playing games for fun, but sadly now when he plays it’s to generate footage for his movies. “I play them now when I want to work.”

What’s the Difference Between Games and Gamification?

    Minecraft

So a few moths ago many people would have said Minecraft? What is that? Now it is one of the fastest growing communities online (one of which both my son Jonathan and I are both members of). Knowing how games engage and enthrall students around the world we need to figure out how to truly use them in education. One of the best sites I have found so far is a program CreativeAcademies where students create their own simulations and animations, then store them in an e-portfolio online. Check it out http://www.creativeacademies.net

Perhaps the best way to think about games in education is not to automatically call everything that looks like fun a “learning game.” Lumping all digital game approaches together makes no more sense than a toddler’s inclination to call every four-legged animal a “doggie.”

Game interest is definitely on the upswing in K-12 and higher education. It seems almost cyclical: every several years, almost in sync with the acceptance of new technologies (such as multimedia CD-ROM, then online, then mobile), there’s a surge of activity with games in education.

But everything game-like is not a game. And while game purists may wince at this simplification, it helps to consider games in education in terms of gamification, simulation and (simply) games. The three approaches aren’t always exclusive – they’re more of a continuum, or a Venn diagram’s overlapping circles – but they are notably different.

GAMIFICATION

Gamification is the current bright-shiny of the three terms – and, as a result, is the most used and frequently misused. But the cleanest definition is straightforward: gamification is adding game elements and mechanics to things that aren’t designed to be games.

Outside of education, some call these “reward, recognition and motivation programs.” And Alex Chisholm, executive director of the Learning Games Network, a spin-off from the MIT Education Arcade and University of Wisconsin, shared an equivalent perspective recently when he noted that saying you’re going to “gamify” something in education means you’re applying game design principles to motivate and inspire learners.

In apps and software, this is commonly interpreted as adding point systems (sometimes with competitive student leaderboards), badges for accomplishments and levels of progression. One of the highest profile examples of this approach is the Khan Academy, which layers avatars, energy points and badges on top of completing traditional math activities.

But gamification can be done well or poorly.

“The first place people go with gamification is ‘rewards.’ There can be dragons,” says Scott Dodson, a gamification expert and executive with Bobber Interactive. “Rewards done wrong essentially train the user that the activity is devoid of intrinsic value which leads to amotivation, short-term engagement at best.”

Dodson adds that rewards can work, but the way the user experience is framed – providing feelings of competence, of being in control and that the outcome matters – is critical, “and marketers (and frankly most people) don’t really have a clue.”

Chisholm expresses similar skepticism when it comes to education. “We’re reserved, if not dubious, about how gamification is employed,” he says, adding it takes a good designer and serious thought about what is actually being gamified.

SIMULATION

Mention the original 1989 SimCity as an example and pretty much everyone understands what you mean by a digital simulation that can be used in education. But a good simulation doesn’t have to be game-like. It just has to have both an internally consistent setting with rules and attempt to recreate a real-world scenario or situation.

One example: Platform Wars, a management simulator used by the MIT Sloan School of Management for its courses and released for public use in February. In it, the student heads up a video game company and has to make strategic decisions over a decade in simulated time to edge out a competitor’s platform and maximize profits. It’s definitely not flashy, resembling Excel more than Electronic Arts.

But that doesn’t mean a simulation can’t be pretty. MediaSpark, which has created business education software for high schools for a number of years, is preparing for the alpha release of GoVenture World, a web-based, massively multiplayer online role-playing business simulation. In it, players (teenagers and older) can choose a role in manufacturing, law, advertising, retail or investment, deal with each other and sell to simulated consumers. One month in play equals a year in time.

Defined another way, “Simulations are re-creations of systems,” says Scott Traylor, who frequently speaks and writes about learning games and is the CEO of digital kids’ content and tech developer 360KID. That simulation can be of a chemistry lab, gravity or even disaster response. “You are dropped into a situation and the only way you succeed is through trial and error, learning the correct ways of thinking to succeed in a particular role. Does learning occur in a well-designed simulation? You bet. Is this a game? You tell me.”

(SIMPLY) GAMES

Successful games in education have a long history, dating back to at least 1985, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (the first learning product to receive the software industry’s CODiE award) and that decade’s Reader Rabbit and Math Blaster, to massively multiplayer, web- and mobile-based learning games of today, like World of Warcraft.

Games, like simulations, are rule-based. But more so than gamified activities and simulations, there’s usually a strong emphasis on beating the game: that is, playing and winning.

“You, as the user, are intrinsically interested in the play experience. If you are engaged at that level, all games have the potential to teach,” notes 360KID’s Traylor. “Good play equals good learning. One example of where learning games tend to go wrong is when game developers apply an A-B-A-B approach to gaming. First you start off by offering some engaging gaming content (A), then you switch to some educational content you must get through in order to return to the game (B).

“That’s the chocolate-and-broccoli approach to gaming. Successful learning games seamlessly integrate learning content into the gaming experience,” he says.

Chisholm is equally direct, saying the field of game-based educational research has really exploded in the past dozen years. “We don’t want to mimic some of the interesting failures of the multimedia market of the 1990s,” he adds.

Traylor echoes the concern. “As people race to develop learning games, only thoughtful and solid collaboration (between gamers and teachers) guided by good research, game development expertise and content expertise will succeed. Learning games could become the latest fad if the market becomes flooded with really bad learning games. That is something I worry about.”

Then add in the reality that the lines between gamification, simulation and game aren’t clean: a fuzzy continuum, an overlapping series of circles or, as Bobber’s Dodson suggests, “a triangle, visually” with gamification off the axis and between the others.

Take Minecraft. Is it a massively multiplayer digital simulation of building with LEGO-like blocks? Or is it a learning game once teachers create projects for student collaboration using logic gates and objectives?

It could be the best response an educator or parent can have, when faced with a digital enthusiast who wants to use games in education, is to first simply ask, “What kind?” And then play on.

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes the regular Practical Nerd column for GeekWire.

5 Things to Expect During an iPad Rollout

There’s no shortage of iPad rollouts in the K-12 space right now. Used across all grade levels and subject areas the devices are adored for their portability, battery life, connectivity, and ability to quickly put mobile technology into students’ hands. These implementations typically generate positive reviews from educational users, but iPads also present challenges for the districts that dole them out, for the teachers that incorporate them into the classroom, and for the students who use them.

Here are five things that you shouldn’t do during an iPad rollout.

1. Go into it without first organizing classroom materials. Before handing out iPads for the first time to her second grade students, Eileen Haggard spent time organizing the devices and their respective resources. A teacher at Stonewall Elementary in Lexington, KY, Haggard said she created a desktop (on her own classroom computer) where each of the 15 iPads are numbered and grouped according to subject (reading and math). This strategy allows Haggard to keep track of the iPads and easily determine what type of content is on each device. She can download only the most relevant apps to the appropriate iPads rather than using a “shotgun” approach to populating the devices with content.

Haggard said she uses a similar organizational approach with daily assignments, knowing that her young students will be most productive when given specific tasks to complete on their tablets. “By taking the time to get all of this set up early,” said Haggard, “I’ve been able to really make the most of the devices.”

2. Expect students to ignore Angry Birds. If there’s one thing that Bill Wiecking has learned from Hawaii Preparatory Academy’s iPad implementation it’s that students will invariably gravitate to computer games like Angry Birds when left to figure out the devices on their own. The private school in Kamuela, HI, uses the tablets in its “energy lab,” where students collaborate and develop sustainable living solutions.

Wiecking, HPA’s energy lab director, said getting students away from games like Angry Birds and engaged in educational projects on their iPads isn’t always easy. Getting there requires a teacher who is committed to using the devices as interactive educational tools for collaboration, research, and communication.

“It’s about students being engaged and on task,” said Wiecking. “Simply purchasing the tools and handing them out is a lazy approach that doesn’t work.”

3. Assume that sharing information and files is easy. Mineola Union Free School District in Long Island launched its iPad initiative by handing out 80 devices in 2010 and another 200 tablets in 2011. More are on the way, according to Michael Nagler, who said the fact that the iPad doesn’t include an easy way to file and share information has plagued the district’s IT team ever since the first device was distributed.

“This is not a network-friendly device,” said Nagler. “Our students use folders to store and manage all of their work on PCs, but the iPad doesn’t include that functionality, and there’s no good workaround for the problem.”

Nagler said the problem has grown as more devices were distributed and as more teachers recognized the limitation. The district has yet to solve the problem, but Nagler said creating e-mail accounts that allow students to exchange assignments and information with their teachers has helped. “Right now we’re using an intranet,” said Nagler, “but as our iPad program expands we’ll be looking for a better solution.”

4. Forgetting to budget for apps. Tight budgets and poor planning can pose a challenge for districts and schools that don’t allocate funding for iPad applications.

“Not only do you have an initial outlay for the devices, but you also have to pay for the apps,” Nagler said. To control that spending and also maintain inventory “app” control on the devices Mineola Union Free SD signed up for Apple’s app store volume purchase program (VPP). The program allows educational institutions to purchase iOS apps in volume and distribute the apps to their users.

“We were able to set up our own iTunes store where students can use vouchers (which the district gives them) to purchase apps for their devices,” said Nagler. This method allows the district to control the app budget while monitoring which free and paid apps the students can and cannot download.

5. Ignore the fact that the device can be a distraction. The iPad has a “cool” factor that can make getting down to business difficult for even the most dedicated student. Younger students in particular have a hard time ignoring all of the neat features that this tablet possesses. To get her second graders on task Haggard said she takes the time to introduce new apps and their functionalities before allowing them to work independently on the devices.

“I know it sounds controlling, but it’s just too easy to get sidetracked when using iPads,” said Haggard.

Haggard said grouping apps according to the way they are used in the classroom also helps alleviate some of the distraction. Productivity apps – such as those used for reading, writing, drawing, and note taking–that students use daily are placed front-and-center on each iPad’s home screen. Haggard said the system works well and helps her students channel their attention on what’s most important.

“If you want students to use their iPads in a constructive manner,” said Haggard, “there really has to be structure and oversight on the teacher’s part.”

Lesson 4 Integrating Technology “Search Challenge Methods”

LESSON 4
“Search Challenge” Method

Time: 15-20 minutes as follows:

• 5-8 minutes working on a Search Challenge
• 5-8 m consulting the Quick Reference Guide
• 4-5 minutes applying the methods to investigate genochoice.com

Materials:

• http://searchwhys.com/CTD12/QR/freshness-1.html
• http://www.genochoice.com/
• computers, one with a projector
• Red Flag Chart (see Lesson One)

Introduction
The site being investigated is Genochoice.com

The Search Method being applied is “determing freshness” (when the site was created or last updated).

Have students try the following Search Challenge. If they get stuck (no progress after 8 minutes) have then refer to the Freshness Guide.

Challenge: Is the material on Genochoice.com fresh or stale? When was it last updated? Choose three pages on the site. Use appropriate search technique to find the date each page was last updated (this may not be the same at the copyright date).

Without previous instruction, students will likely not know how to find the date. Be sure they use the Guide rather than get frustrated.

Quick Reference Guide
This resource was created to help students enrolled in 21cif online courses that teach Research Skills. It’s a free resource that provides methods to locate and interpret missing dates for articles and Web pages (plus a lot more).

Application
Once students understand several techniques, have them research genochoice.com to find missing dates.

Add or move Red Flags on the Red Flag Chart as a result of investigation (see Lesson One for an explanation).

Genochoice is rather tricky in this regard, as are many other sites. Archive.org may be the best method to compare how long pages have remained the same. Genochoice has no files that can be downloaded to check freshness and the javascript on each page records the opening of the page as the last update.

Model Lesson 3 “Flipped Discussion”

ISTE MODEL LESSON

ready-to-go mini lesson

LESSON 3
“Flipped Discussion” Method

Time: 15 minutes as follows:

• 3-4 minutes demo
• homework: do backlinks investigation
• 11-12 minutes discussion

Materials:

• http://www.genochoice.com/
• computers, one with a projector
• Red Flag Chart (see discussion, below)

Introduction
The site being investigated is Genochoice.com

The Search Method being applied is “finding backlinks” (incoming links to a page from another site).

Demonstrate 3 ways to find backlinks. Explain how backlinks serve as external references for a site and it is important to gather opinions of writers other than the author of the site being investigated. Getting several other opinions is called triangulation. Provide a link to step-by-step instructions for backlink query, e.g., http://newmedz.com/first-aid/linkcheck-1.html

Method 1: link:http://www.genochoice.com (not as powerful as it once was)

Method 2: http://www.genochoice.com -site:www.genochoice.com (finds examples of the hyperlink on sites other than genochoice.com

Method 3: (Deep Web) Ue Google to find link search engines. One of these (free) is opensiteexplorer.org. This returns many more results for an external search of genochoice.com than Methods 1 or 2. However, there is a daily limit to how many links searches you may do for free and you may discover that multiple searches from the school IP address exhaust your free searches quickly.

Home Work
Have each student spend 15 minutes outside of class doing one or more backlink searches. Driving questions are: Why does this site link to genochoice.com? By linking, does this external link support or discredit the information on genochoice.com?

Discussion
When students return, follow up the backlink search activity with a discussion of findings and their implications.

It may be helpful to create a Red Flag Chart with three columns: Accused | Suspicious | Acquited (or similar terms). Place the findings in the appropriate column. Red Flags may travel from one category to another as a result of investigative activity. Furthermore, students may not agree on where to place a Red Flag, which makes for a good discussion starter.

• As a result of backlinks, should the information on genochoice be trusted?
• If you want to probe deeper, ask: Did the external sites get it right? Why would an artist-medical keynote speaker-PhD candidate-webmaster create such a hoax site? Wouldn’t that hurt his reputation?
• Why do you think genochoice.com was created?
• Did any new Red Flags appear?
• Did any Red Flags disappear?

Discussion may lead to a number of interesting hypotheses, which may be further investigated in another session, or assigned.

Genochoice looks less and less like a hoax site the more it is investigated.

Model Lesson 2 for Integrating Technology

ISTE MODEL LESSON

ready-to-go mini lesson

LESSON 2
“Teamwork or Jigsaw” Method

Time: 10-15 minutes as follows:

• 2-3 minutes instructions
• 7-8 minutes group searching
• 10 minutes to share findings

Materials:

• http://www.genochoice.com/
• computers, one with a projector

Introduction
This is a follow-up session to Lesson One, but could be used without the previous lesson.

The site being investigated is Genochoice.com

Divide the learners into groups of 2-4. Each group will choose one fact or claim on the site to fact-check as a group.

Display the site and have students suggest facts or claims that could be investigated. If you didn’t investigate Virgil Wong in the previous lesson, include him now.

Among possible suggestions are:

• Who is Elizabeth Preatner, MD?
• What is RYT Hospital?
• Can DNA amplifiers identify negative genes and eliminate them in your child?
• Is there such a device as GeneScan 2000®? (found by browsinghttp://www.genochoice.com/clone.shtml)
• Did the LA Times really state: “The ultimate e-commerce site of the future?”
• etc.

Group Work
Give each group several minutes to fact check their selected fact or claim. Members of a team do not need to use the same search tools which improves the diversity of findings. Teams may use a Red Flag Chart (see Lesson One) to categorize their findings.

Jigsaw
Call time and give team members 1-2 minutes to share what each person found. Then form new groups, with a member of each team on a new group. Each person serves as the expert for their investigation of a fact or claim. New teams share their findings, deciding what Red Flags they have found that causes them to doubt the facts or claims being made.

Make a list of the Red Flags.

Model Lesson 1 Think Aloud Demonstration

ISTE MODEL LESSON

ready-to-go mini lesson

LESSON 1
“Think Aloud” Demonstration

Time: 10-15 minutes as follows:

• 5 minutes think aloud
• 5 minutes search as individuals
• 5 minutes collect findings

Materials:

• http://www.genochoice.com/
• computers, one with a projector
• whiteboard or Red Flag Chart

It may be helpful to create a Red Flag Chart with three columns: Accused | Suspicious | Acquited (or similar terms). The findings in this mini lesson will all likely go in the Suspicious column. However, Red Flags may travel from one category to another as a result of investigative activity. Furthermore, students may not agree on where to place a Red Flag, which makes for a good discussion starter.

Think Aloud
This lesson takes place in the context of a science course where DNA, genetics and “designer babies” is the topic. It is used here for demonstration purposes–any topic could be used and substitute an appropriate “questionable” result.

Among results for “designer babies” is this Genochoice.com

Use this site to demonstrate how an investigative searcher might approach the material. Students need to see an example of good searching in practice. Focus on Authorship in this instance. Open the page and browse to find information about who wrote this or is responsible for its content. As you search, note the credits link on the page.

Click this and point out information about the credits: Virgil Wong. Also note that this is not what you expected to find: a medical site written or designed by an artist and performance credits for several other people. Point out that now you have some good keywords to fact check. Proper nouns make good fact checking terms because they are so specific, so unique.

Start a list of things you find out about Virgil Wong. We have one Red Flag (he’s an artist, not a medical expert?) Then have the students try fact checking Virgil Wong to discover “as much as they can” about this person. Everyone is free to search for information about Virgil–the more eyes looking for information the better.

After five minutes, call an end to searching and begin to collect information from the students. This may be done on a whiteboard, sticky notes or any online app that is made for group collaboration. Or you could call on students to report what they found, trying to get as complete a picture of Virgil Wong as possible.

Among the findings possible, he is:

• a web designer
• featured in a TED vdeo
• a PhD candidate in cognitive science
• an artist
• a keynote speaker at medical conferences
• a pregnant man
• etc.

Discuss
Is thisreally the profile of a person you think would be the author of a credible site on “designer babies?” Why? Why not? (answers to Why Not are “Red Flags”).

If we start to find Red Flags associated with online information, we need to be skeptical and not believe claims on the site without checking them out. More about Red Flags

Encourage students to do this type of investigative searching on other sites they come across while doing research.