June 20th, from 1:00 – 4:30
University of Minnesota, Science Teaching & Student Services (STSS) Building
Room 412
Register now!

This event will look at re-engineering the classroom to harness the power of digital technologies. How can we customize learning to meet the needs of each student? Technology tools, teaching innovation, and new ways of organizing learning may provide the answer. Join us to hear from national experts on technology-enhanced customized learning.

Featuring

• Jennie Magiera, a 4th-5th grade math teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. Jennie began implementing a 1:1 iPad technology grant. She was also named a Golden Apple Teacher of Distinction in 2008, Apple Distinguished Educator and this January she was named the Chicago Public School’s Tech Innovator of the Year.
• Dominick D’Angelo, Principal of I.S. 228 in New York, has a strong focus on mathematics and technology. In 2010 the school began the School of One program for mathematics. The School of One seeks to customize learning to each child and is housed in its own dedicated section of the school, where instruction takes place in large, interconnected classrooms.

Don’t wait until the event to get the conversation going.  Join the virtual Education Innovation Gathering on InCommons to discuss and share information on the topic, access relevant videos, documents, links to related organizations and resources. Create a profile or log in through Facebook.

Here’s a picture painted from a recent report (The Broadband Imperative: Recommendations to Address K-12 Education Infrastructure Needs) from the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA).

Broadband is Essential

It is a simple fact that access to high-speed broadband is now as vital a component of K-12 school infrastructure as electricity, air conditioning, and heating. … In fact, out-of-school access to broadband by students and teachers is now arguably as important to the overall quality of the student learning experience as access at school.

Broadband Supply is Inadequate

While a 2010 Federal Communications Commission survey of E-Rate funded schools found that most had access to some form of broadband service, nearly 80% of respondents reported that their broadband connections were inadequate to meet their current needs. Outside of school, home broadband adoption rates have all but stalled since 2009, leveling off at roughly 65%.

STEDA made four recommendations:

1. Recommendation 1: Move to Address K-12 Broadband Infrastructure Needs. The set a target for 2014-2015 of at least 100 Mbps per 1,000 students/staff for an Internet connection and at least 1 Gbps per 1,000 students/staff for the WAN.
2. Recommendation 2: Ensure Broadband Access for Students and Educators
3. Recommendation 3: Build State Leadership
4. Recommendation 4: Advocate for Federal Funding

I want to interject a note here from a recent The DLTCL Electronic Newsletter that brings home the importance of Federal funding…

The Federal Communications Commission recently released information outlining the fund demand for the July 1, 2012, E-rate year. Here are some (sobering) highlights.

• Total demand for 2012 is $5.237 billion. This is an increase of 21.5 percent from the demand for 2011 of $4.310 billion.
• Demand for Priority 1 funding (telecommunications and Internet services) is $2.444 billion. For the first time in the program, the Priority 1 demand exceeds the $2.3 billion in funding available, without rollover funds. (Each year there are some funds not used from previous years. It is estimated that for 2012 this “rollover” may be about $400 million.)
• Demand for Priority 2 funding (internal connections) at a 90% discount is $1.379 billion.

What does all this mean? Assuming no major changes in the above figures, all eligible Priority 1 applications will be funded. However, most Priority 2 applications cannot be funded. State E-rate coordinators were in Washington recently and met with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Schools and Libraries Program staff to review various E-rate issues, including the 2012 fund demand. Federal officials do not know how they will address the funding issue, although FCC regulations say that when there are not enough funds, they are to prorate discounts. (Note: DPI has routinely filed comments with the FCC requesting that the discounts be reduced to address this funding issue.)

It is expected that schools and libraries will start to be notified of approved applications for the July 1 funding year later in May.

Clearly access is a bottleneck, at home and at the schools. I think that the numbers can be overwhelming for most people. What’s the difference between 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps? The SETDA report does a nice job of explaining what a school can do with various speeds; I’ve abridged the scenarios below. To put it into perspective think about which experience you’d like to see your kid or your future employee to have. In other words – how are we preparing future workers?

Basic Connectivity for Supplemental Enrichment – 10 Kbps per student/staff broadband connection

Students are scheduled to visit a central lab to access locally-run software applications, go online to conduct research for term papers, and compose occasional papers and presentations. Faculty and staff might use the network primarily for email and to post newsletter updates.

Emerging Reliance on Online Educational Tools and Resources – 50 Kbps per student/staff broadband connection

The school implements a partial 1-to-1 laptop program (9th and 10th grades only) and encourages its students to use their devices to access the web for more dynamic content, collaborate with other students, download videos, and receive and post assignments on the school’s learning management system.

Transformation to a Technology-Rich Learning Environment – minimum of 100 Kbps per student/staff broadband connection

Students actively use their laptops in class to access rich, multimedia-enhanced educational content from the Internet. They post their content (including audio and video podcasts) to school learning management systems, access their e-textbooks and get their assignments online, and collaborate daily across the network with other students via wikis and other Internet-based applications.

This week, the St Cloud Times paints a different picture of Internet in the schools. The Internet/broadband now permeates every aspect of education – from teaching to education administration. Now it’s the classroom, school and student without access that have become the exception – and not in such an exceptional way…

Broadband is being used in Minnesota schools for student testing, reports to the state, portals for parents to track their child’s work, and for students to take online classes, according to a December report from the Governor’s Task Force on Broadband. Professional development for teachers is another area where broadband access can reduce costs.

“I think people don’t always realize … how essential Internet access is to the business of doing education. It’s no longer nice to have,” said Mary Mehsikomer, technology integration development and outreach facilitator for TIES, which is an education technology collaborative.

“It’s just as important as having electricity and water. It’s really become a core component of the whole business of delivering instruction and also managing school districts.”

The good news is that as the article points out – most schools and the majority of students have access. The bad news is that they often don’t have sufficient access. There are programs that are out there supporting connectivity, especially for schools. The FCC’s E-Rate program subsidies offset about $20 million to $25 million in Minnesota every year, about half of what it costs schools. On a more local level, Foley Schools recently received funding (via Blandin Foundation’s MIRC program) to install more wireless units in the school for school and community use.

And the Internet isn’t just for K12…

“Internet access has gotten so vitally important for college students,” said Vi Bergquist, chief information officer of St. Cloud Technical and Community College. “It’s almost a must.”

“Some people wouldn’t be able to get an education if we didn’t offer online classes,” she said.

At the college, registration is done only online and some classes are offered online, she said.

The college accommodates students who don’t have access at home with open computer labs, which is good but I think insufficient for many students. The article mentions a college student who was trying to take an online class using only her mobile phone. (That’s some dedication to the effort!)

So while progress is being made on the school front, progress is still lagging for home access in some areas and with some demographics…

“Some (parents) don’t realize what the kids can’t do,” he [Marc Johnson, director of ECMECC] added. “They don’t know they have access that just isn’t robust enough.”

As a community we should be asking what our kids can’t do due to limited technology – and is the cost of that lost opportunity greater than the cost of providing ubiquitous opportunity. (Both in terms of broadband connections and computers – as a parent of three students I can attest that the cost of the equipment can easily trump cost of connectivity.) There are lower-cost options available from Comcast and CenturyLink ($9.95/month and reduced rate computers for qualifying families) but that only helps in Comcast/CenturyLink coverage areas.

This paper will explain the economic and societal gains enabled by broadband, and describe how different rural service providers and the communities they serve have embraced the challenges and opportunities of new technology.

They take a look at Education, Health Care, Agriculture, Electronic Government, Public Safety, Utilities and the Consumer’s Home. Each chapter includes a statement of need (generally backed up with statistics and citations), some specifics on what communities and providers ought to be thinking about moving forward and a couple of case studies taken from real rural communities.

I think this report can be used to compel a community to take a closer look at broadband. It could offer some advice on goals. And, as it’s been developed by the NTCA and therefore uses examples from local telecommunications providers, I think this could be used to engage local provider through examples of success approaches by counterparts in similar areas.

I would like to pull out two Minnesota examples used in the report – both highlight best practices in Education…

Halstad MN – Discovery Education Drives Use

Based in Halstad, Minn., independent telecommunications cooperative Halstad Telephone Co. (HTC) maintains an Ethernet, fiber‐based network that provides broadband service to each of the four K–12 schools in its territory. HTC is part of the Northwest Minnesota Special Access, a consortium of 18 rural telephone companies that connects 126 schools and 43 libraries in the state. Students often use a remote video connection to take advanced placement, foreign language and other specialty courses from a teacher located in another facility. The network is linked to the University of Minnesota, Crookston, enabling high school students to enroll in college courses via a video conferencing application.

Although the network has been in place for many years, HTC recently observed an exponential increase in online activity. In 2010, HTC arranged provision of Discovery Education service to its four local K–12 schools at the company’s expense for one year. Under the terms of the arrangement, instructors and students have access to Discovery Education’s multimedia and interactive content within the school building. Content includes audio files, images and videos, as well as interactive elements such as online quizzes, educational games, and math and science lab simulations. The rural communications provider reports that the various school systems engaged in this endeavor each have a 6 Mbps to 30 Mbps symmetrical connection, and due to the popularity of multimedia content, the various capacities are maxed out at least once per day. HTC also stated that combined with the increasing use of tablets, it expects many schools to double their broadband speed requirements within the next two years.

Spring Grove MN – Devices Drive Use

Headquartered in Spring Grove, Minn., rural provider Spring Grove Communications (SGC) enables its citizens to learn on cutting‐edge technology devices. SGC partnered with its local school district to outfit students with the latest laptops and tablets. Apple iPads are used in all of the elementary classrooms, and every seventh through 12th grader has an Apple MacBook Air available to him during the school day. If a student wishes to take home a MacBook Air, he has the option of renting one for $15 a month. Many of the families renting laptops have never had a computer in their home. The program engages students on a dynamic, digital online platform, providing for learning anytime and anywhere. It also is educating students and teachers alike about how to use this technology and the importance of broadband in today’s economy.

In addition to the student aspect of education innovation, virtual learning is a driver of economic development for small, rural towns. Under the traditional education system, a teacher is limited to open positions within driving distance of her home. With virtual education, a teacher residing in a rural area is able to teach from home and reach students across the state, district lines or the globe.

As Cisco reports…

Dr Michael Johnson believes that one should “never waste a good crisis.” In recent years the provost of Itasca Community College (ICC) has faced more than his share: beginning in 2005, declining enrolments in northeastern Minnesota dealt a serious blow to institutions of higher learning, as well as local elementary and secondary schools. As a result, colleges and schools funded by the state based on student population found their budgets stretched beyond the breaking point.

But Johnson and his colleagues in administration have turned obstacles into triumph: as part of the Itasca Area Schools Collaborative (IASC), the college now works in close partnership with a consortium of seven rural Minnesota K-12 school districts to share resources and provide the highest quality education possible for their students. Supported by a robust networking infrastructure, standardized systems and innovative technology tools, IASC members are ensuring that geography and distance no longer limit academic opportunity.

Blandin is pleased to have played a supporting role in the transformation. We invested $50,000 in MIRC funds through the Lightspeed grant program and $750,000 in regular grant funding to build two “immersive telepresence classrooms” in the IASC districts and related training.  (Subsequent funding includes $1.76 million in federal dollars, $1.76 investment from vendor partners and district investments of approximately $1.5 million.)

While Cisco gets into some of the details of how it happened, Minnesota Public Radio details the fruits of IASC’s labor…

Teachers are using telepresence classrooms for Spanish and Ojibwe, but next year, the district will offer 17 courses in them, ranging from literature and writing, to business, mass marketing and calculus.

School officials say the uses go beyond academic courses. The technology also will allow students to talk to people anywhere in the world, and take virtual field trips to places like NASA and the Smithsonian Museums.

[School Superintendent Matt] Grose said modern distance learning technology levels the playing field for school districts that are remote and sparsely populated. It allows them to hire specialized teachers and share the costs.

“Our kids in Deer River are going to have opportunities to take higher level courses that we can’t offer here, or at least that we don’t have the enrollment to justify a teacher for,” he said. “All of the sudden you can justify running that course and you have kids that are getting access to things that are rigorous and relevant. And we think that’s important.”

It appears that only a very small handful of K-12 schools and college campuses in Minnesota are using the newest generation of interactive technology.

We are pleased to see hard work and investment reap such benefits. We wanted to share an added perspective from IASC Technology Services Director Lora Mathison…

“This golden thread of connectivity allows classroom students to take trigonometry, dislocated workers to be retooled, agencies to offer state-of-the-art trainings for staff and business meetings to be scheduled without drive time.  The expansion to the community is only in infant stages… the expanded opportunities  for students, families, staff, community, businesses, medical institutions, non-profits and others will only be limited by creativity.  The future promises to bring new ways to utilize the telepresence classrooms that have not even been thought of yet.”

“As exciting and successful as this project has been for IASC and the region, it is just a glimpse of what may follow.  Fundamental changes in public education are on the horizon and innovative technology solutions such as telepresence will be able to offer transitional support.”

And while we’re celebrating Grand Rapids Area’s efforts around education, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune on the Strive Partnership…

Known as the Strive Partnership, the program follows this strategy: Identify specific goals, come up with a common way to measure those goals, and do so by using a rigorous set of data that can be shared with everyone. Each community sets its own priorities for improving education for students “from cradle to career.”

The Deer River School District is using the approach for an effort called Itasca Area Student Success Initiative.

Cell Phones for Oral Reports…

Ideas for the Classroom

• Have students do their oral reports using Google Voice. If they don’t like how they sounded the first time, they don’t have to send the message. They can re-record until they have something with which they are happy.
• Use Google Voice as an assessment tool to easily capture student’s reading level. Not only to have you have a recording, you have a transcript too and a place to keep notes. Rather than talk to a parent about how a student has progressed across a year, let them listen to it their child themselves.
• Have students share something interesting about themselves and post the recordings on a class page or in a blog where other students can listen or comment.
• Text Talk: Classroom Stories – Spanish
  • Students in Spanish class can practice their language skills on the phone. On their own time, students call the teacher’s Google Voice number and read something in Spanish or create a dialogue which is sent to the teacher’s Google Voice account.

Cell Phone Video

• Ideas for the Classroom
• Have students act out chapters of a book they are reading and record it using video. Acting out a chapter helps solidify understanding.
• Record mini lessons and how to’s using the video on your cell phone. These can be stored on the classes online space as well as emailed or texted to students.
• For teachers using the reading workshop, taping accountable book talk between pairs or in book clubs is powerful. Students can go back and look at their talk to see how they did and what they might change, teachers can listen in on conversations they wouldn’t usually be able to and doing so provides documentation of growth.

Through projects called Sauk Rapids-Rice Prepares for 2020 and Foley is an Intelligent Rural Community at Home, at Work and at School, Sauk Rapids-Rice Community Education and Foley Community Education have increased opportunities students, the community and business owners have to learn about and access technology and broadband in Benton County.

Through these projects Sauk Rapids-Rice Community Education and Foley Community Education have increased open computer lab times for their communities and students, are provid-ing basic computer skills classes and broadband classes through the U of M Extension.

Foley Community Education has also been providing LEGO Robotics classes for school age students. “LEGO Robotics allows students and teachers to collaborate with others around the world through LEGO Robotics forums and resources,” said Stephanie Amberg of Foley Public Schools. “Students are provided an opportunity to collaborate together and challenge their minds.”

Sauk Rapids-Rice Community Education also purchased 12 iPads to be used by students, Adult Basic Education, Community Education and during on site experiences at local senior communities. “Teachers use them in their classes. Students really like working on them, especially for math concepts and math fluency activities,” said Sandy Grosland, Director of Sauk Rapids – Rice Community Education. “One teacher uses the iPads with the document camera and projects information onto the smart board to use with a large group. They have also used them for short stories in English.” Grosland also indicated that the school board is using the iPads during school board meetings to access all agenda information rather than using paper copies.

So that’s kind of exciting. I was interested in what they planned to do with the technology once in place – and I got one of the best responses I’ve seen from Maggie Kraemer at the school…

My goal/hope is this equipment will allow students in Independent School district to experience a world that is larger than Nobles County. I want them to see live knee surgery, talk with scientists, compare notes their peers in other countries, tour world-class museums – I want to open the world to them. I hope to increase understanding and open students’ minds to the possibilities that exist in our great big, beautiful world. Some of my teachers have thoughts and dreams of their own others will need more structure; to this end, I’m going to enter in to a contract with CILC. This URL will show you some of what CILC has to offer – I created it for my teachers yesterday -http://www.screencast.com/t/CmWheD6P8A

The video is definitely worth the four minutes it takes to watch. You could get some good ideas, learn about some good sites and get a little enthusiastic about the teaching that’s happening in the state.

Online learning takes many different forms. Sometimes it is a teacher using internet resources in the classroom. At other times, students take a fully-online course, working either from home or in the computer lab or media center at their school. In blended or hybrid courses, the students meet with the teacher once or twice a week. In the most fully online format, students go to an online-only charter or alternative school. The Minnesota Department of Education’s (MDE) provides a list of all the accredited online learning providers statewide.

Some of the reasons for going online to learn include making up credits, scheduling issues, an alternative to regular school – and in rural areas specifically online classes are an opportunity to take classes that might not otherwise be available or may not be available when a student needs them. Online programs are also offered (in a related article) as an option for kids who learn at a different pace, especially if that pace is very fast. In the spirit of full disclosure, I know the family featured in the article about online programs; they as a family are very technically inclined and very bright. Online courses have been a boon to parents and kids!

Today the Sheila looks at best practices for teaching online. One practitioner offers advice…

Robert Bilyk, Director for the Center for Online Learning at Metro State University, said the key to successful online learning is having a structured presence. “It’s really important that the instructor reaches out,” he said. Instructors need to be welcoming, and must respond to students in a timely manner. The instructors must “help students one on one,” he said. “That is the number one key thing,” he said. “Once a student feels the course is instructor-less, the student gets alienated from the course.”

The article also looks as recent audit of online learning programs…

The state audit showed that while the number of online course registrations had quadrupled in the last few years, online students were less likely to finish the courses they started. Full-time online students were more likely to drop out than students in general, and had significantly lower proficiency rates on the math MCA-II, although their proficiency rates in reading were similar to those of other students.

One reason noted for the discrepancy is that some students who move to online learning have had challenges in traditional school setting so they may not be predisposed to succeed in an academic setting. I was surprised to hear the downside of online learning, as it  was somewhat contrary to results I had previously read – but I suspect it depends on what you want to measure and find.

It makes sense to take a closer look at online learning; I reported earlier this month on legislative strides to bring a little online learning to all students. There are pushes from almost all side to move on it – we just need to make sure that the students, teachers, parents and infrastructure are prepared to help it move forward! (An online education roadmap like Wisconsin’s might help.)