PILOTed

Making an impact on kids

What should every principal be doing to make schools more effective at preparing every child for adulthood?

The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, part of North Carolina State University, lays out an 8 step plan. The Friday Institute works with teachers and principals around the US on leadership and instruction.

Mary Ann Wof, Elisabeth Bobst, and my friend Nancy Mangum just codified their methods in the seminal book Personalized and Digital Learning, published by Harvard Education Press.

Of course, it begins with vision. If you don’t know where you’re headed, how are you going to get there? But vision isn’t what a principal dreams up and then communicates. And vision is not consensus. You can’t expect every person in an organization to commit to an untested vision. An effective vision emerge from collaboration and conversation with a core representation of stakeholders, it builds momentum, and eventually consensus from success.

Very few successful schools operate top down, with hierarchical and rigid management. Change management principals and distributed management are central to most successful schools. The formal administrators of a school are neither omnipresent, nor omniscient. Really good schools task teachers and instructional coaches with key aspects of change and improvement.

All successful schools empower everyone. The children are empowered, given agency over what and how they learn. Teachers work together to develop and improve professional practices. Parents play a role.

These are just three of the eight steps in the plan, and the book provides practical advice for each, with examples and “try this now” exercises.

And you’ll have the chance to learn about all eight of these principles live and online with the Friday Institute’s series on Edchat Interactive. Register here for the first session, which will be Thursday, January 11.

Skoolbo Discussion

I had a very thought-provoking conversation with Colin Brown of Skoolbo last Friday.

Skoolbo is a free resource for teachers, parents, and kids worldwide that contains short learning games. They are used by over 50,000 schools (about 300,000 students ages 5-9) around the world with about half of all users coming from the US. There is a premium version for schools with enhanced ways of tracking student progress and assigning work to students.

The conversation centered around learning research an d a new partnership with ChuChu TV. If you haven’t heard of ChuChu TV, you really need to learn about them.

The Research

The Skoolbo platform responsibly (based on their student privacy and child safety policies) tracks student performance and activity, and makes the research available to researchers. Lamar University correlated the data with itegs (International Test of Early grade Skills) for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the US. In these early grades, the US did surprisingly well, showing the greatest improvement in reading and numeracy skills in the lowest quartile of students, especially compared to the UK and New Zealand, which are both seeing increasing gaps between higher and lower performers. And, if you don’t look too closely at the number of countries included, you will be relieved to know the US never ranked lower than 6^th.

In general, top performers at age 5-6 are more advanced than lower (bottom 25%) performers of children three years older, ages 8-9. It would be interesting to find out if those gaps increase even further as the children grow up. Boys are about 3 months more advanced than girls in numeracy skills, while girls are about 3 months ahead of boys in reading skills. These trends go across all countries.

One surprising outcome was the incredible lead of Hong Kong in numeracy skills. Even at age 5.5, Hong Kong students are three grades ahead of students from the other countries. And these weren’t “privileged” Hong Kong students, the students were poor, with no Internet access at home and whose first language is Chinese. One big cultural difference is the importance of Math in the culture in Hong Kong; there is a firm belief that Math will take you anywhere, and that it’s simply not acceptable to be bad at Math, it would be as foreign as saying, “I am bad at breathing, so I won’t breathe.”

Colin said that Skoolbo is committed to making the data available free to researchers.

ChuChu TV

ChuChu TV runs Youtube channels of educational videos for children ages 0-6. Colin said that for the last 5 years, their prime channel has ranked in the top 20 of all Youtube channels, with about 500 million views a month, and is the number 1 preschool channel worldwide. SocialBlade currently rates them 21st (with 10.5 billion views), which is still nothing to sneeze at.

While I hadn’t heard of ChuChu before the conversation, I did check with relatives that have young children, and they used these videos with their kids.

ChuChu employs about 230 animators who churn out videos with musical educational content.

With their content free, ChuChu makes their money on Youtube ads.

What’s next?

Marshall McLuhan coined the terms “hot” and “cold” media in Understanding Media back in 1994. And while Youtube  is a 21^st century phenomenon, watching videos is still passive learning on cool media.

Colin is partnering with ChuChu to add learning content and analytics around the videos in a joint venture named Chu Chu School. Games, activities, curriculum, tracking, and reporting will be available in a school package in the next few months.

It will be very interesting, to watch this merger one of the most popular creators of children’s content and a widely used education games platform, to see if they can successfully use the mechanisms of Youtube tie-ins and freemium offerings to reach schools and parents and offer them subscriptions.

How to get EdTech Products into the hands of more students

A summary of the Education Business Forum

I have to congratulate co-chairs Robin Warner and Mitch Weisburgh (wait, that’s me, am I allowed to congratulate myself?) for putting together the best group of speakers ever at the SIIA’s Education Business Forum last week. This is the conference to learn about the business of running an education technology organization:

• how to finance growth and product development
• what are the emerging trends and technologies that have the potential to transform education
• how do you get your products into the hands of more students
• how to prepare for partnerships, mergers, exits, and acquisitions
• network and forge partnerships with successful EdTech investors and businesses

Here are some highlights.

Financing your Ed Tech idea

Before you have revenue or product, if you haven’t run and sold businesses before, you’ll need to bootstrap the business yourself or get money from friends and or family members. You can gain access to good resources and networking opportunities through incubators such as StartEd in NY or LearnLaunch in Boston. Grant financing up to $1 million is available through SBIR programs at the US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, although the grants are very competitive.

Once you have customers, you still need to bootstrap until you reach around $100,000 to $200,000 in revenues, but at that level you can look for Angel Financing for rounds of $150,000 to $500,000. Angels generally invest locally, and being part of an incubator is a strong vote of confidence that influences angel investors.

Professional investors start getting interested when you have $500,000 or more in revenue and are looking to scale your idea with investments of $1M to $3M, and there are different levels of professional investors at even higher levels if you are in the $8M to $15M revenue range.

Tech Trends that Have Transformation Potential

IBM is one of the companies leading the charge in artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, block chain, eXtended Reality (XR, which subsumes both augmented reality and virtual reality), and game based learning. If you missed Phaedra Boinodiris’s talk on where these technologies are leading us to, what types of jobs they open up, how they are being used in education today, and how to partner with IBM to catch these waves, you missed it. Maybe consider coming to the next SIIA event, the Education Impact Symposium, in June.

Jussi Kajala of the Finnish company 3DBear and Lisa Castaneda of Foundry10 talked about studies on the use of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications in schools. These technologies help students visualize spatially, can be incredibly immersive, and provide students with experiences they might otherwise not have. And here’s a request from students, “Please don’t ruin XR when you bring it into schools.”

Career Readiness

The work environment is incredibly chaotic; this is what we are preparing students for. Companies are not looking to keep their employees for any length of time, and they are unwilling to invest in preparing them for the workfoce. Recruiting tech talent has become a zero sum game, each company is poaching talent from the next. Companies deploy recruiting systems to screen from thousands of potential applicants for jobs, looking for keywords that indicate experience while applicants are learning how to game the system. In the meantime, how are people supposed to get the experience when experience is an entry level requirement? College degrees are widely used as indicators of some level of competence even though they are very poor indicators of proficiency or ability. We are all starting to question the wisdom of frontloading 4 years of education before careers when that education does not truly train people for their jobs and when nearly everyone is going to need retooling a few times during their working career.

There are growing opportunities to help students visualize possible careers, learn hard and soft skills, intern and apprentice, and display competencies at secondary schools, postsecondary, and after.

How to get your product in front of more kids

Here are some of the concerns voiced by the people who make decisions about whether your products get in front of kids:

• Do you really know who my student is and how your product is going to help my student
• If you tell me your product is going to solve all my problems, I’m going to be skeptical
• What is the installation process like, I don’t want to do installations, I want something cloud based and scalable, but something that will work even if the network has problems.
• Are you going to save me time, money, or effort?
• Can the data be used by the dashboard I already use?
• It is mobile friendly?
• Is it WCAG 2.0 Compliant (and if you don’t even know what this mean, you’re out of the running)
• Are there independent people who can vouch for your product’s effectiveness, and can I talk to them?
• When things go wrong, how do you react and how will you support me?
• Who is using your product now, and can I talk to them?
• Why did customer who no longer use your product stop, and can I talk to them?
• How do I know you’ll be around in 5 years?
• Can I trust you?

Other Opportunities to Learn on Edchat Interactive

From Consumption to Creation: an online discussion this Tuesday on the changes in pedagogy as we switch from “listen and learn” to “do, make, and learn” with Monica Burns.

Let’s Make School Dangerously Relevant: exploring the role of schools, classes, and teachers in the shift from an industrial model to a global innovative one with Scott McLeod.

Slush 2017 Helsinki

I know I wasn’t the oldest person at Slush, because Al Gore was there and he’s 69 years old. But I was probably 35 years older than the median of the 20,000 tech heads from 130 countries attending the world’s largest startup event.

Some snippets of advice from some of the entrepreneurs and investors:

• You can’t change consumer behavior by persuading them, you have to give them an alternative that’s demonstrably better.
• It’s fantasy to expect masses of consumers (or customers) to switch to something more expensive.
• You’ve got to get your systems (production, marketing, sales, support) right in one market before you expand geographically. Avoid the VC trap; don’t expand too fast.
• You don’t make innovation spread. Innovation spreads, or it doesn’t.
• The only way to stay on top is to challenge and change what you are doing.
• You don’t build by focusing on what is going wrong, you expand from what is going right which also breeds excitement.
• The only way to secure data is not to gather it in the first place; the moment you start saving data, you are putting your customers and your company at risk.
• Storing your data under blockchain allows more choices for decentralization, mitigates risk, and reduces cost vs the traditional way of centralizing your data.
• The education system has to have both excellence AND equity, at scale. It's not neither, nor either, it has to have both.
• If teachers aren’t embracing the change (in education) you want to implement, the revolution collapses. And to do that, you have to trust teachers.

Will AI enhance our lives or obliterate the human race?

One series of talks were devoted to artificial intelligence and blockchain. The future belongs to decentralized (meaning blockchain) artificial intelligence. Current AI systems suffer from two missing ingredients: they can’t adapt to new situations without a great deal of human input (for example an AI system that can play the game of go cannot also drive a car), and they are not capable of rich models of objects and their interactions (for example, an AI system might be able to recognize faces, but it would not understand that the face was part of a human being and nor how to create a relationship with that person). It’s expected that the first gap will be solved in the next 3-5 years, which portends things like cars that under most circumstances will drive far better than humans, and the second in 15-20 years, which means machines may be able to learn to complete any task better than humans.

But don’t worry; 60% of AI experts say there is nothing to worry about, while only 40% maintain we are most likely on a collision course with destruction. Of course, speaking of experts, Ernest Rutherford, the founder of the atomic model, famously predicted that there would never be an atomic weapon, and that was just 12 hours before the first one was detonated. Would you get on a plane where only 40% of the experts were predicting it would crash?

Can we design a better person?

Another series of talks focused on human augmentation. Bionic devices are currently used primarily for disabled individuals. They can help people hear, walk, etc. Neuro technology (the interphase between neurons and devices) can work with bionic devices and provide feedback mechanisms. And gene editing already is used to alter crops and change animal cells to produce different chemicals (gene editing on pig cells growing in a lab enables those cells to produce human insulin). But these three technologies have even greater promise. Bionics will be able give people super human strength or other physical abilities (already most professional athletes get eye surgery in order to get vision twice as good as normal human vision). Neuro technology will soon allow brains to process faster, access more information, and control objects through thought. Gene editing will eliminate certain diseases while also offering the ability to create “designer children.”

Will we use human augmentation for the benefit of humanity, or will it further increase the gulf between the haves and the have nots? What do you think?

3DBear and TeacherGaming

Backing off these heavy thoughts a little, 3DBear reached top 10 startup status (out of 100 startup finalists) with Jussi Kajala’s riveting pitch startling the judges by crash landing a drone on the judges’ table. You can see at right how he used this to bring home the disruptive power of 3DBear to immerse kids in 3D design.

If you come to the SIIA Education Business Forum this week, or to FETC in late January, you’ll be able to meet Jussi and another Finnish EdTech star, Santeri Koivisto, whose TeacherGaming Desk is connecting curriculum and standard based lessons with popular video games to help teachers provide engaging lessons that promote deep learning.

Interesting online discussions on Edchat Interactive

And, please join us online in some exhilarating discussions:

• Shifting pedagogy from consumption to creation with Monica Burns
• Are your kids’ classes dangerously irrelevant with Scott McLeod

Just click on the links and register.