PILOTed

Remote Learning via Webconference reinforces both privilege and deprivation

How do we give every student dignity when we conduct live online classes with them? Each time we videoconference with a student we are inviting ourselves into their homes. What are our reactions and how do we think students and their families feel when

• An argument breaks out at home while we are conducting a lesson?
• Two children need to be on the same computer at the same time?
• We crowd out whatever bandwidth exists in the house?
• The child is in the same room with their other relatives who also are stuck in isolation?
• There are 10 or more people sharing the same (small) residence?
• Members of the family walk around not completely dressed?
• Are we going to require the family to keep the home or room immaculate?
• The paint is cracking , the windows are broken, or the furniture is in disrepair?
• A student is homeless; how do they participate and how do you think they feel about showing a different “home” every week?
• A student doesn’t have access to food?
• A student is in an abusive environment, and even more so now that they don’t get out for the school day?

Who is thinking of these things and how are we fixing them?

A Behavioral Guide to Changing People's Minds

If every time you disagree with someone or offer someone criticism, they take it and change, you don’t need to read the rest of this blog post.

Thomas S. Critchfield offers ten rules for changing others’ behavior and getting better at changing others’ behavior in the Association for Behavior Analysis International published by the NIH.

1. The organism is always right. It’s not the person who is wrong; it’s an action or a misstatement by that person. Make that distinction clear in all communications.
2. Behavior is not personal. Behavior or statements are not a matter of intention or lack of personal responsibility. They are only actions, only behavior. Do not impugn a person’s character or intent. People do not accept assistance from someone who is on the attack.
3. Behavior has a function. You need to understand the rewards provided by the behavior in order to change it; what are the historical and environmental influences that lead to the behavior.
4. Plan your own actions to support behavior change. Your behavior needs to be what the other person needs in order to change. What behavior could you exhibit that is most likely to result in change by the other person or group? What words or actions can you use that honor the customs and culture of, that establish rapport with, the person you are trying to change?
5. Behavior changes gradually. Both in terms of you getting better at creating change and other people changing. A single suggestion is not going to make everything right. Just reading this once is not going to make you magically more persuasive.
6. Pick your battles. Even when there are a lot of things that need changing, target one problem at a time, one where changes can realistically be made. For some, you won’t have enough access to them to create a change. Just move on.
7. It’s easier to prevent than to fix. Ongoing behavior is difficult to change; it’s always easier to build good habits and models before they become problems. Why wait for someone to mess up when in many cases you can provide an ounce of prevention?
8. Help solve problems. Behaviors result from actions that (are designed to) solve some problem. Find the pressing problems, find out about what’s important to the other person and help them solve those issues through more effective means.
9. Skills become more fluent with practice. You’ll get better at this the more you do it.
10. Their failure to change or learn is actually your failure to explain or teach. If you try something and it doesn’t work, reconsider how you approached changing the other person’s behavior. Focusing on how they failed to follow what you clearly communicated may make you temporarily feel absolved, but is not going to help you change people and it not going to give you the results you ultimately want.

If you have read this far, you’re probably more like me in that not every time that you offer advice do people take it. I’m hoping this article will help us all get better.

The original article applied these principles of applied behavior analysis to getting people to stop misconstruing the practice of applied behavior analysis. This essay applies them more generally.

Tidbits heard at BMO 2019 Back to School Conference

BMO's Back to School Conference is always one of my favorite places to hear about potential disruptions, new trends, and investment information in education. This year did not disappoint.

There are 5300 colleges and universities in the US; 20% of them are going to disappear in the next ten years.

We’ve known for years that one-on-one instruction (tutoring) has a two sigma advantage over group instruction, meaning that an average tutored student performs about as well as a top ten percent student who learns in a classroom. Technology should be able to allow us to make group instruction as effective as tutoring.

What once worked in selling to schools no longer works.  Some of the factors changing the way schools make purchasing decisions today include:

1. Districts are focusing more on student outcomes which requires a different way to sell.
2. No one takes marketing calls anymore, or answers emails.
3. Decision makers do research online.
   1. You’ve got about 15 seconds online to make your value proposition clear.
   2. Buyers want to easily see the impact you have had with other schools and districts.
4. When they meet with you, districts want to know how you’ll work with them to get value from the data you can provide.
5. Buyers need an easy way to try a product before buying it, and know there is an easy way to disengage.
6. More decisions are being pushed down: from the state to the district, from the district to the school, and some even to the teacher or groups of teachers.
7. Buying decisions can be made annually when materials are online, as opposed to once every 5-7 years when materials are in textbooks, which also means sales are smaller.
8. The sales person who shows up with the best donuts is not necessarily the one who is going to get the deal.

The best uses of AI haven’t been invented yet.

It’s just a matter of time before Gaming is predominant in education; high engagement along with assessment and adaptation. Kids are happy to sit on social media and take the silly tests that often pop up, but the testing in school doesn’t engage them.

In the short term, immersive technologies like virtual reality will have more success in corporate training than in education: corporations are more able to make decisions based on expected results. But if you are not in immersive technologies now, when it does hit, you will be too late.

Districts are becoming concerned that they are losing students to online providers, home schoolers, and charter school. This means a loss of state and federal money, so they are more willing to look for solutions that retain students they might lose or get the ones who have left to return.

There are going to be 80 million jobs needed in middle skills occupations; these do not require a four-year degree but do require different skills than we currently teach in high school.

There is a shift in IT skills requirements. It’s not just IT departments, but jobs are increasingly requiring IT skills.

Organizations are starting to care about reskilling their workers instead of just focusing on hiring for needs. This is partly the result of a tight job market.

The focus of K12 should be to prepare each generation to think and operate as adults. If we continue to test the way we do, that won’t happen. No employer has ever said, “I need someone who scored high on their Algebra 2 test.”

The 8 Agents of Chaos that can destroy any business

This is from a session at the Serious Play Conference led by Andrew Gassen. Andrew coaches executives and entrepreneurs to achieve their desired outcomes.

 

Agent know it all 

Attributes: you’re really smart and you can solve all of these hard problems that other people have not solved, but you can do it.

Rides previous successes, relies on previous anecdotal experience, no or little customer research, reality distortion field

Impact on the team: greenshifting, skip customer discovery and validation, build software because I said so, use excuses like our direction ran counter to the market, knowledge silos.: (we lost our customers and our costs went down grenshifting to we have reduced costs).

Wrong approach: think harder, try to convince the customer that they are wrong, fire people who disagree 

How does that work: lack of customers, competitors overtook us, reputation build by market

What to do: 

1. focus team on outcomes, reframe knowledge as testable hypotheses (instead of "this is true" use "we think this is the case and here is how we will measure to see if it really is",
2. agree on the indicators of success and progress,
3. do work, measure progress as quickly as possible, revisit, reflect,
4. reframe, and refocus
5. Let yourself believe you are right, but frame it as a hypothesis and find a way to frame it and measure it, following Paul Saffo's strong opinions weakly held paradigm. (Example: Clickable prototypes, test different concepts out on the people who will be using your product)

 

Agent Feature Factory

Attribute: Once we build the next thing our product will be ready

It’s a mindset it’s not about the next feature

Signs that this applies: All these programs do X, we have to also; I met with a prospect and they said they  would be interested if we did Y, we really need that featuer.

If your product is not getting traction, it’s easier to say we will add more stuff than to say some of our assumptions might be wrong.

Impact on team: build mindset that more = better ( better = better, not more), : too many projects so work is half-assed, chasing the competition, lost sight of actual outcomes trying to deliver.

What not to do: set milestones from the top (and then move them, causes things not to get in the hands of real users), build what other people are building but a little different, build sales expectations to match the cost.

How to solve: don’t overstuff with features, practice continuous deliver, build an outcomes based roadmap with the team, understand what your value is, adopt lean startup principles (reframe to these are the problems we are going to solve, not these are the feature we are going to provide), use the roadmap and adjust where necessary,  do half as much, not half-assed

Table stakes, you have to have these features, it doesn’t matter how good, you never get happy users.

Performers: the better you do these, the better people like you

Delighted, just by having those you make people really happy even if it’s not fully completed (that is what fuels market domination)

 

Agent Old School

Attribute: If it worked 30 years ago, it will work now

Causes: previous successes, outdated education, being out of the game for a while, lack of real-world/domain experience

Impact on the team: doing things that contradict modern best practices, unjustified confidence, just enough progress to keep going and not question it, being passed by competitors

What not to do:nothing, start uprising/mutiny, talk about transformation

How did that work: everybody dug their heels in, team trust eroded, ppl left, decisions made based on allegiance, not value

How to tackle: get a baseline on how things work today, identify the top 1-3 areas needing tweaking, collaborate and align on shared success indicators, get little wins, one by one

If you are the one who wants to make the change, you have to compromise first  need to arrive at that measure together, not dictated by top 

How not to tackle: you hired me to fix things, let me fix things, get rid of all this that you did before and do it my way, burn bridges

Example: Dick’s Sporting Goods (human centered principles, competing with Amazon)

Wrong: waterfall development

 

 

Agent Value Line

Attributes: Resume driven development: people who focus on those below the line, because those are the things to build their resume, tons of priorities, more time gets spent on projects that help internally than that help the customer.

Examples: what project management tool, instead of what new features or what bug fixes affect the customer.

The things above the line drive value to your users, the ones below are things they don’t care about

The way to refocus the organization: Acknowledge that those things are the most important to work on, but it doesn’t matter unless you do the things things on top too 

Wrong: focus on making decision based on technology not customer use, and focus on buzzword bingo

Impact on the team: everyone is super busy and working hard, really neat internal tech demonstrations, actual progress seems really slow, with small incremental improvement like "That thing that took 25 minutes before took 22 minutes, let me show you how I did that. Tech complexity went through the roof, every new hire wiped out substantial parts of the code base. We delivered so many tasks on the backlog but not making progress on the goals.

This runs rampant to all tech companies. 

What to do: use user stories: as a teacher I want to do xxxx so that yyy. Or job stories based on the task, and prioritize the backlog ruthlessly “how does this get us to our desired outcome for the user". Establish a culture where whoever finishes first go grab the next thing on the priority list they can do. The person in charge of project management is more important than the Project Management tool.

1. Align on why we exist and key outcomes
2. Map out the activities the team, not individuals engage in
3. Estimate the time each activity takes
4. Prioritize areas where that time can be reduced
5. Empower people to make the changes

The double agent

Attributes: Here is how we did it, so you need to make your software (workflow, selling process, whatever) work like this too. 

Examples: someone from a different industry who comes in, partner agreements where one partner has the preponderance of power, someone who was successful 10+ years ago and is still riding that reputation.  For example someone who had success at a textbook publisher ( A textbook doesn’t get released until it’s done, software can be ready to deploy in three weeks.)

Impact: doing things we don’t agree with, devalues our expertise, people working in unintentional stealth mode, turning down user feedback, partnership devolves to nothing productive, competitors pass you, the value proposition that made you special doesn't get delivered.

What not to do: do the minimum required to meet the contract, when partner wanted something it went to the top of the backlog.

What do to:

1. Align on outcomes not features
2. Be explicit about who owns what in the relationship
3. Be the expert in the areas of your expertise
4. Regularly check-in on progress toward diet success indicators

You don’t have to roll over just because they are bigger. If you are already in a bad relationship, get everyone to anonymously contribute: 

1. Drop: what do we need to stop doing what's not working,
2. Add: what do we need to add,
3. Keep: what should we keep,
4. Improve: what should we do to improve (keep things anonymous. (Drop, add, keep, improve)

 

Agent Hollywood

Attributes: Look at those great awards and metrics, indicators that make you look successful even if you are not. Happens when you have internal competition for resources, and when there is low trust

Impact: people feel incentivized to stretch the truth to the point where it still kind of looks true in order to "win". Wasted time and effort on vanity indicators ( we have 50,000 people on our landing page ), people choose sides, false sense of security.

What not to do: show the other side is wrong, one up, win as many awards as possible 

What to do: 

1. align on the outcomes you are trying to achieve (otherwise you will fall into this trap.
2. measure what matters (ultimate indicator of our company’s health)
3. Don't measure too many things, you are not better off by measuring everything than measuring nothing

 

Agent tug of war

Atributes: Teammates disappear on pet projects, us vs them, frequent changes in the team, team spread too thin to do good work, 

Atomic unit for progress is a team all moving in the same direction, not the individuals

What to do: do less but all in the same direction eventually to happy customer.

 

Agent viability

Attributes: stuff gets done and it gets done to spec but projects don't move the company forward.

Fork was a product that was done to spec and on time but ultimately useless.

Peer pressure and hubris, silly expenses, time to market is too long, and no sales

Focus on fundraising not delivering user value (I will build this this week, now my focus changed)

What happens:say yes to anything with dollars possibility associated, constant pivots, shut the business down.

What to do:

1. Metrics on what matters
2. Understand cost model
3. How will you make money
4. Focus on your unfair advantages
5. Follow the shortage path to revenue

Bottom Line

If your organization does not understand what good look likes you can’t rally people around anything. You need a North Star metric.

CoSN 2019 Recap

Foto from Art Poskanzer, Flickr

What do you think when you see these pictures of old classrooms, with the chairs aligned in rows, and some phrase like, “every sector of society has changed dramatically since the 19^th century except one, education”?

Simplistic, right?

I do often wonder, though, what’s wrong with rows of chairs in a classroom? Is there really anything to learning space design?

Well, I just found out that, yes, there is. Learning space design can facilitate effective learning and teaching practices, just like great kitchen design can facilitate effective cooking.

I learned this by facilitating a learning space design workshop with Randy Fielding this past week at the CoSN national conference.

Great learning space design starts with an understanding of effective pedagogy, just like great kitchen design begins with an understanding of food preparation.

We know that real effective pedagogy requires flexibility. There is a time for real world, authentic, relationship-based learning. There is a time for didactic instruction. There are times for group work. There are times for individual reflection. And there are times for whole class instruction.

Randy walked us through methods for balancing specialized spaces with flexible spaces, allowing for both watching and doing, and for watchers to feel part of a learning process. While a final design requires a trained professional like Randy, first approximations and refinements are within the domain of any educator just by keeping the ends in mind:

• What are the different methods of learning and doing that you want to employ in the space?
• How do you allow for effective movement?
• What output and sharing mechanisms are you going to encourage (LED screens, tablets, flipcharts, etc.)
• What else can the space be used for?
• How do you make the space welcoming?

You may be wondering, what was my role in “facilitating” the workshop? For the final 45 minutes, participants had the chance to do their own redesign of the existing space in Augmented Reality using the 3DBear app. 3DBear has collections for library design, learning space design, and room design. Providing a hand-on activity right after or as part of instruction is an especially powerful and engaging teaching technique. In fact, allowing students a voice in designing their own space provides an exciting exercise in design thinking and student voice.

Ah, but what is good pedagogy?

Heidi Backman is the superintendent of Kaunianen (it rhymes with Coney Island) Finland. You may know that Finland was determined to be the happiest country in the world. Kaunianen is reported to be the happiest city in Finland, and the root causes, according to the to article, are the community and school educational and enrichment activities that run under Heidi’s domain.

Heidi listed her the prime reasons for success:

• Establish a spirit of interpersonal trust within the organization and throughout the community
• High quality teacher education
• Maintain stability, with strategic objectives achieved through step by step reforms
• Maintain a social mission, with an emphasis on equity: no big differences between schools, no big differences in opportunities to different segments of the population
• Focus on learning, not testing, and understand that learning does not mean instructional time, learning means learning

There was a fascinating interchange during Heidi’s session at CoSN.

A US district administrator asked, “Can you share with us some of your failures, some of the things you’ve tried that have failed.”

The Finnish answer, after a long pause to think, “No, I don’t think so, because we don’t measure things by success or failure. We do things to gain feedback, so that we can observe, measure, and improve. Everything we’ve done has given us feedback to improve. We just don’t think of our initiatives that way.”

Interesting food for thought, right?

The scene at CoSN. No one seems worried about the Pterodactyl.

Education Business Forum 2018

This week was the Education Business Forum in NY, the conference where we learn about how to run and grow an education technology business.

There were sessions on funding, investing, marketing, selling, hiring and managing, and transforming businesses. Here is a short summary of two of the sessions. And if you are hungry for more, well, I guess you should attend the Education Industry Summit in June.

Finding the right people

We are all called upon to either hire people or at some point look for a job ourselves. Here are resume and interview tips for you if you find yourself in either role.

What companies look for in employees

• Employees who will be good ambassadors
• People who are looking to learn and seek out opportunities
• People who attract other competent people
• People who demonstrate values and integrity
• A person who shows a good balance of humility and self-confidence

What companies look to avoid in employees

• Candidates who cannot give examples of success or failure
• Candidates who focus on the short term
• People who say they are ready for the next step in their career (because at some point soon they will likely be saying that to another company)
• People who give “there was too much change” as their reason for leaving
• Someone who doesn’t ask questions or doesn’t ask good questions during the interview

Privacy

While Europe passed their continent-wide privacy law, in the US, it’s been up to each state, and states often model their laws on California. This year, California passed its CCPA privacy law, which, according to one policy wonk at the conference is “the worst written statute I’ve ever seen” with ambiguities, contradictions, and even plenty of typos.

The law applies to any business that reaches 50,000 devices, people, or households. It does not apply to nonprofits. If you expect to do business in California you need to comply by January 2020 or risk $7500 per instance (per person or device) in fines.

In oversimplified terms, the law requires companies to provide

1. Clear notice that you are collecting information
2. Transparency in disclosing what data you have and are collecting, and you must provide a copy of the information you have on a person upon request.
3. Opt-out capabilities that are easily accessible and obvious, and once opting out you cannot contact that person again, sell that person’s information, and an individual can authorize another individual to make that request for them
4. Deletion, the ability for someone to request you delete all the information you have on them
5. Non-discrimination, you cannot provide the same services at different prices to different people or groups of people, or different services at the same price to different people.

While the law is a clear attempt to reign in Facebook and Google, one of the ambiguous areas is education. If a student or parent requests deletion, but if your agreement with a school or district requires you to track student achievement, which of those two takes precedence?

The SIIA is monitoring this and trying to get the state to clarify how it applies to education technology. If you are a member of the SIIA, you can contact SIIA Public Policy for clarification.

McKinsey on Design

We are increasingly calling for teaching design in schools. Why is design important?

McKinsey Consulting recently reported that companies with good design processes (top quartile) outperformed their industry by about 2:1: higher revenue growth, larger return to stockholders, and better financial performance.

It’s not just design for designers, McKinsey outlined four characteristics of these organizations that outperform their peers:

The leadership/design connection

Those companies made design a top management issue. Yes, there are people tasked with design, but designers and top management worked together to analytically choose the designs that would have the most impactful effect on the organizations. Design decisions were not relegated to middle management, and top management did not just make decisions based on gut-feel. Top management were well versed in the ramifications of different design decisions so could make objective decisions based on the impact of the designs on their customers.

Design as UX

Design isn’t just about a product, users and customers are making their own decisions based on a total experience. The best organizations consider (and measure) how design affects the customer journey, and also consider how alternative design can affect aspects of the customer experience that are outside of just using the product.

Cross functional design

While there may be a design department, it is working hand in glove with the other functional departments in the organization, sharing responsibility for the design. Design in these organizations is about the user, and however different departments touch the user experience, they need to be part of the process. Isolationist tendencies (or silos) can be hard to overcome and resist, yet the best organizations figure out a way to do it. And designers should be spending their time and efforts touching all departments to enhance products and services for customers, not on creating slide shows or presentations or marketing materials.

Continuous Iteration

The best organizations don’t just design a product, service, or operation and then move on. Ongoing learning, testing, iterating, and measuring with users is critical. The best organizations prototype early, share prototypes with potential users, and use that feedback to inform design modifications. And monitoring externalities like actions of competitors, emerging technologies, and psychometric trends are all blended into the functions of all departments and funneled into the design process.

Organizations that are strong in design outperform other organizations. McKinsey concludes that design excellence is within the grasp of very organization, and depends on design being integrated in all four areas. We should be building that framework into student learning.

By the way at the end of the McKinsey article there is an organization survey. How does your organization stack up?

And if you feel like you would like to take action to improve your organization’s performance or impact, please contact us at [email protected] 

What if what we know is wrong?

What if what we (think we) know is wrong?

For example. We know that when people know how to evaluate news sources they are less likely to fall prey to fake news and false images. So we educate students how to evaluate news sources and determine which ones are likely to publish images and articles that are trustworthy.

But it turns out that’s wrong. The biggest predictors of whether a person is able to discern that a story or image may be false are

1. The individual’s knowledge of digital photo-editing and social media posting
2. The viewer’s attitude toward the depicted issue

Social and heuristic cues of online credibility (such as trustworthiness of the site or intermediaries) had no significant impact. (Source: Fake images: The effects of source, intermediary, and digital media literacy on contextual assessment of image credibility online)

If we find out that what we previously believed if false we can take action.

In this case, we can dig deeper. We can find out that, because of time or effort constraints, people tend to believe online images, that they don’t tend to actually seek out other source to validate information, but they make quick judgments; that people who already familiar with techniques to fabricate images or stories are more likely to spot potential falsehoods than those who do not, and also that people who already agree with the information depicted are less likely to be critical.

And then we can adjust our actions accordingly. In this case…

• Since we know that we are inclined to trust pictures and also inclined to trust information that supports what we already believe, possibly we can check ourselves whenever we see online images, especially ones that support stereotypes that we tend to accept.
• When working with students, instead of focusing on “good” sources and “bad” sources, we can involve them in exercises in photo-editing to achieve different objectives or re-writing articles to slant toward different viewpoints and then lead discussions about those techniques.

But how do we catch ourselves when we think we know what we’re doing, but we’re wrong?

Like what if we were starting an EdTech business and were sure you knew the market: the potential buyers, what they would pay, how to reach them, how they would use your product, and how you would sell them? I wonder if talking to Academic Business Advisors would help you determine if there were any unanticipated obstacles or more efficient tactics?

Leveraged Learning: How the Future of Education Might Play Out

 

How would you prepare if you knew you were going to embark on the most important project or task of your life; but you had no idea what it was, what skills or knowledge you need, the specific fields of operation, the scope, or the tasks involved? Think about it.

Interestingly, you'll likely come up with the same skills that tend to lead to career success, the ones that are most needed by society, and the ones that schools should be tasked with providing.

In his book Leveraged Learning: How the Disruption of Education Helps Lifelong Learners and Experts with Something to Teach, Danny Iny talks about the societal forces that are changing education, what is likely to come out of it, and what we can be doing today to prepare.

Danny talks about education as moving to a three-phased system: 

1. Foundational: base skills and knowledge
2. Last Mile: skills and knowledge needed for specific life choices
3. Continuing: skills and knowledge needed for whatever happens to be the current or next task

While large organizations like the existing institutions are likely to continue to dominate foundational education, new opportunities exist and are emerging in the areas of last mile and continuing education.

What are these skills that we'd need to prepare for the unpreperable? Iny outlines the following:

1. Salience: The ability to pose central problems and to ask important questions.
2. Novelty: An interest in and ability to find solutions for problems not tackled before. It is intellectual nonconformity, the ability to distance oneself from the established scientific theories and concepts, or artistic forms.
3. Ability to relate old knowledge to new problems: The opposite of novelty, this is the ability to recognize familiar patterns in seemingly new and unique problems.
4. Generativity and mental flexibility: The ability to generate multiple and diverse approaches to a problem is essential to the creative process in science. A scientist would be exceptionally lucky to hit upon the solution of a daunting problem from the first go.
5. Drive and doggedness: In a sense, the opposite of the previous, an ability to deploy sustained effort toward tackling a problem. This is about the relationship between inspiration and perspiration.
6. Mental wandering: The mysterious capacity for the productive and seemingly effortless pursuit of ideas wherever they take you.
7. Mental focus: The opposite of mental wandering, this is an ability to systemically pursue a logical train of thought.
8. Iconoclastic frame of mind: In order to forge ahead of society, a creative individual must be driven by a sense of dissatisfaction with the intellectual, scientific, or artistic status quo.
9. Resonance with central societal and cultural themes: A creative individual, and certainly a genius, is ahead of society, but his/her work must be recognized by society as important and valid in order to survive.
10. Social grace: Certain supremely creative individuals were known to history for their social suaveness and adaptability, and others for a notorious lack thereof.

If you're interested in options for transforming your classroom, school, or district, you might want to join in our Edchat Interactive discussion with FETC speakers Randy Ziegenfuss and Lynn Fuini-Hetton this Thursday night. For more information and to register, click on Leading Transformation, what works and what doesn't.

 

#FETC 2018

FETC 2018 is in the books.

For me, the conference started with the EduTechGuys interviewing me about game-based learning at FETC. This was the first year FETC had a separate pavilion dedicated to education games. It was so popular it’s going to be expanded next year with more presentations and more games. Games mentioned in the interview are TeacherGaming, 3DBear AR, Agents of Discovery, Wibbu/Ruby Rei, and Amplify Reading.

If you listen, you’ll also learn that in Oklahoma, 25 times 25 is 225.

Speaking of games, I got to spend some time with Azi Jamalian of Littlebits. Playing with the different coded electronics parts is such a fun way to learn computational thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communications, and inventing to solve a problem while also experiencing electronics concepts such as power, input/output sensors, motors, servos, parallel and serial circuits, voltage, and capacitors.

Leslie Fisher did a brilliant review of Augmented Reality uses in education. She and I both agree that AR is poised to explode across the education spectrum. It immerses and engages kids, delivers compelling content, and also empowers kids to solve problems and create without requiring the purchase of physical objects.

One of her favorite applications is Aurasma, now renamed HP Reveal. You can make pages pop into life by creating an aura, which can link a trigger to text, 3D objects, or videos. Based on audience reaction, a second very popular application is goosechase, an AR app for scavenger hunts. Of course, Leslie has over 50 AR apps on her AR resources page on her website.

Poster sessions are always one of my favorite activities at tech conferences, because you get to spend real time talking to educators doing remarkable things with their kids. FETC had a special poster schedule for AR and VR apps.

The Academy of Holy Name in Windsor, CT has elementary students demonstrate their understanding of zoology by creating their own animals using Creaturizer. Middle school kids create bio domes using CoSpaces. And high schoolers create their own interactive historical adventures using Story Spheres.

Tampa Preparatory School has a 6 station VR creation lab. Computer science students create VR experiences using Unity 3D, while art students use Oculus Medium, Tilt brush, and the 3D scanner “Structure Sensor” to create 3 dimensional interactive art.

A conversation with Bob Dillon highlighted one of the mega trends at the conference. For a variety of reasons, federal and state policy is mandating, schools are demanding, and publishers are paying more attention to inclusive instructional design (or Universal Design of Instruction, UDI). Being able to accommodate students who have deficiencies or learning preferences is becoming required and commonplace, and publishers that do not have inclusive features baked in are seeing their products bypassed by curriculum committees at districts. This is a specialty of The ETIN’s Sarah Kloek, and she will be talking about how to comply with federal and state regulations at the SIIA Annual Conference in June.

And another conversation with TeamDynamix's Andrew Graf highlighted that security is the second biggest concern of superintendents nationwide. Districts have to contend with parents’, students’, and teachers' increasing expectations about immediate access to the content they want when they want it, and if there is a problem, that it be solved immediately, at the same time as they face resource constraints. Dynamix’s solution is to make it easier for users to fix problems on their own while also making it less labor intensive for the right expert to fix problems that require specialized knowledge.

And no conference would be complete without conversing with Tom Whitby. Tom and I planned out a series of Edchat Interactives on Wednesday nights that will drill down on the most popular topics of the Tuesday Edchat Twitter Chat. You can sign up for Wednesday, Feb 7 here, or see what is coming up here.