PILOTed

Is the US globally competitive?

Most of you who are reading this are in education, and most are in the US. We are preparing the next generation to take roles in the US culture, society, and workplace. And to participate in the workplace, there have to be good jobs. Are there, in fact, going to be jobs, for today’s students?

The World Economic Forum publishes an annual study of the world’s economies and how attractive they are for business. With all the talk about high tax rates, crumbling infrastructure, and bloated government in the US, the report’s conclusions are that “Switzerland, Singapore and the United States remain the three world’s most competitive economies.”

In terms of size, the US is the world's largest economy. Switerland’s economy is 19^th and is 1/30^th the size of the US, and Singapore is 37^th and is 1/3 the size of Switzerland’s. The US looks great compared to other large economies, China is the 28^th, Japan is 8^th, Germany is 5^th in terms of competitiveness.

Overall, growth around the globe has slowed, due to low productivity gains, increased income inequality, and aging populations. But there is a promise for future higher economic growth due to a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” based on digital platforms and technologies that converge physical, digital, and biological applications. Some of the most promising areas are artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things, and advanced manufacturing such as 3D printing.

If I were directing school, district, state, or federal education policy, I would be preparing students for leadership in these fields. In fact, the report concludes that “an increasingly important element of competitiveness is creating an enabling environment for innovation.”

The process of starting to produce new products and new sectors is incredibly difficult; education is only one piece. Two good models for focused effective strategies are the Dominican Republic, which set up the National Productivity and Competitiveness Initiative as a public-private partnership and Colombia which set up a National System of Competitiveness to coordinate initiatives of the government with the private sector, schools, and civil society on issues related to productivity and economic development. While the US as a whole is much larger than either country, these could be great models for state or county initiatives here.

Compared to the rest of the world, the US is in pretty good shape. We should feel lucky to live here. Not that we can’t do better, and not that we don’t have to move forward. As a society, and as the people who will most influence the next generation, we need to focus on programs and activities that will increase equality and prepare students for the jobs of the fourth industrial evolution.

SpeakUp's From Print to Pixel

SpeakUp's latest report is From Print to Pixel: The role of videos, games, animations and simulations with K-12 education.

They report that 84% of school principals believe that effective use of technology within instruction is important for student success, but cite that the biggest obstacle is getting teachers to change their instructional practice to one infused with technology; the top barrier is the lack of teacher training on how to integrate digital content within instruction.

According to principals the 5 biggest benefits of using more digital content:

1. Increases student engagement
2. Extends learning beyond the school day
3. Enables personalized instruction
4. Increase relevancy and quality of instructional materials
5. Improves teachers’ skills with technology

What are the biggest uses of technology by teachers? 68% use videos they find online, 48% use games, 36% use online curriculum and 30% use online textbooks.

Students, not surprisingly, embrace these forms of instruction. One example, through the eyes of a 6^th grade student: “Virtual reality simulations can help us with subjects like science, help us interact with chemicals or tools that can be dangerous in the real world. Even in History we could practically time travel and experience the Trojan War or experience what it was like to be a Pilgrim without any real danger.”

MS and HS students like video-based instruction:

1. They can watch it as many times as they want
2. Easier to understand concepts
3. Connects lessons to the real world
4. Fits their learning style
5. Easy to access and find

Yet, relatively few students seek out resources on their own. Only 44% of HS girls and 34% of HS boys say they independently go online to find videos to help them learn. About half of all secondary students say that they are learning important things online on their own outside school.

To me, that is the biggest disappointment. It's exciting to live in a time of change. But, I would have hoped schools would be better able to spark students to take more control of their own learning. 

Are you compliant with privacy and security requirements regarding student data?

How would you even know?

Here is a primer, whether you are a teacher, administrator, or service provider.

The goal is to protect student information, student records and student-generated content from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification or disclosure based on the sensitivity of the data and the risk from unauthorized access. The implementation is a moving target, as the technologies and methodologies often refer to meeting or exceeding

• industry standards,
• the HIPPA Security Rule as amended from time to time, and
• the current guidance and recommendation from Health IT Policy Committee.

Student security applies to any entity that knows that their service is designed, marketed, and used for school purposes. If a student or school is using a product that does not meet these criteria, the privacy laws may not be applicable for that company or that product.

Student information, student records, or student-generated content cannot be used for any purposes that have not been spelled out in a contract, and specifically cannot be used for targeted advertising, and the information cannot be sold, rented, shared, or traded. While a company can advertise, the advertisement cannot be based on any information acquired or access through school purposes.

Student identifiable information cannot be stored for longer than is required based on the educational purposes, and all student generated content is owned by the student and parents.

A supplier can use student identifiable information in order to improve their service.

A suppler can de-identify student information, and use it to improve their product and to demonstrate effectiveness, and it may share de-identified student information to improve their services.

Generally, in case of a breach, the supplier is required to notify the local or regional board of education (and sometimes students and parents) within a specified amount of time, sometimes within 30 days.

Generally, any use of school data or systems must be under contract, and all contracts should include at least the following provisions:

• A statement that student information, student records and student-generated content are not the property of or under the control of a contractor;
• A description of the means by which the local/ regional board of education may request the deletion of student information, records or generated content in the possession of the contractor;
• A statement that the contractor shall not use student information, records and generated content for any purposes other than those authorized pursuant to the contract;
• A description of the procedures by which a student, parent or legal guardian of a student may review personally identifiable information contained in student information, records or generated content and correct erroneous information, if any, in such student record;
• A statement that the contractor shall take actions designed to ensure the security and confidentiality of student information, records and generated content;
• A description of the procedures that a contractor will follow to notify the local/ regional board of education, in accordance with the provisions of section 4 of this act, when there has been an unauthorized release, disclosure or acquisition of student information, records or generated content;
• A statement that student information, records or generated content shall not be retained or available to the contractor upon completion of the contracted services unless a student, parent or legal guardian of a student chooses to establish or maintain an electronic account with the contractor for the purpose of storing student-generated content;
• A statement that the contractor and the local/regional board of education shall ensure compliance with the FERPA of 1974, 20 USC 1232g, as amended from time to time;
• A statement that the laws of the state of Connecticut shall govern the rights and duties of the contractor and the local/regional board of education and
• A statement that if any provision of the contract or the application of the contract is held invalid by a court of competent jurisdiction, the invalidity does not affect other provisions/applications of the contract which can be given effect without the invalid provision or application.

If the contract is missing one or more provision, the entire contract might be void.

What should be your take-away?

If you are going to use an applicable product or service, or if you are intending to provide a product or service into schools, you need documentation that

• There are security measures that meet industry standards for use of student data.
• There are security breach notification procedures.
• Uses of any data is limited to approved purposes, especially regarding advertising and marketing strategies.
• Agreements exist with any and all third parties cover the security and privacy requirements of the state.

I want to note that some of the descriptions and language come from the Connecticut Act surrounding student data and privacy.

Real Cool for School

On August 24 (my birthday, by the way)  First Lady Michelle Obama announced ThinkZone Games as the grand prize winner in the Reach Higher Career App Challenge! ThinkZone Games will receive $100,000 and additional sponsor prizes valued at $300,000 for our career exploration mobile app Hats & Ladders.

If you're going to be at the EdNet Conference Sept 25-27, and want to talk about the place of games in our education system, or about Edchat Interactive, or about the education market, contact us.

 

ASUGSV 2016 Highlights

What happens when 3500 of education’s digerati descend on San Diego? If you answered, the ASUGSV Summit, you're right.

For me, there were two sessions that hit it out of the park. Of course, that's not counting the 27 meetings over three days. Oh, and while we're talking about hitting it out of the park, how about those Mets?

Mind Games: Can Emerging Game Technologies Improve Learning & Talent Outcomes

• Rob Hutter, Founder, Learn Capital
• Johan Brand, CEO, Kahoot
• Vu Bui, COO Mojang AB (of Minecraft fame)
• Norihisa Wada, CMO, EduALab (Japan)
• Lauri Jarvilehto, CEO, Lightneer

Key takeaways:

• There is a parallel design structure to designing great games and designing great learning. When looking at brain images, there is virtually no difference between play and learning. In fact, well-designed games inspire self-regulated learning.
• Games solve the problem of students being too bored to learn. To close the engagement gap, schools need to compete with other distractions; games will do that, and best practice is playing games followed by a discussion of tactics, obstacles, and accomplishments.
• The power of games is the interaction-feedback loop, which fuels learning. While educational games have long been viewed as an oxymoron, that is rapidly changing as efficacious products are coming to market.

ED is in the Middle of mEDia

• Alan Arkatov, USC Professor and Katzman/Ernst Chair in Educational Entrepreneurship, Technology and Innovation
• Edward Fields, CEO, HotChalk
• David Rogier, CEO, MasterClass
• RIchard Sarnoff, Managing Director, Private Equity, KKR

Key takeaways:

• The large media companies are taking a close look at education (e.g. the $230M Bertlesmann plunked down on HotChalk). As the media companies look for better returns, they see that education is becoming more like what you watch on TV, except that people are willing to pay perhaps $5 for an hour of entertainment, but $100 for an hour of education, and the market for education is expanding as more people need to learn more over their entire lifetimes. Today, about 1/3 of the time people go online it’s to learn something.
• There are large hurdles. It’s hard for outside companies to understand that education requires a 7-10 year horizon; education is at best a get rich slow market. Second, while a lot of technology in other sectors has replaced humans with capital, that’s not happening in education. Third, education is highly regulated, with multiple layers of decision making, and so moves incredibly slow.
• While current levels of investment may feel like a bubble, addressing the biggest education issues are going to take such a long time to tackle, and the scale of the problems is so big, that the returns will eventually be huge. This will be even more readily apparent with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, which it will make it possible for students, teachers, and objects to interact without physically being in the same space and time.

And if you're looking to expand in education, shouldn't you be talking to Academic Business Advisors? 

 

The Teacher 2 Tech connection

The following post was written by Steve Isaacs and originally appeared on the Teacher2Teacher Facebook Community. Steve teaches Middle School technology classes, including game design, at William Annin Middle School in Basking Ridge, NJ. When technology providers give voice to teachers, kids benefit through vastly improved educational resources.

[Early in my career] I started to realize that I was interested in connecting with other educators who were interested in gaming and game design. I also realized there weren’t many people teaching middle school game design.

I’m always developing my own curriculum and started to connect with companies that make the product I was using whenever I could. Thanks to social media, I quickly learned that these companies are very interested in making connections and developing relationships with teachers, but a lot of teachers don’t realize they’re that accessible.

Over time, that led to a collaboration with BrainPOP. I had been working with a lot of companies such as E-Line Media (I use Gamestar Mechanic with my 7th graders). I was doing a little bit of consulting with them; I think a lot of my suggestions helped shape the product over time, and I became friendly with a few people over there. Katya Hott moved over to BrainPOP, and she and I started talking about connecting the developer side and educator side of edtech.

There’s a cultural divide between developers and educators and other stakeholders, so I started thinking more specifically about developers and put in a proposal to present at SXSWEdu 2014 on that topic. What Hott and I presented was a problem-solving session; it really was us starting a discussion about how we could bridge the gap [between educators and developers] and how we could start to build community through a Twitter chat.

That community [developed from that session], #EdTechBridge, has grown tremendously on Twitter and outside the hour-long chat since it started in early 2014. One of my goals for #EdTechBridge is to continue to help see those relationships [between educators and developers] come together outside of the chat. There are a lot of opportunities for educators to work with developers to help shape products, which is really important if these products are going to be used in classrooms as effective teaching tools.

Steve’s top 4 tips for making Teacher2Tech connections:

1. Join us for #EdTechBridge on Wednesday nights at 7 pm ET. #EdTechBridge was created to help form and nurture relationships among edtech stakeholders including educators, developers, students and researchers. The chat helps to build the community and provides a starting point for relationships to form based on shared interest regarding products and users.  

2. Reach out directly to developers of products you use. Developers are very accessible and interested in forming relationships and receiving feedback. This can often lead to productive working relationships that are mutually beneficial. I find Twitter to be a great place to start these discussions--tweet out a comment to the edtech developer’s Twitter account. Praise is always a great way to start a conversation. :)

3. In addition to the #EdTechBridge weekly chat, we started a Slack community. Slack is an online community platform that allows for persistent discussion. This format allows us to continue conversations outside of the community through the channels in the Slack group. We have channels dedicated to general discussion, introductions, future chat topics and collaborations. You can also initiate small group or 1:1 discussions within the online community. Anyone interested in joining the #EdTechBridge Slack community is welcome as long as they provide me with an email address so I can invite you.  

4. Get involved in #Games4Ed, a nonprofit aiming to bring more games into the classroom while looking at critical issues around the use of games in education. A #Games4Ed Twitter chat takes place every Thursday at 8 pm ET and is moderated by myself, Mallory Kessen from Gamindex and Melissa Pilakowski. Find out more about the #Games4Ed initiative by visiting http://www.games4ed.org/.

BMO 2015 Back to School Conference

BMO’s Back to School Conference is always an interesting departure from other education events. At Back to School, the perspective is financial; which education products, services, and companies will provide a return to investors? 

Education business is unlike any other business. Everything you do has to be a multi-constituent solution; you have to provide outcomes, value, and efficiencies for a wide variety of stakeholders, with long decision processes. This makes for long selling cycles and longer gestational periods for companies. While Facebook started in 2004 and went public in 2012 with a $100B valuation, education investors need more patience for significantly smaller returns, if they make any money at all.

Even so, the last few years have seen an unprecedented level of interest from investors. A few years ago, there was under $100 million dollars invested in education. Two years ago, there was $334M. Last year, $1.2B was invested, and this year looks like more of the same.

Here were some of the most interesting observations from pundits and investors.

We are unlikely to see a real revolution in Higher Education, because the government (state and federal combined) is putting up too much money to keep things the way they are. Every year, the government puts up $100B in student loans and an additional $130B in grants to institutions per year. How is a new mode of education, without access to those subsidies, going to overcome that headwind?

Not only is there unprecedented investment in education, there are an incredibly large number of startups. When Jonathon Harbor opened applications for 10 spots in his Edge Edtech Accelerator (to receive $100-150K investment plus 3 month bootcamp) he received 560 applicants.

One of the things fueling investment is the myriad of opportunities for company exits. While there has always been the possibility of a few companies growing large enough to be being acquired, there are over 100 examples each of the last two years of companies between $10M to over $200M of annual revenues selling out for substantial profits for their investors.

Of course, a lot of edtech valuations haven’t proven themselves out, but in the short term, edupreneurs are doing well.

One of the critical obstacles for new products and companies is the ability to pilot their products in schools. Can’t you hear a principal saying to an entrepreneur, “I’m really not interested in you trying out your minimum viable product on our kids.”

While there has been an emphasis on data, it’s hard to find data that accurately measure student skills  and that is actionable. In fact, when you consider the things that we say we really value in education, like planning, communicating, problem solving, and persistence, there is virtually no usable data.

Sounds to me that if you're considering expanding your business in edtech, maybe you should contact Academic Business Advisors.

Thank you to BMO, Jeff Silber, and the team for another great conference!

Games in Education Symposium Wrapup

On August 6-7, 1^st Playable hosted the annual Games in Education Symposium in Albany, NY.

This is a free event for educators to get hands on advice in game based learning, and I was able to attend (and present) on the first day.

Keynote with Peggy Sheehy

The symposium started with Peggy Sheehy keynoting. “There’s a word for most games used in the classroom,” she began, “boring.”

But even bad games can have educational value, and the best game based curricula involves the kids in the design process. Begin with two questions for the kids:

1. How can I best teach this?
2. How do you want to learn it?

Kids today are the future, and the future isn’t sitting in rows taking tests. Schools need to be more like a game; when you get it wrong, you just do it again until you know how to do it right. In school in particular, and in society in general, we pit the seriousness of work against the frivolity of play, when we should be maximizing the outputs of work through deploying fun and engagement of play.

There were tons of breakout sessions, from fun ways to flip your classroom, digital games of Middle School Science Learning, Teaching Computer Science with App Inventor,  and the NY STEAM Girl’s Collaborative.

ARGs with Paul Darvasi and John Fallon

Using the real world as the field of play. Paul Darvasi and John Fallon (the real one, not the guy at
Pearson) have created Alternative Reality Games to teach a variety of subjects. One of the most recent was to teach digital literacy and privacy. Students became immersed in a mystery, trying to figure out who was trying to amass information on US and Canadian citizens in order to control them, and in the process found out just how much information was available about them, how that information could be used against them, and how to protect their identities. Another recent game was the Ward Game, re-enacting the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the classroom. Their tips:

1. Develop a compelling narrative and story
2. Create emotional connections
3. Repurpose space in the classroom and school and place them into the game (diplomas, newspaper articles, announcements, posters, etc.)
4. Create false documents that look like real ones
5. Use social media, like fictional characters on FB or videos on YouTube
6. Get collaborators who can play characters or face email or social media accounts
7. Use a variety of game mechanics, like quests and missions, timers, puzzles, cyphers, codes
8. The correct solution to a puzzle or quest must be obviously correct to the participants

Game Jam with Games4Ed

After lunch, Kimberly Heftje, Marianne Malmstrom, Steve Isaacs, and I (all of Games4Ed) ran a 45 minute session where participants broke into small groups to create their own game based learning curriculum. Four groups successfully created activities that used existing games to teach science, ELA, and math along with 21^st century skills such as problem solving, planning, and collaboration. All participants will be able to re-enact those processes back in their own schools to expand on that curriculum or to create their own with their fellow educators.

Closing with Marianne Malmstrom

In a closing session for the day, Marianne Malmstrom gave a talk on creating space for student-driven learning.

Are the things we teach and assess in education the most important things for students to learn? If we fill up schools and class time with all the stuff in the standards and assessments, there is no place left for learning, we will be too busy teaching.

As the adults in the room, we are the experts in life; we don’t have to be the experts in content. And bookending Peggy’s comment, Marianne’s conclusion was that if we would just listen to the kids, they’ll tell us how to teach them.

My only regret is that I was not able to stay around for the second day. I heard Steve Isaacs’s keynote was epic!

Coming Up

I am in three speaking proposals for SxSW Edu. Please vote:

• ARG! Let’s Create Games for Learning: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/54757
• Power Up STEM Professional Development with Games: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/56393
• Edu-gaming: money, morals, and games in classrooms: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/53244

We have a great lineup for Edchat Interactive over the next week:

• August 20: Hacking Education with Mark Barnes: http://www.edchatinteractive.org/upcoming-seminars/august-20-hacking-education
• August 25: Games Jams with Matt Farber: http://www.edchatinteractive.org/upcoming-seminars/mattfarberaug2015

Looking to see as many of you as possible at the BMO Back to School Conference in NY September 10 and at Ednet 2015 in Atlanta October 4-6.

Serious Play Conference

The Serious Play Conference deals with the big issues of society, and in a fun way.

Did you know that there is research that shows the value of diversity? Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon
abstracted the data that indicates:

• Expertise diversity leads to innovation, the more diverse, the more innovative
• More diversity leads to more conflict, but the conflict sparks useful desirable innovation
• A key characteristic of a leader, one that leads to highly functioning teams, is trust; if the team members believe the leader has their back, they will be considerable more effective.
• Gender and age diversity lead to consistently better results, and, in fact, are more highly associated with success than ethnic diversity

We all know that intellectual knowledge is just a fraction of what we need in order to live, and that historically the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) were taught through societal institutions such as family, apprenticeship, and religion.

Today, these KSAs can be taught via games. Here are three examples.

Dojo, by GameDesk, helps people learn to regulate their emotions and behaviors. Have you ever wanted
to calm yourself down, or to focus on one thing instead of … squirrel? Instead of trying to learn through reading or listening, you could attach biofeedback devices and learn and practice through Dojo. Imagine if students could learn these skills in schools? You can see how Dojo works in this video.

What if you could learn history through art? How was Picasso’s art influenced by society and historical events, and how did his art reflect on and impact the world around him? Andre Thomas of Texas A&M founded Live Lab to leverage the university’s Game Design students, Professional game designers, and Electronic Arts’ publishing might to create games that excite and motivate students. While Universities often produce games that show results in research trials, that’s where most university projects stop. The goal of Live Lab is to take these prototypes, finish them, and produce and distribute games that are backed up by research.

Or, what if we all had the skills to detect situations that lead to rape and the skills to defuse the situation? Decisions that Matter has been tested with hundreds of college students yielding substantial, if not yet published, results. The game was produced at a cost in excess of $1M through grants from NSF.

 With all these games, impact has been proven, what remains unknown is how to get these games into the hands of thousands or millions of students who can benefit, and how do you make these operations sustainable. Those questions are yet to be answered, although we are hoping that Games4Ed can lower the barriers.

ISTE 2015 Thoughts

Another ISTE; what did we learn?

This was a very exciting ISTE for me personally.

On Sunday June 28, we had our Games4Ed in person meeting to discuss Game Jams, PD around Game Based Learning, and Pilots of games in schools and districts. We were expecting just over 30 people, but more than 50 attended, teachers, administrators, game developers, policy makers, researchers, and software publishers. There was high energy and momentum building around each of these initiatives. Look for Announcements from Game4Ed.

Soledad O’Brien’s keynote Sunday night was one of the best ISTE opening keynote’s I’ve heard. She gave an inspiring message around equity and diversity. One of her notable quotes was, “I want to live in a country where education is a civil right, not a function of your parent’s zipcode.” And as inspiring as her presentation was, educator Rafranz Davis’s was just at another level. You can always count on Rafranz to be provocative, entertaining, and inspiring. In describing the need for diversity in administrators, teachers, mentors, and role models, Rafranz noted: “You cannot be what you cannot see.”

On Monday June 29, the highlight was being a judge for ISTE’s Ed Tech Startup Pitch Fest. This is an opportunity to hear young innovative companies describe how they are transforming education.

Tuesday started off with an SIIA and CoSN breakfast where educators and administrators described their good and bad experiences with vendors. As in the past, districts are looking for solutions that help them solve big problems, they don’t want products, they want partners who do their homework in advance, listen to their priorities, and help them plan implementation and support for whatever initiatives they are about to undertake.

Tuesday’s highlight was listening to students describe their tech experience in school at the PR with Panache suite. Some of the quotable statements:

• Why would you have a 60 year old teacher who doesn’t even know how to reset a router be the gatekeeper for us using technology?
• If you’re trying to teach me something I already learned two years ago, don’t complain when you see I’m bored and not paying attention.
• Don’t talk about how you have computers in every classroom, when they are so slow we can’t actually do any work on them.
• I don’t care that the vendors are tracking me, even without tracking I can go on the Internet and find out where you live and what you are interested in in 2 seconds.
• We’ve learned to be careful about what we put on the Internet. We know there are bad people out there, and that there are things we shouldn’t post. Now you need to trust us and let us get our work done.
• Technology will never replace teachers. We need teachers. Without teachers, growing up would be like Lord of the Flies.

The Admin Special Interest Group is one of my favorite events at ISTE, where school and district
administrators share their best practices. There were 15 different presentations, all meaningful. Scott McLeod’s trudacot protocol for facilitating conversations about deeper learning, student agency and technology integration was definitely a highlight. Another modeled student quests on the Breakout Games, although students weren’t actually locked in the room. Admittedly though, it was tempting.

Late Wednesday morning was an interview of Larry Cocco and me by Jeff Bradbury of TeacherCast, where we talked about game based learning, student engagement, Games4Ed, and EdChat Interactive. We'll let you know when it is posted.

Erik Martin of the US Department of Education led an interesting discussion on the use of games in class as one of the closing sessions. Games are the only way to experience events and places we cannot physically visit. The way we will scale game based learning is to provide hands-on practice to teachers, and then demonstrate how games make their lives easier. To show the impact of games and how games are inspiring learning, the Department now publishes their information on Game Based Learning at http://tech.ed.gov/games/.

And then it was over.

But don't stop the learning, see what's coming up on Edchat Interactive. Our next session is July 29 on Grading, Assessment, and Feedback, with Dave Nagel.