What should the dream K-12 tablet be like for e-reading and other uses? The issue for teachers isn’t just the hardware but also the supporting system behind it. How easy is it to update apps? Or distribute reading materials?
Via Whispercast, Amazon at least seeks to make it easier for educators to send legally purchases e-books to students devices, even nonKindles, and in the era of six packs of $50 Fire tablets, K-12 interest should only grow. Other vendors such as Amplify are also at work on these issues.
Thinking generically, here’s what I’m looking for—both in terms of distribution and student engagement and interaction with e-books:
1) A Web-Based or Cloud-Based System
You’d be amazed at how long it can take to download individual apps onto a dozen or more different devices. I’d love a cloud-based system where each time a device is turned on, the user logs in and then sees content which is customized to him or her. No downloads needed! Just log in, and use it as you wish.
For example, let’s say I was the school admin and I spent some time each September setting up a log-in for each teacher. The grade 1 teacher could log in, choose their content and presto. When their students log on, the books and apps and video will all be the content she chose. Want to make some changes? No problem. Log in as the grade 1 teacher, find the book or activity you want, and add it to your collection. The next time your students log in, there it will be.
2) Two-Way Communication
I’d like to see the kids be able to communicate with the adult administrators better. Let’s say that I pre-select a book for my Grade 1 students. What if they could comment back to me? What if I could pre-set options for them to click on when the book is done to tell me if it was too hard or too easy? Or if I could show them how to highlight words they found tricky, and then I could access those highlights after the fact?
And the kids in our life are all huge YouTube fans. How sweet would it be if every time the Kiddo favorited a video, his dad got a message saying Kiddo wanted to share it with him? It could give parents a real window into what their kids are interested in. And we’re trying to get the child more interested in books, too. I’d love to have an ecosystem where he or she could wish list something, and we’d get an alert with an option to buy it.
3) The Ability to Set Assignments
I find many of my students waste too much of their precious tablet time on ‘free play’ because teachers either don’t know what to do with them, or don’t know how to monitor their use to only productive things. Let’s go back to my classroom teacher log-ins. What if that Grade 1 teacher could log in every Monday, via a web interface, and set some tasks for the week? Before the student can free play, they have to read a story in Raz Kids, do a phonics review game, achieve a target score in a math drill game, and watch three pre-selected science videos.
What if the device could automatically compile a weekly report, too? For each kid log-in, it could track when these activities get checked off and how they did with it (for example, Raz Kids does track scores for each student). This would be such useful information, and easy enough to automate…
The key for me is more web, less downloadable apps. I know there is a downside to that because you’d need an active wifi connection to keep it all running. But that is much easier to achieve in a school setting than three hours or prep time a week to download content, and I think the trade-off would be well worth it.
Ah, but Joanna, you’re taking away the one advantage kids have over their teachers—their sheer numbers. Kids get away with doing what they want because monitoring is so time and labor intensive.
With kids, I worry less. They often need to be monitored. But the recent NY Times article on Amazon reveals a worrisome trend—employers coming up with ‘metrics’ that the upper management thinks measure productivity in office workers. It signals a return to the dread Taylorism of a century ago, with resulting poor morale and high turnover.
“Scientific Management, also called Taylorism, is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
And it is far more suited to monitoring teachers than their students. In the end, a student can say, “Ah, buzz off” (or worse) if hassled for not meeting some metric. For teachers, not generating the proper metrics that some “system” is calculating could mean their jobs. The down side to knowing what each kid is doing in great detail is like that with standardized testing, it distorts the often complex teaching process.
Particularly worrisome are efforts to apply these metrics to nursing and even medical practice. I deal with the bad effects of that in my Senior Nurse Mentor. It illustrates the principle of unintended consequences. Aiming to achieve X may also result in Y and the harm done by Y may outweigh the benefits of X.
Standardized testing of students, for instance, often leads schools to ‘teach to the test’ and often to drop any topic that, however useful for students, doesn’t impact those test results. Checking off activities may lead teachers and students to cheat, making it look like they’re doing more than they are.
I’ve taught a few college courses using iTunes U which is now available to K-12. I use the private course option which does not require an institutional affiliation. Public or private, an iTunes U course has many of the features on your wish list. An iPad for each student is required. Details on iTunes U: https://www.apple.com/support/itunes-u/public-site-manager/
However, like other hosted (ne’ cloud) services, iTunes U is network dependent and consequently slow to download an eBook, video or other content the first time. After that, it stays on the iPad, space permitting. This prompts me to think that what’s needed is a Low Hanging Cloud (LHC).
By “low hanging cloud,” I mean an intermediary cloud server located in the home or in the school building. This device would be on one’s Local Area Network (LAN) and, so, be much speedier (gigabit potential). The LHC would download and cache files from the internet-based cloud and redistribute them via the LAN on demand.
This is actually an old idea used in corporate IT to facilitate desktop management and version control. So, the more people downloading the same file on a LAN the greater the efficiency.
Indeed, lots of things would work better and faster with an LHC. Even a small family unit, each with a laptop or mobile device, would benefit. Perhaps this could only or best be done by the vendors who run these cloud-based services. Being more hardware oriented, I’d expect Apple to do this before Google They could then sell us yet another device for our LANs.