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Ernest Hemingway Meets “This American Life”: the New English Lit Class

February 10, 2012 | 11:07 AM | By

Getty

College professors are finding creative ways to use tablets in classes.

By Stephen Chupaska

What will e-readers do to the time-honored tradition of scribbling notes in the margins and underlining passages in print books?

Remains to be seen how quickly college students will adopt e-books on a mass scale. Thorny issues over who can use the books when students rent digital versions, how the growing movement of free, online textbooks will be incorporated into college curriculum, and figuring out how to share notes online are just a few important unknowns that are still being hammered out as college students think about using ebooks.

And though students still complain about using iPads (slow, cumbersome typing, for one thing), some English literature college professors are finding creative ways of using its multi-media uses.

Scott Cohen, an English professor at Stonehill Colllege, located about 30 miles southwest of Boston, is in his second year of implementing the iPad into his lessons.

“The iPad really helps move between different kinds of texts and material, visual, cinematic, written, audio, etcetera,” Cohen said. “Students love them, beyond just being a new shiny device.”

Last year, Cohen received a grant from the college’s Center for Teacher and Learning to purchase three iPads as part of a pilot program in his Storytelling in the Age of Information class.

“The iPad really helps move between different kinds of texts and material, visual, cinematic, written, audio.”

Cohen incorporates the popular NPR public radio show This American Life in his classes, and using the iPad allows the class to move between audio clips and an annotated transcript of the story that can be projected on a screen.

Cohen said students can initiate these sequences and bookmark them, efficiently saving them for future reference or emailing them to each other.

The iPad allows Cohen and his students to capitalize on the “improvisational” nature of class, as they can call up passages more quickly or even play a clip from the radio show to counter a point Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad

How to Judge if Research is Trustworthy

January 31, 2012 | 10:21 AM | By

B. Gilliard

[UPDATE Feb. 3, 2012: Please see additional clarification from both of the researchers of the studies cited in this article below.]

Scientists are notorious for questioning the veracity of publicized research — and with good reason. They want to know: Who conducted the research? Where was it published? What were the survey questions?

It’s that much more important when it comes to evaluating research in education that will affect the investment decisions of teachers, parents, and administrators.

Case in point: does the iPad boost student learning? Is it a solid educational tool, as the headline from a recent article in Wired magazine says, maintaining that the devices are improving student engagement and assessment.

The article draws on two recent studies conducted on iPad apps: one on Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Fuse Algebra I app (see MindShift’s coverage here) and one on Motion Math’s fraction app (see MindShift’s coverage here). Both of these studies tout positive results for the apps in question: In the case of the former, state standardized test scores jumped by 20%; in the case of the latter, students’ scores improved an average of 15%.

Both studies were commissioned by the companies in question; Motion Math hired an independent researcher and Houghton used both the research firm Empirical Education and its own staff to Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, apps, iPad, motion math

Study Shows Algebra iPad App Improves Scores in One School

January 23, 2012 | 2:01 PM | By

Lenny Gonzalez

Students at Presidio Middle School use the HMH iPad algebra app.

As Apple pushes out its new education products, new information about whether using the iPad gives students an advantage over using print books is starting to surface.

Results from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s year-long study comparing students using the publisher’s iPad algebra app are in from Amelia Earhart school in Riverside, Calif., and it’s largely positive, according to the company.

The study showed that 78 percent of students who used the HMH algebra iPad app scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California Standards Test, compared to 59 percent of students who used the textbook version. “As students were randomly assigFuse, the results indicated that use of the app was the chief cause behind the improvement in student test scores,” the report states. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, HMH-Fuse Pilot Study, iPad

With Media, Parents and Kids Learn More Together

January 20, 2012 | 11:20 AM | By

Flickr: Andrew Shell

Kids learn with each other while playing games on the iPad.

Most of what we read about kids and screen time revolves around whether or not it’s good for them. But one aspect of media use with kids that’s worth examining closer is how co-viewing affects their experience. Whether kids are watching TV, creating digital media, reading, searching, or playing video games with parents, siblings or friends, consuming media becomes a different kind of experience than when it’s done alone.

Though TV is still the dominant media in most homes, other forms are quickly permeating daily life: video games, apps, and exploring the Internet are woven into most families’ activities. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center calls it joint media engagement (JME), and they’ve just released one of their comprehensive reports, The New CoViewing: Designing for Learning Through Joint Media Engagement, about the phenomenon and its effects. The theory goes that the better we understand how kids use media together, the better designed the media can be, to take the most advantage of how kids work, learn, think, and make things together.

HOW PARENTS RELATE

Perhaps the activity that parents love most to do with their kids — reading — has been vastly transformed by digital media. E-books can be read on Web sites, computer software, products like LeapFrog, and of course tablets and e-readers. And depending on whom you ask, e-books (or print books) are the medium of choice for reading together. The typically tech-cautious New York Times decided that “for their children, many e-book fans insist on paper.”

But the Cooney Center’s own “quick study,” which followed 24 families with kids three- to six-years old reading both print and e-books, showed that most kids preferred reading an e-book to a print book, according to Digital Book World. And maybe just as importantly, “comprehension between the two formats were the same,” though the enhanced e-readers with all the bells and whistles were distracting to young readers.

Still, “If we can encourage kids to engage in books through an iPad, that’s a win already,” said the Cooney Center’s Carly Shuler.

Raise your hand if you’ve discreetly texted your friends or shopped on your mobile phone undercover while watching “Cars 2″ with your kids.

Plenty of studies have shown that kids learn more when they’re consuming media alongside their parents — parents typically chime in and explain what’s going on or answer questions or share their opinions about what they’re seeing, hearing, and doing. In turn, parents can have a better understanding of what their kids are doing and learning and what they’re involved with during their kids’ media use.

And for a lot of parents, this kind of interaction is important. A recent national survey showed that two-thirds of nearly 1,000 parents of 12- to 17-year-olds said they talked regularly with their kids Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, digital media, e-readers, iPad, Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Did Apple Just Reinvent the Textbook?

January 19, 2012 | 10:57 AM | By

Flickr: wohnai

There’s been speculation for months now — at least since the release of the Steve Jobs biography — about Apple’s plans to take on the textbook publishing industry. And today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we finally got a glimpse of what the company has been planning since long before the death of its co-founder.

As Apple’s Phil Schiller noted in his opening remarks today, “Education is deep in our DNA… and has been since the very beginning.” And while that may be true, it was one of the company’s most recent inventions — the iPad — that took center stage today as the ideal learning device, with Apple touting kids’ (of all ages) love and desire for the tablets.

Apple boasted the adoption that iPads have already seen — some 1.5 million iPads already in use at educational institutions, with over 1000 schools having 1:1 iPad programs. Apple also noted the rich app ecosystem that’s been built around the iPad as a learning device — over 20,000 educational apps made specifically for the device.

While the mantra throughout the event was “iPad, iPad, iPad,” the focus of much of today’s event was on textbooks — digital textbooks — and Apple’s insistence that these are “not always the ideal learning tool.” Apple unveiled several new tools that it argued would move the “great content” found in textbooks into a new, interactive, durable, portable format — in other words, move the textbooks onto the iPad.

Reading: Apple introduced iBooks2, an update to its iOS e-book app (which sadly still isn’t accessible on Macs, let alone on Windows machines) that offers a new category specially for interactive digital textbooks. These new e-textbooks contain many of the features we’ve been more accustomed to seeing in interactive e-book apps rather than in the iBookstore — videos, photos, Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, Apple, apps, digital textbooks, e-readers, iPad

The Touchy-Feely Future Of Technology

December 29, 2011 | 2:30 PM | By

Flickr: maxcosworth

By NPR Staff

In 1975, when then-composer and performer Bill Buxton started designing his own digital musical instruments, he had no way of knowing he was helping to spark the next technological revolution. But nine years — and a master’s in computer science — later, that all changed.

“I wasn’t trying to make a computer interface, I was just trying to make a drum,” Buxton tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “Did I envision what was going to happen today, that it would be in everybody’s pocket — in their smartphone? Absolutely not. Did we realize that things were going to be different, that you could do things that we never imagined? … Absolutely.”

Today, Buxton is known as a pioneer in human-computer interaction, a field of computer science that has seen a spike in consumer demand thanks to a new, seemingly ubiquitous technology: Touch.

According to the technology, media and telecommunications company IHS iSuppli, global shipments of touch-screen cellphones and tablets have gone from 244 million units to 630 million units in just two years. This year, iPad sales nearly quadrupled compared to 2010.

Casio AT 550 watch

Read more about the history of touch-screen technology as it has evolved over the years.

But if you ask Bill Buxton, the touch explosion has been long in the making. It’s part of a theory he calls The Long Nose of Innovation and it says that much of the innovation behind any technological breakthrough actually takes place over a long period of time.

Buxton became part of the long nose of touch technology when, in 1977, he signed up to study computer science at the University of Toronto. Today, Buxton is principal researcher at Microsoft Research, but he says the fact that he started out as a musician and not a technology insider has been invaluable to his work in computer science.

“It’s just your imagination that’s driving it and you’re not trying to be so deliberate,” he says. “That usually just makes you get uptight, constrained and it’s far better just to find something you love doing, chase it down and the rest will just fall out.”

Sci-Fi: Boldly Going Where No Science Has Gone Before

To many, the tablet computer seems new. But NPR’s Laura Sydell reports that the idea for a flat, personal computer shaped like a book has actually been around for a long time. Just think of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in which space travelers follow news on Earth via a “Newspad” that downloads the world’s major electronic papers.

Clarke’s newspads also show up in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film by the same name, where the fictional devices look so much like an iPad that today Samsung says it proves their Galaxy Tab isn’t a rip off of Apple’s iPad. They’ve even included a link to a YouTube clip from the film in their court documents.

Even before Space Odyssey, tablet computers had already appeared in 1966 on the original Star Trek. The first iteration was called an electronic clipboard and was used to control the ship. Around 1989, it was redesigned to ultimately do a lot of the same things iPads do today; the show’s characters used it to read books, look at reports and send messages.

Usability expert Kevin Fox says he’s not surprised science fiction writers came up with the tablet before science did.

“I think science fiction is the brainstorming part of science,” Fox says. “Look at Jules Verne for example. He’s talking about going to the moon; he’s talking about submarines, that sort of thing. It’s a lot easier to do that than it is to hold your tongue … until you’ve actually made a rocket that can go to the moon.”

How iPads Are Changing The Classroom

Now that the iPad does exist, people are finding a lot of practical applications for it. Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington County, Va., has a growing cache of iPads, about 100 for 600 students. The school uses its tablets for everything from writing to math to reading graphic novels. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, iPad