Daniel Choo

Earlier this fall, Microsoft announced that its Xbox 360 would soon offer special games and TV shows associated with several well-known children’s programs, including Sesame Street and Nat Geo Wild. The plan, says Microsoft, is to create shows that would foster a new kind of “playful learning,” tying them to the capabilities of the Microsoft Kinect device.

The timing of the news wasn’t great: the same day Microsoft unveiled its new toddler-friendly Kinect games, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report urging no or limited screen time for children under age 2.

But bringing the Kinect to children’s television is an intriguing proposition. Microsoft say that it’s filming new TV shows and building new games that “seek to inspire kids and their parents to get off the couch and into the action, working cooperatively with their favorite characters to have fun and learn at the same time.” Fun, learning and even physical activity are often invoked when it comes to children’s programming — and it’s something that the American Academy of Pediatrics challenges us to think about: while the shows might tout educational content, research actually suggests there are some negative consequences of TV on toddlers’ development.

Of course, Sesame Street, while geared at young children (those in preschool and early elementary levels), is aimed at those older than age two. But the cautionary note the American Academy of Pediatrics makes is still worth considering.

Yet the Kinect does add a new twist to children’s television viewing. The Kinect is a motion-sensing input device for the Xbox 360 game console. That means that with it, users can control their video games — and now their television shows — without having to use a game controller. Instead, the Kinect senses bodies, gestures and voice, and by using the “controller-free magic of Kinect,” says Alex Games, educational design director for Microsoft, “we can encourage kids to use their motor skills and to learn using their body in immersive experiences.”

With the new programs, television and play will be combined in order to promote a different level of engagement, according to Microsoft. With “Kinect Sesame Street TV,” kids will be able to help Cookie Monster with specific tasks, and he’ll respond to their gestures and to their voices. Of course, Sesame Street characters have always addressed viewers directly, speaking though the screen to those watching at home. The show has long asked children to sing or count along with them. But with the Kinect, the characters will now actually be able to interact more, gauging for example if a child gets the wrong answer to a question that it has posed.

This more embodied type of learning, mediated through computing devices, is something that the 2011 Horizon Report pegged as one of the key trends to watch in education technology. Although the Horizon Report said that “gesture-based computing” was still four or five years away from mainstream classroom adoption, we’re certainly seeing strong indications of what this will look like via new consumer electronics devices. It’s evident in the multitouch interface of an iPad, for example, or with the voice-input of Siri and the new iPhone 4S, or with the body-control of the Kinect. It’s clear from these examples that the future of our computing devices likely won’t demand input from a keyboard and mouse.

And if the new children’s programming with the Microsoft Kinect and Sesame Street are any indication, the future of television will likely look quite different too.

Flickr: Spacepleb

It’s been roughly two months since the launch of the Department of Education’s Digital Promise, and though it’s still very early in the process, a few pointed goals are emerging.

The main premise behind Digital Promise is to serve as a national center for research to spur innovation that will improve learning through technology, said Karen Cator, Department of Education’s Director of Technology.

At this point, the center has three goals:

1.  To bring smart ideas based on sound research to those who can bring it to life. More specifically giving entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators who create new learning products a central place to access the vast amount of research that’s already been conducted about how we learn and ways to improve learning.

2.   To offer challenges and prizes as an incentive to those who can find ways to vastly improve opportunities to learn.

3.   To create an organization where schools and leaders can work together on problems with using technology to improve learning. This group is called the League of Innovative Schools, and at this very early stage, it’s a loosely knit collaboration of people who’ve expressed interest in becoming involved.

Within this group, there are three specific goals.

• Making sure that schools and districts are informed and supportive of innovation when investing in new technologies — it’s what Cator refers to as “smart demand.”
• Gathering evidence and learning more about what’s already happening in schools and districts with respect to using technology. Harvard professor and Macarthur Fellow Roland Fryer is heading up the effort of figuring out how to gather new and different kinds of evidence, Cator said.

• Finding ways to learn from each other through collaboration.

For the most part, this is being headed up by Mark Edwards, superintendent of Moorseville Graded School District in North Carolina. Edwards is organizing the first meeting for the League of Innovative Schools on Nov. 28-29, with superintendents from around the country, as well as education consultants and service providers. (See more about Edwards’ views on learning technologies in this PBS Newshour video.)

At the moment, the Digital Promise Web site is very much a work in progress — a repository of comments and input from educators and school officials. Under the Grand Challenges tab, the site asks: What challenges in teaching and learning can technology help us solve? Comments include things like quality professional development for all, how to use video games for learning, how to best support innovators, how to implement flipped teaching in class, and using technology for performance assessment.

Under the League tab, the site asks: “How are you using technology to advance teaching and learning in innovative ways?” People have offered up things like offline and online mobile learning, software that tests and trains reading, and online assessments. Some of the ideas here seem to be written by those who have created educational products, but there’s also feedback from those who want to share their own experience and ideas.

Other recent initiatives from the DOE:

• The Learning Registry, a central repository of online education portals where those who create education content can collaborate and share resources. What does this mean for educators? They can find a list of resources like PBS Learning Media, a trove of 16,000-plus educational digital assets and resources organized by grade and subject area, and Smithsonian Education, which provides free access to almost everything under the Smithsonian umbrella.
• Microsoft will take over the DOE’s TEACH campaign, the online advocacy and recruitment program, which includes the Teach.gov site. As Edweek’s Ian Quillen points out, Microsoft has been involved with the Federal Communications Commission’s “Connect to Compete” program to bring broadband to low-income communities, “as well as launching programs to offer discounted hardware and software to educators and digital literacy training to the public.”

Read more about the DOE’s plans here.

This post was updated to clarify the number of digital assets on PBS Learning Media.

The Smithsonian Institution

Last week, as part of the Imagine Cup award ceremony, Hal Plotkin, the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education, praised Microsoft for its commitment to STEM education with its hosting of the global student technology competition. Plotkin encouraged other companies to step up and invest in these sorts of endeavors. As the projects submitted to the Imagine Cup must tackle the UN’s Millennium Goals – poverty, hunger, disease, infant mortality, environmental destruction, and so on – it’s not just good for the U.S. education system, it’s good for the world.

Microsoft is not the only corporation involved in promoting STEM education.  Earlier this year, MindShift profiled the Change the Equation non-profit, through which companies like ExxonMobil, Dell and Lockheed Martin have supported science and technology education. Intel says it’s spent over $1 billion on education projects. And just last week, Google announced the winners of its first online global science fair, just one of the many programs that the search engine giant has undertaken to help encourage budding scientists, engineers, and programmers.

Corporate sponsorship and funding is seen as necessary to help boost the programs that oftentimes schools can’t afford. That seems to be particularly true when it comes to student competitions and science fairs, as these sorts of “extracurricular” projects are often on the chopping block when schools look to streamline their budgets.

But what are the implications of having students engaged in corporate-sponsored science? In the case of both the Imagine Cup and the Google Science Fair, participating students were required to use Microsoft and Google products respectively in their projects. Of course, students don’t often have a choice when it comes to the technology they get to use in the classroom. If your school has Windows computers, you use Windows; if your school runs Macs, you use Macs.

Corporate-sponsored activities aren’t anything new in education, and they certainly aren’t restricted to science fairs. One need only look at sports to see how marketing and sponsorship “plays out” — for better or worse.

Technology corporations do have a vested interest in helping support STEM education as it means a good supply of skilled workers in the future. But it’s easy to see companies’ involvement as marketing efforts — producing future customers, not just future employees.

How then do schools distinguish STEM-as-marketing from STEM-as education? And do they need to? How do we both welcome and scrutinize these corporate efforts? What are our alternatives?

One may be the “maker movement,” as exemplified by Make magazine and the Maker Faire. The DIY, hands-on exploration encouraged by the maker movement may be just the thing to get kids encouraged in science and technology. Not only does the maker movement encourage creativity and innovation, but it’s also breaking down the walls of the schoolroom, making it clear to students that science isn’t something that happens in the lab or in the classroom. It can happen in your backyard or in your garage. And it can happen without major investment from big companies.

Daniel Choo

Within the first 60 days of its release, Microsoft sold some eight million Kinects, making it the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history (beating out the iPad and the VCR).

For those who aren’t familiar with it yet, Kinect is a sensor input device for the popular Xbox gaming console that allows gamers to play without any controllers.

It’s been less than a year since the Kinect has been available to the public, and while the rapid uptake by consumers has broken records, it still feels as though the full potential has yet to be unleashed — particularly in the classroom.

We’re probably just beginning to explore the possibilities for building and using video games for learning. Now, the Kinect adds even more dimensions to gaming, least of which is the physical and the auditory, bringing “the real world” to gaming.

The Kinect sensors include a RGB camera, a depth sensor, and a microphone — all meaning that the physical actions taken by gamers can be captured by the Kinect and used in turn to control simulations. “You are the controller,” as some of the early marketing for the device contends.

But it isn’t just this gesture-based computing that makes the Kinect interesting for educational applications. It’s the fact that the Kinect software was quickly hacked and that now Microsoft has released a software development kit (SDK) so that users can hack away, but with permission and even guidance — a big draw for both hobbyists and student hackers.

These user-created hacks are, quite frankly, a lot more impressive than some of the original games that came with the Kinect.

At the ISTE 2011 conference, Bryan Baker, a computer science teacher at Allen High School in Allen, Texas, gave a presentation on how to use Kinect and the XNA Game Studio as a way of teaching high-school-level computer science students programming and game design.

“I want to light a fire for you and your kids,” said Baker in his presentation, “because this is really cool stuff.”

It is, indeed, because SDK for Kinect helps put game development in the hands of students. It’s all free, save the cost of the Kinect device itself. The official SDK allows .NET developers to write apps in C++, C# or Visual Basic. Some of the unofficial hacks do open Kinect development to other programming languages, but as these are unofficial, they do raise some questions about how teachers handle official and unofficial “hacking.”

Nonetheless, the potentials for Kinect are still exciting, and as teachers will have the summer months to play with the official SDK, I predict we see more Kinect development occur in computer science classes in the fall. Indeed, as Baker exclaimed with delight, “Some day, this device is going to take attendance for us!”

Flickr:WilliamC

• Microsoft announced this week that it has agreed to acquire the popular VOIP service Skype for $8.5 billion. Skype has become an important tool for educators bridging classrooms around the world, and the acquisition may boost Microsoft’s status in the education sector (provided, of course, Skype still works on Apple computers).

• According to the June issue of Consumer Reports, Facebook has about 7.5 million users below the required minimum age of 13. And 5 million of those users are ten or younger.
• While teens and pre-teens may love Facebook, they’re less than enthralled with Foursquare and other location-based check-ins. That’s the findings of a recent survey by Dubit, a youth communications agency, reports Business Insider. According to the survey, 48% of teens have not heard of Foursquare, Facebook Places, or other location services, and 67% of teens who have heard of the services don’t use any of them.
• Google has announced the semi-finalists for the Google Science Fair. Voting on these entries runs through May 20.
• Inside Higher Ed reports on a new survey by Student Monitor that finds that print textbooks are popular on campuses — far more popular than e-books — due in part to a thriving textbook rental business. 24% of students say they’ve rented at least one textbook this year, up from 12% this time last year. Only 5% say they’ve purchased a digital textbook.
• Disney subsidiary Playdom, an online gaming company that makes a number of popular children’s games, has agreed to pay the FTC $3 million over charges that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by illegally collecting and then exposing children’s personal data without receiving consent from parents.
• At its annual developer conference this week, Google announced a “new kind of computer” — a cloud-based netbook-like laptop based on its new operating system Chrome OS. These Chromebooks will be offered to schools via a $20 per month per student rental program. MindShift raises questions that schools should consider before signing the 3-year contract.

Flickr: WilliaC

• The Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released its study on children’s media usage. Among its findings, television is still popular, but children are engaging in a variety of other media platforms. Almost 25 percent of young children under age 5 use the Internet at least once a week, and just under half of those under the age of 6 play video games.

• The social learning platform Xplana released its report on digital textbooks in higher education, calling the industry at a tipping point and contending that by 2015, one out of every four textbooks will be e-books.

• Google rolled out some changes to its Google Docs enhancing its collaboration features. Google Docs has allowed comments for almost a year, something that makes the apps great for classroom – for teachers and for students giving feedback. This week, Google expanded those comments into “discussions,” making them editable, making them appear in threaded conversations, and letting collaborators use the @ symbol to refer to each other by name. Google Wave lives on!

• A complaint was filed against Northwestern and New York University, charging that the schools’ use of Google Apps for Education violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to the National Federation of the Blind, Google’s educational suite is not fully accessible. Google has responded saying it has “a strong commitment to improving our products,” but the company did not offer any details.

• Microsoft released an update to its video game development platform for kids, Kodu. Kodu is an icon-based development environment, requiring no programming skills but teaching some of the basics of computational thinking and used to build games for PC and Xbox. Microsoft also announced the Kodu Cup competition for students age 9 to 17.

• A new education-focused startup incubator launched this week. ImagineK12 will provide a 3-month accelerator program, with funding and mentorship, for early stage ed-tech startups. Founded by startup veterans Geoff Ralston, Tim Brady andAlan Louie and modeled after the very successful Y Combinator program, ImagineK12 aims “to effect positive change in the K-12 education space.”