New Tech Network

In many schools, project-based learning happens in isolated cases: in certain teachers’ classrooms here and there, or in the contexts of specific subjects. But for students to benefit from project-based learning, ideally it’s part of a school’s infrastructure — a way to approach learning holistically.

For one quickly growing network of schools, project-based learning is the crux of the entire ecosystem. New Tech Network, which was founded 15 years ago, is taking its school-wide project-based model to national scale. The organization, which offers a paid program for schools to use its model, began with a flagship school in Napa and has grown to 120 schools in 18 states, most of which are public schools.

The network has not only grown in size, but also in notoriety. President Obama visited Manor New Tech High School in Texas last week, as part of an effort to promote an education agenda focused on producing graduates that can compete in today’s global economy.

The nod from the president comes at a time when New Tech is attempting to position itself as a successful model to follow. But rather than relying on test scores and such quantifiable numbers to prove its value, New Tech’s own 2013 annual report frames success by focusing on deeper learning that can’t be measured by standardized test scores and their college readiness. Yet it’s that lack of emphasis on test scores, an all-consuming worry for many districts, that makes it more difficult for the organization to pin point numbers to tell its story.

Here are a few of the statistics New Tech has gathered from their schools: students graduate at a rate six percent higher than the national average and enroll in college nine percent more than the average. They also persist in four-year universities at a 17 percent higher rate and 46 percent higher rate when it comes to two year colleges. Perhaps most importantly, they claim that students’ higher order thinking skills between freshmen and senior years grow 75 percent more than a comparison group that did not attend a New Tech high school.

New Tech calls itself a school development organization and is a non-profit subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks, another non-profit that acts as a foundation, education policy advocate and on-the-ground work through mergers with groups like New Tech, Strive and EdWorks.

GRAPPLING WITH THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

New Tech offers whole-school change to any school interested in contracting with them, including public schools. It has implemented the model in charter and private schools as well, but the majority of its clients are public schools. “From where we stand, public school districts are as capable of innovative schools as charter schools,” said Lydia Dobyns, president of New Tech Network. But as everyone in education knows, every school and every district has different needs, and the organization’s offerings are changed accordingly.

New Tech schools are entirely project-based and cross-disciplinary. Students take courses like Bio-literacy, which mesh subjects together, emphasizing that disciplines are not stand-alone endeavors. Technology is woven throughout the school day and at home seamlessly. Many New Tech schools have one-to-one programs and all schools in the network use a learning management system called Echo that tracks student progress, is open to teachers and students, and connects New Tech educators around the country.

New Tech Network

Assessments are designed to measure different kinds of learning outcomes. Mike Reed, principal of Columbus Signature Academy in Indiana, said that only 60 percent of assessment is based on content. The other 40 percent is based on what he called “school-wide learning outcomes,” things like written and oral proficiency, work ethic, presentation skills and the ability to give and take feedback. Students can see the project rubric and know where they need to improve their skills.

“Looking at school performance is really different from looking at student growth, which is really what we want to focus on,” Dobyns said. That’s why New Tech doesn’t promise to increase school test scores – it sees that as a separate question, and one that they’re not necessarily interested in.

The schools that have taken on this model don’t seem to mind that test scores aren’t the focus. “A big difference you’d see is student engagement,” Reed said. “Students are working on authentic projects and problems.” He gave an example of a cross curricular physics and environmental science class that studied the physics of power and electricity. “Our students learned those skills and then rewired houses that were destroyed in New Orleans’ 9th Ward. They’re going to remember that far longer than regurgitating a test or a lab.”

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

New Tech works with schools individually, offering professional development as the school gets started. “One of the things we’ve learned and changed is that every implementation is now a custom designed implementation plan,” Dobyns said.

New Tech sticks with a school for five years, spending the first year laying ground work, listening to what schools want and need and garnering teacher buy-in. They offer intensive trainings to help teachers retool skills to teach entirely-project based and cross-curricular classes. Each school is given a coach who visits throughout the school year, checks on lesson plans, suggests changes and helps troubleshoot problems. And New Tech focuses on nurturing the leadership capacity of principals so they can continue to innovate with teachers.

[RELATED READING: Are Teachers of Tomorrow Prepared to Use Innovative Tech?]

At Columbus Signature Academy, Reed and his staff discussed the professional culture they wanted to promote and decided they’d make decisions by consensus. “That changes everything in a school,” Reed said. Those affected by a decision get equal say in making it, and that includes students. For example, teachers are in charge of the master schedule because it affects them most, but students can weigh in about how changes affect them too.

If gaining consensus is important in New Tech Schools, so is transparency. Teachers share and vet lessons with colleagues at the beginning and end of every project to learn from successes and mistakes. Teachers aren’t penalized if something they try doesn’t work out. They share their successes, experiments, and failures and everyone learns from the experience. That’s the kind of collaborative learning schools expect from students and Dobyns thinks it’s important that teachers experience and practice it too.

TRANSITION CHALLENGES

Opening or converting to a New Tech school can mean some growing pains.

“It’s almost a month of de-programming,” said Randy Hollenkamp, director of Bulldog Tech in San Jose, one of the few middle schools New Tech has begun to pilot. When kids enter his seventh grade they are so used to the traditional school system, they don’t know how to work collaboratively on projects. “At first their grades go down just because it’s projects. It’s actually kind of harder because you have to be a self-learner.” In traditional schools, kids are constantly being directed, so they don’t have to think for themselves as much, Hollenkamp said.

“Every year, as you grow into it, it’s difficult for the group of students who aren’t a part of New Tech,” said Jason Witzigreuter, principal of Adams Central in Monroe, Indiana. Adams Central is a unique school in the New Tech Network because it is a K-12 school under one roof, but only the high school uses New Tech’s model. Witzigreuter calls his school a hybrid model and a learning experience. The school is three years into the experiment, which means the seniors are the only class without their own laptops and without some of the communication and presentation skills that the freshmen quickly pick up.

“Our kids at a lower grade are able to understand how to collaborate better and use those soft skills, or 21st century skills, better because they’ve been taught that through New Tech,” Witzigreuter said. He tries to use the younger students’ success to encourage seniors into demonstrating the same kinds of higher order thinking and maturity.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

From New Tech’s perspective, one of the hardest things about working on a five-year timeline can be school leadership changes. And, like any part of the public school system, funding cuts can affect whether a district is able to continue to pay for the program.

COSTS

New Tech’s model is not cheap. It costs about $100,000-$120,000 per year for each school. That hefty fee includes support, training, professional development, and access to the knowledge and experience of all the other schools in the network. Still, to pay for it, districts have done everything from pass school bonds, apply for state innovation grants, apply for private foundation grants and beg districts for the money. In addition to New Tech’s service fees, schools have to pay for the technology that accompanies the program and often facility redesign to foster more collaborative “studio” spaces.

Though it’s a big price tag, the principals interviewed at three New Tech schools thought the money was well spent. Success For All is another school development program that uses a “whole school” model at the elementary school level. They estimate that for 500 students, their program costs $120,000 in the first year and decreases to $50,000 in the second year, finally reaching $30,000 in the third year. High schools programs generally cost more than elementary programs, though.

NEW DIRECTIONS

New Tech has proven that its model is scalable, in part with extra cash from its parent company KnowledgeWorks. Now they’re trying to see if it can work beyond high school. In the past year New Tech has opened 10 middle schools in various states and is dipping into the elementary school scene as well. They’re also trying to find ways for districts to expand the model to other schools nearby on their own. “The first New Tech School can be an anchor in their district and then the strategies can spread across the schools,” Dobyns said. Leaders and teachers at the anchor school could act as trainers and coaches to others, lowering the cost of transitioning future schools.

Renato Ganoza/Flickr

In this era of global competition, test scores are used as the primary benchmark to call out which countries will produce “successful” students. Knowing that American students are competing against a global pool of the best and brightest has led education leaders to focus more on how they score on international tests compared to students from other countries.

But high test scores don’t provide a complete picture of students’ success, according to Yong Zhao, world-renown author, scholar, and professor of education at University of Oregon.

“Countries that score highly, have students with lower confidence,” Zhao said in his keynote address to educators gathered online for the 2013 Leadership Summit.

That seems counter-intuitive, and Zhao isn’t claiming a causal connection — he questions whether focusing on test scores might inadvertently lower confidence. Zhao has analyzed data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and discovered a negative correlation between high math scores and confidence.

Similarly, in his analysis of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test that analyzes how countries score in reading, math and science, Zhao found a negative correlation between attitude and attainment. In other words, the countries with lower scores had students who reported higher interest in the subjects. Zhao analyzed media stories from high scoring countries like Korea and Japan, where students don’t show enough confidence or enthusiasm for subjects in which they excel.

He found the same results when he looked at students’ belief in their entrepreneurial capacity, their ability to start businesses or be self-starters. “Everybody is trying to perfect this system and make a good bet about the knowledge and skills that our children might need,” he said. “All of this says that the measures we use to measure education outcomes, to view them as the best education systems in terms of test scores, do not result in the same kinds of things we might value otherwise — entrepreneurial capabilities, confidence, enjoyment.”

TESTING FOR THE WRONG QUALITIES

Zhao’s findings have led him to question the value of the tests altogether. If the stated goal is to get kids ready for careers, and careers demand confidence, creativity, and an entrepreneurial attitude, then why focus on test scores that seem to produce the opposite effect?

“A lot of times teachers have been asked to improve our schools, to make our schools more effective, but the question I’m raising is, effective at what?” Zhao said. “Some reading programs could improve your students’ reading scores, but cause your students to hate education.” He’s concerned that national initiatives like the Common Core State Standards could have unintended consequences.

In Zhao’s view, most education systems start out by defining the outcomes. They make a bet about which skills will be important and promise that if students master those skills, they will succeed. Zhao sees this as a flawed approach because it forces everyone into a homogenous group, a bit like making sausage out of all different kinds of meat. Defining outcomes allows systems to measure results, but it stamps out individuality.

Countries that score well on international exams, like Korea, have clearly defined outcomes, narrow curricula, and dictatorial systems with clear ranking and sorting systems. Students know exactly how they stack up in that system.

“Everybody is reminded everyday that they have to master the skills,” Zhao said. “But in the process you have people who are either kicked out of the system or put down into a different school and they will lose confidence.”  By valuing what’s prescribed and assessed, the system creates a uniform group with little confidence in the individual’s unique contributions.

Zhao pointed to the tremendous amount of local control in the U.S. educational system as both its savior and a contributing factor to its lower test scores. It allows for different types of schools and for students to demonstrate that they can be good at different things. There are arts schools, engineering schools and schools focused on bi-lingual education. That kind of choice allows students the chance to find what they are good at. The U.S. system also gives learners many second chances to keep learning and find their strengths.

[RELATED READING: Some Ask: What's the Value of Common Core State Standards?]

“The new education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content,” Zhao said. “We start with individual differences; we start with their cultural strengths.” Beginning with the individual and building upwards from there allows each person to become uniquely great at something. And when students are passionate about anything, they can then be creative and entrepreneurial. For Zhao, the new model has to be about creating a new middle class based on creativity.

To do that, he suggests giving students more autonomy over their learning and emphasizing the importance of making authentic products that solve problems. He also emphasizes a global learning community that can collaborate to fill the gaps that each country, school or teacher experiences.

ZHAO’S INITIATIVES

Zhao is actively trying to create the learning experiences he has written and lectured about. He’s started an online education community called ObaWorld, which costs $1 per student per year and is a closed, private site. It’s a cloud-based learning platform, like Moodle, and includes similar features like the ability to make and evaluate portfolios. But Zhao is most excited that he’s recruiting students and teachers from all over the world to participate. So a teacher can create a tool or course and put it on ObaWorld to help an educator on the other side of the country.

His other big push is to create more entrepreneurial school leaders through the Global Education Leadership Master’s program, which is based online and accredited through University of Oregon. Students will have to create a product that will improve education and will be encouraged to think about schools as entrepreneurial global enterprises.

Flirck:WoodleyWonderworks

Every educator wants to create an environment that will foster students’ love of learning. Because the criteria are intangible, it’s difficult to define or pinpoint exactly what they are. But one group is giving it a try.

Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) launched the Innovative Learning Environments project to turn an academic lens on the project of identifying concrete traits that mark innovative learning environments. They sifted through and categorized the research on learning science, documented case studies, and compiled policy recommendations they hope will transform the current system.

Their book, The Nature of Learning: Using Research to Inspire Practice and the accompanying practitioner’s guide, lay out the key principles for designing learning environments that will help students build skills useful in a world where jobs are increasingly information and knowledge-based. The principles are not job-specific – no one knows what the future economy will demand. Instead, the main goal is to develop self-directed learners, students with “adaptive expertise.”

“Adaptive expertise tries to push beyond the idea of mastery,” said Jennifer Groff, an educational engineer and co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign. “You may be proficient, but without adaptive expertise you can get stuck very quickly as the world shifts.”

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World]

Groff doesn’t dispute that mastery is important and that students need to learn age-appropriate content, but she also argues it’s equally important to develop students’ ability to go beyond that, to question and apply learning in new situations.

To that end, these are their identified principles for innovative learning.

1. 1.Learners have to be at the center of what happens in the classroom with activities focused on their cognition and growth. They have to actively engage in learning in order to become self-regulated learners who are able to control their emotions and motivations during the study process, set goals, and monitor their own learning process.
2. 2. Learning is a social practice and can’t happen alone. “By our nature we are social beings and we learn by interacting,” Groff said. “We learn by pushing and pulling on concepts with one another.” Structured, collaborative group work can be good for all learners; it pushes people in different ways.
3. 3. Emotions are an integral part of learning. Students understand ideas better when there’s interplay between emotions, motivation and cognition, so positive beliefs about oneself are a core part of reaching a more profound understanding. The power of emotions and motivation in the classroom are well documented, but often overlooked because they are “soft.” Still most teachers know that if a student is upset about something that happened at home or in school, he won’t learn well. Similarly, keeping students motivated should be the starting point of learning. If students understand why it matters, learning becomes more important to them.
4. 4. Learners are different and innovative learning environments reflect the various experiences and prior knowledge that each student brings to class. “You really want practices and processes that help teachers engage each student where they are,” said Groff. This principle is understood by every frustrated educator teaching to a “middle” that doesn’t exist.
5. 5. Students need to be stretched, but not too much. “It’s really critical to find that student’s sweet spot,” Groff Said. Educators should try to prevent both coasting and overloading. Students need to experience both academic success and the challenge of discovery. In a diverse classroom group work can help achieve this as students at different levels help one another.
6. 6. Assessment should be for learning, not of learning. Assessments are important, but only to gauge how to structure the next lesson for maximum effectiveness. It should be meaningful, substantial, and shape the learning environment itself. “Good teachers do this informally most of the time,” Groff said. “But when it’s done well and more formally it’s a whole structure and methodology where you collect feedback on the learning pathway and it drives the next step that you take.”
7. 7. Learning needs to be connected across disciplines and reach out into the real world. Learning can’t be meaningful if students don’t understand why the knowledge will be useful to them, how it can be applied in life. Understanding the connections between subjects and ideas is essential for the ability to transfer skills and adapt. “We can’t just have things remain in silos that never interact,” Groff said.

IMPLEMENTING THE PRINCIPLES

Many of the seven principles Groff outlines are second nature to good teachers, but they can feel hard to achieve within education systems that are slow-moving, bureaucratic and resistant to change. Still Groff says there are ways for teachers who want to create an innovative learning environment to begin down the path, even without the full support of their colleagues and administration. Groff also hopes shifting to the Common Core could offer openings for building in these practices. “It’s designed in a way that condones a lot of the principles that we’ve been talking about,” she said.

Everyone knows the common barriers educators face: the school culture, the students and themselves. Groff says with some reflection and problem solving, teachers can often begin to work around these barriers. An educator might think she’s open to innovation without realizing that there are preconceived notions about how one should teach that are deeply ingrained.

What’s more, if the school culture does not encourage experimentation, educators can mitigate negative reaction by framing the ideas in a way that will be accepted, or by bringing in outside resources to try and convince naysayers. Even finding one colleague in or outside of the school to bounce ideas with can make the process much smoother.

Educators can also test ideas with students before implementing them. Students have been indoctrinated into the same educational mindset about what makes a “useful” education as everyone else, and some might be resistant to new teaching methodologies. Without their enthusiasm it can be hard to persevere through other obstacles.

CASE STUDY

The darling of the Innovative Learning Environment case studies is the Jenaplan School in Germany. It’s one of the few schools embodying all the principles fluidly. The school has about 450 students that range three to 20 years old. Students aren’t broken up into grade levels, instead they learn in mixed-age groups as well as in groups of roughly the same age. Learning is directed by students, often project-based, evaluated primarily through writing and projects, self-assessments and peer-assessment. The schedule is periodic, focusing on a topic like geography or history for three to four weeks and crossing into multiple disciplines. The teacher is seen as an active mentor and coordinator and the school has active parental involvement.

The Jenaplan School has won awards for its model and in the eyes of the Innovative Learning Environment researchers is doing an excellent job at preparing students to be adaptive and nimble thinkers in a knowledge-based world.

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Just a few years ago, the idea of using a mobile phone as a legitimate learning tool in school seemed far-fetched, if not downright blasphemous. Kids were either prohibited from bringing their phones to school, or at the very least told to shut it off during school hours.

But these days, it’s not unusual to hear a teacher say, “Class, turn on your cell. It’s time to work.”

Harvard professor Chris Dede has been working in the field of education technology for decades, and is astonished at how quickly mobile devices are penetrating in schools. “I’ve never seen technology moving faster than mobile learning,” said Dede, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

That’s not necessarily surprising, given that a staggering 80 percent of teens have cell phones. This penetration of mobile devices in the consumer market has also wrought what Dede describes as a “sea change” in the education landscape.

“People are talking about this being an inflection point,” said Elliot Soloway. Soloway is a professor at the School of Education at the University of Michigan, and a longtime proponent of mobile learning. “It feels like something major is about to happen. It went from a silly idea, to, ‘Of course it’s inevitable.”

The most recent data available is from 2010, and indicates that 62 percent of schools allow cell phones to be used on school grounds, though not in classrooms. But both Dede and Solloway, who are closely involved in coaching schools on how to use mobile learning techniques, said a lot of progress has been made in just the past couple of years.

“What I’m hearing from schools more is that they’ve eliminated policies restricting using mobile devices for learning and they’re interested in developing mobile learning programs as fast as possible,” Dede said. “We’re going from districts fearing it and blocking it off to welcoming it and making it a major part of their technology plan. We’ll be surprised if a significant portion of districts aren’t using mobile learning inside and outside of schools soon.”

More than 1.5 million iPads have been deployed in schools. That’s not counting school-supplied non-Apple devices, or the most ubiquitous device of all — students’ own mobile phones.

Classroom uses for iPads and cell phones are vast and varied. Some schools are replacing print books for apps that feature videos and interactive quizzes. Kindergarteners are learning to read using an iPad app. Teachers are using tablets to monitor student progress on “dashboards” that show moment-by-moment test scores. Others are using cell phones to take instant polls in class to gauge student comprehension. And more students are using smartphones, many of which have stronger processing power than their schools’ desktop computers, for instant fact-finding, calculating, mapping, and note-taking.

With all these direct applications for learning, it’s easy to justify using mobile devices in school. But what real and lasting effect will they have on the “formal” learning equation? Will this become just another passing craze in the long line of fads that have swung through schools and classes in past years? What criteria are being used to gauge a successful mobile learning program?

For progressives who have been itching to use technology to deconstruct and redesign the current classroom model – one teacher parsing facts to 30 or more students quietly sitting at their desks who will be tested on what they can memorize – the idea of mobile learning holds great promise. Here’s an opportunity to reach every student in a meaningful way. But unless traditional teaching practices morph to adapt and fully take advantage of what mobile devices can afford, some fear the promise will go the way of all the technology collecting dust in the corner of the classroom. Worse, it might eventually lead to what everyone unequivocally dreads: the mechanization of teaching.

“I’m petrified that we’ll apply new technology to old pedagogy,” Soloway said. “Right now, the iPad craze is using the same content on a different device. Schools must change the pedagogy.”

“It’s the classic cycle of old wine in new bottles that tends to happen when people get excited about the technology itself,” said Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which researches how media affects learning. (The new wine bottles being tablets and cell phones, of course.) “They buy all sorts of new technology, things like interactive whiteboards, and slap on old practices on the new devices.”

Even with the latest available technology, schools are still using old delivery tactics –  like technology carts – taking iPads from classroom to classroom in schools that can’t provide a take-home device for every student. But that’s exactly the kind of short-term thinking that drives Soloway mad.

“A cart of iPads will have as much impact on student achievement as a cart of laptops had — which is pretty much zero,” Soloway said. “So lots of schools are going to be disappointed after a year of iPad use when they see no gains.”

Actually some schools are seeing gains. A couple of very early findings show somewhat higher test scores; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reported that students in one class who used its algebra iPad app showed a 20% increase compared to those who used its textbooks; and in Maine, kindergarteners who used an iPad app for literacy scored 2 percent better than those who didn’t. “We’re pleased with such a short window of using iPads as instructional tools,” said Auburn Superintendent Katy Grondin in a Bangor Daily News article. “We are seeing it’s making an impact in learning.”

Flickr:Flickingerbrad

But Soloway and others question whether any of the old pedagogy around algebra or literacy have been affected by the use of the devices in these early studies.

“Publishers will create apps that support their paper textbooks – or they will port their paper textbooks over to a PDF and say, ‘See, we have an eTextbook.’ Publishers can’t admit that their model is broken, that they are in the process of being disrupted,” he said. “All they can do is entrench further and talk even louder that they have the answer; that their apps are really exciting and will engage the kids.”

Soloway challenges schools to think about what they’ve gained in student achievement through the use of devices. “We are using new technology to implement old pedagogy,” he said. “We are not exploiting the affordances of the new technology to give kids new kinds of learn-by-doing activities. Flash card programs for the iPad are too numerous to count. What a waste!”

But what about student engagement, the buzzword that’s dominated edu-speak especially in reference to technology? Soloway said engagement will go up when the iPad is used. “But engagement always goes up when technology is used — laptops, even electronic whiteboards. School is deadly boring to the kids who are accustomed to the fast-paced digital world in which they live the moment the school bell heralds the end of school. So to say that iPads result in increased engagement is to say nothing.”

POSSIBILITIES AND POTENTIAL

So what exactly does this idealized view of mobile devices for learning look like? It’s not easy to specify, or even outline. Each educator, each class, each school will have to find the best way to integrate mobile devices based on its student population. The opportunity of using mobile devices and all of its utilities allows educators to reconsider: What do we want students to know, and how do we help them? And what additional benefit does using a mobile device bring to the equation? This gets to the heart of the mobile learning issue: beyond fact-finding and game-playing – even if it’s educational — how can mobile devices add relevance and value to how kids learn?

There’s not just one explanation. As mobile devices evolve and become ever more powerful and multi-functional, the answers will change. In the meantime, there are some things educators know for certain do make a big impact on learning.

“There’s something in the design of mobile that lends itself to a different way of learning and interacting,” Michael Levine said. “It’s a way of developing a one-to-one personalized computer
in the classroom. There’s a powerful notion that you can walk away with the world at your fingertips.”

In class, the mobile device provides the “one-to-oneness” that Levine said allows for what most educators agree is one of the most important tenets of a well-rounded education: personalized learning – students owning what they learn.

A child, for example, who’s learning about plant growth, can take pictures of the roots of a tree on her way home for school, Soloway said as an example. She brings it into class the next day, shares it with the teacher and other students, and they talk about what they’ve discovered.

But can’t a camera do the same thing — or finding the picture of the root online or in a book? “Taking a picture for themselves is a lot different than getting one from a book,” Soloway answered. “A child owns the picture when the child takes it; it is meaningful to the student. When the child takes a picture with a phone, the child can then integrate the picture into an artifact that also contains a concept map, an animation, etc. In fact, the picture can be imported into a drawing program, then labeled with text. So it is more than a camera.”

Shelley Pasnik, director of Center for Children & Technology agrees. “Having a personal device support your learning changes things up,” she said. “It’s different than having a computer lab down the hall.”

The closest students came to personalizing their learning before mobile devices was changing fonts on Microsoft Word programs. “Now you have your own collection of apps to choose from,” she said.

Flickr:Flickingerbrad

But the apps shouldn’t be the focus of discussion. “That’s where the pedagogical practice comes to play, a thoughtful use of tool sets. Having the apps sitting on your phone on your desk in and of itself isn’t going to make you smarter, and it won’t make the classroom more anything,” she said. “It’s what you do with it, and how it’s supported, how teachers and students know to learn, to use those tools. It’s part of a complex nature of learning.”

And for any this to succeed, the devices – whatever they may be – need to be integrated into a broader sequence of activities, not an isolated tool that sits outside of everything that’s going on, Pasnik said. But that’s exactly what first happens when new devices are introduced.

“That’s a common first step — it’s the ‘extra,’ it’s what kids do when they finish their ‘real’ work,” Pasnick said. “But when it’s really integrated into a sequence of activities, kids are moving between screens given what’s developmentally appropriate, they’re playing games. Some experiences use screens, then manipulatives or other materials, they’re engaged in conversations with peers and adults in the room. That’s where it works. There’s not this ‘privileging’ of this device. Instead, all of it is moving toward the learning goal.”

Using mobile devices as tools toward a learning goal is exactly what students at Catholic High School in New Iberia, Louisiana, are doing. Seniors at the school are using their phones to convert historical information they researched about their hometowns into QR codes that can be used on a walking tour they designed. Smartphone users can learn about historical sites by scanning the QR codes on their devices.

This project exemplifies the kind of learning-by-doing that mobile learning can be used for. Though the device makes it possible to create dynamic, interactive features like QR codes, one could argue that the learning equation of this project is not necessarily creating the QR codes (though there’s also an argument to be made about teaching tech). The point at which kids learn is when they go into their community and research noteworthy historical sites to understand their significance.

Students could have just as easily created individual print brochures that featured historical sites around town — and the educational value would have arguably been comparable. What the mobile phone added was an immediacy to the task at hand. Was it imperative to the learning process? Probably not. But did the QR creation make the project more interesting, more relevant to their lives, and thus more personal for students? That’s what educators are betting on.

But when it comes to using cell phones for things like taking polls, that may not necessarily change traditional lecture-based teaching tactics. “I personally think there are better things to do in the classroom than lecture,” Chris Dede said. “Polling devices are based on lecture. You’re not having a discussion about it, but getting a quick sense of what students understand and modifying lecture accordingly. I would like to see teachers using different pedagogy.”

As a college professor, Dede thinks students can use their cell phones to have “back-channel” discussions that happen during discussions that happen in class. But even then, Dede doesn’t display the Twitter discussions on the board because he says students find it distracting. And if it’s distracting for college students, it would definitely be distracting for grade-schoolers. “Kids are still learning to type, they’re not as good as multi-processing. It’s all they can do to keep track of one thing that’s going on,” Dede said.

These are the kinds of issues that are still being hashed out in schools: What’s more distracting than helpful, what’s just straight up utilitarian, what’s helping students understand concepts better? What’s allowing them to make a particular lesson more personal and relevant?

THE SOCIAL QUOTIENT

The way most classrooms are designed currently discourages social interaction in class. Desks are lined up facing front. But the social aspect of learning that’s been lost in the past decades, Levine said, can be leveraged with mobile devices. “So much of what research has taught us about child development, and even the most recent research on brain development, is that the social aspect — relationships in the context of which you’re motivated to learn, and the types of people who are encouraging kids to learn, that social aspect is fundamental to who we are,” he said.

Mobile devices seem to be — at least in theory — a real enabler of social interaction. “They’re social learning objects,” he said. “Kids plug into their friends and families and important social networks. When you begin to combine features of mobility and socialness and access to every learning object you can imagine, that becomes more seamless and natural and interesting in terms of possibilities.”

This social connection is what helped at-risk kids do better and enjoy math more in a pilot study called Project K-Nect last year. Students collaborated with each other through blogs, instant messaging and email on their mobile phones.

THE MOBILE FUTURE

From where we stand now, it seems that the mobile revolution in schools is inevitable. But as the hype around the wizardry of the technology escalates, it’s imperative to focus the discussion on how to use devices not to mechanize and standardize, but to bring back the human, personal element to teaching and learning. Kids learning from each other, making what they learn personal and relevant, and giving educators more tools to reach students.

“Because mobile devices are the new piece here, people want to know does it make a difference,” Pasnik said. “When we know that learning happens because of relationships, and we want to keep that richness. So the question of the value of a single piece like the mobile phone becomes reductive. You falsely are having to focus in one element, when in fact, learning happens because multiple elements are interacting with one another.”

Flickr: from_ko

When asked what tech tools students would like to use in learning science and math, their reply was no surprise: “They said they wanted something that would utilize social networking technology — something portable. Overwhelmingly, they wanted to use a smart phone,” said Project K-Nect founder and director Shawn Gross about his interview with  Washington, D.C. area- kids five years ago.

“Students told us that the subject matter was too abstract, there wasn’t enough [real-world] application, that they were having difficulty with the instructional methods. They thought technology might be a way to change that,” says Gross.

With that directive in mind, Project K-Nect’s social-media-based curriculum combines project and collaborative learning with new media learning for the 3,000 high schoolers in three states who currently participate.

The initial goal of the nonprofit — launched in North Carolina in 2007 with the support of Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative and other organizations and now also in place in Ohio and Virginia — was to increase student performance in STEM subjects, particularly in low-income areas. The requirement, therefore, for Project K-Nect’s participating schools, is that at least 50 percent of the student body qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Do smart phones help low-income, at-risk student populations learn math? Yes, most definitely, says Gross. The majority of participating students scored 20 percent higher on standardized tests than their peers in the same school and 30 to 40 percent higher than students in the district and state after a single year. (Click here to see a full research report on the program in Onslow County, North Carolina).

But for very high-risk students — such as those who are homeless or are attending school primarily for a free lunch — the technology-integrated math class is not as likely beneficial, Gross says. There is a lot more going on in that student’s life than academia, and curriculum alone won’t change that.

“It’s hard to just say ‘at-risk students,’ — there are different categories of at-risk students,” he says. “The bottom line is we see increased student achievement and engagement because this is a media that students feel comfortable utilizing. It’s an outlet to be able to express themselves in a totally different fashion.”

ON HOW IT WORKS:

“Initially, we partnered with Drexel University and Florida State University to create the curriculum. We built a comprehensive set of Algebra 1 resources: all the components related to instant messaging and blogging, assessment tools for teachers, supplemental activities, project-based learning components, problem sets, and cartoon animation. There are basically mini apps for every unit of instruction that get pushed out to a student’s device.

Teachers speak for 10 or 15 minutes about the fundamentals of the unit and give some instruction, then pass it to students who work in teams to create videos that describe the steps students need to take to arrive at proficiency [in Algebra 1]. Then, teachers ask the kids to apply the math to something. They post the videos up into the blogs [that all Project K-Nect's participating students share]. When they run into stumbling blocks they create a video and tag it with ‘SOS.’ One of the schools will pick up an SOS tag within a matter of minutes and will respond back, either using instant messaging or a video response.

[Visit Project K-Nect's blog to see example videos of what students are doing.]

WHY IT WORKS:

“Social networking is heavily questioned by adults, so at first, no one thought students were going to be using blogs to actually do math. It turned out that those adults were dead wrong. Students from different geographic regions were communicating socially, sure, but they were also communicating to help each other to achieve this common goal of succeeding at Algebra 1. They were taking control of the learning process and creating personalized learning communities.

And what has been really dramatic are the changes in instructional strategies in the classroom. Teachers have gone from lecture-style textbooks to a completely different approach: It’s project-based learning design that they’re doing, now.

What’s surprising — in a good way — is that the majority of the students we started with in 2007-2008 school year went on to take an AP Calculus course or are currently enrolled in AP Statistics. In this district [Jacksonville, North Carolina], typically only about 2 percent of Algebra 1 students will go on to take AP math course. Now, those students are sitting in an AP class in their senior year.”