Numbers tell stories*. The difficulty is in getting them to do so in a way that humans understand.
A side project (feasible?) I’m currently working on for work is a functional, real time data dashboard. In my mind I can picture the end result of a dashboard that serves up relevant and understandable data that teachers and administrators can use to shape the direction of their school and classes.
This is an enormously difficult task. Tracking multiple variables and presenting them in a way that the average teacher, parent, and student can read requires a profound knowledge of statistics, coding, and graphic design (not to mention a bit of cognitive psychology).
Whenever I encounter such difficulties I always find myself wondering when “the big intelligences” are going to create the tools that open up possibilities for the layman and woman. For example, my mom used to balance a checkbook using graph paper and an old (2 foot by 2 foot) calculator. It took her hours. Now I just have Mint do it for me with its ever so cool graphing apps to display my spending habits (my major weakness: alt-bluegrass).
I want the app that takes datasets and turns them into stories.
Google (any surprise?) and Microsoft (see Pivot Post) are starting to tackle this problem. It’s easy to get lost in the data subsets that Google’s Public Data Explorer has available. Want to see Ohio’s personal income per capita get kicked in the face by other states? Check out this fun graph:
For a thought experiment, swap out Ohio and use students…or classes…or schools…or socioeconomic classes…or (gasp) teachers. A short, animated display of data allows you to connect the dots quickly and immediately. Google lets you upload your own datasets (but it still takes some knowhow). When this becomes drop dead easy, why not use it constantly in education?
Final datashare – I love this 4 minute history lesson that really hits home. A social studies class could do a lot with this:
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And, in my opinion, good storytelling is good teaching.
Problem:
In an online class, with middle school and high school students, how do you deal with due dates?
What we’re seeing
In Moodle, you can create due dates for assignments, forums, and quizzes. This has the nice feature that a big fat warning appears in front of students telling them when something is due. It also highlights it on a Moodle calendar.
Date Due by Calsidyrose
But the problem is that if a student misses the due date, then the activity closes out and doesn’t allow them to submit something late (with some variation).
We thought about just having a “due date for the topic” at the end of the week. That is, let students take their own time in deciding when they wanted to do their work. The problem with this approach is that too many students would wait to try and complete all the assignments at the last day of the topic (Sunday night) and, because of the time crunch, submit less than stellar work.
What we’ve done
At least for the beginning, we put due dates in the opening class page – but not in the actual activities themselves (thereby letting kids submit stuff late). Course teachers determine how they want to penalize kids for late work (just like a brick and mortar classroom).
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Image Credit: Calsidyrose with a CC License.
This year is the first year we’ve piloted a purely online (developed in-house, sort of) course. The course is health, and currently we have 60+ students in 3 classes.
Because it’s a pilot, it’s obviously a learning experience. This semester I plan to blog about what we learn, what works, what doesn’t work, what challenges arise, what advantages we find.
We want to offer more online classes. So the goal is to always get better. And to get better, I need a place to brainstorm the eLearning process. To see the process, check out the tag online learning.
There are some 7.2 million teachers in the United States. Some are good, some are bad. Some are luddites and some are patiently waiting the singularity.
The biggest trick for me, as a teacher (or in my current case, semi-teacher), is to connect with other creative educators who think outside the box. In the past I always could find a few in my district (or maybe, if I was lucky, in my school). But even in those cases you sometimes suffer from group think. For better or for worse, your lens on the educational field is colored by district policies, goals, etc.
But a few inventions have really changed this problem of connecting with the creative and intelligent teacher masses. One invention is the teacher blog. Many super star teachers blog and share what’s going on in their classroom. They seek each other out and comment on each others’ blogs. They get into pedagogical arguments that challenge the status quo. They brainstorm ideas and failures.
They keep learning (something a disturbingly large portion of teachers stop doing after year 5).
Dan Meyer posts a short commercial that sums up, from his perspective, how this works. Take a look.
For me, this is were all the fun is in the profession. Learning new things. Being pushed to try things in different ways. Trying to define (and redefine) excellence and then trying to reach it.
What a cool job.
The NYTimes has an interesting article on the blurring of lines between work and home because smartphones allow you to be constantly in touch.
It’s a conversation my wife and I have had recently. We’re committed to putting the phones/computers down from the time we get home to the time our daughters go to bed. In a way, it’s liberating to have THE RULE.
On the other hand, if the Moodle server crashes, I want to know about it right away.
Last week our district’s email went down for some 6 days. We all felt very disconnected from each other (wait – how do we communicate without email?). Still, it was nice not to have the constant distraction (well – until folks figured out Google Talk).
I used to post on this blog every 2 weeks (at the very least). What happened?
To be blunt: my job got really really busy.
And that isn’t a complaint. I love my job immensly. It’s awesome.
But I haven’t spent much time sharing observations and articles because, well, I haven’t had time. Today I had a moment where I thought “you really need to post this”. You see, we’re piloting a complete online health course. Generally speaking, it’s going well. I’m learning tons. What not to do, what to emphasize, how to change midstream to get results. Good stuff, all of it.
I need to keep track of this. I need a few moments to reflect and ponder so I can get better at this job. To blow it out of the water.
So misterv is back on board. My goal: 1 post a week (at least). Who knows, perhaps I’ll carry the same goal over into zjvv.net.
A wonkish look at the development of mobile apps for the education community…a good bit technical, but for those interested….
The Penny Determination Algorithm…in which Mr Meyer asks how we should be asking our kids to think.
Does Teacher Tenure have a Future?…in which Scott McLeod thinks probably not.
College might not pay…I know, it’s a heretical statement, but read this very thoughtful post (with lots of graphs/eye candy) that makes a compelling case for how college might not be worth it.
Genes or Teacher…a meta study that examine which has more influence in students’ reading ability – their genes or the quality of teacher? Very, very interesting.
We have met the enemy and the enemy is PowerPoint…but I suspect we’ve always known that.
Does the fourth amendment apply to data in the cloud?…I’m concernedwith the idea of our current Supreme Court going Ted Stevens on this.
We don’t trust the government, but we like government websites…one interesting conclusion, people who interacted with more government websites came away with a more positive view of the government. Gets back to what I’ve always thought, transparency is good for democracy.
Why we need to learn the language of data…in which we see that ignorance on statistics is becoming a political problem because, “If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on — and you can’t tell when you’re being lied to.”
eLearning hits barriers in the US…geez, did you know that China and Mexico have digitized it’s entire collection of k-12 courses? Try and pull that off in the US and you run into the fact that education is a state/local issue.
