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NAEP 2014 Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment

For the past year, I’ve been on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Technology Literacy Assessment planning committee. (See my post NAEP Technology Assessment 2012.) The first phase of writing the framework (which is where my committee contributed) is now complete. At the last meeting, we recommended to the NAEP Governing Board that the name be changed to better align the assessment with the common vocabulary and conventions used in K-12.

Simply put, calling the assessment “Technology Literacy” didn’t really capture the breadth of the planned assessment, which will cover technology as anything in the “designed world.” That term includes engineering principles, design and systems in a wide variety of contexts. It goes well beyond the much narrower K-12 use of the term “technology literacy.” In K-12 schools, districts, and state departments of education, “technology literacy” typically means the knowledge and ability to use computers and technology with fluency, efficacy, and safety in schools.

This post outlined some of the issues inherent in the previous name “technology literacy” THE Journal: NAEP Gets It One-Third Right.

But now, the name has been changed to the NAEP 2014 Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment. I think this aligns better with both the scope of the assessment and the conventions of K-12 schools across the country.

One other change, the date has been pushed back to 2014. This change is due to the time  needed to develop computer-based items for this assessment. For the first time, this assessment will be 100% computer based.

You can take a look at the framework at www.naeptech2012.org.

Eventually this will move to a new domain, www.naeptech.org, but this is not up yet (as of 3/10/10).

As someone who is both an engineer and works in technology education in schools, I believe this is a good compromise. I think it will help people better understand the results of this assessment as we move forward. And in the long run, I hope it will spur the design of innovative and diverse learning opportunities for students that combine engineering, IT, programming, math, science, collaboration, communication and many, many different types of technology.

Sylvia

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Edutopia – Students Teach Technology to Teachers

“When middle school students Alison and Nat confer with their teachers, it’s to talk about the lessons the students are preparing for student teachers as part of a new Generation www.Y program. The young people are part of a growing group in schools across the country who are sharing their own expertise to help make prospective teachers more aware of how students learn and the best ways technology can be used to support their learning.”

Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation published this story and video on the GenYES program in Olympia, WA. The video is from a while back when the model was called Generation www.Y. That was a bit difficult to pronounce, so we changed the name to GenYES.

This video was created during an interesting time period – the GenYES students not only worked with teachers at their school, but formed teams with their teacher and a pre-service teacher. These 3 member teams learned and taught each other technology, and prepared lessons using new technology. Just another way students can be involved in improving education for all!

Sylvia

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The Youngest Speaker at TED Advocates “Kid’s Eye View”

During her time on the stage at TED, Adora advocated a sort of “Kid’s Rights” sentiment, arguing that adults should take young people more seriously and be more interested in learning from kids to foster a more reciprocal relationship between age groups. She says that because kids tend to be less constrained by social norms than adults as we get older, young people can often offer a unique and perhaps more creative, out-of-the-box approach to problems.

via The Youngest Speaker at TED Advocates “Kid’s Eye View”

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Student Leadership – Building Authentic 21st Century Skills

This is an archive from my webinar at the Cyber Conference for the Capitol Region ISTE affiliate (CRSTE) held on Feb. 27, 2010.

Student Leadership – Building Authentic 21st Century Skills
Clicking this link will launch the Elluminate web meeting tool and start the archived webinar. It may ask you to OK launching Elluminate. Once it starts, it’s just like you had attended the online webinar in real time. You can hear the recording, see the slides, and watch the chat log.

See the list of all archived sessions

In this session, I talk a bit about how empowerment and engagement are an essential part of the cycle of learning. Hope you give a listen!

Sylvia

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TEDxNYED – the role of new media and technology in education

I’m excited to be participating in a new kind of event this weekend, March 6, 2010. You may have heard of TED – a once a year, incredibly expensive (but free online), invitation-only event where “riveting talks by remarkable people” are showcased. TEDx events, in contrast, are locally organized and run with a minimal entry fee. These events are meant to bring people together to share and talk around common interests.

TEDxNYED will  examine the role of new media and technology in shaping the future of education. There is an incredible line-up of speakers, and you can watch the conference live on Saturday from 10am-6pm EST.

You can also visit the TEDxNYED Facebook page and become a fan.

Sylvia

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Citizenship is a verb

US K-12 students aren’t getting adequate instruction in “cyberethics, cybersafety, and cybersecurity,” according to a just-released study sponsored by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and Microsoft released today. The survey, of more than 1,000 teachers, 400 administrators, and 200 tech coordinators, found that – although over 90% of administrators, teachers, and tech coordinators support teaching these topics in school – only 35% of teachers and just over half of school administrators say the topics are required in their curriculum. A bit of pass-the-buck thinking turned up in the results too – 72% of teachers said parents bear most of the responsibility for teaching these topics  while 51% of administrators said teachers do.

via Connect Safely |How to teach Net safety, ethics & security? Blend them in! | NetFamilyNews.

Check out my quotes later in this article – I was thrilled to be interviewed by Ann Collier, one of my heroes in the effort to address Internet safety and ethics in a sane manner. We had a long conversation about digital citizenship and what it means. To me, citizenship is a verb, an act of participation in a community. To be a citizen means more than being told rules, it means having the rights and responsibilities of membership. So it’s simple. If we want students to be “21st century citizens” or “digital citizens” or ANY kind of citizen, we have to give them responsibility and include them in the actions of the community. This, of course, should be guided, gradual, and mentored, but it should not just be telling them the rules of a game they aren’t allowed to play.

Otherwise, it’s digital dictatorship, not digital citizenship.

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Lessons about projects from Tinkering School

I’ve written before about Gever Tulley and this short TED talk video about his Tinkering School. I used it to open my Educon conversation – Tinkering Towards Technology Fluency.

Here is just a short list of things he mentions as he’s describing how to structure learning environments where children learn through tinkering.

no set curriculum
no tests
lots of stuff
lots of tools
real tools
immersive
time
how to make things
deep realization that they can figure things out
nothing turns out as planned
every step is valuable
just start building
fully committed to project at hand
success is in the doing
failures are celebrated and analyzed
child-appropriate response to frustration
all materials useful

These kinds of attributes are great goal-posts for any authentic project, not just technology projects.

Sylvia

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Why Education Reform Will Work This Time

This is a remarkable piece of video from 1998 unearthed by Gary Stager. In it, Ryan Powell, then a GenYES middle school student, interviews Seymour Papert and John Gage about the model of students learning technology in order to help teachers in their own schools. Both of these heavyweights of educational technology say some really interesting things about the model, including Dr. Papert saying that it’s the best thing the US Department of Education has ever funded! Pretty nice to hear that.

As further background, Dr. Papert is the father of educational technology, a colleague of Jean Piaget, and an internationally renowned educator famous for the theory of constructivism. His advocacy of student laptop programs extends around the world including the XO laptop for developing nations, and he invented the Logo programming language for children. John Gage, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, started the NetDay movement to wire schools and originated the phrase, “the network is the computer.”

About halfway through this clip, Dr. Papert talks a bit about why he believes that education reform can happen now, even though decades of reform efforts have not had much impact.

He says there are two things that are different now. One is that school was designed to fit the previous “knowledge technology” of chalk, blackboards, paper and pencil. These technologies match quite well with the prevailing pedagogy of the last century, which relied on instruction, teacher as the center of all knowledge, and delivery of content. So criticizing it was a bit idealistic and theoretical. But now we have new technology that directly enables construction, connection, and distributed expertise. These new knowledge technologies tip the balance and as a result, new pedagogy can become reality.

The second factor is what he calls “Kid Power.” The technology amplifies the voices of people who are traditionally without voice or representation in our society.

For more explanation of Papert’s view on why technology will power education reform, check out this speech: Chlld Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century.

In Gary’s post about this video, he also recalls some of the early days of Generation YES, when Dennis Harper had this “crazy idea” of kids being at the center of changing education with technology. Seymour Papert on Generation YES & Kid Power : Stager-to-Go

By the way, Ryan is now a college graduate serving in the Peace Corps in Benin, West Africa with his wife Kimberly.

Sylvia

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Tinkering and the grades question

Tinkering is still at the top of my mind these days, even though I haven’t had much time to blog about it much (besides this). But often when things are on your mind, everything you see seems to relate. If you think about buying a yellow car, all of a sudden the world seems full of yellow cars.

So reading this Alfie Kohn News and Comments article about grades made me think about tinkering again. Because often when we talk about doing something different in schools, we hear, “but how will that fit into the current classroom?” And that means everything from 42 minute periods to test prep to grades.

But tinkering is one of those things that doesn’t fit in neatly. It takes time, doesn’t result in neat projects that work with canned rubrics, and might not have any impact on test scores. But should that matter? Can’t we help kids at least a little by making things more like tinkering and less contrived and pre-planned?

Then this hit me.

As for the research studies: Collectively, they make it clear that students who are graded tend to differ from those who aren’t in three basic ways. They’re more likely to lose interest in the learning itself. They’re more likely to prefer the easiest possible task. And they’re more likely to think in a superficial fashion as well as to forget what they were taught. Alfie Kohn

These are exactly what kids need to be able to do to tinker. And grades squash that.

Maybe we are asking the wrong questions. Maybe implementing “some tinkering” where kids are eventually graded, no matter how authentically, is a contradiction. Maybe even counterproductive if it confuses kids. Is it even worth doing?