pbl

Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Education Leadership, EdvocatePD

Creating Real-World Connections and Fostering College and Career Readiness

By adopting a single platform that serves as a virtual staging area for all project-based learning, Columbus Signature Academy’s New Tech High School helps connect students to real-world learning while prepping them for success in college and the workforce.

By Joshua J. Giebel

When I ponder the traditional classroom setting, where instructors use textbooks, whiteboards, and lectures to teach math, I can only imagine how difficult it must be to make the critical real-world connections that students need to be able to fully engage with the subject matter. Simply telling students that geometry will someday become an important part of their lives isn’t enough. As learning facilitators, we have to illustrate those real-world connections, give pupils hands-on experience and examples, and then help them parlay their newfound knowledge into smart college and career choices.

At Columbus Signature Academy’s New Tech High School in Columbus, Indiana, we’ve been using project-based learning (PBL) since inception. When I was hired seven years ago, I was a recent college graduate whose teaching experience involved administering daily lectures and homework assignments in a traditional classroom setting. I’d heard of PBL through a college course and the concept interested me. I went through a rigorous, week-long training course on the nuts and bolts of PBL and then jumped in feet first.

When Will We Use This in Real Life?

The question math teachers hear most from students is, “When are we going to use this in real life?” Using PBL, I can provide the applications before that question pops into the student’s mind. As I was developing my own style of teaching math, this concept intrigued me. By creating projects and problems, I can show pupils how they’re going to “use it in real life” as they’re learning. This approach pushes them to develop a skill, come up with a solution, and/or create a workable method for solving the problem that I put in front of them. They can focus on building critical thinking and problem-solving skills in a way that the traditional classroom setting doesn’t support.

This year, my high-school geometry class tackled a project involving the furniture that they use in the classroom. In an effort to get more comfortable while seated, students tend to lean back too far in their chairs, which are built with small footpads. Because of the added weight and pressure pupils create when they lean back, these footpads break quite frequently.

To get to the bottom of this problem, we analyzed the design of the footpad and of the chair itself, which is made with an arc (where the footpad goes) that’s similar to a real, natural circle. Using the breakage problem as a focal point for the lesson, we talked about the arcs of circles, arcs on segments, sectors of circles, tangents, and all of the properties that go along with finding the center point of an object. Then, using an AutoCAD program and a 3D printer, students redesigned the chair footpads.

To take the project a step further, we had panelists from the chair manufacturer come into our class and assess the various alternatives that the students had designed. As it turns out, the company was aware of the problem and had already come up with a new design that was actually quite similar to some of our student projects. That was pretty exciting.

To manage the content associated with this and other problem-based assignments that my geometry and calculus classes work on, we use itslearning as our learning management system (LMS). For about two years now, students have used the centralized platform to conduct research, submit journal assignments, do their reflections, and create and store presentations, among other things. Using Prezi, Google Slides, or another type of presentation software, they work collaboratively and store all of their materials in the LMS.

For the chair project, for example, we shot a video of a chair breaking and then uploaded it into the LMS for students to watch and analyze. They were able to see what was happening during the breakage, where the stress was being created, and other key points. Then, using dynamic geometry software like GeoGebra and Geometer’s Sketchpad, they mapped out their arcs before putting them into the AutoCAD program.

Developing Tomorrow’s Workforce with PBL

What makes PBL so engaging is the fact that it’s student-centered—a key point that our LMS enables and supports. Put simply, students don’t have to come to me for every single thing. I can post information in the LMS and students know that they can always access it—whether they need it at the time we’re talking about it or three days later. This is a huge time-saver that allows pupils to manage themselves while also allowing me to be more productive during classroom time.

By encouraging students to identify real-world problems, develop solutions, and then present those solutions using 21st-century tools, PBL supports college and career readiness. This is important because today’s employers don’t want to hire people who are simply competent in academic areas; they want to hire people who can think critically and solve problems collaboratively.

Knowing this, our school intentionally and regularly builds in these skills to our instruction and assessment. In my view, college and career readiness is all about possessing 21st-century skills (e.g., the ability to communicate orally and in writing, collaboration, work ethic, mindset, etc.).

Project-based learning embeds these skills into each new undertaking so that, by the time students graduate from high school, they have had more experience working collaboratively, presenting to experts, and writing professional documents than most people have in their lifetimes. And by providing students with authentic, real-world problems, we engage students in the type of work they may encounter after high school. These experiences teach students about critical thinking and provide opportunities to persevere in solving problems.

Experimenting with PBL (or jumping right in) can seem daunting and difficult for any instructor. But it’s a worthwhile endeavor, and if you set realistic goals for how often you will do projects, come up with projects that you’re passionate about, and take a risk to change the way the class looks, it will pay off. The rewards are great and center on giving ownership back to students and then supporting those efforts/projects with an integrated LMS—a critical step in helping education move in the right direction as we go forward.

Joshua J. Giebel is a mathematics facilitator at Columbus Signature Academy’s New Tech High School in Columbus, Indiana.

 

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Education Leadership, Policy & Reform

How companies learn what children secretly want

Faith Boninger, University of Colorado and Alex Molnar, University of Colorado

If you have children, you are likely to worry about their safety – you show them safe places in your neighborhood and you teach them to watch out for lurking dangers.

But you may not be aware of some online dangers to which they are exposed through their schools.

There is a good chance that people and organizations you don’t know are collecting information about them while they are doing their schoolwork. And they may be using this information for purposes that you know nothing about.

In the U.S. and around the world, millions of digital data points are collected daily from children by private companies that provide educational technologies to teachers and schools. Once data are collected, there is little in law or policy that prevents companies from using the information for almost any purpose they wish.

Our research explores how corporate entities use their involvement with schools to gather and use data about students. We find that often these companies use the data they collect to market products, such as junk food, to children.

Here’s how student data are being collected

Almost all U.S. middle and high school students use mobile devices. A third of such devices are issued by their schools. Even when using their own devices for their schoolwork, students are being encouraged to use applications and software, such as those with which they can create multimedia presentations, do research, learn to type or communicate with each other and with their teachers.

When children work on their assignments, unknown to them, the software and sites they use are busy collecting data.

Ads target children as they do their homework. Girl image via www.shutterstock.com

For example, “Adaptive learning” technologies record students’ keystrokes, answers and response times. On-line surveys collect information about students’ personalities. Communication software stores the communications between students, parents and teachers; and presentation software stores students’ work and their communications about it.

In addition, teachers and schools may direct children to work on branded apps or websites that may collect, or allow third parties to collect, IP addresses and other information from students. This could include the ads children click on, what they download, what games they play, and so on.

How student data are used

When “screen time” is required for school, parents cannot limit or control it. Companies use this time to find out more about children’s preferences, so they they can target children with advertising and other content with a personalized appeal.

Children might see ads while they are working in educational apps. In other cases, data might be collected while students complete their assignments. Information might also be stored and used to better target them later.

For instance, a website might allow a third party to collect information, including the type of browser used, the time and date, and the subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over by a child. The third party could then use that information to target the child with advertisements later.

We have found that companies use the data to serve ads (for food, clothing, games, etc.) to the children via their computers. This repeated, personalized advertising is designed specifically to manipulate children to want and buy more things.

Indeed, over time this kind of advertising can threaten children’s physical and psychological well-being.

Consequences of targeted advertising

Food is the most heavily advertised class of products to children. The heavy digital promotion of “junk” food is associated with negative health outcomes such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Additionally, advertising, regardless of the particular product it may sell, also “sells” to children the idea that products can make them happy.

Research shows that children who buy into this materialist worldview are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and other psychological distress.

Teenagers who adopt this worldview are more likely to smoke, drink and skip school. One set of studies showed that advertising makes children feel far from their ideals for themselves in terms of how good a life they lead and what their bodies look like.

The insecurity and dissatisfaction may lead to negative behaviors such as compulsive buying and disordered eating.

Aren’t there laws to protect children’s privacy?

Many bills bearing on student privacy have been introduced in the past several years in Congress and state legislatures. Several of them have been enacted into laws.

Additionally, nearly 300 software companies signed a self-regulatory Student Privacy Pledge to safeguard student privacy regarding the collection, maintenance and use of student personal information.

However, they aren’t sufficient. And here’s why:

Student privacy laws are not adequate.Mary Woodard, CC BY-NC-ND

First of all, most laws, including the Student Privacy Pledge, focus on Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII includes information that can be used to determine a person’s identity, such as that person’s name, social security number or biometric information.

Companies can address privacy concerns by making digital data anonymous (i.e., not including PII in the data that are collected, stored or shared). However, data can easily be “de-anonymized.” And, children don’t need to be identified with PII in order for their online behavior to be tracked.

Second, bills designed to protect student privacy sometimes expressly preserve the ability of an operator to use student information for adaptive or personalized learning purposes. In order to personalize the assignments that a program gives a student, it must by necessity track that student’s behavior.

This weakens the privacy protections the bills otherwise offer. Although it protects companies that collect data for adaptive learning purposes only, it also provides a loophole that enables data collection.

Finally, the Student Privacy Pledge has no real enforcement mechanism. As it is a voluntary pledge, many companies may scrupulously abide by the promises in the pledge, but many others may not.

What to do?

While education technologies show promise in some areas, they also hold the potential to harm students profoundly if they are not properly understood, thoughtfully managed and carefully controlled.

Parents, teachers and administrators, who serve as the closest protectors of children’s privacy at their schools, and legislators responsible for enacting relevant policy, need to recognize the threats of such data tracking.

The first step toward protecting children is to know that that such targeted marketing is going on while children do their schoolwork. And that it is powerful.

The Conversation

Faith Boninger, Research Associate in Education Policy, University of Colorado and Alex Molnar, Research Professor, University of Colorado

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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