Education

Study: Emerging Technology Has Positive Impact in Classroom

Stacey Roshan, an Advanced Placement calculus teacher at Bullis School—a private school for students grades three through 12 in Potomac, Md.—faced the problem of trying to keep her students engaged as she walked them through the difficult mathematics curriculum. During her previous three years at the school, Roshan notes, students were routinely stupefied by the traditional classroom lecture and often left class with more questions than answers.

"They wanted so much more time in the classroom to work on problems," Roshan says.

To meet the needs of her students, Roshan made radical changes to her lesson plans. Using Camtasia Studio, a screen recording and video editing program, Roshan uploaded her lectures to iTunes and assigned them as homework. "We've kind of reversed the whole dynamic of the class," she says. "Instead of lecturing in class, I lecture to them when they're at home, and we work problems together [in the classroom]. I liken it to an English classroom where the kids go home and do the reading and then they come into class and have this lively, engaging discussion."

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Taught with the video lectures, Roshan's students in the 2010-11 school year scored an average of 4.11 on the AP calculus test, compared to the 3.59 average among her students who took the test and were taught in the traditional classroom setting the year before. And a third of the class—a 10 percent increase from the previous year—scored a 5, the highest score a student can achieve on an AP test.

Other teachers have successfully implemented technology in the classroom, according to a recent study by CompTIA—which surveyed 500 K-12 and college instructors across the country. The report, IT Opportunities in the Education Market, revealed that 78 percent of K-12 teachers and administrators believe technology has positively impacted the classroom and the productivity of students. Roughly 65 percent of educators surveyed also believe that students are more productive today than they were three years ago due to the increased reliance on technology in the classroom.

Jim Tracy, headmaster at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Mass., sees the "process of technology coming into the classroom as inevitable." Under Tracy's watch, Cushing has provided an interactive whiteboard in every class and wifi access across the high school's campus for students to use laptops and tablets. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is Cushing's implementation of an all-digital library.

"We were able to offer our students a library that was anywhere on campus where they were," Tracy notes. "For the same amount of money you would pay for a few thousand books on a shelf, you could have access to digital databases that give students access to literally millions of sources."

[Read about the top 10 tips for doing e-research.]

Working with a larger budget gives a school system more freedom and flexibility to purchase new tools and technology to use in the classroom. According to the study by CompTIA, 27 percent of K-12 educators believe obstacles, such as budgetary restraints, will make the adoption of new technology more difficult during the next 12 months. Respondents to the survey were instituted at schools with operating budgets ranging from less than $5 million to more than $100 million.

Tracy notes that, while having the luxury of a larger budget, Cushing's goal is to provide a technological guide for public schools. "Everything we try to do is designed to be an experiment," he says. "If it's successful, it's designed to be replicable in the public schools."

For a public school district, such as the Chicago Public Schools, budget concerns "are always an issue," says Talha Basit, the client computer service manager at CPS. Though there are more than 400,000 students among 675 schools, only about 100,000 computers and 5,000 iPads are available for student use.

CPS made iPads available through a grant process in which teachers had to apply for the technology and articulate how the tool would be used in their lesson plans. Using a management program called Absolute Manage MDM, Basit was able to track and oversee the usage of the tablets during the school year. "You can't just hand out iPads just for professional development or training for the teachers," Basit notes. "If you have the teachers who are motivated and know how to use a tool, we've seen some good results."

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Basit says the jury is still out on test score improvements, but that the schools have seen improved attendance and a lot more enthusiasm from students. "The kids are eating this stuff up," he says.

While many educators have expressed goodwill toward the use of technology in the classroom, others are resistant to change. According to the study, 17 percent of respondents stated that purchasing new technology provides little benefit for students or instructors.

Kristen House, a former instructor at Belmont University and founder of A Novel Idea, a novel-writing workshop for middle school and high school students, believes that any school with a limited budget should be spending the money on training teachers. "As educators, we're expected to do so much with so very little," House says. "And instead of sitting down and getting to the root of the issue, which is the [student], we throw gadgets at the problem."

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While acknowledging that the use of smart phones and tablets has helped students do research and communicate, House says that the technology is only as good as the teachers that are using it. "A great teacher can do more for a student than any amount of money or technology you can throw at it," she notes. "Gadgets go out of date and humans do not. We only get better with age and with teaching and our gadgets all break down."

Cushing Academy's Tracy believes that educators who are against the implementation of technology in the classroom are fighting a losing battle. "Students inhabit a 21st century world for 18 hours a day," Tracy says. "And, all too often, educators put them in a 19th century classroom for six hours of that day, and the students feel a tremendous disconnect. We have a responsibility to teach them the skills to optimize these tools."

With the implementation of technology being such a popular topic in high school, Bullis School's Roshan—who plans to introduce iPads into her AP calculus class next school year—suggests teachers stick with what makes them the most comfortable. "I don't think that your material ever gets old if you're delivering it effectively," she says.

Texas A&M Relaunches Math Research Camp for High School Students

After a two-year hiatus, Texas A&M University's SMaRT Camp for high school math students has returned.
The very popular Summer Mathematics Research Training (SMaRT) Camp organized by the College Station, TX university math department lost its funding after 2013, but, with the financial support of the Texas A&M math department and small grants from the American Mathematical Society, Mathematical Association of America and the Texas A&M Office for Diversity, it's back.
Advanced high school students from all over the world attended the two-week summer camp in late June — free of charge — and not only indulged their own passions for mathematics, but learned research skills that helped them delve into topics like numbers theory, cryptography and computer architecture.
"There are many camps like this around the country," said Texas A&M Math Professor Peter Kuchment, who founded the camp six years ago, "but they cost a lot to attend. So, to have it back and still free, it was happiness."
The students, some of whom came from as far away as Hawaii, spent all two weeks on campus.
"We try to teach them how to do real research, not soundbite math problems," Kuchment said. "We find an area where we can start from scratch and move on to very advanced topics within two weeks."
Every morning started out with a lecture by Oksana Shatalov, another Texas A&M math professor and camp co-director. The students then separated into smaller study groups led by counselors who were undergraduate and graduate students. They recapped each day's material in great detail and assisted campers with homework assignments. Other Texas A&M professors dropped in for guest lectures on math topics as well.
Saturdays were known as "Saturday Celebrations" in which exams designed to test students on the week's lessons were given. No grades were given and exams were merely marked with comments designed to guide students to how to find the correct answers themselves.

Process Change: How to Do School Differently

If K-12 leaders don't transform their processes, technology will be "just a $1,000 pencil."

If K-12 leaders don't transform their processes, technology will be "just a $1,000 pencil."

When the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) last year issued a report saying that countries investing heavily in school technology have seen no noticeable improvement in their scores on international benchmark exams, education thought leader Alan November wasn't surprised.
"There is essentially no evidence that technology has added value to our core business" of teaching and learning," November said. But that's not because technology is a poor instructional tool. On the contrary, "I don't think we have a technology problem," he said. "What we have is a learning problem."
November said he believes the reason technology so far has failed to move the needle on a system-wide scale in education is that most K-12 leaders haven't changed their processes to take full advantage of technology's power. He points to research from Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff and others who have noted that process change is "absolutely essential" for technology to improve quality in any organization.
"Technology without process change is just a $1,000 pencil," he said.
During his 2016 Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference in Boston July 20-22, November and other speakers explored several ideas for how K-12 teachers and administrators can think differently about how they approach education — from the skills that students learn to the kinds of lessons that teachers design.
Making Thinking Visible
What Zuboff realized with process change, November said, is that "when organizations introduced new technology, they saw the greatest change when their workers were given more control. There was an immediate shift in productivity."
Technology empowers workers to collect their own data, he explained, without waiting for guidance from a supervisor who controls all of the information. He added: "Now you've moved the decision making to the people who are closest to the problem."
For schools, an example might be showing teachers how they can make their students' thinking more visible through daily formative assessment, and then using this information to put students into appropriate groupings for small-group instruction — or re-teaching a concept if many students are still confused.
Lainie Rowell, a former Apple Distinguished Educator and Google Certified Trainer who is now an independent ed-tech consultant, shared several ways that teachers can use technology to make their students' thinking more visible, even in low-tech classrooms.
For instance, if students don't have their own digital device, teachers can use a free service called Plickers to print out special cards that students can use to indicate their response to a multiple-choice question. Each student is assigned to a unique card that has a different design, depending on whether the student holds it up with choice A, B, C or D facing upward. (The unique shapes on each Plickers card help protect students' privacy, so they can answer questions honestly without worrying about what their peers think.)
Using the camera feature on a smart phone or tablet, the teacher scans the room until each student's response has been recorded by the Plickers software — and then the teacher can see how each individual student responded, as well as the class as a whole.

Digital strategies show promise for emergency heart and stroke care

Mobile devices, social media, visual media and crowdsourcing have the potential to improve emergency care for cardiac arrests, heart attacks and strokes, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association.

The new statement, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, reviewed scientific studies to evaluate current knowledge on the effectiveness digital strategies at improving emergency cardiac and stroke care.
"When seconds count, early recognition of the symptoms of cardiac arrest, heart attack or stroke and quick action can make a huge difference in whether someone lives or dies or has serious complications afterwards," said Raina Merchant, M.D., M.S.H.P., director of the Social Media Lab at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and co-author of the new scientific statement. "Digital platforms can support existing efforts to educate people about what to do in an emergency. Learning what to do -- including how to perform CPR and recognizing the symptoms of stroke -- is something many people can do that can save lives."
Some studies on digital strategies have shown positive results, such as a Swedish study that used a mobile phone application to alert volunteers within 500 meters of a cardiac arrest victim to respond and start CPR. It found that 62 percent of the volunteers with the app started CPR, while only 48 percent of bystanders without the app started CPR.
A Japanese study found that when emergency department personnel sent pictures of 12-lead ECGs via their smartphone to interventional cardiologists for interpretation, the smartphone method shaved 1.5 minutes off the time clinicians needed to diagnose a patient, compared to sending the images via fax.
Smartphone apps to view brain images for stroke and Face Time videoconferencing apps to assess stroke patients by a remote neurologist may also be feasible.
However, the statement authors emphasize that, while the potential for applying these tools to improve care is compelling, they require evidence of their effectiveness.
While no research to date has shown negative results of using digital tools for emergency cardiac or stroke care, the authors raise the issue of unintended consequences to patients due to inaccurate information being provided via digital tools, which could lead to medical errors and higher costs, and the risk of disclosing patients' health information in violation of federal privacy law.
"As many of these interventions are new and emerging, it is an optimal time to conduct rigorous evaluations just as are done for traditional medical therapies and interventions," Merchant said.
Some unanswered questions that should be the focus of future studies include:

Can mobile devices be converted  into defibrillators?
Can video sharing platforms help real-time bystander CPR and automated external defibrillator (AED) coaching?
Can emergency personnel use ce ll phones to pinpoint the best hospital for treatment based on the patient, traffic, hospital readiness and average treatment times?

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Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by American Heart Association. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Cameroon President:Paul Biya Offers Laptop 

To All University Students

Cameroon Intelligence Report, an online tabloid is reporting that President Biya will be offering laptop computers to every university student in Cameroon. Each student from public or private universities will receive a computer laptop. The report further states that an agreement will be signed today Wednesday the 27^th of July in Yaounde between Jacques Famé Ndongo, Minister of Higher Education and a Chinese company.
Cameroon Intelligence Report further stated that their source at the Presidency indicated that President Biya offer  was within the scope of aiding young university students secure access to modern day digital economy. In total, nearly 500 000 students will benefit from the Cameroonian dictator’s Greek gift. The amount reportedly commissioned for the project has not been disclosed.
 
Breakthrough: Drinking Water Made From Urine

Bio-engineers at Ghent University have developed a water purification process to recover pure water and fertilisers from urine. They’re testing their solar-powered installation on the urinals at this year’s Gentse Feesten.
Urine contains 70% of all useful fertilisers in wastewater but makes up only 1% of the total volume of wastewater. Instead of diluting it and disposing of it in sewers, the Ghent installation will filter it at the urinals.
As the concept works on solar power, it’s ideal for summer festivals, which suffer from logistical problems concerning wastewater. The researchers also aim to introduce the installation in developing countries where farmers often have little access to commercial fertilisers, resulting in loss of harvest. If local farmers were able to recover fertilisers and water from urine, agriculture could be organised more sustainably and locally.
The urinals are a project of the Centre for Advanced Process Technology for Urban Resource recovery, which gathers experts from various backgrounds to use resources from waste streams. Last year the centre created a beer called From Sewer to Brewer on the basis of recycled waste water. The purified water from the urinals might also be used to create a new version of this beer.
Culled from the Bulletin, Belgium