Mining The Comments Section
Posted: December 5th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 5 Comments »
1. In the comments section of my blog, Jen linked to an excellent blog on Kitchen Table Math.
There is no just-in-time learning, and you can’t catch-up.
For the sake of argument, say it takes two years to consolidate the skill of adding and subtracting double-digit numbers. (I’m guessing it takes more than two, but I don’t know.) If a child learns to add and subtract double-digit numbers in second grade, he or she will be proficient in fourth grade.
Delay teaching the algorithms until fourth grade and now you have a cohort of students who won’t be proficient in addition and subtraction until 6th grade.
That’s the way it works. Two years is two years.
2. In the comments section of Kitchen Table Math, Allan wrote:
If folks don’t mind a little mercenary self-promotion, a friend and I grew disgusted enough with what passed for educational software that we decided to start our own company to make some for tablets. Our first app allows children to practice longhand arithmetic; yes, including division.
I finished the web page for it just this weekend:
http://www.edisongauss.com/blackboard-math-app/
3. So I followed the link. It does look interesting!
4. Makes me wish there was an EdTech Test Kitchen that would review this stuff.
5. The closest thing we’ve found is EdSurge. Very zippy writing about ed-tech marketplace news, and the product review section seems to be growing.
A friend at Gates Foundation says EdSurge will be adding, at some point, some punchy “This is good, this is bad” type reviews. For now it’s mostly descriptive. I.e., you can read about the differences between TenMarks, Khan, and ST Math. But you won’t find either a Roger Ebert “thumbs up or thumbs down,” nor a RottenTomatoes 1 to 10 scaled score, that would allow you to easily compare and choose.
EdSurge itself is a young organization and it’s very promising as a go-to resource.
6. Many of you read this blog in email form. So you miss the comments, which get added after you’ve received your daily email.
I have been thinking about a way to relaunch my blog, one that better uses my sharpest commenters, including Jen, Ed, Tom, and Paul.
My idea is to
A) Send certain folks some blogs in advance, have them comment by email, and then fold their comments into the post itself.
B) Cultivate some guest bloggers.
But since this takes time and thought, I haven’t moved on it.
I’d be down for some kind of collaborative doo-hickey.
I guess the question is how general is the pattern I first noticed here for KIPP Lynn:
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2009/05/watching-regent-vol-1.html
Math goes way up in year one and basically holds serve; reading is a four year climb. I haven’t done a study, but since then it seems like a common pattern.
The EdTech Test Kitchen. . .it’s being worked on http://www.sunnylands.org/news/view/208
Me too!
I’m in! Looking forward to catching up on commenting this weekend…having 2 kids is very different than one while doing this job.
Hi Mike -
I’m Catherine, the person who wrote the comment about memory consolidation.
Jen (above) alerted me, and I’m thrilled to see the title of this page!
If you’re building an Ed School, I hope you’ll get in touch with the people at Morningside Academy in Seattle and with the precision teaching field in general. (Maybe start with Rick Kubina at Penn State?)
I’ve written posts about Morningside and Precision Teaching over the years, but I haven’t done them justice. (Get the MESAG might be a good place to start — )
Morningside Academy guarantees its work: the student will make two years of progress in one year’s time or tuition is refunded.
Obviously, the school focuses intently on efficiency in learning.
Here’s the way the Morningside people put it (drawn from notes I took at the Morningside Summer School Institute this summer):
‘We put our money where our mouth is – if you’re not going to be a SPED lifer – every year you gain [only] 6 months & [you] get farther and farther behind – instead of gaining 6 months, we want you to gain 2 years for 1 year in the chair
People say it’s impossible
If we don’t do that, we give the parents the money back
There are a couple of riders – students have to attend & parents have to support the program – parents have to be involved in daily report card
The kids gain two years – [they're] not lifers in special ed – we want them to gain a lot and grow a lot’
The precision teaching people are the real thing — and no one in the public schools apart from a few autism specialists has even heard of precision teaching.
I’ll close by saying that I’ve always admired you and your schools–!