Kids @ School Posts from the What's KICKin' Blog by Fran Kick

Printed Bubble Sheets and GradeCam

While it might be fun to fantasize about every student toting a laptop or iPad to and from school, the future of printed bubble sheets in many schools is safe and secure with GradeCam. CSO and Co-Founder Rich Porter shared GradeCam at Launch Education & Kids Conference.

While optical mark readers (OMR) have certainly been around for quite some time in education, they require special pre-printed forms ($) and specialized scanners ($$). Both of which are costly for schools and have limited integration with various third-party classroom or school-wide gradebook software. What CEO and Co-Founder Rob Porter did with his patented technology is eliminate the need to purchase forms or specialized scanners. Teachers can design and print answer sheets on plain paper using any printer, scan the student answer sheets with any web cam, document or laptop camera, and with a click of a button, student scores are entered immediately into any electronic gradebook.

While the GradeCam team understands that “learning is driven by what teachers and pupils do in classrooms” NOT by standardized state assessments; teachers, schools and entire districts can link questions to state standards generating standards-based reports to monitor student progress. Their technology aims to save teachers and students time, reduce assessment stress, and help improve the quality of day-to-day instruction. They turn Scantron®-like bubble answer sheets into giant QR codes for grading kids in class. Faster, easier, cheaper.

NOTE: “Scantron” is a federally-registered trademark related to computer software used for scoring tests, survey and data collection, etc. No affiliation is implied with GradeCam. However, many times the term “scantron” is generically used to refer to any scannable bubble-sheet in education. Scantron, headquartered in Eagan, Minnesota, has more than 1,100 employees located across six U.S. facilities. Scantron also has a world presence through more than 100 distributors in 70 countries. Reportedly, 15 different Ministries of Education around the world use Scantron scanning solutions for their national assessment programs. Well, at least until they convert to GradeCam.

FYI: Scantron is a subsidiary of Harland Clarke Holdings Corp., which is wholly owned by M & F Worldwide Corp. (NYSE: MFW).

How the Teen Brain (and Your Brain) Learns Best

While this video is about the teen brain and how it works, it has application to many stages of life. The lessons of this video actually apply to everyone. Created by What Kids Can Do (WKCD) a national nonprofit that strives to reach the broadest audience possible with two primary messages: (1) the power of what young people can accomplish when given both the opportunity and support they need and (2) what youth can contribute when we take their voices and ideas seriously.

If you were to add a ninth condition for learning, what would it be?

Inspired by a true story is still fiction – right?

In a truly postmodern twist, movie screenings for the film Won’t Back Down, during both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention, are creating some buzz in advance of the film’s September 28, 2012 release. That’s great for ticket sales. The movie is described as being “much like the documentary Waiting for Superman.” Except this film is a fictionalized account “inspired by a true story.” Still it has sparked strong reactions from union leaders, activists and teachers.

Isn’t it ironic that fiction is sparking such strong reactions, when our current reality should be more than enough to inspire “we the people” to individually as well as collectively improve our schools and our communities by reclaiming public education? Perhaps some good will come out of all this (besides more movie tickets being sold). Anything that sparks or inspires people to start their own kitchen-table conversations, back-yard, neighbor-to-neighbor, authentic real-world deliberation…

Oh, wait. I forgot. These are political ~~infomercials~~ conventions.

We bear a lot of responsibility for this. We were focused – as unions are – on fairness and not as much on quality.
—Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers

Culture of Distraction Demands More Slow Tech?

Matt Mullenweg, one of Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, shared an insightful essay on the Culture of Distraction. Referencing a recent Joe Kraus presentation, Paul Graham’s Acceleration of Addictiveness, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Huxley’s Brave New World as well as Orwell’s 1984, Matt politely yet poignantly shares his concern: Is Silicon Valley creating products that are so engaging that they’re also incredibly distracting, to the detriment of creativity and productivity?

Ironically, Matt used the essay to also announce his company’s new comment push notification feature for iOS app-enabled devices such as iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Hmmm? Now, while some might consider this a paradoxical juxtaposition – the ultimate of postmodern marketing – he still makes some insightful and important points to consider.

Microsoft’s commercial humorously makes the point that we just might need a phone to save us from our phones.

As paradoxically juxtaposed to Apple, who would have us stop the world to reflect on life–using an iPhone of course.

Slow-tech to save us from high-tech? Yin and yang might be the key to balancing what we do and how we do it. Kickin’ back a bit every now and then, so we can keep KICKin’ IT IN!

I believe that the biggest gift we can impart on our kids is the ability to be mindful – to pay attention to the things and to the people that are actually around them. In 10 years, that’s going to feel VERY VERY different than the norm.

—Joe Kraus, Partner at Google Ventures

What All Teachers Should Learn from Jazz Band

A professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University shares what all teachers should learn from jazz-band teachers in his article for Psychology Today.

Unlike traditional education, where the goal is to meet minimum standards on state-mandated tests, jazz band directors make very clear their high expectations that everybody in each band class should become as proficient as they can. The whole point of their teaching is mastery and excellence.

—Dr. William Klemm, Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University

Student Loans Worry Students, Families, and the Fed

Student loans have received considerable media attention in recent months as researchers and policymakers voice growing concern about the heavy debt loads assumed by students and their parents. Now the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has announced via Grading Student Loans that since student loans have grown to be such a huge part of the consumer debt landscape, they’ll be providing quarterly data–detailing the demographics of borrowers–on the Liberty Street Economics Blog.

How big a problem is student debt? Very big. As of the third quarter of 2011, the outstanding balance on student loans ($870 billion) exceeded the outstanding balance on credit cards ($693 billion) and auto loans ($730 billion). That’s big.
—Cheryl Russell, Demographer and Editorial Director of New Strategist Publications

Wonder when colleges will start to be concerned? Students seem concerned as do recent college graduates given they’re:

Moving less (and moving back home more)

Not getting married

Having fewer children

Spending less

Perhaps those trends will turnaround as the job market improves? Hope so, or we might see student loan delinquencies higher than anyone would have thought possible.

Making school different or keep stealing dreams

Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?) is a quick 30,000 word read just released from Seth Godin. While he doesn’t offer a prescription, and it’s certainly not a manual on how to fix our schools, Seth will provoke you to think about a different set of educational goals. Now don’t worry, you won’t have to tie these into the common core curriculum or develop a new formative and/or summative assessment for them. According to Seth, “It’s more a rant than a book. It’s written for teenagers, their parents, and their teachers. It’s written for bosses and for those who work for those bosses. And it’s written for anyone who has paid taxes, gone to a school board meeting, applied to college, or voted.” Plus, it’s priced to fit into any education budget no matter how badly your’s has been cut because it’s FREE! Get a copy for every faculty member, every administrator, every school board member, every parent, and every citizen in your community. Seth asks questions and shares insight that will hopefully spark a few essential conversations communities across the country need to have regardless of their current or past socioeconomic realities. After all, in the words of John Dewey:

Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and, for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the ‘essentials’ of elementary education are the three R’s mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals. A curriculum which acknowledges the social responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are relevant to the problems of living together, and where observation and information are calculated to develop social insight and interest.
—John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)