The future of teaching Difference engine: Let the games begin
Autor: The Chaotic Economics | Publicado: 2012-02-04T19:40:00-08:00

Será mesmo que o uso dos Tablets e IPhod´s ("áifód´s") serão mesmo capazes de melhorar a aprendizegem da nova geração, ainda mais nas séries iniciais ??? Uma noticia q saiu na The Economist na seção de C&amp;T deles, me chamou a atenção...


The future of teaching    Difference engine: Let the games begin  Jan 27th 2012, 7:17 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES  

FULL  marks to Apple for devising ways to improve how science, mathematics  and other topics are taught in primary and secondary schools across  America. The company’s “Reinventing Textbooks” event last week showed  how effectively Apple’s popular iPad tablet computer can replace the  stack of tedious, and invariably outdated, textbooks that school  children have to lug around these days (see “A textbook manoeuvre”, January 19th 2012). 

Apple  is providing a free Macintosh application, dubbed iBooks Author, which  allows publishers, teachers and writers to produce interactive textbooks  with video, audio and even rotating 3D graphics that spring to life  with the touch of a finger. By and large, interactive multimedia offer  more engaging explanations that students more readily grasp and  remember. To play such books on an iPad, a free application called  iBooks 2 must first be downloaded from the company’s App Store.  Interactive textbooks can then be purchased from iTunes, Apple's online  store, for $15 apiece or less. That is a seventh of the price of the  average textbook used in schools today.

No question that  interactive textbooks deliver results. A pilot study carried out for  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a textbook publisher based in Boston,  compared the performance of two groups of children over the course of a  year at the Amelia Earhart Middle School in Riverside, California. A  control group used the traditional Holt McDougal Algebra 1 textbook,  while an experimental group used iPads with an interactive version of  the same coursework. At the end of the year, 78% of pupils using the  interactive text scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California  algebra test, compared with only 59% scoring likewise with the standard  textbook.

Done properly, interactive textbooks offer not only  video tutorials, more personalised instruction, just-in-time hints and  homework help, but also instant access to assessment tools, teaching  resources and the ability to network socially with students elsewhere.  Using tools for highlighting and annotating virtual flash-cards,  students can select information within the text and store it for later  revision. Searching public databases, direct from within the textbook,  is also possible. At school, students can sync with their teachers’  computers, to hand in their quiz results and homework for marking. 

Houghton’s  pilot programme in Riverside was not the first attempt to use e-books  in education. Indeed, digital textbooks have been around for more than a  decade, but have made little impact on education so far. According to  Forrester Research, a market-research company based in Cambridge,  Massachusetts, e-books accounted for only 2.8% of America’s $8 billion  textbook market in 2010.

The problem has been the lack of  suitable devices for reading them. Laptops and PCs have been too  cumbersome for the job. Dedicated e-readers have lacked the screen size,  colour graphics and computing power to render the rich multimedia  content. The latest tablet computers seem finally to fit the bill.
Except  for one awkward thing: at around $500 apiece, tablets like the iPad 2  are still much too expensive for all but the wealthier school districts.  Unlike computers, which are installed in classrooms and shared by  pupils, the whole point of a tablet is that it is carried around by an  individual and used anywhere, including the home. That means one tablet  for each and every child. Even with bulk-buying discounts of up to 10%,  cash-strapped school districts—which provide public education for nine  out of ten of America’s 58m school children—cannot afford the upfront  cost of tablet-based teaching.

Put it this way. On average, the  textbooks used in American high schools cost a little over $100 each.  Given normal wear and tear, they last for around five years, as they are  passed onto subsequent students. Typically, pupils use five different  textbooks in each grade. That means textbooks cost a school district  around $100 a year for every student attending secondary school. The  figure is only marginally less for pupils in primary schools.

With  breakages, losses and theft, there is no way that a $500 iPad could  survive for five years in a school environment without costly  maintenance, repair and replacement. Add the cost of downloading five  original $15 textbook titles from iTunes for each pupil in every grade,  plus annual upgrades for every student. In other words, by going the  virtual route, education authorities could find their textbook costs  soaring out of sight. 

Why not let children who can afford to buy  their own iPads use them in class? Outside private schools, that is  never going to happen. No superintendent of public schools could allow  such a digital divide to emerge in the classroom. Ethics aside, lawsuits  would fly (giving new meaning to the term “class action”) as a minority  of students hogged the high scores and the scholarships.
The  difficulty of dealing with such issues—not to mention the bureaucracy of  the public school system—explains why Inkling, a San Francisco firm  that has pioneered interactive 3D textbooks for the iPad, has steered  clear of schools and focused instead on the needs of college students.  Your correspondent saw everything, and more, that Apple demonstrated  last week while interviewing Inkling’s founder, Matt MacInnis, a year  ago. At the time, Inkling had produced over 60 multimedia textbooks for  the academic world. Today, it lists 113 to Apple’s four. With the  Inkling app installed on an iPad, chapters can be downloaded from iTunes  for $1.99 a go.

Apple’s marketing muscle will surely stimulate  demand for better interactive content, not only in primary and secondary  schools, but for tertiary education as well. “That’s a rising tide that  floats all boats,” notes Mr MacInnis. “The future of digital-learning  content isn’t a book on a screen, but an engaging multimedia  experience,” he says. In other words, the flat e-book is dead. Sorry,  Amazon.

And yet, for all the interactivity with stunning graphics  and engaging video, your correspondent cannot help thinking that  something is missing here. Despite their compelling content, the  interactive textbooks seen so far perpetuate the “linearity and  conformity” of traditional learning, where everything is geared—from  kindergarten to high-school—to preparing for college entrance; where  mistakes are expunged at the cost of creativity.

This is what Sir  Ken Robinson, a leading authority on education reform, calls the  “industrial model” of education. As professor of education at Warwick  University, Dr Robinson led a national commission on creativity,  education and the economy for the British government, and has spent the  past decade trying to prevent education authorities from stifling their  students’ inner passions. In his view, creativity is as important in  education as literacy—and should be given equal emphasis. 

That  would seem a reasonable start. So, if software is to be used as a  teaching aid (called “blended learning” in pedagogical circles), then it  should seek to balance the need for correct answers with the freedom to  take risks and break rules. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong,” Dr  Robinson preaches, “you’ll never come up with anything original.” 

No  question that industry is crying out for innovative young minds capable  of taking intellectual chances. A common complaint is that science  education, in American schools especially, is doled out in easily  digested bites that condition students to get correct answers, but  without any profound understanding of why. In a report published last  year, the National Research Council in Washington, DC, identified a  number of cross-cutting concepts (such as “cause and effect” and  “stability and change”) that provide the weft and the warp of science.  Mastering these thoroughly, the report argued, would provide a firm  foundation for young thinkers to take the kind of chances needed to be  truly innovative. 

One promising approach along these lines has been adopted by the CK-12 Foundation,  a non-profit organisation that seeks to reduce the cost of teaching  materials by using open-source methods. Its FlexBook platform,  predominantly for science and mathematics, allows high-school teachers  to mix and modify content freely to meet individual needs, while still  adhering to curriculum standards.

This year, the CK-12 Foundation  is to start offering tools that will allow high-school students to  teach themselves. To help them, the foundation has devised a “concept  map” that contains the 5,000 or so concepts in science and mathematics  that students need to master if they are to qualify for admission to  Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University.

Meanwhile, the Khan Academy,  with backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others,  continues to develop its library of 2,700 free video lessons stored on  YouTube that cover everything from arithmetic to finance, history and  physics, along with several hundred practice exercises. The videos  provide one-on-one tutoring via an online electronic blackboard that can  be paused so students can learn at their own pace. In your  correspondent’s opinion, the Khan Academy has the makings of what a  free, world-class, virtual school should be. Try it.

In the end,  the two technologies that could save science education from the kind of  reforms the pedagogues have in mind are video games and social  networking, especially mobile versions. These are technologies that the  young understand and embrace. As such, they have greater potential for  motivating students to achieve excellence than anything else currently  on the horizon.

Vinod Khosla, a legendary Silicon Valley  investor, says he is personally excited by the prospect of high-school  education “moving from teachers talking uniformly to bored A students  and clueless D students, 50 in a class, to individual ‘gamified’ and  adaptively difficult systems that leverage our social inclinations.” In  other words, when a student can win points, stars or badges by helping  friends understand difficult concepts—and his or her own reputation gets  an immediate boost on Facebook as a result—then high-school education  will finally have entered the 21st century. Pray for the day.



agora uma nova perspectiva...


mas será q funciona mesmo ??