Tag Archives: EdTech

Digital Divide Then And Now: EdTech Nonprofit MOUSE Turns 15

More than a decade before Code.org or Girls Who Code kicked off, New York nonprofit MOUSE was teaching tech in underserved city schools. MOUSE is still doing that work, but now its reach is national.

MOUSE recently marked its 15^th anniversary with a celebration in New York City. I covered the event for EdSurge.

MakerBot printers at the MOUSE anniversary event were printing trinkets like this.

It would be easy to group MOUSE with the recent crop of programming nonprofits. The organizations share a lot of goals, including bridging the digital divide, training our future workforce and helping young people develop confidence and other personal qualities. I found that MOUSE favors a more human-centered learning style than most programming outreach groups, though.

MOUSE Corps, MOUSE’s afterschool program for high schoolers, functions almost like a youth version of IDEO or frog design. Members (who must apply to the program) spend a year developing socially-conscious tech projects via a hands-on, anthropological process.

MOUSE students demo 3D printing in the makerspace

MOUSE Corps is small and New York-only right now. MOUSE’s other program, MOUSE Squad, is more established and better known. MOUSE Squad is intriguing in its own way. It teaches middle and high schoolers to be the tech experts in their schools. They can act as their school’s IT helpdesk or assist professional IT staff. Squad members can also learn robotics, 3D printing and game design through MOUSE’s online curricula.

This is where MOUSE stands now. Next, it wants to expand far beyond its current strongholds in New York City, California and Chicago. Dramatic growth could be tough since other tech-centric youth development nonprofits have started courting school support and corporate donations. But kudos to MOUSE for what it’s achieved in its first 15 years.

Big Data In Public Schools Ignites Privacy Debate

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Big Data looks different when the target is your child. I’ve written before about the benefits of marshaling and analyzing swaths of data. InBloom, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, wants to bring big data’s perks to public schools, but it’s encountering resistance from parents who view the data collection and crunching as an invasion of their children’s privacy.

I covered the New York City version of this debate for EdSurge here. On one side: parents and some educators who oppose New York State and City’s decision to build a new education data portal based on inBloom’s software. They worry that inBloom’s infrastructure, which is capable of capturing and tracking reams of data, will gather too much sensitive information, which could be hacked or otherwise misused.

On the other side of this issue are education officials and technologists who believe the new software adequately protects privacy while enabling schools and teachers to better customize learning and save money.

It’s a debate that is already occurring elsewhere around the country and will likely spread further. New York is currently one of eight states piloting inBloom’s new software. I imagine similar discussions will take place in any school districts that sign on to inBloom in the future.

The New York parents I met want to halt inBloom completely. As Big Data moves into all realms of life, inBloom may set an important precedent.

EdLab: Building EdTech And Community At Columbia’s Teachers College

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In New York, the educational technology scene is dominated by start-ups and Meetups. I belong to the NY EdTech Meetup, which is popular and organizes good panels and discussions on a regular basis. At times, though, I’ve thought the community would benefit from another organization stepping in and being active.

Monitors outside Columbia’s EdLab office showing sites and apps the organization developed.

Over the past few months, Columbia’s EdLab has taken on that role. Though EdLab is part of the Teachers College library system, it operates relatively independently, brainstorming its own ideas and quickly prototyping them. The result is a steady stream of innovative educational software products, including apps, news sites and online curricula.

In recent years, eight-year-old EdLab has started opening access to these services and websites beyond Teachers College. The 40-person organization has also begun connecting entrepreneurs, students, faculty and working teachers through seminars and demo nights.

EdLab staffers told me outreach is a natural transition since EdLab regularly speaks to these groups. You can read more about EdLab and its evolution in this story I wrote for EdSurge. Anyone interested in edtech, particularly New York edtech, may want to keep an eye on EdLab’s product-development and community-building work. EdLab has some big plans, including a multi-year effort focused on rethinking education, which will kick off in 2013.

Special thanks to Kate Meersschaert, the EdLab Innovation Fellow who introduced me to the lab and its many projects.

More Edtech Writing: NYC’s iZone360 Gets Personal

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My latest story is for EdSurge, a “community resource for all things in edtech”. EdSurge is a Silicon Valley-based start-up that publishes two weekly newsletters about educational technology; one geared towards entrepreneurs, one for teachers. EdSurge also operates a wiki-like site full of information on educational products, organizations, schools, etc. If you’re interested in education, educational technology and/or education reform, check out the site/newsletters.

Below is a snippet from my story, which focused on the iZone360 school redesign initiative spearheaded by the New York City Department of Education. iZone360 is a select group of a few dozen NYC middle and high schools tasked with re-thinking traditional public school education to be more personalized and effective. The schools spend a few years experimenting with new ideas and technologies that other New York and U.S. schools may follow. The rest of the story can be found here.

“The conversation has gone well beyond gadgets,” said Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary of innovation and improvement for the U.S. Department of Education. A room of about 150 New York City educators nodded in response. The group, part of a NYC DOE initiative called iZone360, gathered on Monday in Google’s New York office to discuss revamping their schools for personalized instruction…

CEOs Learn To Speak In Code

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The proliferation of accessible, online resources and night/weekend classes has made it easier than ever to learn how to code. But is coding a skill that small-business CEOs — who usually have their own technical teams or outsource their programming work — need? That’s the question I examine in this story, which appears in the June issue of Inc. magazine.

The executives I interviewed had (collectively) studied CSS, JavaScript and Ruby at Skillshare, Codecademy and General Assembly. They said their new understanding of code helped them communicate with their engineers, whether in-house or overseas, and enabled them to schedule and manage projects more effectively. Afterwards, they were also able to handle small tasks, like tweaking simple web design elements, without interrupting their developers. In short, the executives felt the classes were worth incorporating into their already-hectic schedules.

Coding classes vary widely in duration, skill level, goals and cost. The sidebar accompanying the story includes some pointers on how to pick a class. Two basic ones are: know your learning style (are you a self-directed learner or do you need in-person instruction?) and ask developer friends/employees for recommendations on what language to study.

This article drew upon conversations with many people. I’d like to thank Avi Flombaum and Dan Kozikowski who teach through Skillshare, Vanessa Hurst of Girl Develop It, Zach Sims of Codecademy, Nick Pettit of Treehouse and Gregg Polack of Code School for their help.

Working on this story inspired me to learn front-end coding beyond basic HTML. I’ll provide updates on that project later on, on this blog.

Using Mobile Screens To Make Reading Easier For Dyslexics

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The SLTR reading method shown on an iPod touch

Could reading on mobile screens help people who have dyslexia? An NSF-funded, Harvard-led study is seeking to answer that question via tests that employ iPod touches and a reading method known as SLTR (Span-Limiting Tactile Reinforcement). I wrote about the study here, on Fast Company’s Co.Exist site, which publishes stories about “world-changing innovations.”

SLTR calls for text to be laid out in a narrow column and for readers to manually advance the text with their fingers, to aid concentration. (There is more to the method, of course, so please read the story!) For personal reasons, I have long been interested in ways technology could ease reading challenges. I hope this area of research attracts greater attention.

Special thanks to Joe, who teaches students with language-based learning disabilities and who brought this study to my attention.