Month: December 2014

Categories
Disruptive Innovation

Google to Revamp its Products with 12-and-Younger Focus

As a primary school teacher, I was always hesitant to allow my students to perform open searches using uncensored search engines. Leave it to an innovative company like Google to address that concern in improvements to their search engine. USA Today’s writer Marco della Cava shares the exciting new from Google.

posted by: Ryan Schaaf

Original Source

SAN FRANCISCO — With Google processing 40,000 search queries a second — or 1.2 trillion a year — it’s a safe bet that many of those doing the Googling are kids.

Little surprise then that beginning next year the tech giant plans to create specific versions of its most popular products for those 12 and younger. The most likely candidates are those that are already popular with a broad age group, such as search, YouTube and Chrome.

“The big motivator inside the company is everyone is having kids, so there’s a push to change our products to be fun and safe for children,” Pavni Diwanji, the vice president of engineering charged with leading the new initiative, told USA TODAY.

“We expect this to be controversial, but the simple truth is kids already have the technology in schools and at home,” says the mother of two daughters, ages 8 and 13. “So the better approach is to simply see to it that the tech is used in a better way.”

Google would not offer a timetable for the rollout. But executives noted this will be a full-time effort that comes on the heels of recent kid-centric efforts such as its virtual Maker Camp, Doodle 4 Google competition and Made with Code initiative, which Thursday will see the lights of White House Christmas trees illuminated based on coding programs created by kids from coast to coast.

“We want to be thoughtful about what we do, giving parents the right tools to oversee their kids’ use of our products,” says Diwanji, who will attend the White House ceremony. “We want kids to be safe, but ultimately it’s about helping them be more than just pure consumers of tech, but creators, too.”

Controversy may well follow in the wake of Google’s drive. While tech companies are always seeking out new markets, which in turn expand their user base and ultimately drive up revenue, traditionally kids younger than 13 have been off limits.

The Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act so far has levied fines against 20 companies in its 15-year history for mining young user information without parental consent. In September, Yelp was fined $450,000 for failing to implement a functional age screen in its ratings app.

“We aren’t looking to play gotcha, it’s just about kids being protected and promoting business compliance,” says Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the FTC’s privacy and identity protection division.

Mithal says COPPA has been updated a number of times in the past decade to reflect the exponential growth of tech trends. Specifically, the act has been amended to include provisions for everything from geolocation data gleaned from mobile devices to photo- and voice-uploading protocols on social networking sites.

“One of the great things about technology is that we should be able to create safe places for kids,” Mithal says. “We don’t want to stifle that as long as parents are in the driver’s seat.”

But parents may have a tough time keeping track of everything their kids are into tech-wise, says Marc Rotenberg, president of the watchdog group, Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“The prospect of audio-based advertising targeting our children is very real, and that’s significant when you’re talking about an age group that is very susceptible to manipulation,” Rotenberg says. “The FTC will have to step up on this. I don’t think we want a world where our kids are sold things they don’t need.”

Diwanji says she understands those concerns, but adds that as a parent she “is a big believer in coaching moments for kids, rather than just blocking what they can do. I want to enable trust in them. Thirteen isn’t some magical number. I want to teach them what’s right and wrong, and bring families together using technology.”

If Google has a skunkworks for this kid project, it’s a small room in its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters dubbed the Kids Studio, where children of employees are encouraged to spend hours tinkering with various prototype projects.

Diwanji says that watching those kids tinker reminds her that a child’s-eye-view of, say, the Google search engine isn’t remotely the same as an adult’s. That fact was brought home by her younger daughter, who after Googling “trains” was stunned to see a list of Amtrak train schedules pop up.

“She came to me and said, ‘Mommy, you should tell Google about Thomas the Tank Engine, because Google obviously doesn’t know about him,'” Diwanji says, laughing.

Her point: User experiences for a range of Google products are ripe for under-13 makeovers. What also is being worked out are the ways in which parents will be able to oversee their child’s interactions with Google’s technologies, perhaps limiting usage to set time frames.

“We want to enable supervision but not be regimental,” says Diwanji during a visit to Google’s San Francisco outpost. “But that’s challenging because no two parents are alike. I have friends who are helicopter parents and others are even more liberal than me, but everyone has to be accommodated by whatever we create.”

Diwanji seems the right person for this push into unchartered waters. Growing up in a middle-class family in western India, she was technologically precocious, winning a coding content in seventh grade and eventually studying computer science as the only woman in her university program.

When she was accepted at Stanford University for a master’s degree in computer science, her father had to mortgage parts of his small software company in order to pay for just one quarter of his daughter’s graduate school education.

“I was determined to stay,” she says with a smile, describing how she approached a range of professors before finally landing financial assistance to complete her degree. A Sun Microsystems job and two start-ups later, she landed a job at Google a decade back.

“This is perhaps one of my greatest challenges,” she says. “We want to lay the foundation right, and then make sure every single part of Google is great for kids. They are the future, so why not give them the tools to let them create it.”

Categories
Digital Learning Gaming

6 Minecraft Lesson Ideas for your Common Core Math Class

My son loves to play Minecraft. The sandbox game was just purchased by Microsoft and is still the rage with digital children. More and more teachers are starting to leverage Minecraft’s popularity and functionality to use as a tool to teach concepts in the classroom. Jim Pike via eSchool News shares six exciting ideas for incorporating the popular digital game into math instruction in the era of the Common Core.

posted by: Ryan Schaaf

Original Source

Last year I taught third-grade math in a whole new way. Combining elements from the wildly popular sandbox game Minecraft, I had students thinking visually and creatively about mathematical models and theories that went way beyond a typical third-grade curriculum, transforming math class into what I like to call Mathcraft.

Why Minecraft? I could say I am using Minecraft for a number of reasons, like how I find Minecraft enhances metacognition by increasing students’ memory storage capacity. The game itself creates a relatable enjoyable experience that can be internalized and shared in a community of learners. The limitations on the working memory are minimized because the gameplay itself is an extension of our visual sketchpad. Working with students they always say, “I can see it,” and when they see it they share it.

However, the real reason I use Minecraft is that the students chose it. The popularity of the game is so overwhelming and when the lesson became the engagement their attention, confidence, and motivation soared. Here are six great ways to use it in your math classroom.

1. Let students create their world.
If you have an aggressive Minecraft class, you can put them in a single world and either let them all build it by themselves, or allow all the students to build a world together. Personally, I just open up a world in MinecraftEDU (which makes it easier for the teacher since you can do things like freeze the students and transport). I don’t use worlds that have already been created, opting instead to let the kids build their own. I use MinecraftEDU as my server runner and open up the superflat world. We start building and we end up with a crazy math city.

2. Create your own visual, conceptual math world.
I’ve tried to use base ten blocks before because they’ve got a lot of great conceptional knowledge, but they’re just a nightmare to use—to get them to fit in and take out, and with the kids always messing up each other’s blocks. But with Minecraft, the blocks are digital so the kids can’t mess each other up, if you know how to manage them, and the bonus is that the students are incredibly engaged. Then you can throw in the fun part. You can let them PvP (fight) and chase each other in their world. The structures they’ve just made make a lot of fun things to hide behind, like funky-looking trees based on prime factorization or stacks of blocks in patterns that represent long division. It’s kind of a conceptual math world.

3. You can use Minecraft, even without access to computers.
We were only able to play Minecraft in the computer lab twice a week but that was perfect because I just ran math class using Minecraft as the lesson on those days. On other days, we’d be doing similar things. The kids would have graphing paper and would make their models with colored pencils and crayons and we would play math. I was really trying to teach them how to read and write algebra and to look at math as a different language.

4. Minecraft is just one creative tool in the toolbox.
In my third-grade class, we did a lot of tracking and graphing slopes, and I turned it into a maker activity as well. We learned how to read rise over run, and how to build a slope in Minecraft. Then we chopped up a bunch of different cardboard boxes and made racecar ramps at different slopes around the classroom, and ran averages on how far the racecar would travel with each slope—and this was a third-grade classroom.

5. Let the dog drive—at least sometimes.
One way to get started is just to try a whole class lesson and to see how the kids respond to it. And be prepared to let the dog drive at times—meaning when the class is playing the game, let them take control and just play. Give them their time but take yours as well. If you need a jumping-off point to get started, look for Minecraft lessons online, or see mine on the website Educade. The Parthenon lesson I created is one example. It turns algebra into a puzzle and it gives students simple instructions on how to build something cool. (There’s also a video that explains why the formulas actually work).

6. Use Minecraft to help change your classroom culture into something students love.
By far the greatest effect Minecraft has had on my students was a change in the classroom culture and attitudes about education. When we were preparing for our benchmark test I gave them ten Common Core word problems for homework. When I put them on our Edmodo page, they got mad at me. Mathcraft—at least the way I use it in the classroom—is not all in a video game. There is a lot of reading and writing of algebra and word problems. Before, they used to complain and give up when they had to do similar problems out of textbook. But now my kids turned even that part of the curriculum into a game and can not put down the pencil.

[Editor’s note: For more on Jim Pike’s use of Minecraft in the classroom, see the video, produced by Educade]

Categories
Uncategorized

Privacy Concerns for ClassDojo and Other Tracking Apps for Schoolchildren

TMI? Not enough? The reality is that the world of big data allows us to store and analyze an unlimited amount of information about anything, including students. This is the medical model, coming to education, using past behaviors to prescribe future paths. It also allows us to predict activity, which, in the case of student behavior – both social and academic – can limit the possibilities and choices students are presented, leaving no room for inspiration, connecting with that magic teacher or learning approach, or having some kind of ah-hah moment that allows that lights up their minds.

Posted By Jason Ohler 

Original Source 

HUNTER, N.Y. — For better or for worse, the third graders in Greg Fletcher’s class at Hunter Elementary School always know where they stand.

One morning in mid-October, Mr. Fletcher walked to the front of the classroom where an interactive white board displayed ClassDojo, a behavior-tracking app that lets teachers award points or subtract them based on a student’s conduct. On the board was a virtual classroom showing each student’s name, a cartoon avatar and the student’s scores so far that week.

“I’m going to have to take a point for no math homework,” Mr. Fletcher said to a blond boy in a striped shirt and then clicked on the boy’s avatar, a googly-eyed green monster, and subtracted a point.

The program emitted a disappointed pong sound, audible to the whole class — and sent a notice to the child’s parents if they had signed up for an account on the service.

ClassDojo is used by at least one teacher in roughly one out of three schools in the United States, according to its developer. The app is among the innovations to emerge from the estimated $7.9 billion education software market aimed at students from prekindergarten through high school. Although there are similar behavior-tracking programs, they are not as popular as ClassDojo.

Many teachers say the app helps them automate the task of recording classroom conduct, as well as allowing them to communicate directly with parents.

But some parents, teachers and privacy law scholars say ClassDojo, along with other unproven technologies that record sensitive information about students, is being adopted without sufficiently considering the ramifications for data privacy and fairness, like where and how the data might eventually be used.

These critics also say that the carrot-and-stick method of classroom discipline is outmoded, and that behavior apps themselves are too subjective, enabling teachers to reward or penalize students for amorphous acts like “disrespect.” They contend that behavior databases could potentially harm students’ reputations by unfairly saddling some with “a problem child” label that could stick with them for years.

ClassDojo does not seek explicit parental consent for teachers to log detailed information about a child’s conduct. Although the app’s terms of service state that teachers who sign up guarantee that their schools have authorized them to do so, many teachers can download ClassDojo, and other free apps, without vetting by school supervisors. Neither the New York City nor Los Angeles school districts, for example, keep track of teachers independently using apps.

If parents wish to remove their child’s data from ClassDojo, they must ask the teacher or email the company.

“There is a real question in my mind as to whether teachers have the authority to sign up on behalf of the school,” said Steven J. McDonald, the general counsel of the Rhode Island School of Design and a leading specialist on federal education privacy law. “Since this is a free service,” he added, “one wonders if there is some other trade-off.”

Sam Chaudhary, the co-founder of ClassDojo, said his company recently updated its privacy policyto say that it does not “sell, lease or share your (or children’s) personal information to any third party” for advertising or marketing.

“We have committed in the terms of service to never selling the data,” Mr. Chaudhary said. “It’s the user’s own data.”

The company plans to generate revenue by marketing additional services, like more detailed behavior analyses, to parents.

But ClassDojo could make money from the information it collects in other ways. Another section of the privacy policy says the company may show users advertisements “based in part on your personally identifiable information.”

Mr. Chaudhary said ClassDojo gave students feedback as a way of encouraging them to develop skills like leadership and teamwork. Some special-education teachers also use the program to set individualized goals with students and their parents.

“Kids are being judged at school every day,” Mr. Chaudhary said. “They are just being judged on a narrow set of things. If we can broaden that set, it’s a good thing.”

But critics say that the kind of classroom discipline that Class Dojo promotes is not made effective by packaging it in an app that awards virtual badges for obedience.

“This is just a flashy digital update of programs that have long been used to treat children like pets, bribing or threatening them into compliance,” said Alfie Kohn, the author of “The Myth of the Spoiled Child” and other books on learning and child-rearing.

Teachers who use ClassDojo can choose which behaviors to reward or discourage. Kelly Connolly-Hickey, an English teacher at West Babylon Senior High School in West Babylon, N.Y., rewards students who “brought in supplies” or “brightened someone’s day” while docking points for cellphone use.

“Knowing that they are being graded on how they behave and participate every day makes it easier for them to stay on task,” Ms. Connolly-Hickey said of her students.

She added that she had not read ClassDojo’s policies on handling student data, but that she had shown the principal of her school how she used the app.

“I’m one of those people who, when the terms of service are 18 pages, I just click agree,” she said.

Teachers can decide whether to display students’ points or to use the system in private mode. Mr. Fletcher, the third-grade teacher, said he used ClassDojo publicly in an effort to be transparent. He deliberately awards many more points for good behavior than subtracts them for being off-task.

Last month, after a well-mannered class discussion about the motivations of characters in a picture book, Mr. Fletcher invited each student to the white board to award him- or herself a point for teamwork. With each point, the app emitted a contented ping.

“I don’t ever award the kids points or take away points without them knowing,” he said. “What I am trying to do is put the ownership back on the kid.”

Melinda McCool, the school’s principal, said she felt Mr. Fletcher used the app judiciously, and had asked him to show other teachers how he used it.

But at least one school is concerned that the app could make a student feel publicly shamed.

“I have told all my staff, ‘You cannot display this data publicly,’ “ said Matt Renwick, the principal of Howe Elementary School in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.

His school also requires teachers to obtain permission from a child’s parent before they start using any app that transfers the student’s data to a company.

Parents are also divided over ClassDojo.

Some like being able to use the app to follow their child’s progress and receive reports from teachers.

“It’s a great way to get the prognosis on your child,” said Gabrielle Canezin, whose daughter is in Mr. Fletcher’s class.

But Tony Porterfield, a software engineer in Los Altos, Calif., asked a teacher to remove his son’s information from ClassDojo. He said he was concerned that it might later be aggregated and analyzed in unforeseen ways.

“It creates a label for a child,” he said. “It’s a little early to be doing that to my 6-year-old.”

ClassDojo has received nearly $10 million from investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Shasta Ventures, New Schools Venture Fund, Paul Graham and Yuri Milner. Mr. Chaudhary says he and his team have studied ClassDojo’s effectiveness by visiting classrooms, conducting weekly phone calls with a few dozen teachers, and surveying 1,000 teachers.

Such an anecdotal approach does not sit well with evidence-based educators.

“That’s like polling people in McDonald’s about how they like the food,” said Brett Clark, the director of technology at Greater Clark County Schools in Jeffersonville, Ind. “They are not asking the teachers who looked at the app, walked away and said, ‘Not in my classroom.’ ”