For months now, I’ve been writing about the curriculum for mobile devices we’ve been developing with school districts across the country.

We have put the best of this together into a cross-curricular ebook library. This is available on a classroom or school site license basis.

We have created three webquests for the March Madness NCAA Tournament. These are available as offline versions using Plucker, so you can use them on handhelds that don’t have Internet access. They are also available as regular web versions.

At FETC this week, Pearson announced enVisionMATH, a program that purports to merge print-based and digital learning. (Check out the animations flying off the page in the video below. Yeah, right. )

With a press release tagline that reads “First-of-Its-Kind Elementary School Math Curriculum Meets the iPod Generation on Its Turf,” I was expecting for these glorious math movies to be available on mobile devices, like handhelds and mobile media players. In reviewing the information on their site though, it appears that this is all designed for desktop (and interactive whiteboard) use.

I hope I’m wrong (I haven’t seen the actual product) and that this is available in a mobile format. If not, Pearson has missed the boat.

Yesterday, David Warlick, in writing about Wikia, mused “what if we had a curriculum that was open and inviting to being gamed by the learners — in a good way?”

I’ve spent most of the last couple months neck-deep in state standards, textbooks, and other curriculum materials, trying to develop some more comprehensible and engaging ways to teach things. A few thoughts and experiences I’ve had while doing this:

- If a kid was tasked with creating with a concise, understandable, and engaging way of presenting a math concept as a 2-3 minute video (as I’ve been doing), he or she would sure understand the concept.

- If a kid researched the history of India and found three “reliable” sources (none of which were Wikipedia, though I’d add that as a fourth resource) that each had a very different take on the “facts” with no consensus on “key dates” like when India became a British colony, some real understandings would emerge. (Some of these might include that all sources are somewhat subjective; that there often isn’t clear consensus on what is a “fact;” that events happen on a continuum, not on a specific day; and that understandings of underlying motivations and themes are more important than names, dates, and places.)

- If a kid had to develop an assessment that tied to key state standards, they might well wonder how these standards were developed and have some interesting reflections on curriculum, standards, and assessment. (Or maybe that’s just me talking.:)

All of this fuels my interest in the open education movement and the idea that open tools like wikis are a very interesting alternative to textbooks. My interest in this area is grounded in a belief that most textbooks and other curriculum materials are ineffective educational tools.

One real problem with the idea of having kids actively creating their own curriculum and learning is time. I concede that there really aren’t enough minutes in the school schedule (or even hours in the whole day) to explore the content required in that kind of detail. Of course if teachers didn’t have to reteach skills and content every year because it wasn’t mastered in previous years, that would help. But there still isn’t enough time for everything.

Following that line of thought leads to looking at curriculum frameworks. There is simply too much included in most sets of standards to be reasonable. That leads to a curriculum that becomes a whirlwind of trying to get kids to memorize a rush of facts that will get them through the state tests. The result is kids who don’t know the basics and, even worse, who have poor basic literacy skills and a real lack of critical thinking and analysis abilities.

We need to examine critically state standards.

Having sat on various discussions with state DOEs and textbook committees, I know the problem. We all want kids to learn what is important. And we all have different ideas of what is important. Get a committee of 20 or more people together to discuss and negotiate this, and before you know it, you have a set of grade level expectations that is 100 pages long and a textbook that weighs so much that it is a health concern (for chiropractic reasons….not considering the learning implications . [Sidenote: The textbook industry has come up with the clever solution of having schools buy two textbooks for each child so that one can be left at home. They seem to have sidestepped the learning implications at stake.]

How much of this is really critical information? Will it help kids get a job or compete effectively in the 21st century world?

These are tough questions. It’s much easier to include everything in the curriculum than to make hard decisions about what to drop. It’s more politically expedient to declare that no child will be left behind than to look at why our education system is not preparing students for the modern world. It’s more convenient to blame things that are out of our control like kids’ home lives or text messaging than to think that the problem is at the very core of how we’ve been defining successful learning.

While I’ve heard a lot of luminaries point to a lot of problems with education, I haven’t heard many people point to frameworks and standards as a source of the problems. What do you think? Do state (national, district) standards need to be reformed?

This problem is so steeped in politics that it is difficult to know where to begin working on it. But like others, I want to try.

Happy New Year! I haven’t been blogging as much as usual the last month or two because I am up to my ears in a ton of curriculum we’re developing for mobile devices. (THE Journal ran a nice article about using mobile devices for delivering content if you haven’t seen it.) We have been developing everything from mini-movies on subjects like sight words and how to skip count for little kids to interactive ebooks on topics from world history to percents, decimals, and fractions for secondary and adult learners.

This had gotten me thinking a lot about a couple topics:

1. How electronic resources can be more effective than textbooks to engage kids and especially to differentiate instruction

2. How the future of 1-to-1 computing for schools is shaping up

I think that both of these are critical if we’re going to be successful in engaging kids. I’ll write more about the first topic in another post. Regarding the second topic, there are a lot of new devices shipping, including things like the XO computer, the Eee, the Kindle, the iPod Touch, etc.

I think the keys to a solid device for education are:

- Low cost (under $300 seems to be a key price point for schools)
- Long battery life (at least 6 hours)
- Multimedia capability (audio and video)
- Capacity for “real” computing (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation — could be via Web 2.0)

There are other features that I’d rate as nice-to-have but not essential like wireless, color, durability, etc.

None of the devices above quite hits all of my “must-have” features, but they are all pretty close. The second-generation releases are likely to be there. Right now, the Eee is probably the closest, though the Kindle is the one that has my attention (in part because I think it may have the longest staying power, which is really critical to schools.) Interestingly, handhelds from Palm and HP — which have been around for years — already have all these features. Alas, though, they are no longer the latest and greatest. (Don’t get me started venting my frustration on how trend-driven technology is, even in schools.)

Some people have said that these devices are too limited for schools because there isn’t textbook content available for them. The more I think about the idea of textbook publishers putting their content on mobile devices though (something I used to look forward to, though it’s probably still a long ways off), the more I don’t think it’s the road to a better future. It’s easy to list reasons textbooks don’t work for most kids — they are huge; they are boring; there is no differentiation; there is little interactivity; the content isn’t comprehensible; etc. etc.

So why would we want that same content in an electronic format?

With more and more great educational podcasts out there, it’s getting hard to choose which to use in the classroom. One thing that sets some podcasts apart are those that provide teacher’s guide and lesson plans for the classroom.

Here are some podcasts with teacher’s resources that you might want to check out:

The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation – Podcast Activity Guide (More Smithsonian podcasts are also available here.)

NPR’s Science Friday podcast – Kids’ Connection site with a wealth of resources including curriculum activities and standards correlation

Some podcasts, like the ESL Podcast, have more extensive learning guides that are available at additional cost. A sample is included here.

If you have lesson plans for using podcasts in the classroom that you’d like to share, let us know. We hope to post a collection of these in the future.

[Image: Reprinted with permission from ClipArt.com; copyrighted property of JupiterImages used with permission under license.]

Constitution Day is Sept. 17. You can get free curriculum resources for studying the Constitution and its making here.

This unit includes an interactive ebook, an annotated copy of the Constitution and its amendments, a collection of web resources on the Constitution, a quiz, and recorded narrations of the Constitution and its amendments! These resources can be used on Palm or Windows Mobile handhelds or on desktop or laptop computers.

Other handheld curriculum units available from K12 Handhelds include a kindergarten animal alphabet ebook and video, a poetry unit, and a unit on African-American history.

We hope you enjoy these resources.

K12 Handhelds is offering Mobile Musings blog readers a back-to-school special on handheld curriculum books.

Integrating Handhelds into the Writing Curriculum and Integrating Handhelds Across the Curriculum* are available for $29.95 each. Or you can buy both for $49.95. This offer is good through Nov. 15. Reference code K12FALL07 when you order.

* No SD card included at this special price

ccLearn is working with the Hewlett Foundation and Google to create a new “open education web-scale search.”

The ccLearn group is devoted to the support of open educational resources. These are educational resources that are licensed in a way that they can be freely shared and used by others.

This new tool should offer much wider access to all the great open resources already out there. Hopefully, it will also increase awareness so that more people consider open licenses for materials they write and publish.

Creative Commons today announced the formation of a new division, ccLearn. This group is “dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources” and has a stated mission “to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.”

That’s very exciting. If you’ve heard me speaklately, you know that I am a very big advocate of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. I believe that this movement coupled with massive collaboration has the opportunity to reshape education by providing valuable resources needed to differentiate instruction.

Stay tuned for more info on this as it develops.