Apple for a Teacher Ping!
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Posted on 01/24/2015 2:47:33 AM PST by Swordmaker
Apple's VP of education on how ingenuity, online services and deformed frogs helped his son win his science fair and why that matters for our schools.
"Steve Jobs saw technology as an amplifier for our intellect" recalls John Couch, who first met Jobs in the early days of Apple.
Apple's vice-president of education remembers the then 20-year-old Apple co-founder comparing computing to a bicycle, referencing its power to augment humans' natural abilities.
As someone who exposed his children to computers from an early age, Couch claims to have witnessed this multiplier effect firsthand.
Jobs gave an Apple II to Couch's eldest son when he was aged just four, sparking in the boy a lifelong interest in digital design that years later led to him designing eBay's first website.
Decades afterwards, in 2001, Couch's youngest was taking part in a science fair and was adamant he wanted to do it on deformed frogs. After a spot of light Googling his son found a paper written by a professor linking the deformities to the presence of a parasite. Rather than stopping there Couch's son emailed the professor, who, after getting over his surprise, was able to help him locate the parasites and extract and amplify their DNA. His son then sent that DNA to an online service for analysis, which found a strong link between that and the protein involved in limb generation in frogs. Unsurprisingly Couch's son won the science fair, but that wasn't the end of the matter.
"He gets a call from Stanford University and asked 'How would you like to spend the summer continuing the research?' and he goes 'Nah, I play basketball in the summer'," Couch said at the Bett Conference in London.
"It's an example of a true learning environment, it's challenging, it's relevant, it's collaborative and engaging," he said saying it was everything education should be in a digital age.
His son's experience demonstrates how technology extends avenues for learning far beyond the teacher and the classroom and the traditional model of book learning, he said.
Each major new service created on the internet opens up new opportunities for next generation to learn, he said.
By Couch's reckoning the incoming Freshman class were three when Google was created, so probably never went to a library to look something up, were nine when Facebook came out, exposing them to a collaborative environment where sharing was easy, 11 years old when Twitter was launched, affording them the ability to easily share ideas, and 13 years old when the Apple App Store opened, creating an expectation that software should be available on-demand.
"Steve looked at this and said we need a new learning environment, we need a new ecosystem for learning. A learning environment that's going to meet the needs of this generation and also the needs of society as we move forward."
"There's an Albert Einstein quote: 'Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid'.
"We need to encourage every child to find their unique genius. Our goal really became how do we build a learning environment ."
Rather than classrooms focusing on rote learning and regurgitating facts from text books, Couch said, Apple studies found that in a digital age classrooms need to use technologies to make learning engaging, collaborative and challenging.
"It's not so important that we know that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, what's important is what was happening around the time, what impact it had and how did that change society."
But just buying computers and relying on digital content is not sufficient to improve teaching.
"I've seen too many institutions use technology as a substitution and it doesn't change the learning environment at all."
Instead, teachers and students should be doing "something you couldn't do without the technology", he said.
No-one's going to pay you for something they could look up online
Couch highlighted the numerous Apple services and schemes that help further education.
Apple has more than one million apps, more than two million books, almost one million media files available through its services, according to Couch, as well as more than 10,000 public courses through its online learning repository iTunes U - with Apple breaking down some of that content into categories and educational level to make it easier to browse.
Its iBook Author service allows people to create e-books and sell them through the Apple App Store, a move that has led to "a lot of schools and unis now creating their own books and bypassing the publishing industry". Apple has developed a curriculum based around one of the books published through the service, "E. O. Wilson's Life on Earth", and will be piloting around the world from this autumn.
The firm also works with teachers to show them how to use content available via its services in the classroom, with Couch saying the firm had trained 30,000 educators in the UK.
Beyond this the firm has developed a framework called Challenge-based Learning, where the student picks the project to pursue, rather than the teacher, which Couch says allows content to be more relevant, engaging and challenging.
"Never again is someone going to pay you to give them answers they could look up online, they're only going to pay you to solve problems to which they don't have answers. Our classrooms are out of step with what the world is looking for."
Increasingly teachers and students will turn to personalised learning services such as eSpark he said, where the students and teachers can choose the lessons that best suits the student, moving away from one size fits all education.
"Going forward technology will really empower teachers to meet the need of each individual student."
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Computers don’t belong in the classroom, imo.
I think up through age twelve....it’s a waste. I would agree, that math classes would be better after the sixth grade if computers were utilized in the class and allowed the more advanced kids to progress quickly through modules. I can remember around the ninth grade where the teacher was incompetent and we wasted around twelve weeks on one single chapter because he couldn’t get more than a quarter of the class to grasp the topic.
I’d also agree that computers do very little in terms of literature or English grammar.
This idea that every kid in a school needs a laptop....it just means more cost waste on the school district for the laptops and the stupid software packages. Few grasp where cost enters into the game.
"Well, we can't have that." -- Teachers' Union
The original pretext for the university is that the teacher would read the books to the class they would copy the book. Great strategy pre printing press. The the university became know for their Library of printed books and the access to smart people to teach others.
Now we can record the people who can communicate the subject matter to others, have access to a library more expansive than any university and do it whenever and wherever we wish.
It shouldn’t cost 60k/yr to get an education.
BTW making children do math w/o calculators in class is a very good thing.
This is all great - but as the article points out - the student only went so far and stopped. He did not see the significance of his achievement.
I’ve talked to IT teachers who tell me that students in the elementary grades - especially 4th and 5th graders - when doing research - will only view the first 3 Google searches and stop or move on without the desire to sink in the results and refine them...even though this is taught in computer tech classes...
I have my students do research papers and do not allow them to use Google searches. Our school has an account with an online database search that accesses scholarly articles. That’s where they must obtain their info. Google is crap when it comes to doing research.
“Computers don’t belong in the classroom”
This is more to the point. I agree. More times than not it is a toy for the students, and not the tool it is meant to be.
IMO there's nothing like a topic-smart and motivated instructor/teacher to ensure actual learning takes place.
How to plug in parents’ credit card numbers into the app store is what they mean by computer education these days.
I think technology in the classroom is a wonderful concept; however, children aren't capable of correctly harnessing its power. Also, at the in-service the speaker told us that children no longer read linearly, but in an F pattern instead. Pull up a Wiki entry and you'll see exactly what that is. We are now training our brains to read until we see a key phrase or hyperlink, then skip down lines and read until we see another. Frightening.
It’s not even about computers being used as toys. It’s been noted that computer learning doesn’t involve nearly as much thought processes because it takes steps out between the material and the student. Computers, in many ways, basically just gives the answers to the student.
Ya wanna improve education???
Re-institute recess.
NOBODY gets paid more than the teacher. NOBODY!!!!
Real (1950’s) textbooks.
Small (walk-there-from-home) classrooms.
No ‘wired’ ANYTHING.
Teachers get rid of ANY student for misbehavior (as in GONE)!
Bring your lunch from home—REAL FOOD!
It would work, too.
It is very unfortunate the professional society sites, scholarly sites, and good aggregation sites are all so expensive. It is very frustrating to find interesting abstracts online, but rarely have access to the paper.
Great. Now we’ve got 2 of the richest organizations on the planet, Gates & Apple, fighting over classrooms.
How Orwellian. Scary and very telling of what Apple has in store (no pun intended) for society.
Perhaps you are right. . . at certain levels. . . on the other hand, I think the Classroom belongs in computers. That's what Apple is facilitating. Did you even read the article before commenting?
"Apple has more than one million apps, more than two million books, almost one million media files available through its services, according to Couch, as well as more than 10,000 public courses through its online learning repository iTunes U - with Apple breaking down some of that content into categories and educational level to make it easier to browse."
I have found that even for normal searches, Google is becoming useless. Too much cruft in the way and too many non-responsive hits popping in. The first page is usually paid positions, so it is hard to know whether it is properly responsive or not. It has also been affected by political considerations. . . and Google disappears things that some employees don't like.
I discovered this back in 2008 when I did a search for Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate . . . and found that Google had replaced every single instance of the images with innocuous campaign stop images. If you went to the links, the BC pictures were still on the sites, but the Google thumbnails had been replaced with non-representative photos that DID NOT SHOW THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE! I posted this fact here on FreeRepublic, and posted screen shots of the searches and results, and others confirmed the situation, and it continued for about a week, when suddenly the correct thumbnails of the birth certificate re-appeared without explanation.
I now use DuckDuckGo for searches.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.