Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

Nearly a decade ago, Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds introduced the concept of and has been the authority on the experiences of TCKs-children who grow up or spend a significant part of their childhood living abroad. Early on, TCKs were identified as the rototype citizen of the future. That future is now, as more and more children are growing up among worlds, creating a culturally rich and diverse world. Rich with real-life anecdotes, Third Culture Kids, Revised Edition examines the nature of the TCK experience and its effect on

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eYK8vsA8K8MC

Technologies For The Classroom Will Target Students' Results

Schools have an unfortunate reputation of implementing new technology because it's cool, and then asking if it's useful. Increasingly, however, the key test for a potential acquisition in instruction-oriented technology is: Will this result in higher student achievement, i.e., individuals' test scores, through increased personalization, collaboration, and interaction in the classroom? While instruction clearly varies across grades, schools, countries, and regions of the world, we see increasingly student-centric, outcome-oriented approaches including:

• Interactive and engaging teaching sparks creative learning. Gone is the ideal of a silent room filled with terrified students listening to a dour-faced teacher reciting the lessons. Lessons are shown on Smart Boards, which reference Internet resources to clarify a concept. The lessons are punctuated by queries to the class to which the students respond with clickers. The answers are immediately tallied and projected so all students can gauge their understanding, and the teacher can adapt the lesson to make sure it is understood. Multipoint technologies also facilitate classroom engagement. With Smart Technologies' Smart Board technology and Microsoft's Mouse Mischief plug-in for PowerPoint, teachers engage students with polls, puzzles, and other interactive games that they participate in with individual mice. Microsoft's MultiPoint, and now Userful's MultiSeat, technology also enable multiple students, each with their own station including not only a mouse but also keyboard and monitor, to use a PC. Microsoft MultiPoint Server 2010 provides a Windows-based version while Userful's MultiSeat Linux 2011 leverages open source infrastructure and applications.

• Mobility extends the classroom and enables continuous learning. Mobility is a major theme in education technology as teachers and students look to leverage a more extended classroom and extend the classroom itself to those who can't come to it. New tablet PCs allow teachers to take interactive learning out into the field. Students can take notes, look up terms, and respond to questions while out observing the launch of their test rocket, the birth of a cow, or the passing of a comet or meteor. With the mobility and flexibility of new touchscreen tablets — an Apple iPad or an HP EliteBook — teachers use applications like the University of Washington Classroom Presenter or DyKnow Vision to really test student understanding. These interactive tools extend the concept of polling beyond multiple choice, allowing students to respond in freeform or even draw their response Teachers and students also use Cisco Flip cameras to film school news shows and class plays or capture and share resources in school, out in the community, or on a field trip.  In China, the government's BlueSky eLearning initiative provides students in rural areas with remote access to educational content and urban faculty members. 

• Student collaboration provides practice for future team work. Preparation for the real world, particularly in secondary and higher education, means encouraging and facilitating collaboration — not only for the collaboration skills themselves but also for the familiarity with the collaboration tools. Students increasingly work in groups to complete projects, using online communities in Microsoft Live@edu (Office 365) or the open source software Moodle for document sharing, information posting through wikis, profile management, or other custom developments.  Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation allows teachers to create community sites for online class projects. And, Facebook's recent move into messaging and their announced support of Microsoft Office documents suggest that social media players will move into student collaboration as well. Connecting informal learning and social environments with the formal learning environment is an area of research and technology innovation in education. 

• Formative assessment enables personalized learning. Another innovation and developing trend is the ability to know what the students don't know or understand immediately and tailor a lesson to a particular student. In education lingo, that means using "formative assessment" to create "personalized learning paths." Teachers and professors test students individually during a lecture or activity, as mentioned above and even through annotations in an electronic textbook. The Adaptive Book developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University allows tablet PC users to create, organize, and share pen-based and audio annotations.  The Adaptive Book can then collect and analyze interactive data; using the collective data, teachers can see students' notes and respond to them. Educators can apply business intelligence to student performance as well, which provides the analytics to create a smarter classroom that becomes more of a personal learning environment when equipped with these new technologies. 

"Educational institutions will increasingly invest in technology to compete, offering the promise of preparing students for a global, technology-driven economy. Technology both in the classroom and in the back office will be a competitive differentiator. Savvy vendor strategists will include education on their syllabus and structure offerings and business models to address the educational community."

We all managed to gather to have a creative brainstorming session on Sunday afternoon. To enable the sharing of ideas Heidi, Alex and Jessica skyped me (Eewei) in and we tried a few 'Gamestorming' ideation techniques to help get our ideas out there under semi-structured creative thinking environment.

We started by talking about some general ideas about what we thought the project could be and put some post-its on the wall. We quickly decided that perhaps having school children as a persona type would be an interesting starting point. Throwing in the idea that they could learn about different cultures through this 'tool' we would devlop made for an interesting brainstorming session!

We created an Empathy map to understand what it might be that these children would see, hear, say, do and feel when interacting with such a tool. Next step is to validate this with real children. Eewei to take this as an action as his wife works with school children!

We then tried to validate the tool using a part of the Business Model Canvas technique which ties customers/end users back to key value proposition via relatiosnhips that need to be formed and understanding what channels are best suited to deliver the experience:

• Customers: Children aged 6-10 years old, Parents, teachers
• Value prop: Make friends, safe learning environment, learn about new cultures, valueable addition to the teaching curriculum
• Relationships: Friend, teacher, trusted peer, trusted system, teaching assistant
• Channels: e-table, web site, mobile, email (penpal)

We had a brief stab at creating the Elevator pitch too:

"For children between the ages of 5 and 10, Culture Buddy (tbd) is an educational tool that helps children learn about different cultures (through the 5 senses) in a safe environment by connecting and conversing with other children around the world"

Home work and next steps are to do individual research on how technologies has helped convey a sense of culture through using the 5 senses!