Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.29.10 | Writing at Fast Company, Anya Kamenetz explains how smartphones and handheld computers are transforming education—and the focus of educational leaders who have long advocated for spreading technology in schools.

This graph nicely summarizes, via several key examples, how the digital media revolution is building steam:

For children born in the past decade, the transformative potential of these new universes is just beginning to be felt. New studies and pilot projects show smartphones can actually make kids smarter. And as the search intensifies for technological solutions to the nation’s and the world’s education woes—“Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age,” as the title of a summit at Google HQ last fall had it—growing sums of money are flowing into the sector. The U.S. Department of Education has earmarked $5 billion in competitive school-reform grants to scale up pilot programs and evaluate best practices of all kinds. Major foundations are specifically zeroing in on handhelds for preschool and the primary grades. “Young kids and multisensor-touch computing are a huge area of innovation,” says Phoenix Wang, the head of a startup philanthropic venture fund called Startl—funded by the Gates, MacArthur, and Hewlett foundations—that’s entirely focused on educational investing. Google, Nokia, Palm, and Sony have all supplied handheld devices for teaching. Thousands of new mobiles—not just smartphones but also ever-shrinking computers—have come into use at schools in the United States and around the world just in the past year.

Kamenetz then takes a closer look at one tool in particular—the TeacherMate handheld computer, which at the start of the 2009-2010 school year was in use in 500 U.S. schools in 14 states. Designed by Seth Weinberger and produced by Innovations for Learning, the TeacherMate sells for $100 and comes with games that align with major K-2 reading and math curricula.

“For longtime school reformers,” writes Kamenetz, “the sales pitch for the TeacherMate may sound familiar. When it comes to our nation’s public schools, the Miracle Man’s wagon pulls into town every week with some magical intervention or other. What feels different about Innovations for Learning is that it isn’t wedded to any particular gadget. While his organization has put significant resources into developing the TeacherMate, Weinberger says his true investment is in the concept. What matters is the development of new teaching and learning practices built around an idea: affordable, portable machines paired with constantly updated, collaboratively designed, open-platform software.”

The technology is also being introduced to students in rural communities by people like Paul Kim, the chief technology officer of Stanford University’s School of Education, who has brought TeacherMates to Mexico, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, India, South Korea, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Palestine, “in most cases working with local not-for-profits, trying them out for a few hours and on a few dozen children at a time.”

As I watch him kneel in the Mexican dirt, surrounded by eager kids, his face wreathed in a broad smile, he seems to delight in the way that the TeacherMate puts the kids in charge. “That’s a phenomenon I’ve found even in Rwanda—where only 1% have electricity,” he says. “With these devices, what the kids pick up in two minutes, the teachers need two hours to learn. The kids explore by themselves and figure it out. When you work with those kids directly, no matter where they are, they’re so innovative.”

Kamenetz also talks with Richard Rowe, who founded and leads the Open Learning Exchange and who once headed the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. Rowe predicts that the TeacherMate software has more lasting potential than the hardware, as it could be adpated to run on the next generation of low-cost mobile technology.

“Mobile phones used offline have virtually the same features as the TeacherMate—screen, speaker, mic, buttons. Mobile phones will continue to be more iPhone/iPad-like in the not-too-distant future. And they can communicate two-way, which the TeacherMate does not,” said Rowe.

The article provides a great overview of the opportunities and challenges, and Kamenetz, who has a new book out—“DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education”—is engaging as she explains the educational revolution underway.