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Saturday, December 10, 2011
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Voices of Literacy
A beautiful movie about what it means to be comfortable with language and literacy:
Friday, October 7, 2011
Cloudflare rocks
I normally don't post much about the webmastering of LearnThat, but what we recently experienced is so dramatic that I wanted to share it with you.
Like I do regularly, I logged into my analytics and saw this:
A drastic jump in page views. People from one day to the next viewed three times more pages on my site.
At the same time, the bounce rate, the number of people who leave the site on the first page (which used to be too high), dropped to less than a third:
Overall, the number of visitors more than doubled!
Of course, I was delighted! It's rare to see such a drastic improvement, not to mention within a day's time.
Overall, the number of visitors more than doubled!
Of course, I was delighted! It's rare to see such a drastic improvement, not to mention within a day's time.
When looking at the different things that had changed, and also considering the ominous spike in the middle of September, I found out that we owe big thanks to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is a new service and I had met Michelle at a local meetup. What she presented seemed too good to be true, but these graphs prove that Cloudflare is very well worth the very low price.
Cloudflare applies a set of services that help your website in many different ways, but the main one is speed.
By caching the static parts of the site on servers all over the world, the load time is reduced so dramatically that improvements like the ones above materialize!
Now that my site is faster, I actually get to welcome all the visitors who come to us, and they have a much better experience, engaging and reading more, and no longer leaving frustrated by to much load time wait.
Thanks, Cloudflare, keep up the great work!!
And thanks for making your outstanding service available and affordable to small organizations like ourselves!
Friday, September 2, 2011
I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation.
... And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start.”
~ Secretary Arne Duncan, October 9, 2009.
... or maybe the Internet? Our schools are failing our students... personalized learning coupled with Open and Social can turn this around!
Vocabulary automaticity is the goal
Most vocabulary programs are tiring, arduous, and ... completely ineffective.
The reason: "Teaching" a word is not enough. Learning vocabulary is only to a limited degree a rational process, and largely a pattern-building, practice-based process. And for practice to be effective, it requires follow up in a personalized manner until the student has really gained automaticity.
Automaticity is a term used in neuroscience that describes a moment when you no longer have to think to retrieve knowledge, it's hardwired into your mind, so you can use it effortlessly and easily, without stopping to think about it.
Vocabulary more than anything else requires automaticity to be of value. At LearnThatWord its what we focus on all day long. The goal is to help learners build automaticity quickly and effectively, and the new upgrade will add more quiz modules that focus on usage and meaning of words, and lots of colorful, fun ways to interact with words.
Everyone at LearnThat.org is very excited about taking the new quiz for a first spin: it's fun and nicely addictive!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The learning schedule
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Spelling errors are costing web businesses big money!
It's not like it's new or surprising: If you have low verbal skills, people trust you less.
This article touches on some of the problems relating to spelling:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14130854
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Being an expert means less brain activity, not more
I enjoyed this little report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13620058
In particular the part where the neuroscientist explains that the characteristic of an expert is less mental activity, not more.
You become an expert once you gain automaticity around the elements required for expertise.
This used to be called memory, but since ideology has piled a lot of polemic smear on this term in the educational domain, we now call it automaticity.
For the last few decades, teachers were taught that memorizing was "stupid" and that all students needed was to be allowed to apply critical and creative thinking. I'm all for critical and creative thinking, but you need a large foundation of underlying knowledge to be successful at it, and that foundation is built through review and repetitive processes that build automaticity.
You need a huge selection of building blocks, in storage and readily available, if you want to build a castle. All the materials have to "just be there" if you want the architecture and design to convince. If you're busy figuring finding the building blocks "as you go" and "in context" you will never move into the castle.
Unfortunately, this is what a large groups of ideologists have been preaching in education, and I'm happy that bit by bit we get scientific data from neuroscience that proves that the brain actually works quite differently:
Not logically, not rationally, and creatively only to a small degree: It becomes more and more evident that humans most effectively create skill through automaticity and forming subconscious patterns.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Another interesting delanceyplace.com snippet...
Interesting thoughts on IQ and genius. I bought the book. Looking forward to a more quiet time to read it!
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Professional evolution
Attended a very interesting and engaging event over the weekend:
ETIS, the symposium of the educational technology industry, here in San Francisco. It is one of my favorite events, because it provides amble opportunity to mix and connect with the greatest minds in educational technology.
Carrying home a stack of cards from new won friends and enjoyed reconnect with old ones. Also carrying home: Two thought reverberating in my mind.
For one, it was exciting to see the call for personalization gain momentum. This is something that's at the very core of LearnThat.org, and it feels great to meet allies and people who share our passion for anytime/anywhere learning.
The voices are getting louder, the crisis more dire.
When will the avalanche take off?
Secondly, I engaged in many conversations around professional development and user adoption, partially triggered by being nominated as an innovator company for our Pay-Per-Result personalized payment concept we introduced on our site. We developed this concept in response to administrators asking for guarantees that our technology works, so we designed a concept that provides 100% guaranteed return on investment, supported by 24/7 customer service/chat. You literally only pay for gained, measured learning results, so in essence: We assume responsibility for it working. We don't tell people to trust us based on our marketing... we know that it works, so we give people the option to only pay for measured results.
Some impressions of the problem:
***Programs that were sold to millions of users, yet their analytics show less than 100,000 unique monthly visitors. This seems common in many products. Looks good---strong sales to administrators---low adoption by teachers---does not trickle down to the student.
***Many programs that are lauded as successes, gaining lots of investor support, but that don't have user traction. Are programs not evaluated with basic analytics, like the Alexa toolbar or Google analytics?
***Colleagues stating that 20% first year adoption of their amazing and userfriendly solutions is common in public schools (Quote: "It's different in private schools, because there is more control. In private settings, teachers have to implement what the administrators decide.")
***Our own experience with public school adoptions, taking unreasonable support effort and long start up cycles to implement -- and we tested our software with focus groups of elementary students, so it's not our user interface.
We have still thousands of licenses in our system, paid for years ago, and never claimed because the teachers never came on board.
Everyone is citing "professional development" as the problem (in any other industry, you would call this training, but it has been pointed out to me that teachers take affront with that term).
"We need professional development and more mentoring" is the common chorus.
Honestly, I don't think teachers need any more "professional development" or "training."
How many hours/weeks/months of professional development should it take to teach the teachers?
The majority of teachers I met so far are capable, smart professionals, passionate about education. They could figure this out in 5 minutes and implement new technology like they do their online banking, facebook social lives and other areas of technology.
What teachers need is an open, honest discussion, respect, and participation in designing 21st century education. They don't need "training" and "mentoring". They need to take ownership of this movement, because they will benefit the most.
If chronic problems don't go away, it's nearly always because too much attention is given to the symptoms, not the underlying causes.
Teachers need assurance that the changes that happen so rapidly (and commonly top-down) are designed to improve their job, not eliminate it.
Currently, public school teachers are disrespected and underpaid, left insecure and vulnerable, criticized by society for evils they did not create. Understandable that under these conditions their tolerance for change is low. They have no reason to hope that new technology will be anything but another painful yank on their chains.
The school of the future has to ensure -- and teachers need to know and be able to trust -- that when all is said and done, they will still be the center piece of education, and society has to make a clear decision and commitment to our teachers.
Personalized education has the power to transform the teaching profession and teachers will be 1,000 times happier and more effective because of it.
Professional development should not focus on the use of products and procedures.
There are many educational products on the market and in any area there are stunning examples of wonderful, user-friendly implementations. Every elementary student could explain these programs to the teacher, if training was really the problem. The problem is that teacher find the very essence of why they chose this career in the first place eroding and threatened. "Professional development" time and resources should be spent to envision the future of personalized learning and to involve teachers in the transition from the traditional classroom to being a mentor of a student on a personalized learning path.
Personalized learning and the promises technology hold are a dream come true for the teaching profession. Once teachers understand how wonderful teaching in such an environment is, and that they're safe to venture into this new territory, we will have teachers spearheading the movement.
Teachers who are just doing "a job" might find the transition too troublesome. Resisting change is not tolerated in other areas of society; it should not be permitted in schools. If you're tired of it all (it's understandable) and can't find the energy to engage yourself, find another job or retire. Excuse me, but this is about our children and the future of our society.
Personalized education allows teachers to really spend time and get to know each student, accelerate their progress appropriately, nurture their talents, and provide learning platforms to bring students together in ways that are creative, relaxed, effective, and rewarding for both teachers and students.
My daughter was fortunate to enjoy such an environment: it's very powerful, and it works.
I hope that more and more teachers and students will start to invest their time, power, and voice to facilitate this change and claim and define their role in this process.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
More interesting research on memory
I have been sharing my beloved delanceyplace.com emails before, and here's the latest super brilliant excerpt and "thought bite" - another piece on memory and our misconceptions of it.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Autism visible as different brain growth at 2 years old
Interesting article - http://news.discovery.com/human/autism-puts-brain-growth-in-overdrive-110505.html#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Not really surprising from a parenting perspective. Two years of age is the time when the child discovers a sense of self, and starts to challenge and explore its options in the social network surrounding them ("the terrible two").
Autistic kids have a different sense of self, and low ability to interact socially, so while the "normal" kids get busy figuring out how the people around them respond to a "no" presented in varying levels of intensity, autistic brains just punch out of this social learning process.
Consequently, their brain is growing faster in the cognitive area during this time.
Wondering if MRI can also detect where non-autistic kids grow during this time... where does social learning take place? Does that show up on these scans?
Not really surprising from a parenting perspective. Two years of age is the time when the child discovers a sense of self, and starts to challenge and explore its options in the social network surrounding them ("the terrible two").
Autistic kids have a different sense of self, and low ability to interact socially, so while the "normal" kids get busy figuring out how the people around them respond to a "no" presented in varying levels of intensity, autistic brains just punch out of this social learning process.
Consequently, their brain is growing faster in the cognitive area during this time.
Wondering if MRI can also detect where non-autistic kids grow during this time... where does social learning take place? Does that show up on these scans?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Twice the charm!
Invited for the second time to attend the conference of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) at the end of May in San Francisco with innovator credentials. Excited!
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