In this episode of our podcast, we're going to be hearing from math educator Jared Bailey, who spent his summer vacation building a web app for his students, so they could have their homework assignments, practice drills, schedule and his contact info all in one place. As could their parents.

Bailey's ethos was simple: he wanted it to be as simple as possible for students and their families to install the app on their mobile devices, and he didn't want to deal with licensing issues or necessarily learn a ton of code. He just wanted his app to be convenient for students.

Vermont middle school educator created app at camp

In this episode of our  podcast, we're going to be hearing from math educator Jared Bailey, who spent his summer vacation building a web app for his students, so they could have their homework assignments, practice drills, schedule and his contact info all in one place. As could their parents.

Bailey's ethos was simple: he wanted it to be as simple as possible for students and their families to install the app on their mobile devices, and he didn't want to deal with licensing issues or necessarily learn a ton of code. He just wanted his app to be convenient for students.

So as part of a learning institute this summer called Make Create Learn, Bailey used the App Shed tool to create a web app -- that is, an app that can be accessed via a web browser and saved to a mobile device's home screen. Web apps allow users to not deal with questions of licensing that arise when publishing to the Apple or Google Play Store.

"Scan this QR code to download the Mr. Bailey classroom app"

Students can access Bailey's app by scanning a QR code fixed to the bulletin board outside their classroom. For some of them, the act of scanning a QR code was as novel as seeing their classroom app, and realizing that they could make suggestions for new features that Bailey would implement (as much as possible) overnight.

 

 

You can check out Jared Bailey's middle school math app here, and follow him on twitter at @jwbvt. You can subscribe to our 21st Century Classroom podcast via Soundcloud, Podomatic or iTunes. The music you hear in this episode is a track by Ellie G called Sampling Anna and is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.

This past summer, we hosted another successful year of Tarrant Code Camp, where campers from all over Vermont came together to learn iOS development, website design, gaming, robotics and art.

Yes, art.

UVM Computer Science professor Robert Snapp taught campers how to code through the use of Processing, a programming language that translates code into visual and audio movement. But can students really learn to code by creating art? And what can you do with Processing after camp, anyway? We tackle those questions, along with the best way to explode a human head, in this episode of our podcast, "Code is art".

Give it a listen.

You can subscribe to our podcast, The 21st Century Classroom, via SoundCloud or Podomatic. This episode features interviews with Danville, Vermont educator Karen Budde, who helped out Professor Snapp with his Code Camp strand, and Burlington-based digital artist Craig Winslow, who creates public art installations using Processing, and blogged about his involvement with Code Camp here. You can also listen to the previous episode here.

By the way, the tree that grows when you wave at it is a real thing, and here it is in action:

Let us know if you're an art educator who's interested in doing some Processing work with your students, or whether you've tried it already and want to join in the conversation. Our door is always open and we welcome listener and reader feedback.

Craig Winslow, along with partner in crime (and Tarrant Code Camp iOS instructor) Justin Kuzma will be debuting a new Processing installation at this weekend's Art Hop in Burlington. It's entitled Camp Light and will look something like this:

Check 'em out. And if you've got an idea for an upcoming episode of The 21st Century Classroom, give us a shout.

NPR recently highlighted a study claiming that students today don't read nearly as much as they used to, so we had Graduate Research Fellow and big-time data/methodology guy Mark Olofson take a closer look at the study in question. The results? Students these days probably read more than you'd think.

It's the End of Reading As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Something new and different for us today: we tried podcasting! And we're disagreeing with NPR.

I know! But listen: a couple weeks ago NPR ran a story covering this Common Sense Media study ostensibly showing that Kids These Days are reading much much less than they were in times past. Which times, you ask? ME TOO.

Cue my suspicious eyebrows.

Now, Common Sense Media is a great resource for materials to help educators and families discuss issues around digital transitions and technology in schools, but... how is that even possible? And me and my eyebrows also happened to be looking at some very informal data with one of the schools we work with that showed in fact 77% of their middle schoolers read for fun on a regular basis. So what was up with the study?

I'm lucky enough to work in a place where I can ask that question out loud and someone rolls their chair back from their desk, holds up a cautioning finger... and then reads the whole study and answers questions about it.

So here we go: this podcast is a conversation I had with TIIE Graduate Research Fellow Mark Olofson, who read the whole study (it's helpful to have the study queued up, because Mark talks page numbers, you can follow along if you like) and talks about whether it's really true that Kids These Days are reading less than they have before.

Transcript below.

In this episode, we're looking at a recent study that has gotten quite a bit of attention. And that, of course, is the Common Sense Media study, which ostensibly shows that kids aren't reading as much as in ye olden days. NPR did a piece on this study, The Washington Post did a piece, Forbes Media, Time Magazine, and all of them seem to just want to do some good old fashioned hand-wringing.

(radio broadcast): %45 of 17 year olds today say that they read for pleasure no more than 1-2 times a year, if that often.

(NPR radio announcer): That's way down from a decade ago, says Jim Steyer, head of Common Sense Media. Among 13-year-olds, a third say they read for pleasure only once or twice a year.

I tend to be naturally suspicious. And in fact, the following week, I saw a much less formal study from one of the schools we work with here in Vermont that showed, in fact, %77 of the middle schoolers they surveyed said that they read for pleasure either a lot or most of the time. Super unscientific, super low end. But it did lead me to want to ask a whole bunch more questions about the data from the Common Sense study.

Now, I'm not much of a data guy, but Tarrant Institute graduate research fellow Mark Olofson is. Mark's enrolled in UVM's doctoral program in education, he used to be a science teacher, and is an overall super smart guy. So, he sat down and read the whole Common Sense study, and here's what he found.

Mark: What was interesting to me was going through some of the methodology pieces, and then actually looking at some of the actual data, then thinking about what we know about schools.

If you go down to the .pdf page 8, this is a meta-study, which means they looked at a bunch of other studies for sort of overall trends. The first study is just NEAT, and that's just reading proficiency. Doesn't really tell us anything about how much kids read. The second one is an in-school survey, and then the rest of them are online.

So that to me starts to set off a little bit like: "I'm not so sure..." that you can say everything when it's an online survey. Because, even though they are using random people generators and probability, people still, to some extent, self-select to fill that out. And also, you're automatically more likely to connect with people who are online if you're giving an online survey.