Intel Releases A Solution Brief on How its Server Board Powers the Critical Links Education Appliance

Intel has released a solution brief describing how its server boards are powering the Critical Links Education Appliance.

A copy of the solution brief can be found here:

http://www.intel.com/products/server/motherboards/S3420GP/S3420GP-overview.htm

The solution brief gives readers a concise view of how the Critical Links Education Appliance, powered by Intel Server Board S3420GP provides both the teachers and students an interactive platform for learning, discussion and collaboration, not to mention a comprehensive infrastructure for communication and IT management at schools.

National Education Technology Plan Draft Released, March 5, 2010

First of all congratulations to the National Educational Technology Plan Technical Working Group (and especially to working group member, Prof. Chris Dede, who is a Critical Links Advisory Board Member) for releasing a highly insightful and creative Education Technology Plan draft, 2010 !

The Office of Educational Technology (U.S. Department of Education) released the National Education Technology Plan draft on March 5th, 2010. Critical Links Advisory Board Member. Prof. Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and has authored many books and research papers on the subject of technology in education. Here is a news release that details Dr. Dede's association with Critical Links, in an advisory capacity.

About the Plan Draft

Now, coming to the plan itselt, it details models for 21st century learning in classrooms and schools across America, and how to "bring state-of-the-art technology into learning to enable, motivate,and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve".

Here are some interesting quotes from the draft that are specific to the challenges faced by the US education system. Although a lot of these issues and concerns are equally applicable (albeit with minor regional variations) to other developed countries as well as many of the developing nations.

"The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures. In contrast to traditional classroom instruction, this requires that we put students at the center and empower them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several dimensions...."

A personalized learning experience (we at Critical Links often refer to this as 1:1 learning or 1:1 eLearning), is obviously a key aspect of the 21st century learing model. At Critical Links, this is what are striving to bring to classrooms and schools around the world with our education appliance and the eco-system that surrounds the education appliance, which is an Intel initiative known as "Intel Learning Series Alliance".

Going into the plan in a little more depth shows us that the working group has done an excellent job of extrapolating the data about broadband penetration (connectivity) and changing behavior of students with respect to technology and mobile devices, to how productivity in classrooms ought to be improved and laying the framework to achieve specific goals in education. Here are some very good examples:

Teaching:
"Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, the model of 21st century learning calls for using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching. In such a teaching model, teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners and classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools as well as to resources that help them act on the insights the data provide...."

"In a connected teaching model, connection replaces isolation. Classroom educators are fully connected to learning data and tools for using the data; to content, resources, and systems that empower them to create, manage, and assess engaging and relevant learning experiences; and directly to their students in support of learning both inside and outside school. The same connections give them access to resources and expertise that improve their own instructional practices and guide them in becoming facilitators and collaborators in their students’ increasingly self-directed learning."

And, here are some comments on productivity that should resonate with school districts nation-wide that are dealing with financial and many other types of challenges at the same time:

Productivity
"To achieve our goal of transforming American education, we must rethink basic assumptions and redesign our education system. We must apply technology to implement personalized learning and ensure that students are making appropriate progress through our K-16 system so they graduate. These and other initiatives require investment, but tight economic times and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend. We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decisionmakers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational attainment within the budgets we can afford."

Some of the recommendations by the working group are very fascinating. Here are some examples:

Learning:
All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society.
To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:
1.1 Revise, create, and adopt standards and learning objectives for all content areas that reflect 21st century expertise and the power of technology to improve learning.
1.2 Develop and adopt learning resources that use technology to embody design principles from the learning sciences.
1.3 Develop and adopt learning resources that exploit the flexibility and power of technology to reach all learners anytime and anywhere.
1.4 Use advances in the learning sciences and technology to enhance STEM (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning and develop, adopt, and evaluate new methodologies with the potential to enable all learners to excel in STEM.

Infrastructure
All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it. To meet this goal, we recommend the following actions:
4.1 Ensure that students and educators have adequate broadband access to the Internet
and adequate wireless connectivity both inside and outside school.
4.2 Ensure that every student and educator has at least one Internet access device and software and resources for research, communication, multimedia content creation, and collaboration for use in and out of school.
4.3 Leverage open educational resources to promote innovative and creative opportunities for all learners and accelerate the development and adoption of new open technology-based learning tools and courses.
4.4 Build state and local education agency capacity for evolving an infrastructure for learning.
4.5 Support “meaningful use” of educational and information technology in states and
districts by establishing definitions, goals, and metrics.

Overall, this is a very high-impact plan that points out some of the deficiencies of the current system and provides great recommendations to bring "learning" and "infrastructure" in schools to the 21st century. I will end with this quote from the report, which really stood out for me:

Learning no longer has to be one size fits all
"All students should have common core discipline-specific learning experiences in preparation for college and careers. In addition, networked technologies offer vast opportunities for group and individual learning experiences that are driven by students' interests"

“One Size Fits All” is old-school – We should allow each child to learn at her/his own pace?

Most of the K-12 solutions out there, whether it is a learning solution or a technology infrastructure solution, seemingly cater to the philosophy of “One Size Fits All”. This is the wrong approach to K-12 education that alienates a sizeable percentage of the student population early on, whether they are attention-deficit, athletically oriented, learning-challenged or students with multiple extra-curricular activities outside of school. Today, technology is available that can facilitate learning at an individual student’s pace, rather than forcing students to match the learning speed of the fastest learners in the classroom. A lot of students give up on serious learning early on, after desperately playing catch up.

Critical Links provides K-12 schools with the learning, IT and networking infrastructure and the consulting services to facilitate such customized learning experience for each individual student. At the core of this solution are the Critical Links education appliance and the Intel Classmate PC, which help provide the24/7 connectivity (voice, data, video, wireless support and security including content filtering and parental supervision), the learning management system, learning activity management system (fully integrated with LMS) and the student, classroom and school administration tools needed to enable such learning. This 1:1 learning allows students to feel independent (and not feel left out), because now they can pace their own learning experience as they have access to all the lectures and slides and notes and videos (all content) as and when they need, without the constant pressure of catching up to peers.

The new-age learning tools such as Wikis, blogs etc. and the ability to create and share content within a small study group or a larger random group of students, makes this an optimum solution for an individualized learning experience or a collaborative one. As a student, I remember being frustrated by certain topics and certain teachers. No matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to cope with the styles of certain teachers or you hate certain topics. Now, the K-12 student does not have to feel powerless when faced with such an eventuality. You have the off-line resources at your finger tips from school or home, without all the distractions of the public internet thanks to the VPN-based, school-centric 24/7 learning experience.

Another aspect of this solution concerns students with learning disabilities – now the parents of such students can take more control of their kids’ academic performance and do not have to be completely dependent on individual teachers to do their jobs well and understand the unique nature of every child with a disability. A parent is in the best position to understand the unique nature of a child’s learning disability and as a result should be empowered to influence the child’s learning experience in a positive way. With the education appliance powered solution from Critical Links, your home can become a virtual classroom with the parents in a position to supervise and monitor their children and to bring them up to speed.