Are You Smarter Than A Smartphone?

Students, Computers and Learning - Making the Connection was released by the OECD back in September 2015. Here's a rather lengthy quote from the Foreword section (shortened and emphasis added):

The report provides a first-of-its-kind internationally comparative analysis of the digital skills that students have acquired, and of the learning environments designed to develop these skills. This analysis shows that the reality in our schools lags considerably behind the promise of technology...And even where computers are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed at best. Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics.

...And perhaps the most disappointing finding of the report is that technology is of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students....

One interpretation of all this is that building deep, conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking requires intensive teacher-student interactions, and technology sometimes distracts from this valuable human engagement. Another interpretation is that we have not yet become good enough at the kind of pedagogies that make the most of technology; that adding 21st-century technologies to 20th-century teaching practices will just dilute the effectiveness of teaching. If students use smartphones to copy and paste prefabricated answers to questions, it is unlikely to help them to become smarter. If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we are using to teach them. Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.

Hmm, something to think about. (found on Hack Education by Audrey Watters)

The Gameful Classroom

GradeCraft by the University of Michigan is a learning management system designed to support personalized 'gameful' courses - read more about it over at Wired Campus. The basic idea is to mimic learning as a video game where students chart their own path through the course material and mistakes don't come with any real consequences - you can simply start over and repeat the level.