More Problems With “Give Every Kid a Computer”

Posted: December 4th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

Kenya, take note:

Florida’s Miami-Dade County school district said it has “pushed the pause button” on one of the country’s largest 1-to-1 digital computing initiatives, citing concerns about the troubled implementation of such programs in Los Angeles, Guilford County, N.C., and elsewhere.

In addition to delaying the deployment of new devices, which had been expected to begin last month, the 354,000-student district is now rethinking its earlier preference for tablet computers and is reconsidering its original plan to give students their own devices.

Read the whole thing here.

Miami is right to be worried. These roll-outs are going badly in LA, in NC, and around the world.

The recent announcement by the 73,000-student Guilford County, N.C., school system that it was suspending its tablet computing initiative also struck a nerve. There, district officials suspended the country’s largest deployment of Amplify tablets after extensive problems with broken screens and overheating battery chargers.

Gov’t officials don’t like the concept of Fail Fast. As in, try it in a couple schools, assume it will go badly at first, and then tinker until you either a) realize it won’t work, ever; b) it can work, here are lessons learned, now we can create detailed implementation plan and roll it out at scale. They don’t like it because it works badly for political reasons. “Hey, we promised computers, let’s ship the computers. I don’t want to wait.”

Bridge will have its first Class 7 kids next month. (January is the start of the academic year).

We’ve created a Term 1 curriculum with a lot more time during class where students read or solve problems independently — atypical for Kenya and much of the developing world.

Before we “go to scale” across 240 academies, we’ve tried to Fail Fast in Sep, Oct, and Nov. Our colleagues Theresa and Geordie would try out lessons with an individual teacher. Then we get observational data plus the teacher’s impressions plus video. That allows our curriculum team to revise, ask questions, send back an iterated lesson, and fail again…

Then we see whether it’s working at scale with 4,400 or so Class 7 kids, before we try this “more independent work, less lecture” approach with C6, C5, etc.