A day of iPad use at Cimarron Elementary

All 338 students in kindergarten through fifth grade at Cimarron Avenue Elementary in Hawthorne have iPads at their fingertips.

The rollout has gone smoothly at the school, one of the first in LA Unified to receive the tablets when distribution began in August.

“We’re rocking and rolling here,” said Cimarron’s principal, Cynthia Williams.

Critics have called the first phase of the district’s iPad program a disaster. In September, 300 high school students skirted security on the tablets to surf social network sites. There was confusion over whether students were allowed to take the devices home and who was responsible if they were lost or stolen, among other problems.

Here at Cimarron, those problems were non-events.

On a recent morning, fifth-grade teacher Jennifer Zabatta led her students in a lesson on fractions, using the Nearpod application on the iPads. The screens displayed two squares, one blue and the other green. The instructions asked students to divide the blue square into two equal parts, the green square into four equal parts, and circle the figure with the larger parts.

Students drew lines on the squares to divide them, using their fingers. Their completed work appeared on the teachers’ device next to their names.

“I can easily monitor who is finished and who understands the concept,” Zabatta said.

Samuel Chanaiwa’s fourth graders used the iPads to type summaries of a story they read in their Treasures anthology called “My Brother Martin.” Chanaiwa’s goal is to upload students’ responses to Google docs, so the class can respond to each other’s work in real time.

In Fernando Palacio’s fifth grade class, students tackled math problems on the iPads at their own pace using a program that boasts alignment to the new Common Core State Standards called ST Math.

Some students worked on rounding decimals, while others calculated the area of rectangles, squares and triangles. To round the decimals, students could choose among four possible answers. They tapped a number, and it appeared in its place on a number line. Connecting fractions and decimals to number lines is part of the Common Core standards.

“I have to juggle a lot with the kids all working on different math concepts,” said Palacio, who walked around the classroom monitoring students’ progress and answering questions when they became stumped. “But it’s a beautiful thing because they are all working at their own level and advancing really quickly.”

Cimarron became one of the LA Unified schools to receive new technology and other resources after a federal civil rights investigation found the district did not afford African American and English learners adequate academic opportunities and resources.

Teachers at Cimarron say it’s a civil rights imperative to provide access to technology in a school where 89 percent of the students are black and 73 percent qualify for free lunch. What’s more, Cimarron was in need of updated technology as the school’s refurbished computers were breaking down.

“This is an important equity issue for our students to have this access,” said Chanaiwa. “For some of my students, the iPad is a great motivator. Other students could not have done some of this work without the supports this technology provides.”

Principal Williams brushed aside the idea that the district had botched the rollout. “We always knew this was a work in progress,” she said.

She did, however, acknowledge that there are “technical difficulties” with the Pearson software. Pearson created the math and language arts curriculum for grades pre-K through 12 that comes preloaded on the district-issued tablets.

As for the problems, Pearson staff come to the school to assist teachers and demonstrate lessons. Williams says she is not impatient for a glitch-free Pearson curriculum.

“There are so many wonderful applications that our teachers can access and use with their students,” she said. “The culture of our school is changing. Teachers bring their iPads to staff meetings. They are sharing lessons with each other. But the most important thing to remember is this is a life-changing experience for our children to have access to this technology.”

Previous Posts: Teacher union survey finds mixed results for LA Unified iPad program; LA Unified Board sees a digital future without Apple iPads; LA Unified busts some myths about the iPad program.

Ron Chandler, LA Unified’s Chief Information Officer

Los Angeles Unified will assemble a student committee to advise its response to the recent security breach of district-issued iPads by 185 high school students, Ron Chandler, the district’s chief information officer, said yesterday.

The move is the district’s attempt to find a way to balance students’ desires to surf the web unfettered with the district’s job of keeping kids safe.

Chandler told LA School Report in an email later that he hoped some of the students who hacked the iPads would be a part of the student advisory committee.

After talking to the students involved in the hacking, the district decided the security on the tablets “is probably more restrictive than it needs to be,” Chandler told a district Board committee that monitors the iPad initiative. The question now is how much of what students want to access—namely YouTube, Twitter and Facebook—should be allowed.

“What this forces is a conversation,” said Chandler, addressing the concern over which websites students should be allowed to access. “I might add that this is a conversation that is going on across the country.”

The security breach took place when students were allowed to take their tablets home. Tablets can be locked down so students are unable to browse the internet at home, but the district doesn’t think this is a constructive option, according to Chandler.

Monica Ratliff, the committee chair, expressed concern over students’ taking the devices home without the board oversight committee’s approval.

“We had been told the [iPads] were eventually going to go home, but that they were not going home yet,” Ratliff said. “So I really think we should have clarification about what was said and when.”

Chandler responded that it was his understanding the decision rested with principals. He promised to provide the sequence of decisions on the matter at the board’s next meeting.

With the $1 billion tablet initiative poised to put iPads in the hands of LA Unified’s 630,000 students by 2014, the district must work quickly to update its tech-related discipline policy. The district is also launching a cyber awareness campaign that aims to educate students, parents and teachers about the responsible use of technology.

To date, the district has handed out 12,500 iPads at 21 schools. This week, 5,000 more tablets will be passed out at six schools. Twenty remaining schools will receive their devices by the end of October.

The students who figured out how to hack the iPad’s security system came from three high schools—Roosevelt, Westchester and Valley Academy of Arts and Sciences. Upon hearing of the iPad breach, Superintendent John Deasy ordered all tablets be returned to schools and remain there until the district decides how to handle the problem.

Chandler emphasized that the websites students accessed were “innocent.” Still, principals will decide if and how students will be punished for their actions.

Previous Posts: iPads Hacked? ‘Surprised it Took This Long,’ Says Zimmer; Students Hack LAUSD iPads – LA Times; Morning Read: iPads Get a Workout in the Valley

The supports range from digital notepads to test items translated into the student’s native language.

The “Usability, Accessibility, and Accommodations Guidelines” identifies three types of support for meeting the needs of all learners:

Universal tools: Available to all students, they include spellcheck and a digital highlighter. Students can mark or flag items they may want to review later. They can use embedded rulers, protractors and calculators for some math problems. Dictionaries are available for tackling the “real-world” writing assignment called a performance task.

Designated supports: These are available to students including English language learners, struggling readers or students with attention deficits so long as they have been evaluated by educators as needing extra assistance. These supports can include “color contrast” text or blocking distracting content. “Stacked translations” provide a translated test passage above the passage in English.

Accommodations:  These are for students with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). A deaf student, for example, can watch videos showing a person signing the test content. Closed-captioning is provided for listening items on the English Language Arts test. Blind students will have access to a talking or Braille calculator. Speech-to-text technology allows students to dictate their answers or give voice commands in order to save work or open and close applications.

The use of text-to-speech technology, which will read aloud the printed text, can be used for reading passages. However, the policy states that this accommodation is only appropriate for about 1 or 2 percent of students with disabilities.

“By adopting common universal tools, designated supports, and accommodations, states will be able to provide an assessment that allows all students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, while ensuring that results are comparable across the Consortium,” Deb Sigman said in a press release. She is the Smarter Balanced Executive Committee Co-Chair and California’s deputy superintendent of public instruction.

Smarter Balanced assessments will be field tested in the spring. The actual tests are expected to roll out in the 2014–2015 school year.

Previous Posts: Testing Bill Taking Shape, Would Suspend API For Two Years, CA Getting ‘Smarter‘ with New Tests to Probe Critical Thinking

Rather different from the usual instruction: “Pick the best answer, A, B, C, or D.” Right?

That’s because California is getting “Smarter.”

Beginning in the 2014–2015 school year, 25 states are replacing their standardized tests with “Smarter Balanced” assessments, a product of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two groups developing tests aligned to the new Common Core State Standards now being taught in 45 states.

In California, the new tests will replace the traditional Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) assessments, which were established by the legislature in 1997. The STAR tests passed into history on July 1 although the state has not yet decided what tests, if any, will be used for the current academic year.

“If you take a look at the Smarter Balanced prototype, you will see that almost all the items have a connection to the real world,” says Jaime Aquino, deputy superintendent of instruction for Los Angeles Unified. “It’s about application. It’s about measuring higher-order thinking. It’s not about multiple choice.”

Aquino says the new test is infinitely superior to the previous California standardized tests, which were entirely multiple choice, except for writing assessments in grades 4 and 7.  The Smarter Balanced tests are designed to probe critical thinking and analysis through a mix of multiple-choice, short answer and extended response questions.

Not all education experts are pleased with the change.

Robert Schaeffer of FairTest, a nonprofit that works to promote quality education and testing, says the new Common Core-aligned tests are longer and “substantially more difficult” than previous tests, calling the questions “esoteric, highly technical and unnecessary for someone to succeed in college or life” with a format he says is no different from the tests many states give now.

“Because of the political pressure to develop these tests quickly and cheaply, they largely failed to revise them,” says Schaeffer. “It’s more important to get it right than to get it fast. It’s easy to develop the perfect assessment system in theory, but you need to try it out in practice.”

FairTest is calling for a moratorium on the Common Core tests. Schaeffer cites the sharp drop in scores in New York and Kentucky, after those states administered tests aligned to the new standards, and FairTest is not alone in its objection.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said back in April that the tests should not be used to judge student or teacher performance, or used in any other high-stakes decisions, until the standards have been field-tested. Education organizations, including the National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association, have made similar requests.

Schaeffer suggests it will take more than three years to try out the assessments and improve them.

“In the perfect world, tests would be treated like prescription drugs,” he says. “Before you can sell a prescription drug in this country, you have to prove to a neutral body that it is both safe and effective. And you do that through experiments and trials and you build to mass administration. You don’t say, ‘Wow! This looks like it’s going to be a cure for a rare cancer’ and start administering it right away.”

In LA Unified schools, the Smarter Balanced tests will be taken on iPads. Elsewhere, students may take them on whichever devices—iPads, laptops, desktops—schools have available, with Smarter Balanced providing pencil-and-paper tests until the 2017–2018 school year to give schools time to acquire the appropriate technology.

The new tests for math and language arts will be given over the last 12 weeks of the school year in grades 3 through 8 and 11. There will be a mix of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Some parts of the test will require students to have some tech savvy. They may be asked, for example, to drag and drop fractions or decimals onto the correct place of a number line.

Students will also have to tackle a “real-world” writing assignment called a performance task, like the example above or this one. To complete some of them, students may first have to read articles or watch an informational video, like this one.

The new tests are lengthy. The language arts and math tests combined will take seven hours in grades 3 through 5 and 8½ hours in grade 11. Schools decide over how many days to administer the test. Teachers have the option to give assessments throughout the school year to track their students’ progress. Deb Sigman, California’s deputy superintendent of public instruction, says these interim tests would be a helpful way to inform teaching and learning.

“We have included in our assessment bill that we think the [interim tests] are vitally important and we encourage that the state pays for them for all districts,” Sigman told LA School Report.

The biggest difference with the Smarter Balanced assessments, aside from the fact that ultimately they will all be given on computers, is that they will adjust to the student taking them. Questions become more difficult or easy depending on how a student answers previous questions. The benefit, according to the Smarter Balanced website, is that the tests are individualized and can more quickly pinpoint the skills students have mastered.

“Struggling students who can’t answer the more difficult questions can be given a set of questions that can really home in on what it is they know,” says Sigman. “We’re not giving kids questions that we know they can’t answer. So it’s a more precise measure.”

This past spring, 52 LAUSD schools participated in pilot tests for the new assessments. Findings from the pilot tests are not yet available, but they will eventually be used to improve the assessments going forward.

Field tests will be conducted in the spring of 2014. In a letter to district superintendents and charter school administrators, Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent of public instruction, wrote that he is requesting “as many schools as possible” participate in the field test, insisting that “this will be a wonderful opportunity for our students and teachers.”

Previous Posts: Aquino Sees Deeper Thinking but Falling Scores with Common Core, California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data

Common Core Training Session at CSU Dominguez Hills

Nearly 1,400 LA Unified educators flooded the California State University Dominguez Hills campus in Carson on Saturday for a free conference on the Common Core State Standards.  “Launch LA Common Core” was organized by Teach Plus, a nonprofit that focuses on professional development for teachers.

The event was held as states are scrambling to train teachers in implementing the new standards. The demand for training is high—about 4,000 teachers wanted to attend the conference at Dominguez Hills. In the first 24 hours of sign-up, 1,700 teachers crashed the online reservation system.

“It’s great to see both the appetite from teachers who want to attend and from those who want to share common core-aligned lessons that they’re already doing in classrooms,” says John Lee of the mostly teacher-led conference. He is the executive director of Teach Plus Los Angeles, which received 100 applications from educators looking to lead training sessions.

Teachers from district and charter schools lucky enough to gain entrance chose from more than 60 workshops in math, language arts, social studies, science and technology. There were also sessions for teachers of special education and English language learners. Some workshop titles reflected the impression that these are tough standards: “Ready or Not, Common Core Is Here: What Every ELA Teacher Needs to Know” and “Conquering the Common Core Using Cognitive Guided Instruction in Mathematics. “

In a workshop titled “Common Core Shifts in Teaching Practice & Learning,” teachers tackled a word problem that instructed them to design the biggest and smallest dog pen possible, using 64 feet of fence. Teachers drew narrow, rectangular pens, square pens and even circular pens. As they worked, they talked about how the problem has “real-world application” and how they would have to provide background knowledge to students who don’t know the meaning of “pen.”

Volunteers explained how they solved the problem. One teacher held up a notebook showing her calculations and drawings. She found all the multiples of 64 before attempting to create the different-shaped perimeters of each pen.  Then she found their areas. The goal of Common Core: to get students beyond blind calculation and into understanding concepts.

The teachers in the room were most impressed with the way Bonnie Kwon, a 3^rd grade teacher at Knox Elementary, solved the problem. To make the dog pen even bigger, she used a wall of a house as part of the perimeter. “That’s outside-the-box thinking,” one teacher said.

“I never learned like this before,” said Candice Smith, a K–1 teacher at 95^th Street Elementary. “When I was a kid, we just learned the formulas for calculating perimeter and area. We threw out the dog!”

All in all, teachers appeared undaunted by the tough task ahead. Los Angeles Unified Superintendent John Deasy acknowledged in his opening address that teaching the Common Core standards would be “unbelievably difficult.”

“We’re going to fail; we’re going to stumble,” Deasy said. “But if we are afraid to stumble, we are not going to succeed. The best advice I can give you: Stay calm and teach on.”

The top four presenters at Dominguez Hills, as named by attendee surveys, will have their lessons videotaped and uploaded to a new LA Unified professional development website. Teachers will have access to videos and other teaching resources.

The educator who led the most popular training session will give his or her workshop at an upcoming Teach Plus conference in Boston.

Previous Posts: Union Survey Finds Teachers Unprepared for Common Core, Aquino Sees Deeper Thinking but Falling Scores with Common Core, John Deasy: one of the biggest adjustments ever – Common Core

Jaime Aquino

Five years ago, as Jaime Aquino was leaving his post as chief academic officer of Denver public schools, a reporter asked him his thoughts on how to improve public education. His response: national standards, coupled with national assessments.

But Aquino told the reporter, “I will never see this in my lifetime.’”

Fast forward to 2013. Aquino is now the deputy superintendent of instruction for Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the country. Another school has started this week, and it’s shattering his prediction of years ago.

In LA Unified’s administrative hierarchy, Aquino is responsible for training 28,000 teachers on how to implement the Common Core Standards, the new teaching regimen that 45 states and the District of Columbia are adopting — in LA Unified’s case, with iPads. The standards prescribe what students in kindergarten through 12^th grade are expected to learn and how they’re going to learn it.

And all across the country, educators and politicians have sounded the alarm: the new standards are tough, and test scores — previously based on each state’s individual testing protocols — are sure to plummet.

“I’m not a gambler, “ Aquino says now, “but I am willing to gamble my entire pension that come 2015 our scores will go down.”

Yet Aquino is undaunted. “Test scores will decrease, not because the students are learning less,” he says, “but because the definition of proficiency has changed.”

Aquino cites a disparity among state standards that he noticed when serving as deputy superintendent in Hartford, Connecticut from 1999 to 2001. Students who passed the Connecticut Mastery test were deemed proficient as a matter of course. Yet had they moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, a 30-minute drive from Hartford, they would have fallen behind when tested against Massachusetts’ more rigorous standards. The expectations were lower, Aquino noted, depending on where students lived.

“I kept saying that in Hartford, we were lying,” Aquino said. “We were saying, ‘Yes, you’re proficient, but God forbid you should ever move to Massachusetts.’”

Now, nearly all U.S. students will be held to the same standards as the United States begins facing down the persistent poor showings of American students in international assessments. In language arts, the Common Core standards emphasize reading informational texts as opposed to literature. These kinds of readings, the thinking goes, will better prepare students for college and the workforce, where they are more likely to encounter texts that dispense information, whether scientific, historical or technical.

In fact, according to Common Core standards, by the time they reach high school, students should be reading 70 percent informational texts and only 30 percent literature. The emphasis is more on supporting answers by providing evidence from the text, and less on sharing opinions.

As for the math standards, parents may be surprised that their kids have one or two problems to solve for homework, instead of 30. The difference, Aquino explains, is that students will have to write an explanation of how they solved the problems. This way, they demonstrate understanding of the concepts, instead of going through the motions of solving a bunch of problems.

Aquino calls the U.S. an “answer-getting culture.” We provide students with “quick tricks” for finding correct answers, rather than tools for critical thinking to help them understand the concepts.  Aquino points to an example of how multiple-choice tests force teachers into providing these quick tricks, simply to increase students’ odds of choosing the correct answer.

“We say to students, ‘If you’re multiplying two numbers, the product is always going to be greater than both numbers,’ ” he explains. “That is always true, except if you’re multiplying a number times a decimal. Students rely on this trick so much that they don’t even multiply. They just look for the answers that are greater.”

Aquino thinks we need to teach math as they do in places like Japan and Hong Kong. He says Hong Kong covers only 40 percent of the topics in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an assessment given to fourth and eighth-grade students in more than 60 countries, including the U.S.

Students in Hong Kong, according to Aquino, perform much better than their American counterparts, who cover 80 percent of the topics. The difference is that, in Hong Kong, teachers stress mathematical knowledge over answers.

“We need to change the way we train teachers in this country,” Aquino says, and for now, he is attempting to do just that in Los Angeles: He’s changing the way teachers teach to change the way students learn. In time, he says, the efforts will boost test scores, too.

Previous Posts: LA’s Most Famous Teacher Critiques Common Core, Common Core P20 Flow Chart, California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data, LA Teachers Get Their Hands on the Future as iPad Era Begins

The start of training

More than 100 elementary school teachers from around the Los Angeles school district gathered Monday at Theodore Roosevelt High School in east LA as one of the first group of instructors to learn how to use the Apple iPad, a key teaching device in the academic year that opens next Tuesday.

These K-through-6 teachers were from among 47 district schools with the least access to digital technology. They are receiving the first wave of iPads — about 30,000 for students and 1,500 for teachers — with another 600,000 awaiting distribution within a year. In workshops like this one, Apple employees are teaching teachers the basics of their new electronic tool.

“These iPads are not a silver bullet,” said Jaime Aquino, LA Unified’s deputy superintendent of instruction. “The silver bullet is an effective teacher in every classroom.” But, he added, “having this technology is going to impact teaching and learning and transform the lives of students.”

The iPads, a five year, half billion dollar investment by LAUSD,  are being introduced as school districts all across the country are implementing the new Common Core standards that will change the way English language arts and math are taught.

Aquino said the iPads will allow a teacher to provide individualized instruction without being obtrusive. Rather than hover over a struggling student, for example, she can send a hint or a prompt and the rest of the class will never know.

It also helps principals and teaching coaches to be inconspicuous, says Aquino. “With an iPad, I can send the teacher a private message that says, ‘Try this,’ or ‘Ask this question.’ I won’t be intruding on the lesson at all,” he said.

Aquino walked from room to room, visiting each training session, motivating teachers and stressing the importance of providing students with modern technology

“This is an issue of social justice,” he said. “Our kids need to be ready for the 21^st century. A reality check, guys? We are already 13 years into the 21^st century.”

The workshops focused on basics: setting up an Apple id, logging in, opening and closing apps. The main lesson: keeping mischievous kids on task. The “guided access” feature allows teachers to control where and what kids do online. If a teacher wants students to stay on a kid-friendly site and watch a video, she can lock students into the site by disabling the home button. The student cannot choose to open another app and play a game instead.

The teacher can also restrict access within the web page. She could circle, for example, the address and search bar. Once circled, the area is blocked, and students are unable to type in another web address or search term.

Most teachers appeared undeterred by the complexities of the iPads. They say the devices are necessary in preparing students for a future that will require technology skills.

“My students are from low-income families,” said Andrea Clawson, who teaches kindergarten and first grade at Apple Academy in south Los Angeles. “They don’t have iPads and laptops at home. They need these iPads to practice their computer skills as early as possible, so that they’re ready for the online tests in 2014.”

The next steps will be to train elementary teachers on how to use the Common Core content, developed by the British firm, Pearson, that is loaded on the iPads. That training will take through Wednesday, when the iPad rollout continues with training for middle and high school students.

Previous Posts: Roundup: LAUSD / iPad Story Goes Global, Apple to Replace LAUSD iPads if Broken, Stolen or Damaged, Low-Income Schools Getting First Wave of New iPads