Honesty is the best policy

The recent Atlanta cheating scandal, in which the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that “178 teachers and principals in 44 schools had engaged in cheating since 2001” (Bello, Gillum & Toppo, 2011), raises tough questions about the nature of education and educational accountability. The fact that the investigation was limited to 56 schools makes the widespread nature of the cheating spectacularly disturbing.  

What does this evidence say about a system of high-stakes testing that unfairly punishes schools with low income students? What does it say about a culture where principals and teachers will lie and cheat rather than promote reform? How can the public trust that the results of high-stakes testing are accurate? How can reformers develop systems to hold schools and teachers accountable, like Scott Walker has promised to do in Wisconsin, which ensure integrity?

Teachers, principals, and politicians could learn a lesson from an episode of The Brady Bunch where Jan Brady calls attention to a scoring error that would have erroneously awarded her the winner of an essay contest. In front of her peers, Jan calls attention to the error and accepts that her honesty will cost her public adulation. The perception of success is not enough; for school reform to truly be successful, it must do more than just hold teachers accountable. It must help them teach better and do it honestly.   

CBS. (2011, June 15). The Brady Bunch - Honesty is the best policy [Video file]. Retrieved from  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCxSIfOYmAU

Bello, M., Gillum, J. & Toppo, G. (2011, July 8). Official: Investigation into possible test cheating expands. USAToday.com. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-07-08-schools-DC-investigation-cheating_n.htm?csp=34news

EdL 755 - Cognitive Surplus review

Clay Shirky begins his book, Cognitive Surplus, by making an analogy between English gin consumption in the early 1700s and American television consumption post World War II. Television itself was not the problem for Americans, Shirky assures readers, but itself a reaction to Americans’ excess of free time and diminished social circles. At this point, Shirky begins contrasting social media, a wholly interactive and networked medium, with the static albatross that is television. He asks readers to “imagine treating the free time of the world’s educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus” (Shirky, 2010, p. 9). He presents this free time as a social asset that can be harnessed for productive projects like Wikipedia or squandered watching television. He points out that teens and young adults are watching less television than previous generations and that a subtle but prevalent shift is beginning in the way Americans consume media. People are beginning to employ “new communications tools to do jobs older media simply can’t do” (p. 15), writes Shirky, invoking as an example Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing website developed to map Kenyan violence in the wake of a controversial December 2007 election.

Shirky never uses the term crowdsourcing, which has long been part of journalistic vernacular, but he examines its tenets throughout the book. The crowdsourcing model allows news organizations or companies to harness the production of many volunteers to replace or enhance the work of a limited number of professionals. On the positive side, relying on volunteers who donate their free time has allowed “news outlets do things that would otherwise be impractical, such as searching through troves of documents looking for interesting material” (“The people,” 2011). In the future, there may not be many journalists earning salaries as their primary career, but everyone can be a journalist in his or her free time. Social media is destroying journalism while revolutionizing it and redefining what it means to be a journalist. Shirky argues that “providing professional content isn’t the only job we’ve been hiring media to do” (p. 19), seemingly acknowledging that amateur content may not adequately replace hard news or investigative journalism. However, he does not discuss the ramifications of the hard news void slowly growing in the media landscape. As news becomes less researched and more user driven, people dig in their ideological heels, accept opinion as fact, and may be falling down a collective slippery slope where more information means less knowledge. Shirky acknowledges that all crowdsourcing projects are not academic or even productive, but he does not address what this shift in media consumption may mean for the knowledge of the American electorate.

Another ramification of this shift toward crowdsourcing is addressed when Shirky examines digital sharecropping. In this new, collaborative, cognitive surplus-harnessing media landscape, “the revenue goes not to the content creators but to the owners of the platform that enables the sharing” (p. 57). Shirky relates a story about volunteers for America Online suing AOL in 1999 for profiting from their unpaid labor. More than a decade later, this issue has become more extreme and more prevalent.  Huffington Post bloggers recently sued it and AOL, which purchased the site for $315 million, for treating them like digital sharecroppers and not sharing the fruits of their digital labor (Katz, 2011).  Shirky does not come down hard enough of this practice, instead viewing it as part of a larger shift in the way that new generations view and interact with media. “One function of the market,” he argues, “is to provide platforms for us to engage in the things we value doing outside of the market” (p. 60). His logic can be readily applied to most of his examples, like Facebook, which does seem to facilitate activities – discussing current events, sharing photographs, reconnecting with people – that people want to do anyway. It is more difficult and worrisome, especially in the age of content farms, to apply this to all human endeavors. Marginalizing all writers and all content by lumping journalism in with Facebook posts contributes to the growing wealth disparity in American society. Using Shirky’s model, the cognitive surplus of the average American will eventually be diminished as he or she has to work two or three jobs make ends meet.

Shirky eventually devotes part of his text to examining the ramifications of new media and social networking on education. Here he relates an interesting history of the Invisible College, a group of scientists and academics who met in random locations and communicated with letters in the mid-1600s. Shirky relates that “within a few years, several members of the Invisible College had produced advances in chemistry, biology, astronomy, and optics” (p. 137) by fostering a collaborative and competitive atmosphere. He goes on to explain the conditions of sharing information and to praise new tools that enable more effective sharing on a larger scale and create products like the Linux operating system. Shirky contrasts this acceptance of collaboration for the greater good with an anecdote involving a freshman engineering student attending Ryerson University in 2007 who started a Facebook study group for chemistry students. To his credit, Shirky paints a nuanced picture of the Ryerson situation by invoking the concept of free riders. He asks or implies many difficult questions facing modern educators: Can educators ever expect a student’s individual work to be done completely in isolation? How can an online study group of 146 members avoid the type of freeloaders that a traditional study group can easily identify and expel? When does sharing knowledge become cheating? Shirky provides no easy answers, acknowledging that education is “less about getting the right answer than learning the right techniques” (p. 148) while arguing that “learners who share their observations and frustrations with their peers learn faster and retain more of what they’ve learned than those who study alone” (p. 149). The school eventually struck a balance between expelling the student and absolving his behavior by downgrading him on one particular assignment. Shirky seems to support this type of balanced approach but argues that schools need to establish progressive policies rather than take reactionary punitive measures.   

In his final chapter, Shirky tries to draw conclusions from the myriad of ideas considered in his book. However, precise inferences are difficult to resolve because “the bigger the opportunity offered by new tools, the less completely anyone can extrapolate the future from the previous shape of society” (p. 189). This paradox is at the heart of Shirky’s book as his historical references and modern observations do not always fully connect, routinely drawing out more questions than answers. The title of the final chapter, “Looking for the mouse,” highlights the rapid change and shifting cultural expectations that are a theme of his writing. While children a few years ago may have expected to find a computer mouse to control a television or projector screen, they may now expect every screen to be manipulated like their iPad or smartphone by simply touching the screen rather than using a mouse. While TVs a few years ago may not have allowed any interactivity, most high-end models are now being shipped with internet access and apps from GoogleTV or other services. While Shirky’s book cannot predict all trends or provide all answers, it does raise many interesting questions that allow readers to draw their own conclusions about an exciting, unpredictable future.

References

Katz, B. (2011, April 12). AOL, Huffington Post sued by unpaid blogger. Reuters.com. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/huffington-lawsuit-idUSN1216794620110412

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive surplus: Creativity and generosity in a connected age. London: The Penguin Group.

The people formerly known as the audience. (2011, July 7). Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/18904124?story_id=18904124&fsrc=rss

Use of cursive not recursive

The state of Indiana has been in the news recently since it decided to drop the requirement that schools teach students cursive writing beginning this fall. With electronic communication on the rise, the most logical argument against teaching cursive is that the time students spend learning it could be better spent learning something more practical.

After I learned cursive writing in the third grade and practiced it throughout my elementary school education, I notice that it quickly fell by the wayside in middle and high school. Teachers did not force me to write instead of print, and I did not force myself. In college, I once spent a week taking notes in cursive and found that, like Billy Madison stumbling on Zs in his eponymous movie, I had to think about how to write certain letters. Cursive writing was not recursive, and I had forgotten how to write efficiently. More embarrassingly, my notes looked like they could have been scrawled by a third grader.

Few of Beloit College's incoming freshmen last year remember how to write in cursive anyway, and the process of informally phasing it out seems well underway. As more states adopt Common Core standards, which do not require cursive writing, I see longhand becoming a lost art. Moreover, I cannot think of any strong arguments to keep cursive writing as part of the curriculum. The best I can come up with is that students will need to write their signature on documents, but surely that does not demand entire units on the subject. Am I missing something?

Video contains PG-13 humor:

EdL 755 - Video Games and Learning review

The preface and introduction to Video Games and Learning begins by debunking the notion that video games are a “fringe medium” (Squire 4), a preconceived notion held by many who were not raised in the era of gaming. Born in 1980, I grew up playing video games and witnessed their integration into American culture. Even at 31-years-old, many of my friends are compulsive gamers, and I too play games occasionally. For the uninitiated, the author uses examples of particular games to emphasize the medium’s emphasis on creating engaging social experiences. Squire writes that games “suggest ways of structuring participatory educational experiences” (15) showing what teachers can learn from gaming and validating the shift toward project-based learning. Games are just one example where students learn more from working through and solving problems than they do from memorizing facts. However, when Squire points to other areas of life where this participatory culture has taken hold, focusing on digital media, he argues that “while schools remain static, learning is changing” (14). Broad generalizations such as this ignore the shifts in educational philosophy over the last decade and discount the progress being made in classrooms around the country.

Squire continues by examining what makes a “good” educational game, devising a strong list of criteria that could easily be applied to other areas of education. Plugging in “group work” to most items on his list shows how relevant and broad these ideas are: Good group work employs academic knowledge as a tool for achieving goals.  Good group work offers multiple ways of [interacting], so that [students] can experiment with a variety of identities in a group. Good group work is social, in that it encourages social interaction of different forms. Good group work inspires creativity and smoothes ramps to usher [students] from users to producers (37). Looking at Squire’s ideas with this mindset helps me to see that good games address many of the same developmental skills as other educational approaches and could achieve better outcomes. The following chapter addresses teaching with games, but it is too short and focuses exclusively on the Montessori system, which the author contends “provides a model of what a game-based learning system should look like” (49). The focus on interest-driven learning is admirable, and educational philosophy seems to be heading in that direction, but I hoped that the chapter would offer more examples of games-based learning rather than focusing on one system. After all, Squire notes that “no system is right for all children all the time” and contends that “it’s the teacher’s job to make [instructional] decisions at the classroom level” (57). It would have been helpful of Squire to offer readers a wider variety of clearer examples of what that instruction looks like.

Squire’s next chapter focuses on the ability of games to create “online affinity spaces” (64) where people go willingly to learn. This gets back to his focus on interest-driven learning because in this scenario, people are actually motivated to seek out spaces to discuss ideas and to learn from each other. The concept of affinity spaces can be harnessed to meet existing educational directives. Recently, Bay Port’s language arts department has discussed the idea that every student in a class should not be forced to read the same book. There has been opposition to giving students the option of choosing a book because of practical hurdles like having the fiscal means to provide these texts, but much of the criticism has also focused on educational concerns. It is true that offering such a variety of texts would disrupt traditional classroom practices, but that disruption may allow students to find a more productive affinity space to learn. Gaming is participatory, the internet is participatory, and the classroom is likewise being dragged into this participatory digital age. There are many web 2.0 resources that could be used in the classroom to accommodate these affinity spaces, but even traditional models like literature circle promote affinity learning.

Squire’s following chapters provide many examples of innovative games that have been developed to help students learn in a participatory fashion in a variety of fields and topics. One idea that piloting these games in the classroom has helped him debunk is the concept that “commercial games have created such a high ceiling that educational games can never succeed” (97). For example, he introduced students to a space simulator called Supercharged! built on puzzle game principles to teach physics and found that students did not immediately bristle because the game’s graphics and production values paled in comparison to mainstream games. However, he found that some students played the game thoughtfully while others played to “win” as quickly as possible (97). I see the idea that kids will only play the most advanced games debunked every day in school as students sneak opportunities to play simple games on their iPods or meet for an after school video game club where their only console is a Nintendo 64. Even though its more graphically advanced successor was just announced, the success of Nintendo’s underpowered Wii console is further evidence that games hold appeal beyond good graphics and violent content.

Similarly, one idea I held about what to expect from this book was debunked in chapter 7 as Squire shares an anecdote about meeting James Paul Gee and discussing with him the impact of games on culture. Squire writes that “James wasn’t concerned about shoehorning games into schools. He wanted to ask how digital media might change schools” (140). Reading the book, I slowly let go of my expectation that Squire would offer ways to integrate gaming into a traditional language arts curriculum. Instead, games provide a different kind of experience that offers a powerful interactive fantasy where students are “actually getting better at something” (161). Games may not be a way to teach literature, but they could be an avenue to allow students who abhor reading to have meaningful experiences similar to students who engage thoughtfully with books. Both mediums promote fantasy, transformative experiences, and blur the line between work and play.  

                

Squire addresses this point further by pointing out that schools “have a tendency to shoehorn innovations to meet the particular constraints of school (45-minute time blocks, local standards)” (212). His book does an admirable job of promoting the ability of games to engage students, to provide them a problem-based medium to solve real-world problems, and to foster communities. His final chapters address fitting this square gaming peg into a round educational hole. The opportunity is there, as he correctly notes that “the economics of textbook publishing […] is flawed” (218), but he also goes on to point out that the strengths of video game-based learning are not measured on traditional standardized tests. This doesn’t, of course, denounce any of the data showing that game-based learning works, but it does show that, like many aspects of education, assessments of learning need to change to keep pace with skills that are relevant to modern times. For games to become part of the system, the system may need to change. More research similar to what Squire provides in his coda may eventually make the case that video games should be an educational tool in schools.

EdL 719 - 21st Century Skills

I tried to post this to the blog Keith set up, but every time I post it immediately disappears:

One notion the book’s authors purport about how the role of education will change day-to-day living comes when they argue that interconnectedness will allow people from every country to “contribute to a global pool of expertise on how best to implement a 21st century education system” (Trilling and Fadel 153). I don’t feel that we are there yet, but this idea gives me hope for the future. We have a long way to go because, disappointingly, leaders with their hands on the educational purse strings seem to be motivated by an allegiance to ideologies rather than by learning from successful educational systems around the globe.  As teachers, we cannot rely on those providing the funding and making the decisions to decide the best course. Luckily, the internet and web 2.0 networking sites have made it easier than ever to reach out as individuals to educators across the globe.

Looking at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics for 2009 (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf), I notice that China, Finland, Korea, and Singapore scored highest in reading, science, and math. Canada, our neighbor to the north, placed 6th overall while the United States comes in at 17th. The United States surely does not want to emulate everything about the Chinese system, for example, but surely each of these countries has something to teach us about how we teach children. As educators, we should take a lesson from the book’s emphasis on communication, cooperation, and collaboration, and admit that, even with this 21st century model, we don’t have all the answers. For example, Finnish students don’t begin formal learning until age seven because “before then they learn best when they’re playing” (*http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8601207.stm).

Overall, the role of education in people’s lives needs to change because “the 21st century global economy is also requiring higher levels of imagination, creativity, and innovation” (Trilling and Fadel 49). Project based learning as described in class and 21st century skills as described in the book let students solve real-world problems that demand the aforementioned skills to prepare them for the challenges of the coming decades. The role of education has changed because it is no longer enough to educate some and let others slip through the cracks. Now, the United States does not have a manufacturing base to accommodate those students who don’t make the grade, and failing them makes it difficult for them to achieve an acceptable standard of living. We need to give them the skills to make their way in a difficult world and the education necessary to enjoy a good quality of life.

*Burridge, Tom. “Why do Finland's schools get the best results?” BBC World News America. 7 Apr. 2010

EdL 755 - Technology Matters review

In Technology Matters, David E. Nye makes a case for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines.  Technology keeps evolving and exists to serve humans and to help solve human problems. He spends the opening chapters of the book arguing against technological determinism, the idea that “a direct line of inevitable technological development led from the first tools to the conquest of the stars” (Nye, 15). Nye seems eager to shatter readers’ notions of what technology is and how we perceive it, finding the layperson’s concept too broad and inelegant. Humans, according to Nye, are not able to predict the technological future, as evidenced by the failed predictions of the science fiction, World’s fairs, the news media, and even experts. Instead of being driven by experts, technological developments often arise in response to consumer demands. Furthermore, these demands vary from place to place and culture to culture, a claim Nye supports by contrasting Americans’ preference for bright lighting with the European choice of dimmer lighting in applications ranging from private homes to billboard advertising. Rather than forcing either technological preference on people, cultural norms shaped the application of technology in each particular culture.

                After laying out his initial premise in chapters one, two, and three, Nye backtracks in chapter four to investigate what researchers can learn from humans’ technological history. For example, he describes the competing automobile technologies of the early 20^th century: steam, electric, and gasoline. Nye accurately describes the benefits of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine over steam or electric-powered automobiles, but he credits Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial gusto and manufacturing breakthroughs with providing the “technological momentum” (59) necessary to overtake streetcars and bicycles as well. I agree with Nye that technologies become ubiquitous through “a variety of interlinked factors” (60) which debunks the notion of technological determinism. He gives brief mention of the VHS win over the competing Beta videocassette technology but neglects to mention Blu-ray winning the next-generation video disc format war against rival HD DVD.  Blu-ray’s victory supports Nye’s idea of many factors contributing to technological momentum and its being “unavoidably bound up with consumption” (66). Sony’s Blu-ray technology offers 50GB of data storage to HD DVD’s 30GB along with the backing of more movie studios. Toshiba’s HD DVD, though, was the only format supported by Universal and Paramount. Consumers bought both formats throughout 2006, but Blu-ray sales slowly outpaced HD DVD, and by the summer of 2007, American consumers were firmly in the Blu-ray camp. In August of that year, director Michael Bay wrote of Paramount’s decision to release Transformers only on HD DVD that “for them to deny people who have Blu-ray sucks!” (Frankel). With that, the pendulum fully swung to Blu-ray, Paramount left HD DVD, and Sony’s format had the technological momentum to win the format war.

                Since technology is in part socially constructed, Nye uses his fifth chapter to explore whether it pushes societies toward uniformity or diversity. One positive aspect of this brief chapter comes in its ambiguity. While Nye seems to answer his own questions in the previous chapters, he leaves the question of the societal impact of technology somewhat up in the air, drawing no clear conclusion. He supports the “shift from viewing technology as the harbinger of standardization to viewing it as the engine of differentiation” (76) while noting the capitalist and corporate interests at work. Nevertheless, he eventually comes down on the side of technology-supported diversity by rejecting the idea that it creates “crushing uniformity and standardization” (86). Tackling farming and sustainable agriculture in chapter six, Nye again assesses the modern condition in an even handed fashion. He outlines the historical view that “technology brings greater efficiency and prosperity” (88) and traces this belief through human societies as it clashes with the inevitable obstacle of pollution from medieval French slaughterhouses to modern coal-fired power plants. Again, Nye comes down on the side of technology, but he presents historical and modern counterpoints using evidence from countries around the world with enough gusto to assure readers he is paying them more than just lip service. When he argues that “[nature’s] limits are our own” (108), he is expanding on his thesis about the indivisible relationship between people and technology. Not only is it impractical and impossible to separate humans from their technological tools, as they are an extension of our ideas, beliefs, and actions, but nature is also part of this symbiotic cocktail. Humans can and have enhanced the natural carrying capacity of the earth, reaping more from the soil than would be possible without the application of technology. Still, there may be limits to what can be agriculturally produced even with advancing technology. Quoting Joel Cohen, Nye astutely concludes that “how many people the Earth can support depends on what people want from life” (108). As he implies, the Earth’s future carrying capacity may be limited by the global push toward an Americanized notion of what constitutes an acceptable standard of living.    

                Nye’s next two chapters explore topics of labor and markets that hit very close to home considering recent developments in Wisconsin and current economic forecasts. Like many American states, Wisconsin has traditionally relied on farming and factory jobs to employ its citizens. Technological advances in agriculture and manufacturing have made those industries less labor intensive, and industry does not need as many people to produce the same goods. Additionally, technology has created a flat world with a borderless economy where jobs in nearly every field can be outsourced to where labor is most cost effective. For workers, this means fewer jobs available along with a surplus of labor, leaving those who are employed less leverage to negotiate for salaries and benefits. As Nye puts it, “as factory and white-collar jobs exit Western economies, new low-wage jobs seem to increase” (130). This certainly makes technology seem like an enemy, but workers quickly need to advance past that mentality to compete for existing higher wage jobs. Workers who are in great demand for the small market of prosperous jobs are “well-educated professionals who love their jobs, and even when away from the office never really leave it behind” (133). Nye offers no conclusions except that Western workers must face this reality, acquire education, and embrace technology to compete in the global marketplace. Chapter 8 touches on a similar topic of market control by questioning whether the same market that created the aforementioned global economy should be responsible for selecting technologies of the future, or if that task is better left to governments. He offers pros and cons of each and highlights specific cases where one or the other is preferred while considering democracy and free speech. There are no easy answers, and Nye provides none, so readers will probably adhere to their existing ideologies. More than other chapters, this chapter’s question can be answered by following one’s political leanings, conservatives advocating for market control and liberals preferring government intervention.

                Nye continues his text with two philosophical chapters questioning whether technology adds to or detracts from humanity’s collective security and intellectualism. In chapter nine, Nye attempts to answer whether advancing technology makes the world safer or invites disaster. Many tools and technological products such as safe buildings and clean, treated water inarguably add to human safety and security, but some of these have unanticipated side effects, evidenced by asbestos and DDT. Weapons of war can aid security, but are primarily responsible for suffering and death. Advancements that experts have expected to swiftly end wars have sometimes prolonged them instead. Ironically, Nye notes that during World War I, “advanced technologies, when shared equally, led not to quick victory but to stalemate” (171). In World War II, nuclear technology enabled by the Manhattan Project may have ended the war, but it took many lives, including 107,000 by the Hiroshima bomb alone (173). Since that time, weapons technology has only advanced, and more nations and rogue groups possess advanced technology. Nye seems to share my pacifist outlook on weapons and war but offers little hope for a future devoid of an escalating arms race where safety rests perilously on human pragmatism and technical reliability. Nye’s tenth chapter addresses whether technology has expanded or hindered human thought. He extols the benefits of multitasking while acknowledging the virtues of nature and solitude. Creating a paradox, he points out that technology has both drawn us away from the physical world and brought about new ways to connect with it. Finally, he advocates “embracing [technology’s] conveniences, even wallowing it its pleasures and fleeing its sensory overload or rejecting its inauthenticity” (207).

                Concluding his book, Nye discusses the future of technology in chapter eleven, pointing out historic human projections about what has since transpired. This chapter brings Technology Matters full circle, as Nye offers evidence to support his rejection of technological determinism. Some of his references seem dated, like when he refers to The Net as a “recent film” (217). Unrealistic even upon release in 1995, the technological dystopia envisioned in The Net seems silly to a modern viewer. This argument highlights the book’s strengths and shortcomings; spending so much of his text on historical and theoretical arguments, Nye manages to make the material seem insightful and forward-thinking. His arguments are well reasoned, but he spends too much of the text arguing against technological determinism long after readers can clearly see his point. As he concludes by arguing that there is “no necessary end to the symbiosis between people and machines (226), I wonder why he spent so much of the book asking questions rather than clearly supporting this thesis.  

References

Frankel, D. (2007, August 21). Michael Bay in Blu-ray fray. Variety. Retrieved from http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117970628?refcatid=13

Nye, D. (2006). Technology matters: Questions to live with. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

The Chromebook Alternative

Since I got an Android phone last December, using Windows 7 on my PC has felt more and more cumbersome. iPads and Android tablets are exciting, but I have difficulty getting past one thing: the lack of a keyboard.

As an English teacher, I try to steer my students away from text-speak and toward writing in complete sentences. Pecking at a tablet’s touch screen keyboard can be frustrating and makes using these devices for writing unnecessarily burdensome.

Google’s new Chromebook seems to offer many of a tablet’s advantages in the form of a netbook. According to reviews, the devices turn on instantly, have long battery life, and run Chrome OS, a browser/operating system that operates in the cloud.  Chrome OS isn’t Android, and I don’t think could live with its limitations on my personal machine. However, this device is tailor-made for the classroom.

Chrome OS is designed to get users to the web as quickly as possible, and all applications are stored externally in the cloud. Students can turn on their devices, log into Google, and immediately have access it its host of applications and the web. Working in this Web 2.0 landscape encourages collaboration and creativity, and with all of the technical hiccups we experience using technology, Chromebooks offer a promising alternative.

Read more about a Chromebook pilot program in Iowa at ZDNet.