In mid-February, the annual New York Toy Fair held their conference at the same time as the virtual world conference called Engage Expo. Both industries compete for kids’ interest and at times, even collaborate in engaging them through both online and offline play. The two conferences offered a rare opportunity to hear how both industries are thinking about engaging kids through digital play.

At the end of both of these events, a number of industry experts gathered together to discuss key trends with kids, technology, virtual worlds, and play. What were some of the key findings for 2010? Less virtual world announcements. Deeper virtual world experiences. Less technology toy announcements. Lower price points across all products. Less “watch me” toys. More touch screens for tech products that were screen-based. The desire by kids to stop being “micro-paymented” to death.

These and other trends can be heard in the video recording of this group get-together offered below. Also included in the video are photos of new products announced at the show that you will see rolled out later in 2010.

For those who would like to simply cut to the chase, I’ve also included a look up table below to find the location within this video where the group talks about specific products you’re interested in. After you’re done viewing, share your thoughts about what key trends you see in the world of digital play. Enjoy!

In the last week of October, I was invited to participate in a conference that was held at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA called Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age. While I was at the event I had the opportunity to interview a number of thought leaders involved in the world of technology and learning. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, I thought it fitting to begin with an interview I had with Gary Knell, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop. The following is a transcription of our discussion. Portions of this interview were edited for clarity. Stay tuned for more interviews in the coming days and weeks.

QUICK QUESTION PICKER:

When looking at expanding into other mediums, how will you apply the Sesame philosophy?

In terms of metrics, do you see Sesame’s on air numbers going down and online numbers going up?

Is it more challenging today for creators of younger children’s content to be on air?

In regards to testifying on Capitol Hill about the Children’s Television Act, what outcome are you looking for?

Do we need the Children’s Television Act for other media formats?

What is the Cooney Prize?

INTERVIEW:

Scott Traylor: Congratulations on the upcoming 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. It’s amazing to think how far the Sesame Street show has come, a show that is often called the “educational television standard.” When you look at expanding into other mediums, how do you think you will be applying that same Sesame philosophy?

Gary Knell: Well the show was invented 40 years ago and has now won more Emmy Awards than any television show in history. Recently we were awarded the lifetime achievement award at the Emmy’s with a standing ovation from, I think, everyone who ever worked in daytime television. But we know today that children are using applications that weren’t invented back when we started the show, and media and technology is getting faster, smaller, and cheaper. So it’s a world of on demand media, portability, those are places that we have to be because those are the access points to where kids are going to find Sesame Street. This was the first year we have ever seen more people and more children access Sesame Street content off television than on television. That’s through video on demand, that’s through iTunes, that’s through YouTube, that’s through our website. It’s through all of the different ways in which we are spreading our content now because that’s where the audience is going. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: So if you were just looking at the metrics of how viewers are watching Sesame Street, you see on air numbers going down and online numbers going up?

Knell: Well I think you’re generally seeing that across television, and certainly network television and PBS is no exception to that because there are a couple of things happening. Sesame Street was one of two preschool shows in 1988. Today there are 54 preschool shows on television. If you just look at market share, you’re not going to have the same market share today that you did 20 years ago. But more importantly, kids and parents are just accessing media differently today. For example, I was just chatting with someone at the University of California here who told me about her daughter who does not watch television but when she sees mom on her laptop, sits down in her lap and says, “Can we watch Elmo for ten minutes?” And I think that’s what’s happening now. I think you’re finding parents who are trying to have more of a control over their child’s viewing habits and behaviors. The TV becomes less of an available babysitter. Interactive technologies give us all the ability to have a more vibrant, richer learning experience than one-way television. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Do you think it’s more challenging today for creators of younger children’s content to be on air? In part I look at the example of Viacom recently folding the popular preschool channel Noggin into Nick Jr. I see this move as something that’s a detriment to the entire preschool space. It’s too bad there aren’t more outlets like that.

Knell: Yeah, I think there were a combination of factors to that decision which may have had to do mostly with branding, as well as the economics of children’s programming, because there are 54 shows, so I think Nickelodeon probably made the decision that, well, we need to be under this umbrella because it will attract more people to watch our programs. But I agree with you. I think we have to have some safe spaces for children, where moms and dads can leave their kids in a place where they’re not going to be marketed to, where they’re going to be safe from commercial messaging, and it’s a place where kids are going to have a learning experience. Because we do know, even with the youngest kids, that television teaches. As Joan Ganz Cooney always says, “It’s not whether television teaches, it’s what does it teach.” So we’ve got to be in those spaces today just as we were in 1969. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Related to those safe spaces for children, I know earlier this summer you were testifying on Capitol Hill in front of Congress about the Children’s Television Act, a bill that a major children’s media advocate, Peggy Charren, was able to see turn into law many years ago. Could you talk a little bit about your latest efforts and what you hope will be achieved?

Knell: Let’s think about how the world of media has changed in the last 20 years. The Internet did not exist 20 years ago, at least in its popular format. What we were trying to urge senators to do was to take a fresh look at this. Maybe the rules about having three hours of educational television on every broadcast station are sort of irrelevant today. I mean most kids don’t know what NBC is necessarily, or channel 9 versus channel 12. It’s really about shows that they’re watching or their platforms online. And I think you’ve got to redefine the space in terms of protecting children’s health and promoting education. So we were trying to promote the idea that there’s a real gap in educational programming today, especially for 6 to 9 year olds, in fact, a bigger gap than there is for preschoolers. The other thing is to make sure that children’s health and welfare are being taken into account. Things like childhood obesity, which have exploded in America over the last decade, in part, many people feel, because of the commercial messages targeting kids with foods that are less than healthy. These are things we were trying to urge Congress to take a fresh look back, 20 years after the initial act, which has become a little bit irrelevant if you go back and look at it. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: One might argue that it’s a bit of a challenge to think about the mindset of Children’s Television Act and applying it online or in other kinds of digital media delivery systems, that in principal it’s a great place to go, but in order to get everyone on the same page to try to implement it across numerous online media outlets, there’s a real challenge there.

Knell: It’s true. Although, you know, children’s content platforms are still children’s content platforms. And so you have these iconic characters who have a huge influence over children. When a major character on some channel is promoting double cheeseburgers, it has a big influence on a child’s behavior. It doesn’t really matter what the distribution platform happens to be. You’re looking at the use of licensed characters to promote unhealthy lifestyles. And those are the things that those of us who care about children’s health need to do something about, and that’s what we’re focusing on, along with a lot of other people. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: During the Breakthrough Learning event held at Google recently, you announced the Cooney Prize. Could you share a little bit about what you hope it will spark in the years ahead?

Gary Knell: Well we feel that we’re just beginning to unleash the power of digital media in learning applications. There are a lot of people talking about it. This is a way to specifically bring attention to 6 to 9 year olds, which the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is focused on, and try to promote digital learning for literacy using online platforms and also, specifically, mobile learning platforms. The iPod Touch, for example, could be a very powerful learning platform, without the cell phone component. And being able to connect kids to content in unique ways who otherwise disengage from learning could be a way that reaches them more directly. What we’re trying to do is spur innovation by having a prize contest. We will be giving cash awards to the most innovative people who come forward with the most innovative ideas. We hope this contest will spur innovation. We hope that these ideas can be incubated to go to market, and frankly, we hope that other people will copy this. We want to start a movement in which we challenge the conventional wisdom in the gaming community, for instance, that education can’t sell. This is the same challenge that Joan Cooney had before the launch of Sesame Street when she was told that education can’t sell on television. Well we certainly know that is not the case. You now have 54 shows on air, you have six competing networks, and all of this started because of a dinner party in Manhattan decades ago, when two people got together and thought about the idea of using television to teach children something, something more than showing them sugared cereal commercials. And look what happened. Now fast forward to 2009, we think we can spark a similar outcome. What we want to do is jump start this idea a little bit through these awards. (Return to Question Picker)

Portable entertainment devices for kids have been on an amazing journey over the last five years. Advancements with small video displays, fast and affordable chip sets, and battery technologies that last longer than ever before have brought fascinating possibilities to the marketplace, and to this year’s Toy Fair.

Enter the latest handhelds for kids: The iPix, a portable video player for the preschool set, and the VEO for older children. Both devices were part of a stellar rollout of products from toy maker itoys. The two products are similar in that they both contain a small, backlit video display for watching popular television shows from Cartoon Network, HIT Entertainment, Nickelodeon, and Nelvana. Both have enough onboard memory to hold up to sixteen half hour shows. Onboard lithium ion batteries can last up to six hours on a single charge. While both devices have similar guts on the inside, their exterior form factor is made to appeal to either a younger or older audience. The video choices for each device are also age appropriate for the two different age groups.

So just how do you transfer TV shows onto the iPix and VEO? Each device can be connected to a computer via the USB port. Once connected, a visit to a unique itoys website allows users to purchase their favorite TV shows and transfer them onto their iPix or VEO. The whole experience is similar to that of loading content onto an iPod, but these online tools are customized specifically for itoys products.

The cost of the iPix is just under $70 and half hour television episodes can be purchased for between $2.49 to $2.99 each. The VEO has the exact same pricing structure as the iPix. Watch for these technology toys to become available in June of 2009.

For an audio recording of this interview, click here.

Cathleen Norris and Elliot Soloway are both pioneering educators who are defining the future of technology and learning.

Dr. Cathleen Norris, a former high school teacher for over 14 years, is currently a professor in the Department of Technology and Cognition at the University of North Texas. Cathleen is also the past president of ISTE and the past president of NECA, the organizing body for the country’s leading technology and education conference, NECC.

Dr. Elliot Soloway is a faculty member at the University of Michigan. In addition to teaching at the university, Elliot is involved with a number of grant initiatives for the development of middle school science instruction through technology. His research also involves working with many different school districts to define technology-based curricula.

Together Cathleen and Elliot have authored and published over 100 different research papers on a variety of different learning technologies through the professional organization the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). They are also founders, partners and collaborators of the handheld software company, GoKnow.

Late in 2008, I had the opportunity to interview Cathleen and Elliot on their thoughts regarding mobile technologies and this platform’s ability to deliver educational content to students.

Scott Traylor: Cathleen, Elliot, could you share with us how your university work and the work you are involved with at your company, GoKnow, have influenced your thinking regarding technology use in the classroom?

Elliot Soloway: Well, Cathie and I have worked together for about 15 years. A bunch of years ago we took on the task of trying to understand why is it that technology has not impacted K-12 education in the same way that it’s impacted basically every other aspect of human endeavor. We conducted a survey called the “Snapshot Survey” and as we went into that survey we thought, “Oh it’s going to be something about the teachers. There’s something about the teachers that’s problematic. If we can just figure out what that problem is, then we could address the issue of why computers and technology have not yet had an impact in the classrooms.” What we found in the survey results was that the issue was about access and wasn’t about teachers at all. It was about the fact that there was such a limited amount of access. 65% of the classrooms had one computer or less in their classroom. We found 60% of the kids were spending less than 15 minutes a week on a computer because there weren’t enough computers or there weren’t any computers. So why hasn’t technology had an impact on K-12? It’s because there hasn’t been enough technology available, so the kids couldn’t use it. And if they couldn’t use it, they certainly weren’t able to learn from it. That was a startling realization. The fact that it is about access was sort of a necessary condition.

Cathleen Norris: In the survey that Elliot was talking about, we surveyed more than 10,000 teachers across the country; from Santa Clara, California to Florida, to New York. We had a really good mixture of teachers. When we found out there was this access problem, we decided that if we were going stay on this path we’re on, which was to provide laptops to all students as the solution to the access problem, then the technology solutions we were looking to achieve were simply not going to happen. The amount of laptops needed, and we were talking about 55 million children in the United States public schools at the time, was a solution that just didn’t scale. Elliot and I didn’t really believe that this was the right answer to the technology access problem.

So five years or so ago Elliot was in a meeting with Roy Pea, a leading professor on education at Stanford University. Shortly after this meeting, Elliot called me and said “We’ve got to start developing for the Palm computer.” This was just after the Palm first came out. He said “Roy’s convinced me this is a real computer.” At that time we were working on an NSF grant. We decided to take what was left of that money and try to develop educational applications for the Palm. In other words, let’s take this low cost, easy to use businessman’s device and retrofit it so that it could be used in schools.

During that summer we had a group of very bright and enthusiastic undergraduate students working with us. We asked them to help define what Elliot called the “cool dozen apps.” We talked to teachers about what kinds of things they did in the classroom and what kinds of ideas the students had for what they would want if they were students in those grades. We didn’t quite come up with twelve apps but we did come up with and develop quite a few. Almost immediately we had more than a hundred thousand downloads of these apps once we offered them online for free. The only problem was that after Palm changed their operating system, our apps didn’t work on the new Palm operating system. People started calling us saying we have to redo these apps so that they work on the new operating system. We said “Excuse me but free is free and we are professors. This is not what we do,” but these calls continued to come in. We thought that maybe we could hire a programmer, one of the original people we worked with us on these apps, and maybe we can just fix this problem. Anyway, long story short, we ended up spinning a company out of the University of Michigan. We licensed the applications from the University and then started to maintain them. This was the very beginning for us in doing anything other than our professorial work. This was how we got into the software business.

ES: Traditionally NSF gives out all this money to researchers. Researchers publish papers, and that’s really great, and they get their tenure and such, but really nothing happens. At the time, NSF was asking “How do we transition research into commercial ventures?” So basically what Cathie and I did was do what NSF wanted; to take the research and make it real. Now we were naïve in the sense that we could easily start a business. No big deal, right? The University of Michigan was very supportive and helpful as we started it. I was the CEO thinking “No problem!” We had absolutely no marketing. We thought people would simply call us up, we’d answer the phone, and we would send off the software. We really had no idea how to do this as a real business. After a while, people started helping us because they realized what we had was valuable and the Palm at that point was really in it’s ascendancy.

We also realized that if people were going to use Palm computers with kids in schools, then they needed our software. For example Sketchy, which is a drawing animation tool we developed that allows students to create animations, is not just a paint program, but a tool that can be used as a sequencer. Kids could illustrate how to do long division with Sketchy. They could use this software to demonstrate long division. They would show the math and write English to explain it. Teachers have shared with us that they can teach long division in half the time when we use Sketchy. So we hit something, we hit a nerve that really made a difference with early adopters.

At the same time Cathie and I we were doing research in Detroit along with some other folks to look at the impact of handhelds on learning. We had three teachers, each of which had four classes. Two of those classes used Palm computers, the other two classes didn’t use Palms. This was a controlled study, paid for again by NSF. At the end of the second year of the study, once the teachers finally understood how to take advantage of the technology, the children who were in the classes that had the handhelds showed a 13% advantage over the children who didn’t use the handheld, using the same test and the same curriculum.

What this study did was confer an advantage in using these devices. It was a difficult study to do and it cost almost $600,000 by the time we were finished with the research. But in the end, we had a control study to support the anecdotal story, which is pretty cool. Today, Cathie and I continue to do research at the universities, publishing papers, writing, because that’s what you do at a university, but also trying to figure out how to make this company into a viable force in K-12.

ST: What year was this when you started?

ES: We developed the applications in 2000 and then by 2002 we were a small little tiny company.

ST: So GoKnow, as a business entity, offers instructional content via the Palm or other handhelds for K-12 use?

CN: That was the way it started, but as of the last year handhelds have converged with telephony. While there are still some companies that make standalone handhelds, many of them are now cell phone computers as opposed to simply handheld computers. We are starting to see the implementation of cell phone computers into classrooms.

ES: Let’s take one step back. What happened was Palm started to back away from the K-12 market and all of a sudden Dell came into the picture. They offered low cost pocket PCs. We ported our software over to the Windows mobile platform when there was an uptake on pocket PCs. But then, that too stopped because of this idea that no one would want to buy a non-telephone handheld device. Everything was going towards this converged device.

Parallel to this was the one-to-one laptop programs as Cathie mentioned earlier. The results from those programs were “They’re not really working.” Why weren’t they working? One reason was there wasn’t enough educational software available for these laptops. A second reason, teachers weren’t receiving any professional development on how to use those laptops in the classrooms. They could show technically how to use the computer, but the bigger issue was how do you integrate the laptop into the classroom. And third, the costs were such that it was not sustainable. You couldn’t keep buying and buying laptops, it just didn’t work. So that laptop thing, it’s still going, but the momentum has clearly died down.

ST: I know we had spoken about this before Elliot. That the business of how computers are sold on the consumer level, with upgrades and operating systems that are updated every 18 months or so, seems to work against trying to create really successful learning software because schools purchase equipment that outdates itself pretty quickly. Schools can’t necessarily repurchase again to keep up with whatever the state of the art is in computing.

CN: That’s exactly right. We had a school district that we talked to just this week that said they were ordering a device, a laptop, and the hardware was changed three times before they received the device.

ST: Well this leads in nicely to my next question. I think it’s clear what the challenges are related to laptops and workstations in the classroom, that there are financial incentives to computer-based businesses that require OS and hardware upgrades. Computer obsolescence seems to occur faster than a school’s ability to pay for upgrades. Do you see similar challenges with handhelds in the classroom?

ES: Well, again, let’s take one step back because there is this new opportunity with these low cost, mini laptops that was started by Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child initiative. While GoKnow was going out and selling its handheld software, people would say to us “Why should we buy a handheld? We can spend a $100 and get a whole laptop computer.” We used to say “Well if you can buy a laptop for a hundred bucks, go buy it.” As you know the OLPC device came out around $200. What also happened was that Intel, Asus, and now Dell, all came out with a $300 – $500 mini laptop, and we’re seeing schools moving pretty quickly to buy those laptops. They’re not buying the $1,000 – $1,500 laptops, but the lower cost laptops are an exciting opportunity. Now they still run XP and you still have problems with these devices turning on or off instantly. There are still all kinds of headaches and the operating systems are still complex, but the price point is really low and that’s very exciting. Handhelds are still in the $250 – $350 neighborhood. Double that and you can get a full laptop.

On the market today you have this mini laptop movement and then you have these converged devices that have a lot of functionality. Everybody has an offering in that space and the prices for those devices are not unreasonable. So now the question is how could K-12 take advantage of this opportunity. Remember, our study stated that access was the problem. Now it seems that access is no longer the problem. It is within the grasp of schools to give every kid a computer. It could be a cell phone computer, it could be a mini laptop computer. The conditions necessary for computing to have an impact could actually be achieved, and it’s only been in the last 6 to 12 months that that vision has been recognized in the community. But now there’s another problem that has raised it’s head.

CN: The biggest single problem now, if children do indeed have access to technology, is the problem of how teachers integrate this technology into the classroom. Up until now, technology is either the focus of the instruction in that it’s an instructional technology class (they’re teaching children about Word and Excel and that sort of thing) or it’s an add on to a lesson (here we’re going to be doing a lesson on the Civil War, let’s look at this website that deals with the Civil War,) but it’s not an integral part of the lesson. We determined that it couldn’t be an integral part of the lesson because there weren’t tools available that easily allowed teachers to create lessons around the technology. There are products like Blackboard or WebCT or Moodle and I can understand why teachers aren’t authoring their lessons everyday in these tools. It’s like asking them to program in HTML. How good are they at that? I would say many of them don’t even know what HTML is, especially when we see elementary education majors who are only required to take one three-hour course in technology. They don’t know the difference between “Save” and “Save as” and we’re going to ask them to create their lessons in something like Blackboard? Well we know that’s not going to happen and so what we did was create what we call the Mobile Learning Environment. The mobile learning environment is a tool that runs on top of Windows Mobile, Windows CE or Windows XP. It allows teachers to easily take whatever applications they normally use, be it Inspiration, or a paint program, or some type of drill and practice program, and it allows them to build a cohesive lesson in a very short amount of time with very little training.

ES: What Cathie’s explaining is that schools have existing curriculum that they have to teach. They bring that pencil and paper curriculum to the table and set it down next to a computer and say “How do I take this pencil and paper stuff and integrate it with the technology?” School districts across the country have specific things they have to teach. Some companies try to replace the curriculum through a new computer-based environment. These companies are saying “You adopt this technology, and with it, you also adopt this curriculum.” We feel that this doesn’t work. School districts have existing curriculum they teach with, you can’t tell them to change the curriculum because of the technology. So then the question becomes how to integrate the technology with the school’s existing curriculum.

ST: Let’s say that technology and hardware, because it’s coming down in price, is not the issue. The problem then becomes software that attempts not to undo lessons and materials teachers have been preparing in an analogue way for years. Software that tries not to tell teachers to chuck all that they know aside and start anew with whatever this latest and greatest software product tells you to teach. The issue is about providing tools that work in addition to and complement side by side with the teacher’s instructional materials they’ve been using for years.

CN: Yes, that’s very well put.

ES: If you go to a situation where the computers are one-to-one, where every child has a computer, be it a cell phone computer or a mini laptop computer, then all the learning activities, all the learning resources are on that device. It becomes the conduit then for the curriculum and for the artifacts the student creates. In some sense it does replace or certainly augments the paper and pencil materials. As Cathie pointed out earlier, the problem was that the computer was used as an add on. The major part of the lesson was still done on paper and there might be one activity that you did on the computer but that activity wasn’t integrated with the rest of the pieces of paper. The computer wasn’t playing an integral role to the lesson. But with one to one, it becomes possible for the computer to play an integral role.

CN: Which is the way it is in business. Most business people do the majority of their work on their computer. Pencil and paper tends to be an aside or an add on for notes. When we start talking about teaching children 21st Century Skills, teaching them how to use the computer for the bulk of what they do is certainly a 21st Century Skill.

ST: Certainly, so long as it’s not just teaching the technical means to do a PowerPoint presentation or write a paper. It’s about the critical thinking that goes on.

ES: Right.

ST: I’ll come back to that point in just a moment. I’ve heard it expressed by business leaders involved in creating educational materials that handhelds present an opportunity to empower student learning in a way we’ve never before imagined possible, but it could come be at the expense of teacher control. Can student empowerment and teacher control coexist in the classroom?

ES: Absolutely.

CN: The teachers who are out of control when students have handhelds are the same teachers who are out of control when the students have pencils and paper. I was a classroom teacher for 15 years and back then the threat was that computers were going to come in and replace all teachers. All of the good teachers felt that any teacher who could be replaced by a computer should be. There is always room for and a place for good teachers. In this case the role of the teacher is different. It’s not necessarily a role of handing out the information. You don’t open up students’ heads and dump in the information. Rather, teachers provide direction and contextualize things for students as they do their lessons. Students are not sitting there like little birds waiting to be fed. To create autonomous learners you must contextualize things for students as they find them or as they run into difficulties trying to fit pieces together because you’ve structured the lesson for them.

ST: You’re singing my song. One of the things we often say at our organization is that a child is not a vessel to be filled, but a flame to be kindled. What you’re speaking to is how do you create that spark and engage that 21st Century Learner.

CN: Exactly.

ES: We saw that spark and the leveling of the playing field when we were working in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City with handhelds four years ago. This was when pocket PCs were just beginning to be available to K-12. We would go into these classrooms where children are physically and sexually abused, they live in homeless shelters, it’s 100% free and reduced lunch. This is a very intense school. You bring in these pocket PCs and they could do anything, they could do everything. If you looked at the work and said “Who produced this?” you wouldn’t know that it was a child from Bedford-Stuyvesant. It could be a student from an upper class suburb. The work stood on it’s own merits. The children there were not successful with the paper and pencil. They didn’t like it. It didn’t meet their needs. It wasn’t part of who they were. But when you gave them this technology, it kindled that flame and they then had an opportunity to produce in the same way that the other kids had. It was astonishing to see.

ST: So it’s your belief that 21st Century Learning Skills can be addressed properly with handhelds?

CN: Yes. The way we learn and what we learn is changing, and that is really the majority of the issue around 21st Century Skills. Children need to learn how instead of what. How do I find this information? How do I determine from this Internet what is valid information? How does this fit into everything else that I’m reading? How does this merge with my textbook? It’s the how. Again, it’s helping the child take the wealth of information that’s out there, assimilate it, and determine what’s a valid source, what’s real information.

Photo of 5th grade students from Singapore using computers that are tethered to desks.

ES: The 21st Century Skills are about teamwork and the “soft skills” kids gain when working and collaborating together. If you watch classrooms with big desktop computers, the kids are sort of sitting hunched over looking up at the machines. They’re not talking to each other. They’re not sharing. They’re just staring at the screens with headphones on. But when you put mobile computers, handheld computers, in a classroom the kids are looking at each other, talking to each other, putting the handhelds in front of each other’s faces. They’re working together. They’re actively engaged in teamwork. It’s a completely different flow in the classroom.

Photo of 3rd grade students from Singapore using mobile computers in a conversational manner.

The smallness, the immediacy, the ease of use of these handheld devices is exactly what is needed to support the 21st Century Skills, where your dynamic workgroups change over the course of a day. If different children work with different kids on different problems, no problem! That’s what happens with these handheld computers because you’re not tethered.

CN: We have some excellent photos of that when we were in Singapore last month. We were working with researchers there at the university in Singapore. They’re implementing a project where they will follow third and fourth graders who are using cell phone computers, pocket PCs, for learning activities in the classroom. We observed great diversity in the entry points into lessons, even on the part of second graders. One such lesson was on prepositions. Teachers gave them pocket PCs and sent them out into the school yard, over to the Koi pond, into the central office in groups of three to take pictures that were illustrations of the preposition “in”. You know, the fish are in the pond, the basketball is in the basket, things like that. They gave them a series of prepositions they had to photograph and then they came back to the classroom and wrote sentences explaining their pictures. Then they shared their pictures and the sentences that went along with it. We saw eight different ways that students could complete a lesson. In the end, they all got the assignment done but they were all able to do it their own way, the way that suited them best.

ST: That really speaks to the empowerment for students. One of the things I wonder about for a greater acceptance of handhelds in the classroom; do you have any thoughts or insights into what professional development should be in place to help this succeed?

ES: When companies that really understand the role of technology in the schools work with the teachers, they realize it’s not a one shot deal. You can’t just go in and only show the teachers how to use the computers. That was the failure of those laptops programs, the lack of ongoing professional development with the integration issue. We stress this when we work with a school district. There are districts that say “Well we don’t have the money and we really can’t do professional development” and Cathie and I just sort of grimace because we know there’s going to be trouble. The teachers and administrators are not going to understand how to use the technology. When the bumps happen, and there are always bumps, they’re not going to know how to deal with those bumps. Professional development is not just having experts help the teachers, it’s also having the teachers talk to each other and work together with children to get over those bumps.

ST: It’s great that schools can invest in the technology, but just buying the equipment and any additional software to benefit the instruction is only half the solution.

CN: That’s exactly right. It would be like buying a new car. It really helps if someone walks you through all of the features of the new car. Otherwise you’re driving but you’re not really taking advantage of all of the bells and whistles that a new car has. A lot of districts think that if their teachers know how to use a computer that this skill translates into knowing how to integrate it. In fact that’s something that they don’t teach in school. Most of the colleges of education don’t have tools to be able to teach prospective teachers how to do that. Teachers who have been out there in the field certainly don’t have that information.

ES: So if we could summarize. One of the first challenges we saw to getting technology to have an impact on the kids was the access problem. Today we feel that the access problem, while it’s hasn’t gone away, is certainly addressable in a scalable, sustainable way. The next problem is this issue of how do you integrate existing curriculum with the technology. That requires professional development, it requires software that helps the teachers in doing that integration so the technology scaffolds in some sense so teachers can create coherent, cohesive lessons. Professional development also scaffolds the teachers in creating coherent, cohesive lessons that integrate the technology. Now that we have access addressed, we have to deal with this integration problem, and it’s integration with existing curriculum.

People say, and I’ll be honest I’m guilty of it too, that we need to have a new curriculum. Technology enables us to do new things. That’s easy to say but it doesn’t address what schools have problems with today. The curriculum will change but everything is not going to change on day one. You have to start where the teachers are, with their existing curriculum, and help them understand how to integrate it using tools like what Cathie suggested along with professional development.

ST: If I could branch off of your comment there. Classrooms have the potential to see beneficial change as a result of technology. Today there are so many different ways of interfacing with these new technologies, be it classroom technologies like Tablet PCs or Smart Boards or consumer technologies like the Nintendo Wii or Apple iPhones. Are you seeing any technology trends that are important to watch in terms of learning?

ES: I think the smallness issue is really important. The cell phone computer is not simply just a smaller laptop computer. We’ve spent years learning how to design interfaces for laptop computers. You can’t just use all those same techniques, scale it back a little bit, and apply then to cell phone computers. Designing for mobile machines with a small screen is different than designing for 15 – 17 inch screens. We have to think about what is the essence and what’s really important. It will require a change in how we think about designing our software, how we design our web pages. Companies that simply take their 17 inch or 15 inch technology and just try and repackage it for the small screen will lose out. People will not buy that solution because it is not effective on a small screen.

ST: That seems to be a common occurrence with publishers, that is if they have a successful program in one media format they simply port it over to another. And that is not the best solution for addressing mobile computing or any other kind of platform for that matter.

CN: Exactly.

ES: It might make instant business success but they won’t have business success with that simplistic model. We’ll see. The proof’s in the pudding. It’s too early to say. That’s our opinion, we’ll see.

ST: Well that’s true. One of the things that I worry about with Smart Boards is people are just porting all of their book based content into static PDFs to be displayed on Smart Boards. There’s nothing engaging there about that solution.

CN: Right. Children are simply watching something bigger. We were in Mexico and we saw that Mexico had adopted the Smart Boards in all the classrooms. At one meeting we attended, they demonstrated how they were going to be using the Smart Boards in the classroom. A teacher had a book opened, displayed on the Smart Board, going through the lessons with the book on the Smart Board. It was just a bigger book, the children are still being passive learners. They simply watched her as opposed to engaging with a technology that fits them, moving up and around, it’s a completely different learning environment.

ES: This was a very powerful learning experience for both of us. Here is a country trying to move into the 21st century. They were going to equip their classrooms with all these expensive, electronic whiteboards. All they were doing was the same thing that they had done with books in the past and that wasn’t particularly interesting to the kids. Displaying the book a little bigger is not going have any impact whatsoever.

CN: We were laughing. We thought “Is this just telling you the same thing, but only louder?”

ST: Andy Warhol had a saying, “If you can’t make it big, make it red.” So maybe that’s the next step.

CN: That’s right.

ES: That’s good.

CN: That’s not to say that some people aren’t doing innovative, imaginative things with Smart Boards, because they are.

ST: Very true. I don’t mean to be down on Smart Boards. I’m excited by them but I get disheartened when I see its use in such a way that it’s really not forward thinking to benefit the instruction with the great medium that’s available to them.

ES: Historically, new technology mimics old technology until you figure out how to take advantage of the new. A classic example is when the movie camera came out people simply photographed the theater because that was the thinking of how you viewed theater. Then Hollywood came along and defined this experience as a new genre, a new medium, one that can tell a new kind of story. It wasn’t immediate. It took a while to figure it out.

We work folks at SRI and they are doing some wonderful things with whiteboards, with the clickers, they’re really trying to go beyond the obvious things that you could do with those devices and be much more engaged, much more imaginative.

ST: Let me ask both of you; whose work are you watching these days? Who do you think is doing neat work with technology and learning that would really benefit students everywhere?

ES: Outside the education world, I think the folks who are trying to develop apps for mobile computers, people who are grappling with how to use multi touch, how to display information, those are the folks that we’re looking at. The range of location-based apps that people are coming out with now, with GPS built in, those are very, very provocative.

We’re going to see new interface conventions generated. Phone companies have opened up access to lots and lots of applications, not just the three or four products that come with the phone when you buy it. You can download and install whatever applications you want. Cell phones are full blown computers. Cathie is intentional when she uses the term cell phone computers. Just like you have desktop computers and laptop computers, you have cell phone computers. The emphasis is on the computing part, that it can enable all kinds of applications. What do you build, how they work, ease of use; these devices have to be ready to go and intuitive from the moment someone picks them up. That’s a real challenge.

ST: I sometimes wonder if the difficulty with technology in the classroom is in how it is defined, semantically. A cell phone in the entertainment industry is portable entertainment or portable gaming device. That terminology doesn’t work in the classroom. I like how you’re framing the conversation, that these are cell phone computers, they’re not cell phones, they’re not entertainment devices, they’re devices made for learning.

CN: Yes. We had a discussion about this just yesterday, about what a cell phone computer should be or not be. In Singapore they’re not enabling voice. They’re only paying for data plans for the third and fourth graders. They will have 24/7 access to the Internet which really levels the playing field because it doesn’t make any difference if you have an Internet capability at home or not. You can still have access to all of the information, no matter where you are because of your cellular capability. But someone in a parents group yesterday said “Do you really think it would make a difference, and what difference would it make, if you did indeed give them voice in addition to it?” We have moved away from the term acceptable use policy of devices to what we call responsible use. As educators, we believe that we need to make all of these users responsible for what they do with their technology. It’s not that we’re dictating what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s about being responsible and maybe that means we do give them voice. We also encourage schools to let children put a few tunes on the mp3 player, or to let them download a game or two because we want the device to seem personal to the children as opposed to it just being another school device. If it’s personal to the child, then they’re going to take better care of it, they will make sure that it’s charged, because is theirs. It’s their personal device. What’s important to you are those things that are personal to you.

ES: We see a trajectory with this issue of one-to-one computing. The entire notion of one-to-one is going to change. The term is inappropriate. It’s a dominant term now because it comes out of the laptop world. It still focuses on the technology as opposed to what the kids are going to do with the technology. I think over the next few years, the notion of one-to-one as a term will disappear. What’s going to happen is that it will be a given that all the children will have a computing device. It probably is going to happen faster than most people think. Right now, a large percentage of schools in the United States, ban cell phones. But once this dam breaks, when schools see that kids are already bringing computers to school and schools don’t have to pay for those computers, the light bulb within administrators will light up. Administrators will begin to notice that one child brings a Motorola, another brings a Nokia, and yet another brings an iPhone. The solution? You just put a layer of software on top of the phone that makes all those non-homogeneous devices homogeneous with respect to the teacher and the learning activities. Just like a Dell and a Sony and a Gateway. They’re different computers. You put a layer of software on top of them and now they’re all the same. That’s the same idea that will happen in the cell phone computer world. And when this happens, we think it’s going to happen very quickly. Not in five years, more like two to three years.

Advances in technology suggest that some day soon classroom instruction powered by low cost computing devices could be a real possibility. When Nicholas Negroponte, founder/chairman of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), announced his vision of a computer so inexpensive that every child on the planet could own one, many of us wished that such a vision could come true quickly if the benefits to education were real. Just after the first low cost XO Laptops were coming off the assembly line at a cost that was under $180 a unit, other large computer manufacturers announced that they too would be developing competing low cost computers. The race for the student laptop had begun. However, to date, no other computer manufacturer has yet been able to beat the XO laptop price. What the world had failed to appreciate by the OLPC initiative, was that a new age of computing is upon us.

A place where many technology enthusiasts go to watch the future of computing unveil itself is on a Website called Gizmodo. It’s a favorite to inventors, technologists, and even toy manufacturers. Just this past March, a new learning product for classroom use was announced and claimed a low price tag of a mere $50. This handheld device that looks like it might be a distant cousin to the Game Boy is called the TeacherMate. Could this be the next low cost classroom innovation to keep an eye on?

The company that developed the TeacherMate is called Innovations for Learning and is located in the education rich surroundings of Evanston, IL. This not-for-profit company was founded over 15 years ago by former technology lawyer Seth Weinberger. Seth started his company out of a frustration for trying to find meaningful and effective educational software to use with young children. Since he couldn’t find what he wanted from the marketplace, he decided to start developing reading and math software on his own with a small team of talented educators. But developing effective software for classroom use was only part of the problem. The larger issue was that schools had ineffective technology solutions in place; PCs that were outdated or not working at all, varying degrees of Internet connectivity, and many other commonly heard complaints about technology that was just not ready to be used at any moment’s notice by teachers.

Innovations for Learning began the search for low cost, hassle free, ready to use technology solutions to bring into the classroom. After an exhaustive search that spanned many years and included a number of complicated licensing and development agreements with multi-million dollar businesses, the company made a bold decision; it decided to make its own educational hardware platform.

When I received a TeacherMate to evaluate, a few things stood out immediately. In addition, its small size, the backlit color screen, and game like interface, it had a USB slot for transferring files and information as well as an SD slot for additional file storage. When I looked under the hood I was amazed. The device had a 500 MB hard drive and used a GNash player on a Linux system to play back Adobe Flash files. This meant that the platform was an open system, something almost all other portable computing devices are not. This speaks volumes about its possibilities for developers and publishers.

Once the TeacherMate was off the drawing table, Innovations for Learning began to port its learning software to the device, and this past March began a two-month pilot program in 15 schools with 450 students from the Chicago area. In addition, an education research heavy, The Spencer Foundation, also expressed interest in the TeacherMate and funded its own research effort alongside the rollout. This study is reported to be close to completion and should be available on the Innovations for Learning Website soon. Today, the TeacherMate is being used by over 8,000 kindergarten and first grade students across 250 schools on the west and south sides of Chicago. By the end of the year a second grade software product will be ready for use as will other grades in future years.

The current business model of the TeacherMate is to offer a subscription package, complete with all the hardware and software necessary to use in a classroom setting, at a cost of $50 per student per school year. Included in that price is all the training and support necessary for teachers to succeed. It also comes with a TeacherMate docking station and simplified Learning Management System so when teachers collect TeacherMates from students at the end of a classroom period, they can dock the devices in one location, download all of the student progress data to their computer, and review the results. Teachers can also review audio recordings made by students on the device from reading software and even define the next lesson for students through the LMS. Currently the only software available on the device is by Innovations for Learning, but founder Seth Weinberger states that publishers are exploring the device as a solution to their own learning software problems.

Here’s the bottom line for forward thinking publishers, administrators, and teachers: We’re currently at a place where it’s now possible to conceive, create and manufacture low-cost, powerful and engaging technology products. We can pick and choose a-la-carte features of such technologies, and do so for a price that is below that of traditional PC workstations. The dreams of yesterday for low-cost and reliable technology products for classroom use are the realities of today. The TeacherMate is evidence of this new computing age. While the XO Laptop was the first step in this new era, the TeacherMate is the next step. The promise of what’s possible with technology in the classroom is at our doorstep and yet, there are more businesses, innovators, and devices still to be imagined to finally bring ed tech into the 21st century.

On October 2, 2008, Nintendo debuted the next iteration of its popular Nintendo DS handhelds called the Nintendo DSi. It’s similar in appearance and functionality to the widely popular Nintendo DS Lite handheld, but the DSi will include the following additional features:

• Not one but two digital cameras, one that is a 0.3 megapixel resolution, the other a VGA resolution, both saving images at 640 x 480 pixels.
• a built in web browser
• an SD card slot
• a built in hard drive for storing downloadable games and photos (the hard drive size has yet to be announced)
• improved speaker quality and the ability to listen to MP3 files
• slightly larger screens (17%)
• a thinner footprint (12%)
• The DSi battery will recharge faster than the DS Lite battery, but the amount of time a user can play per charge is slightly less than that of the DS Lite (link)

Some minor UI changes have also been made, largely the power up slider switch is now a button on the lower left face of the device. The biggest news about the DSi is it will no longer be backward compatible with Game Boy cartridges, quite a change from Nintendo’s long standing effort to be as reverse compatible as possible. In order for Nintendo to shave 2.6 mm from the thickness of this new device, it decided to part ways with the GBA slot.

It’s also rumored that both of the screens found on the DSi would be touch-screen capable, but the rumor appears to be incorrect. The DSi will have only one touch-screen as is found on the original DS and DS Lite.

The new Nintendo DSi handheld will be available for sale in Japan starting November 1, 2008 but won’t make its way to North America until sometime later in 2009. One reason for the delayed US rollout as suggested in a recent Wired Magazine interview and detailed in PC World is that the Nintendo DS can be found in one of every two households in Japan (also one in every five people in Japan own a DS) while in the US only one in five households have a DS. US sales of the DS continue to be strong while sales in Japan are starting to wane. This DSi rollout strategy suggests that the DS still has a lot of selling life left in the US market before the new platform should hit North America, thus the delay.

Maybe one day if Nintendo adds cell phone capabilities to its handhelds, such a device will still be referred to as a gaming platform and not a cell phone, whereas cell phone companies that add gaming features are still selling cell phones. I imagine how we refer to this device has everything to do with Nintendo’s business position, that is to bring fun to everyone through its products. So let’s call a cell phone a cell phone, and a video game platform a video game platform. No matter how feature rich they become, it’s all about the company’s intent. Play on Nintendo!

(For some great images of the Nintendo DSi, visit Nintendo World Report.)