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Imagine for a moment that you’re a teacher or an entrepreneur with a new idea or new tool for helping students learn and teachers teach. With some 13,500 separate school districts in the country, many with unique needs, interests, burdens and political considerations, it’s essentially impossible to sell your idea district to district.
Even worse, when a single district – or even an entire state – picks up your education advancement, the isolated nature of local governance means a neighboring district may know nothing about it. So, your better way to slice bread, to use the old expression, may never spread. Or, at best, it may spread very slowly.
That slow adoption, district to district, may be partly responsible for an appearance that our schools are stuck – not making the giant technology and research-driven advancements we’ve all be promised.
But, in many cases, innovations are hidden more than stalled. And some of them are ground-breaking and perhaps even revolutionary. They’ve just been isolated – working well in a place but outside the spotlight that can help good ideas spread.
What’s especially interesting about some of these innovations from around the county is not just that they’re working but how they’re working in secondary ways – ways their founders may not even have intended – to change school culture, upgrade student habits, coalesce community engagement and leverage technology.
Here are five education innovations being used in classrooms right now in Illinois, Washington, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama – ideas and teaching technologies that are worthy of spreading.
Easy Augmented Reality in Early Learning
Texas – Alive Studios – Edinburg, Texas is less than 10 miles from the Mexico border and, not coincidentally, has a high number of English Language Learning (ELL) students, especially in primary levels. Getting those early learners up to English proficiency is essential to successful academic and social progress.
In Edinburg, teachers are using Alive Studios’s easy, augmented reality lessons that use 3-D zoo animals to teach English spelling, vocabulary and pronunciation, as well as math concepts, in their pre-k and kindergarten classrooms. In one study of classrooms with 90% ELL students, kindergartners went from being able to recognize and pronounce fewer than 10 letters to recognizing and pronouncing all of them in 26 days.
Words won’t do well in describing what Alive Studios is doing and how students react – but this video on their homepage may.
“One of the pain points for superintendents these days is the smothering cost of remediation; specifically, the money and time spent on trying to get 4th-8th graders proficient at grade level,” said Kaye, the CEO and Chief Zoo Keeper of Alive Studios. “Of course, this is a worthy effort, but it is a never-ending race unless we address the source of these problems. Too many of our pre-k to 3rd graders are lacking a solid foundation of reading and math to build upon. As a matter of fact, 67% of American 3rd graders are getting handed into 4th grade without being proficient in reading.”
With the level and depth of engagement that augmented reality offers and the success that ELL programs are enjoying with it, it’s no reach to see the benefits of the technology anywhere students may be struggling with language and math basics. And even where they are not. In fact, the idea is already spreading; pre-k programs in Philadelphia are scheduled to begin using the technology this summer.
Not alone
These are not the only education innovations that are working in public schools – in reality there are hundreds. Maybe more.
But highlighting just these five in places as diverse as Texas, Alabama, Washington and Illinois should make it clear that many schools are not mired in tradition or adverse to change. Technology is in place and working in classrooms from coast to coast – and with some pretty impressive results. What’s need though, is more attention to the tools and technologies that are working so they can spread.
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