Campus Parent Portal Login
Our school district has launched a "parent portal". (The "portal" word annoys me for historical reasons, but it's reasonably descriptive). It's supposed to allow us to track our children's progress. It will be interest to see if there's any useful data beyond the lunch bill.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Why Clifford Phonics software is not educational, and Earobics is not entertaining
Amazon.com: Software: Clifford the Big Red Dog: Phonics
We have a pretty good collection of pre-school through grade one "educational software". Clifford Phonics is one of the better examples; that's why I'm picking on it here. We also own Earobics, a niche market package for phonemic awareness training. I've watched our children work with both, and it finally dawned on me why mass market "educational software" has only marginal educational value.
It's the market, stupid.
Take Clifford Phonics. Sure it teaches bits of phonics and reading, but it teaches it in an ad hoc way without any kind of consistent progression model. Worst of all in the incessant music. I watched my son using it during a rhyming word exercise. He's supposed to hear two words, then pick an object that rhymes with them. Great idea, except one of his challenges is isolating sounds and retaining them in short-term memory -- and all the sounds in Clifford Phonics are surrounded by a loud and incessant musical background. It's like trying to find a lost object while wearing psychedelic eyeglasses.
Nice pictures. Catchy music. Lousy education for a child that needs education. Fun for a (younger) child who has no disabilities, and no real need for the software either.
On the other hand, consider Earobics. Dull as dishwater. Weak production values. Boring. But it's structured, it isolates sounds, it has a good progression model.
The Clifford Phonics people aren't dumb. Their reading consultants probably know it's of marginal or no value to a child who really needs help. The Earobic folks aren't dumb either, but they know Earobics can't invest in fancy production values.
Why does this happen? That's the way markets work. Clifford Phonics, and its ilk, are products for the large and wealthy "edutainment" market. This is a market made up of fairly well off adults who need to entertain their children and like the non-violent aspects of this software and the reinforcement of respect for learning. Any educational component is relatively minor, but it's not important anyway. The vast majority of these kids will inherit their parents facility for learning and the software is of minimal value and minimal harm.
Earobics and its kin are markets for a the small and relatively poor education market.
The same phenomena operates, by the way, with advertiser driven health education web sites. People who really need health education in diabetes, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis are a small minority, and their disease often means they don't have a lot of cash to attract advertisors. The market with money has different medical interests: weight loss, cosmetic surgery, exercise programs, life extension, back pain (everyone gets that) and self-diagnosis (usually of exotic disorders). The huge expansion in internet health sites in the late 90s was all driven by advertising dollars, and they focused on entertainment and production values -- not services and education.
Could edutainment software also be educational? In theory yes. They could make the music optional, they could enable parents to control what parts of the program kids could use, they could implement progression and monitoring but keep it optional. The problem is all these things increase costs and don't help one bit with the target market. That's not a formula for staying in business.
Could truly educational software develop better production values? I think there's more hope here. If the open source community starts getting into the game business, then the production frameworks used for entertainment software would be available for use in true educational software. A company could focus on its core competencies and narrow revenue streams, while parents and outsiders could donate the work to add production values on an open source base. It's not easy, but I don't see any market forces actively pushing against this option.
Otherwise, we'll be stuck with two unsatisfactory choices: entertaining software that's not truly educational, and educational software that's really boring.
We have a pretty good collection of pre-school through grade one "educational software". Clifford Phonics is one of the better examples; that's why I'm picking on it here. We also own Earobics, a niche market package for phonemic awareness training. I've watched our children work with both, and it finally dawned on me why mass market "educational software" has only marginal educational value.
It's the market, stupid.
Take Clifford Phonics. Sure it teaches bits of phonics and reading, but it teaches it in an ad hoc way without any kind of consistent progression model. Worst of all in the incessant music. I watched my son using it during a rhyming word exercise. He's supposed to hear two words, then pick an object that rhymes with them. Great idea, except one of his challenges is isolating sounds and retaining them in short-term memory -- and all the sounds in Clifford Phonics are surrounded by a loud and incessant musical background. It's like trying to find a lost object while wearing psychedelic eyeglasses.
Nice pictures. Catchy music. Lousy education for a child that needs education. Fun for a (younger) child who has no disabilities, and no real need for the software either.
On the other hand, consider Earobics. Dull as dishwater. Weak production values. Boring. But it's structured, it isolates sounds, it has a good progression model.
The Clifford Phonics people aren't dumb. Their reading consultants probably know it's of marginal or no value to a child who really needs help. The Earobic folks aren't dumb either, but they know Earobics can't invest in fancy production values.
Why does this happen? That's the way markets work. Clifford Phonics, and its ilk, are products for the large and wealthy "edutainment" market. This is a market made up of fairly well off adults who need to entertain their children and like the non-violent aspects of this software and the reinforcement of respect for learning. Any educational component is relatively minor, but it's not important anyway. The vast majority of these kids will inherit their parents facility for learning and the software is of minimal value and minimal harm.
Earobics and its kin are markets for a the small and relatively poor education market.
The same phenomena operates, by the way, with advertiser driven health education web sites. People who really need health education in diabetes, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis are a small minority, and their disease often means they don't have a lot of cash to attract advertisors. The market with money has different medical interests: weight loss, cosmetic surgery, exercise programs, life extension, back pain (everyone gets that) and self-diagnosis (usually of exotic disorders). The huge expansion in internet health sites in the late 90s was all driven by advertising dollars, and they focused on entertainment and production values -- not services and education.
Could edutainment software also be educational? In theory yes. They could make the music optional, they could enable parents to control what parts of the program kids could use, they could implement progression and monitoring but keep it optional. The problem is all these things increase costs and don't help one bit with the target market. That's not a formula for staying in business.
Could truly educational software develop better production values? I think there's more hope here. If the open source community starts getting into the game business, then the production frameworks used for entertainment software would be available for use in true educational software. A company could focus on its core competencies and narrow revenue streams, while parents and outsiders could donate the work to add production values on an open source base. It's not easy, but I don't see any market forces actively pushing against this option.
Otherwise, we'll be stuck with two unsatisfactory choices: entertaining software that's not truly educational, and educational software that's really boring.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Project Read -- from Bloomington Minnesota
Welcome to Project Read
Beth is the sister of our friend Jane. She teaches in Cleveland and focuses on children who can't read. She's fully up to date and reading research; in their systematic structured phonemic based program they teach the vast majority of their non-reading students to read -- with perhaps 1 in 50 resorting to a "word recognition" program. Her thought on schools that are still oriented to "whole language" was "get out now".
Talking to her is like finding water in the desert (kudos to Bob for insisting we bother her). The big surprise though was that the program favored by her school district comes from our back yard -- the place I go to work every day -- Bloomington Minnesota.
Here's some text from the Project Read web site (emphases mine w/ some corrections to their web typos):
Beth is the sister of our friend Jane. She teaches in Cleveland and focuses on children who can't read. She's fully up to date and reading research; in their systematic structured phonemic based program they teach the vast majority of their non-reading students to read -- with perhaps 1 in 50 resorting to a "word recognition" program. Her thought on schools that are still oriented to "whole language" was "get out now".
Talking to her is like finding water in the desert (kudos to Bob for insisting we bother her). The big surprise though was that the program favored by her school district comes from our back yard -- the place I go to work every day -- Bloomington Minnesota.
Here's some text from the Project Read web site (emphases mine w/ some corrections to their web typos):
Project Read©/Language Circle© is a research based mainstream language arts program for students who need a systematic learning experience with direct teaching of concepts and skills through multisensory techniques.
Project Read© has five curriculum strands:
... Project Read©/Language Circle© is designed to be delivered in the regular classroom or by special education, chapter one, and reading teachers who work with children or adolescents with language learning problems. Project Read© is recommended as an early intervention program for grades one through six, but is equally effective with adolescents and adults.
- Phonology
- Linguistics
- Reading Comprehension – Report & Story Form
- Literature Connection
- Written Expression
Project Read©/Language Circle© is cost effective. The cost per Project Read student is about 10% of the cost of funding a special education "pull out" program. Project Read's principles of systematic learning, direct concept teaching, and multisensory strategies reach the alternative instructional needs of students, thereby reducing the number of students referred for special services.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
The neurophysiology of autism
The New York Times > Health > Focus Narrows in Search for Autism's Cause
The hypotheses:
1. Autism is a disorder of connections between functional components of the brain leading to an inability to integrate cerebral subunits.
2. Some of the subunits function well in isolation. This can lead to a strength of focus and an understanding of the detail.
3. Subunit isolation is associated with an excess of white matter and with inflammation. It is not known whether the inflammation is related to the fundamental cause or if it is a secondary response. It is also not known if the inflammation is helpful, harmful or irrelevant.
The hypotheses:
1. Autism is a disorder of connections between functional components of the brain leading to an inability to integrate cerebral subunits.
2. Some of the subunits function well in isolation. This can lead to a strength of focus and an understanding of the detail.
3. Subunit isolation is associated with an excess of white matter and with inflammation. It is not known whether the inflammation is related to the fundamental cause or if it is a secondary response. It is also not known if the inflammation is helpful, harmful or irrelevant.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Faughnan Reading and Spelling database
I'm engaged in a small project to see if I can help integrate the diverse approaches that our son's school is taking to teaching him reading.
The research I read, and the opinions of leading reading researchers, currently favor an integrated, structured and coordinated approach to teaching reading that spans home, schools, special education, tutors and aides and regular classrooms. The current research paradigm is that the bulk of effort should focus on phonemic education; it's an open question as to what value "whole word"/"whole language"/word-recognition approaches add to this. Certainly our son's educators believe strongly that the whole language approach (Edmark, etc) brings some additional value. In the absense of research, and in the absence of individualized prescriptions (functional MRI, genome analysis, etc) expert opinion has to be credited.
I think it is true of every organization, not just a school, that coordination and integration is extremely challenging. In a school, where a class is a compromise between the needs of the one, the needs of the many, and funding this challenge takes on another meaning. Integration may not occur on a time scale that will be meaningful to our special needs reader.
We are, for better but more likely for worse, trying to take on some of that integration role. To that end I am compiling a word database (currently Microsoft Access 2000) that relates different word lists used by my son's varied teachers (Fry, Dolch, and top 100) to his spelling assignments and to his knowledge (read, spell). I'll probably add sample sentences too. Words will be associated with phonemic attributes (isPhonemic, etc).
The goal is to use this to track his progress, to try somehow to coordinate what he's being taught at school, and to generated some exercises to complement his homework. As a side-effect it also contains the above lists (based on the linked sources, at least one word appeared twice in a single source, suggesting a bug on data entry).
A published version of the access database is here. As I work on it I'll add reports, views, documentation etc. If anyone has a particular interest in this database, or would like other formats (FileMaker for Macintosh, Excel, tab delimited) or reports please email me at jfaughnan@spamcop.net.
The research I read, and the opinions of leading reading researchers, currently favor an integrated, structured and coordinated approach to teaching reading that spans home, schools, special education, tutors and aides and regular classrooms. The current research paradigm is that the bulk of effort should focus on phonemic education; it's an open question as to what value "whole word"/"whole language"/word-recognition approaches add to this. Certainly our son's educators believe strongly that the whole language approach (Edmark, etc) brings some additional value. In the absense of research, and in the absence of individualized prescriptions (functional MRI, genome analysis, etc) expert opinion has to be credited.
I think it is true of every organization, not just a school, that coordination and integration is extremely challenging. In a school, where a class is a compromise between the needs of the one, the needs of the many, and funding this challenge takes on another meaning. Integration may not occur on a time scale that will be meaningful to our special needs reader.
We are, for better but more likely for worse, trying to take on some of that integration role. To that end I am compiling a word database (currently Microsoft Access 2000) that relates different word lists used by my son's varied teachers (Fry, Dolch, and top 100) to his spelling assignments and to his knowledge (read, spell). I'll probably add sample sentences too. Words will be associated with phonemic attributes (isPhonemic, etc).
The goal is to use this to track his progress, to try somehow to coordinate what he's being taught at school, and to generated some exercises to complement his homework. As a side-effect it also contains the above lists (based on the linked sources, at least one word appeared twice in a single source, suggesting a bug on data entry).
A published version of the access database is here. As I work on it I'll add reports, views, documentation etc. If anyone has a particular interest in this database, or would like other formats (FileMaker for Macintosh, Excel, tab delimited) or reports please email me at jfaughnan@spamcop.net.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Reality meets NCLB
Pantagraph.com - News - Official: No Child test contradicts disability act 01/30/05
On a practical level, however, NCLB has some advantages. It's easy for educators to push special education students into a twilight zone of vague and unment IEP goals. NCLB may become a major driver for the implementation of evidence-based reading programs that work for all comers -- including children with learning disabilities.
If we were a "better" species, I'd say that NCLB is stupid and pointless. It's degrading and hurtful to force a child to take a completely inappropriate and pointless exam. But humans are not a "better" species -- we are what we are. Given our many failings, maybe NCLB isn't hopelessly absurd. We may find a way to use it to our advantage -- even as we fight its absurdities.
Seven districts in LaSalle and Bureau counties were notified they did not make AYP, which eventually could hurt funding. Allen is now exploring the best approach to take in appealing because of the late notice and contradiction of approaches with the state law.I see this as yet another example of Right wing's "problem of the weak". NCLB seems to have as its foundation the idea that every child can "perform" at a required level. On the face of it, that's absurd. It's akin to assuming a blind person with sufficient testing and remediation will learn to match color swatches.
Each of the seven districts have been contacted by Ottawa High School about joining a federal lawsuit to change the way special education progress is measured. The Streator district board has not decided whether it will join that lawsuit
'Many of these students will never meet or exceed the standards,' said Allen. Among the problems that can't be addressed is that No Child requires students be tested at their age-appropriate level.
If they were able to perform at that level 'they wouldn't be in special education in the first place,' said Allen.
Of the 1,900 students in Streator grade school, 450 are in special education. Of those, 76 percent have severe reading or comprehension problems and cannot adequately be tested under No Child guidelines. State law requires in a special education student's plan that they be instructed at their functional level.
On a practical level, however, NCLB has some advantages. It's easy for educators to push special education students into a twilight zone of vague and unment IEP goals. NCLB may become a major driver for the implementation of evidence-based reading programs that work for all comers -- including children with learning disabilities.
If we were a "better" species, I'd say that NCLB is stupid and pointless. It's degrading and hurtful to force a child to take a completely inappropriate and pointless exam. But humans are not a "better" species -- we are what we are. Given our many failings, maybe NCLB isn't hopelessly absurd. We may find a way to use it to our advantage -- even as we fight its absurdities.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Teaching Reading: Scientific American March 2002
how_to_teach_reading.pdf (application/pdf Object)
This important article was published in Scientific American in March of 2002. It's essential reading for any parent who's child is struggling to read. The SciAm web site charges for a copy of the article, but a PDF is distributed on Lexia Learning web site. Once you toss out some irrelevant pictures it's barely six pages long.
The article is a popular version of an analysis done in 2001/2002 for the American Psychological Society. It recapitulates the conclusions from the year 2000 NIH report, but it also delves into the politics of how reading is taught. In brief the scientific evidence for a phonics approach is quite strong, but progressive educators strongly believed in the 80s and 90s that a holistic creative approach with an ad hoc use of phonics was superior. A part of this belief seems to have been a deconstructionist approach to evidence; a belief that some things could not be tested or evaluated but rather had to be managed experientially.
Right wing conservatives were enraged by the "whole-word/whole-language" approach. Phonics, often associated with religious schooling, became their rallying cry. I don't know why they were angy, but, sadly for a leftie like me, the social conservatives were right about Phonics. Whole-language instruction is not the best way to teach reading for most children.
This is an article I'd like to distribute quite widely.
This important article was published in Scientific American in March of 2002. It's essential reading for any parent who's child is struggling to read. The SciAm web site charges for a copy of the article, but a PDF is distributed on Lexia Learning web site. Once you toss out some irrelevant pictures it's barely six pages long.
The article is a popular version of an analysis done in 2001/2002 for the American Psychological Society. It recapitulates the conclusions from the year 2000 NIH report, but it also delves into the politics of how reading is taught. In brief the scientific evidence for a phonics approach is quite strong, but progressive educators strongly believed in the 80s and 90s that a holistic creative approach with an ad hoc use of phonics was superior. A part of this belief seems to have been a deconstructionist approach to evidence; a belief that some things could not be tested or evaluated but rather had to be managed experientially.
Right wing conservatives were enraged by the "whole-word/whole-language" approach. Phonics, often associated with religious schooling, became their rallying cry. I don't know why they were angy, but, sadly for a leftie like me, the social conservatives were right about Phonics. Whole-language instruction is not the best way to teach reading for most children.
This is an article I'd like to distribute quite widely.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Lexia: software package for reading instruction w/ "phonemic awareness"
Lexia Library
Phonemic awareness is the PC term for phonics (ok, some say phonics follows "phonemic awareness", but I think practically speaking it's understood to mean "phonics"). Lexia is one of a myriad of pre-packaged commercial producst sold to schools to teach education. They're sold for a high price to school systems; typically a lower cost version is sold for family/home use.
Our schools system (Ramsey) is experimenting with Lexia, Earobics and the "Sunday system" (sp?). It looks like we'll get family exposure to Lexia; including buying a copy for our home. I'll provide a review here later. (They provide both Mac and Windows version. I assume the Mac version requires Classic. Buyers of the newest Macs have to install Classic separately.)
This web page provides some of the background and marketing material for the Lexia methodology. It looks like it's a good overall orientation to this class of reading instruction methodology.
Another page describes the program designers. There's a strong Orton-Gillingham (phonics) influence and a fairly strong Massachusett's General Hospital reading clinic influence. They seem to be on board the "No Child Left Behind Train", which is pretty good for a group from sin city (Boston). I wonder if they have friends in Kennedy's office. In any case, it looks like a promising team for a reading instruction package.
Phonemic awareness is the PC term for phonics (ok, some say phonics follows "phonemic awareness", but I think practically speaking it's understood to mean "phonics"). Lexia is one of a myriad of pre-packaged commercial producst sold to schools to teach education. They're sold for a high price to school systems; typically a lower cost version is sold for family/home use.
Our schools system (Ramsey) is experimenting with Lexia, Earobics and the "Sunday system" (sp?). It looks like we'll get family exposure to Lexia; including buying a copy for our home. I'll provide a review here later. (They provide both Mac and Windows version. I assume the Mac version requires Classic. Buyers of the newest Macs have to install Classic separately.)
This web page provides some of the background and marketing material for the Lexia methodology. It looks like it's a good overall orientation to this class of reading instruction methodology.
Another page describes the program designers. There's a strong Orton-Gillingham (phonics) influence and a fairly strong Massachusett's General Hospital reading clinic influence. They seem to be on board the "No Child Left Behind Train", which is pretty good for a group from sin city (Boston). I wonder if they have friends in Kennedy's office. In any case, it looks like a promising team for a reading instruction package.
Measuring Progress - Tests and Measurements for the Parent, Teacher, Advocate and Attorney
Measuring Progress - Tests and Measurements for the Parent, Teacher, Advocate and Attorney by Pete and Pam Wright (Wrightslaw)
Wrightslaw publishes books on legal aspects of special education. This web page was linked to from the Lexia sight. It provides advice on how to measure progress. This is vital material to write into an IEP. I wonder if the IEP can also include a "Plan B" -- what do do if the benchmarks aren't being met.
Wrightslaw publishes books on legal aspects of special education. This web page was linked to from the Lexia sight. It provides advice on how to measure progress. This is vital material to write into an IEP. I wonder if the IEP can also include a "Plan B" -- what do do if the benchmarks aren't being met.
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