TEDxManhattanBeach - Tom Vander Ark - Innovations In Education

Good morning Manhattan Beach! Great to be back! That was fun Barry! I appreciate that, and what I hope is a great follow-up on chat about the power of personal digital learning! I met these three young gentlemen in the slums of Delhi last fall, and you can see they're bright-eyed extraordinary young people and very eager to have their picture taken with this tall white guy wandering the streets. And I had a great conversation with them. They spoke reasonably good English, they go to a Government school -- but here's the problem. They have huge class sizes and the teachers don't show up on a very regular basis. So, they are not really getting the preparation that they need and so, as fun as it was, to see the fire in their eyes, I thought to myself: "There's not a very good chance that these three guys are gonna connect to the idea economy." But here's the good news today: you and I can change that! So, before they are in high-school, we can create a terrific high-school experience for kids like that in Delhi! We have challenges here in the United States as well, almost a third of our kids don't graduate. We've made a little bit of progress in the 15 years that I've been working on that problem, but another third don't graduate from high-school, ready for collage or career. So, basically two thirds of U.S. kids don't get what they need or deserve to be ready for the idea economy. And again, what I am excited about, is right in front of us, we have a chance to do better, a lot better. There are three main reasons that I am so excited about personal digital learning, three variables that I think will change not just education, but the world. The first one is customization. So, for almost 15 years, we've been able to vary rate, time and location of learning. When I was a school superintendent we launched the first K-12 on-line school in the United States and we gave students the ability to learn when, where and how they wanted to. But it was still a single slog through a body of content, sort of a one-way path, right? What's changing now is customization. This is a picture of "School Of One" in New York. It's an exciting math pilot program and every student has a unique experience. So, they walk into this big double classroom where they have a double period and they'll see their name on the screen that looks like an airport terminal that shows you what gate to go to, and that'll tell them which station they're gonna start at, and some of them are learning on-line with a tutor, and some of them are learning at a game, and these students, right in the foreground are in a small group instruction with a teacher. Let me describe that! So, a teacher has prepared a lesson for six to eight students but here's what's different than today: each of the students at that table, is ready for that lesson! It's the right lesson, on the right day, in the right mode. And what a gift that is for kids and teachers, right? If they can walk in a room and know that they're ready to meet each other! Teachers feel much more successful in this kind of an environment. And at the beginning of the day, the teachers get to look at this dashboard and see the experiences recommended by a smart algorithm, and they can apply professional judgment to the experiences that kids are gonna have! They can jump in as they're doing -- up here and help out in a real time fashion. So, it's an exciting example of how customization will improve learning per hour. That's the net benefit! That more kids are gonna learn more per hour when we teach them in the right way, at the right level, in the right modality. The second benefit is motivation. We're gonna learn so much from casual game developers in particular. This is a picture of Manga High which is a set of games developed by a casual game developer named Toby Rowland who sold the game company, retired and began developing educational games. So, like Salman Khan who's developed a terrific resource, this is a game based version of learning math. There are other visual approaches to math that I think for many students are going be so motivating! The net benefit will be that more students will learn more hours per day and more will be able to extend the day and the year because we'll be a better job of engaging kids in learning the way they want to learn. So, customization, motivation -- the big three is equalization. It's the transition that Barry talked about, to one-to-one computing. See all these kids in the South Bronx, see all the backpacks there? The crazy thing that we do to middle school kids and loading them up with this giant backpack full of text books. And it no longer makes sense to do that. It's now cheaper to give them a tablet, with great resources and connect every student, like this one, to great content, to great teachers, 24/7, 365. So, the promise of equalization is that will lift the floor, that will close the digital divide for good and that every student, every day will have access to terrific educational opportunities. So, let's talk about how this will happen. On-line learning is growing much faster that most people think. So students that took an on-line course in the US last year was about 4 million. By the end of this school year, by the second semester, it'll be about 6 million. By next fall, it will be 8 million. It's growing at least 50% a year. So, this is happening much more rapidly than any historical educational reforms have happened. And what that means is that more students are learning outside of traditional school, but I don't think it'll be much more than 10 or 15%. Most students are still going to learn at school but it'll be learning on-line at a new kind of school. I call it a 'blended school.' Here's an example, in an unlikely place. It's Yuma, Arizona. This is a little border town, where there is a terrific High School called "Carpe Diem." There's 300 students that learn together in an environment that mixes on-line and on-site, sort of the best of both worlds. So, they spend about half of their time learning on-line, with the support of a group of lab supervisors, and they spend the other half of their time in these engaging, Socratic seminars during project-based learning. So, the neat thing for teachers is that each student has had good academic preparation for the Socratic seminars and they're making these two forms of learning, on-line and on-site, work pretty well together, it's a good early example of blending the best of two worlds. Blended learning is different than Educational Technology. For 20 years, we've been layering technology on how we've always done school. But what's different about schools, like "Carpe Diem" or "Rocketship Elementary" in San Jose, is that, for at least a portion of the day, there's a shift in delivery to an on-line environment, and that's done to boost learning productivity, but also to make the school more productive, to allow a different kind of a staffing model. So, let's go under the hood or behind the tablet and talk for 2 minutes about what's gonna make customized motivating learning possible. First of all, it's gonna be these big content libraries of both open and proprietory content. They'll be aligned in a lot of cases with the common core and they'll sit on top of a social layer, one that looks like Facebook that allows you to create groups really quickly and has lots of apps, that tools for teachers and kids. It'll have a set of aligned services, that go with it, students' services, professional development for teachers, school improvement services, sort of an ecosystem of services. And the exciting thing is that the 10,000 key stroke day that our kids are headed for, it's gonna be captured in a data warehouse and we'll be able to create smart recommendation engines that like "School of One" queue up a set of learning experiences. So, just the right learning experience for your son or daughter, the right time, the right mode. And here's what I think blends can look like. So, you may or may not have liked the picture I showed you of "Carpe Diem", but here's what the next "Carpe Diem" will look like. It will be the "School of One", so think of a play list on a tablet that your son or daughter has at home, sort of a customized learning experience that helps them build the knowledge and skill to participate in something that feels like expeditionary learning. So, community connected, project-based, highly social, highly engaged. That's the kind of schools that we ought to be aspiring to. Places that engage hearts and minds and build knowledge and skills. I met this young lady in the slums of Nairobi. It's called Kibera. There's about a million people that live in the most dire circumstances that I've ever experienced. The good news is that she attends a Bridge International Academy. There's about 50 of these, super-low cost private schools, they cost about 4 dollars a month and they're getting US levels of literacy. But there's not a High School for her. And I want to build a High School for this young lady and I think, you and I have the opportunity to do that. Right around the corner is the potential using inexpensive tablets and open content and these new low-cost blended school formats. I think we have the chance to build this young lady an extraordinary High School experience, that will connect her to the idea economy. That's why I think personal digital learning is such a big deal. We finally have a realistic chance of reaching kids, from New York to Nairobi and from Detroit to Delhi, and creating for every kid on this planet a very effective and engaging customized learning experience! Thanks! (Applause)