Jet Stream Worksheet: Fill & Download for Free

For the most part I've been pretty underwhelmed by most education technology. But there are some great resources available.A long time ago I worked on the Mathwise project. This was a set of online units for degree level mathematics. It consisted of a HyperCard stack with explanations, diagrams and questions and answered which were marked by the software. It took a huge effort to produce with about 30 academic and 5 support staff to write over a two year period. I'm not really sure what happened but I don't think it really gained any traction. I certainly never heard about the project again after I moved on.I think the same can apply to much courseware, they take a lot more effort to produce than more traditional methods but don't really produce significant advantages over other methods. A good text book can be hard to beat.Later I've worked in a Further Education college. When I joined there was a big push to install smart boards in every class room. These cost £7000 a piece, coming to a hefty sum to equip the whole college. I did experiment with using one to control a 3D application, but I have not seen anyone else use them as more than a whiteboard with a video projector.The college like many other UK education institutions uses Moodle a "Virtual Learning Environment" basically a Document Management System for education. It allows students to download PDF and Word documents with assignments and submit their work electronically, normally in Word format. It does the job but it is a heart sink kind of system, not particularly friendly to, ugly, temperamental. Its basic form of interaction consists of uploading and downloading word documents. Why are we still stuck with this legacy system? There should be no need to do anything outside of a web-browser these days. I don't want to have to download a document then open it in another application, just to see what a two line assignment title is.There are a whole bunch of other backend systems used by teachers. These do tasks like recording student marks and attendance. Many are incompatible with each other often requiring double entry of data. The design of these is not very inspiring.One of the big problems with a tech enabled classrooms is that the internet is always available. It was bad five years ago when students could easily browse the web on college provided computers, these could be controlled with content filters, but often led to games with students trying to find ways round the block. Now things are worse, as they all have smartphones which can't be controlled.Sometimes I think my ideal classroom is would consist of a whiteboard, chairs, tables all inside a Faraday cage. I would like a good range of books, posters and tactile objects students could interact with. It is easy to control the available resources when they are in physical form than in the open internet.Actually this is not far from the way I teach the group of home educated kids I work with. For the most part it's old school methods, discussion, chalk and talk, working on printed worksheets. A printed worksheet has a lot of advantages over its online counterpart: there is no visual distraction, no surrounding menus, certainly no flashing notifications to say you have a new facebook message. I had a good experience on Monday when all the kids quietly worked in silence on a worksheet for fifteen minutes, without any prompting on my part. If this had been done on a computer the first thing they would have seen would be some message to distract them from the task.Technology has its place, but it should only be used when it supports learning. I teach maths and physics and like quite a lot of hand on experimental work. Often we use modern technology in the experiments. I'll get students to record video of the experiments on their phones. For instance Galileo's experiment to show the acceleration of gravity affects all object equily can be enhanced by taking a video and replaying it in slow motion. I use the Arduino microcontroller quite a lot.For instance in the above experiment it was used to record millisecond timings of balls rolling down a ramp. The total cost of equipment for this was less than £50: an arduino, lcd display, diodes and light dependant resistors.The UK had a particularly good patch for development of software engineers about the time of the Sinclair Spectrum. This was because relatively advanced technology was available at affordable cost. The likes of the Spectrum and BBC micro were good for bedroom development as they were quite simple development environments. This is in contrast to a PC with vast API's to navigate. We have seen a similar situation with mobile phones, low cost development devices with quite a low barrier to entry. This was part of the motivation behind the Raspberry PI, making the technology affordable. (I prefer and Arduino as is an order of magnitude simpler). I'm a little excited about the release of the BBC micro:bit. Which is you be given to all UK school children and hopefully will inspire a new generation of coders.There are many really nice bits of software out there with great educational uses. I particularly like software which are basically tools for exploration.My favorite site of last year was earth.nullschool.net :: a global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions. This allows you to explore the global weather system.There is so much you can learn from this tool, not just the wind, but ocean current, pollution, the jet stream.Another great resource is gapminder which allows the exploration various data about the different countries of the world. With this you can look at how the different countries develop over time. It is all very interactive and allows different indicators to be plotted against each other.The software is currently not working with the latest version of flash, but they are working of a javascript bubble chart Gapminder bubble chart.We are in a world of data, much publically is available, although it's not often that easy to work with all the different formats that comes in. Giving students access to real world data could be very empowering. Often students are given fake datasets to work with, why not let them use the real thing?A personal dream of mine is to work on a system when many different dataset from many different sources could be easily extracted, combined, visualised and analysed. You would need some scraper scripts, to be able to extract data from specific sources, some common descriptive framework to describe the data and various end user programs.The concept of Open Source and open content licenses like Creative Commons comes into play here. While these are common in the software world and places like wikipedia, it has not made much progress in education. The idea of sharing resources is a natural fit for educators, many teachers use photocopies worksheets from other teachers. The Time Education Supplement has a whole section on resources which can be downloaded Teaching Resources , (alas these are mainly word and pdfs so its hard to browser online). A proper licensing regime would easy this process. The freedom to modify which goes with much of the open source community and is the heart of the wiki model could also play a part. Ideally educators could build on each others work, fixing errors and producing better resources. The might not be completely achievable as each educator has a different style.There are some great educational video being produced these days. Numberphile produces many maths videos on advanced topics reminding me somewhat of the old Open University material I used to watch in the 1980's. His other channels like PeriodicVideos does the same for chemisty, others cover computers and physics. Another good channels include Electro BOOM. These video are often a good supplement to learning. Good for broad overview and motivation but they cannot be used as a standalone resource. I've found the videos from independent producers much better than official material produced by the Educational Institutions, who often try a bit too hard.There are a few good games CellCraft taught me a lot about the chemical working of cells, I use Lightbot for teaching some basic ideas about programming. Some of the games by Zachtronics give a warped twist to programming concepts and produce some very tricky logic puzzles. There are also a lot of very so-so educational games, which are loosely disguised exercises. To my mind these fail as compelling games and fail as exercises.Returning to the question "How can we use technology to create an effective alternative to the current, traditional system of higher education?"I would first acknowledge that technology should be secondary to education. The basic process of absorbing knowledge, and practicing the skill is not going to change significantly. If you want formal education you still need exams and qualifications. Technology is not a magic bullet, and we have seen many cases of grand schemes which don't live upto the hype.Personally I've learnt much more out of education than in it, and the informal education system should be encouraged. Allow easy access to kit to encourage kids to learn by doing in their bedrooms. Be it video production, or programming. Develope afordable systems in the price range of a teanager. The reason Photoshop is pirated so much is that it is priced outside the pocket of teanagers/young adults and there is no good alternative.Often the really good pieces of software and technology come from the left field, independent people who pursue a tightly focused idea and produce a stunning bit of code. These people should receive support from governments and educational institutions, to produce resources with open licences so they can be used by everyone, in formal education or not.