bryn hammett

Adam, your frustrations surrounding one-on-one conferencing is all too real. It is evident that your practice has inspired this ingenious product. While most of my teaching experience lies in teaching senior math and physics, I did spend a couple years teaching upper elementary and I can certainly relate to the challenges you face with effectively and efficiently providing students feedback on their written work. Over the last decade I have watched programs like Khan Academy revolutionize differentiated instruction and assessment practices in the math classroom and wondered when analogous programs will exist for writing assessments. You provide an interesting overview of current writing assessment software and address their inherent limitations. I appreciate your concern with written versus typed text and agree that elementary school students should continue to develop their handwriting skills even if they have access to devices. I have no doubts that software will come to exist within the next decade that will instantaneous assess hand writing work. The positive effects would be simply to great for this product not to exist one day. The question that intrigues me is what adverse effect will this technology have on student writing and their ability to develop a voice? Consider how Spellcheck was initially designed to improve the writer’s ability to spell but had an opposite effect. Your proposed writing assessment software might have the intentions to provide students with individualized and immediate feedback but may end up harming their written abilities by ironing out any student voice and encouraging lazy writing. That all said, I think this idea has amazing potential.

Hi Winter, thank you for putting together the very compelling venture, OrangeEnglish. Your idea is simple and yet has the potential to dramatically improve the fluency of many Chinese English language learners while yielding considerable returns to investors. While studying Chinese in Wuhan, I discovered the importance of learning full sentences as building blocks to my fluency. I found the significant difference in sentence structure between the two languages made it very ineffective to simply learn isolated vocabulary without context as to how they fit within common sentences or sayings. If OrangeChinese existed during my 3 years in Wuhan, I certainly would have profited from this resource. The potential market of OrangeEnglish is absolutely immense but I imagine there is significant competition in ELL resources in China. You are wise to offer free, limited access subscriptions to the OrangeEnglish in order to attract future paid subscriptions. The OrangeEnglish appears to focus on common oral communications which do vary considerably between English speaking nations. I’m uncertain, for example, whether all English speakers would use the phrase “I’ll keep you posted”. I wonder if OrangeEnglish accommodates for the diversity found in the English language or whether it is focused on a North American vernacular. In any case, your idea shows considerable thought and consideration and has the potential to gain considerable traction.

Hi Christopher, hats off to you for crafting a well thought out product and engaging pitch. I couldn’t agree more that there is high demand for to peer-curated learning tools on the web. We need look no further than Youtube to realize the power of peer-created and peer-rated content. I have often dreamed of an Educational Youtube whereby instructional videos are rated, curated and tagged by users so that teachers and students alike can find the most effective instructional videos appropriate for their grade level. It would appear LURNT broadens this idea to include a wide range of instructional resources. I agree with you that the success of LURNT relies heavily on successfully building a strong user base, ideally a user base that is willing to pay for your service! I imagine it will be challenging to convince teachers, students and parents to pay for access to curated, but otherwise free, content through LURNT. I would be interested in your thoughts on how you forecast LURNT being profitable without overwhelming the user with advertisements? I ran into a similar challenge with my project and realized that there is a certain expectation in education that content should be cost and ad free. It’s no wonder that Khan Academy is so successful and why I find Study.com videos equally frustrating. On another completely different note, you are among a very small handful of people that I know who have lived in Burkina Faso! I lived just south of Ouahigouya 15 years ago.

Thanks Reg, I also see great promise of intelligent things in tomorrow's classroom. As a math and physics teacher, I am continually seeking out new and efficient ways to assess my student's understanding. While assessment is an essential pillar to education, it often fails to support learning and to provide deep insight into what the student actually knows. I foresee intelligent assessment in the near future; assessment that is both affective and adaptive to the individual learning profile of each student and both formative and summative in nature. I imagine tools that are able to scan student-practice and problems covered in class and generate individualized assessment that varies in depth and scope for each learner profile. Students would appreciate the infinite practice and immediate feedback from such a resource and teachers would appreciate having access to so much data without having to create, administer or mark a greater number of assessments. Administrators, curriculum developers and other stakeholders would appreciate having a more standardized understanding on how certain students perform compared to a global norm. Without a doubt, adaptive computational learning environments will become the norm in every math classroom which will allow teachers more time to focus on support the students who need it most.

With the growing number of MOOCs and other online learning environments, there is a growing need for online instruction that is specifically tailored to the learning profile of each student. I forecast two emerging trends in adaptive software. First, I predict online learning platforms will be better able to adjust instruction based on the nature of the responses provided by the learner. As the quality of the responses improve, so does the level of difficulty and abstraction in content. Likewise, the learning platform might recognize a gap in understanding and provide additional support in a particular area before allowing the learner to proceed. Second, I predict different online learning platforms will become more integrated with each other. I forecast greater collaboration between various online learning platforms allowing for a learner's progress and success in one application to inform their personalized learning experience in another. Say one platform demanded a high level of cognitive strain on the student in the morning, a second platform might offer a lighter and more hands-on learning experience in the afternoon.

Self-guided learning will continue to grow as a tenet of 21st century learning. As curricula continues to ebb toward inquiry-based models, teachers are forced to give up the reins on teaching facts and rather design and engineer learning environments that accommodate self-paced instruction that meet the needs of a diversity of learning profiles. The role of the teacher is no longer to impart knowledge, but rather to empower students to effectively teach themselves. I forecast an inevitable growth in the field of self-guided learning environments that tailor just-in-tie instruction to the unique learning profile of each student.

I see exciting potential in self-guided online-learning activities that adapt to the learner's attitudes and emotions. I have employed several self-guided learning platforms in my classroom in recent years (Khan Academy, Duolingo etc) to provide leaning experiences that are better tailored to my students unique learning profile. I have often compared these self-paced learning activities with my experience teaching using one-on-one instruction. I concluded that one-on-one instruction allows me to pick up on the emotional state of the learner and adjust my level of my instruction based on how the learner is feeling that day. I see enormous potential in affective learning platforms that adjust individualized instruction and assessment based on various emotional cues from the learner. Emotional cues might include the user's weight and pacing of keystrokes, facial expressions, heat rate, breathing rate and vocalizations.