Tag: school

Kanban for Kids

I find it interesting that Anya’s school had very good “lessons” for taking notes — the teacher had a class where she would talk and the kids took notes. The kids then submitted the notes, and she basically graded the notes. “This was just a funny story, no need to include in notes” or “when I mention something three times, it needs to be in your notes. Add ‘whatever got mentioned repeatedly in class’ here”. I won’t say that Anya loved note taking class, but she did it. And, since kids got to use their notes for their tests … she saw the benefit of having decent notes.

Time management, though, the school seems to take the “throw in water, if you don’t drown … well, you can swim!” approach. They assign a bunch of stuff, generally due around the same time for extra fun. And then they don’t say anything to the kid if they’re a month behind. So I found myself explaining Kanban boards to Anya.

We do digital things at work, but she needs something everyone can see just walking by. So paper cards, magnets, and white board it is! You make a column for “stuff I am going to need to do” — we call this a backlog. New assignments go here first. We thought color coding the classes would be cool — so take a square of paper, write the name of the assignment, the date it is due, how long you guess it will take to complete (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week).

You then have other columns for “in progress”, “done”, and “stuck” — we have additional columns at work because they make sense for what we do — “UAT testing”, “Awaiting Feedback”. You may find there are other columns that make sense for your classes too — I used to have a “Researching”, “Draft”, “Editing”, and “Final Draft” columns because everything was a research paper.

At work, we plan a week or two of work — you pick enough cards to fill up the week, and that’s what you are working on. This means our cards could represent a week of work — I’m only going to finish one card this week, but that’s a full week of work. For school work, picking the cards daily kind of makes sense because new assignments pop in all the time. It would be difficult to shoehorn new assignments into an already planned out week.

If the “in progress” items will be picked daily, then a card shouldn’t represent more than a day of work. So “Write the paper” is too generic. That would need to be broken out into “select topic”, “start research”, “continue research”, “finish research”, “start draft”, “continue draft”, “finish draft”, “review draft”, “edit draft”, and “finalize report” might all be reasonable items to accomplish in a day.

Using this method, you can see when things are due, realize when you have two or three big things due at the same time (so some are going to need to be finished early), and can keep track of anything where you are stuck (had to ask the teacher for clarification, waiting for a book to be available from the library, etc).

If nothing else, she seems happy about the “moving it to the completed column” bit!

Connections Academy – Planner UI/UX Issues and Learning Module Voices

I was surprised at the voices used for the cartoon characters in Connections Academy’s learning modules. Anya paused her maths lesson to tell me the lion is shrill. And proceeded to mimic the voice. I had her play a little of it for me and, yeah, it’s awful. The ladybug in the language arts module is better, but that’s a terribly low bar. I’d expected there to be a few voices from which we could select — not just because someone may well find a voice objectionable, but also because some people have frequency specific hearing loss — someone with trouble hearing high frequencies isn’t going to be able to use these modules. I set up an in-browser audio equalizer and dropped out high frequencies. Makes it usable, but I’ve still submitted feedback with my observation.

Then there’s the planner. I’ve noticed a few UI problems in the Planner —

  1. I am frequently unable to save an event – in cases where something is not populated, the missing item is highlighted in red. That’s not what I’m talking about – I’ve got all of the required fields populated, nothing is highlighted when I click ‘save’. It just stays on the item creation form. I am able to cancel item creation, try again, and get an event created.
  2. When the purpose is set to “Enrichment”, items cannot be opened/edited/deleted.
  3. When creating a new item, expanding the “Recurrence” section produces an overlap between the “Description” field and the top line of the recurrence selection. The description field is on top, which renders the top half of the check-boxes unusable.

And more of a UX issue … while the event items can include half-hours, the credit hours field appears to be an integer value. It is auto-populated with a float. Which leads me to expect

School’s Out — Books

Well … it doesn’t look like school is going to resume until, possibly, August. Maybe not even then. Our district’s go at distance learning has been quite lacking — they’ve basically taken three weeks off to (hopefully) sort out some content to complete the year. I wanted to get Anya a bunch of books — she doesn’t enjoy e-books in spite of the fact we’ve got an endless supply from the local libraries. She likes physical books. I do not like blowing fifteen or twenty bucks on a book … so that’s not going to work out well 🙂

I remembered Book Outlet, where I got her Lucy and Andy books (they have a referral program – 10$ off your first order of 25$ or more and I get a bonus 10$) — I went through their entire collection of not-yet-teenager books and ordered 43 books for about 150$. That’s about 3.50$ per book, mostly hard covers. There are some reference books, drawing instruction books, science experiments, maker ideas, programming books, and a lot of fiction books to try out. I even found a book about urban animal rescue — she’s rather enticed with the idea of being a vet and rescuing wild animals. This will be a great supplement to whatever the school puts together for the remainder of the year. (I also picked up a 2nd and 3rd grade curriculum — additional work for the remainder of this year and something for the summer).

Educational Philosophy

I was discussing educational philosophy with my mom a few days ago — especially early childhood education, which wasn’t either of our specialties. But as Anya is getting older, it’s becoming relevant. And I’m surprised by the rigorous curriculum adopted by one of the local “elite” preschools around here. It’s got a wait list and enormous price tag. And it ignores a great deal of recent research regarding childhood learning – essentially that very young kids form the neural connections that are needed for formal schooling through free play. Not by getting them to sit down and listen to lectures at an earlier age, not by being told what to do and doing it … but by being left to their own devices to use toys “wrong” and run and climb.

Made me think of my experience with education — and I graduated top ten in my class, so this isn’t just “the school is why I’m failing, not me” complaining. School managed to take all of the fun out of any subject. Not sure if that’s just the Puritanical history of the country dictating that work shouldn’t be fun or just a reality of trying to teach 30 kids in a class.

I love reading. And talking with friends about what I’ve read. I do *not* love reading a few chapters and writing a five page double spaced Arial 12 point text essay on the allegory … you get the idea.

I started University as a history major – but I don’t care as much about the exact date that the Treaty of Versailles was signed as much as the socio-political impact the treaty content had on much of Europe. I don’t want a list of the crusades and their dates – but the cultural impact, the religious impact, hell even the political impact that having a large number of military leaders and men roaming across the continent had “back home”.

Chemistry lab experiments were graded on the % deviation between your results and the predicted outcome. You were essentially being tested on your ability to get exactly 12 milliliters into a container. Or you had the good sense to BS your way through the experiment, calculate the intended results, and reverse engineer your experimental values with a variance somewhere between 91% and 97%.

Art – first of all, I find the idea of grading such a subjective subject to be right silly. Personally, I would have graded on attitude and effort. Someone who lacks hand-eye coordination but put a lot of thought into the media and technique may have made an ugly picture … but they got something from the experience. A talented artist may have fobbed off the class but made a beautiful piece. I have to say, I had a physical education instructor who graded with that exact logic. Someone from the girls’ basketball team could grade poorly in the basketball unit not because they didn’t make baskets but because they were disruptive to class and weren’t trying. Someone who was putting forth a lot of effort but didn’t make any baskets could still get an ‘A’. Usually, though, physical education was graded on one’s ability within specific sports.

Maths and physics become a memorization challenge. Foreign language classes were recitation. Any class – they managed to turn it into an unpleasant experience.