By Jennifer Baljko

 

Kids, regardless of where they live or what social or cultural background they come from, have a natural ability to pick up a device, fiddle around with the drop-down menus, and figure out how to make the technology work for them.

It was no different when students in Ghana and Clearwater, Fla. were handed an e-reader. Curious expressions soon faded as the kids bounded through the training and moved beyond uncertainty to mastery.

This week, we’ve painted a picture of how two of the world’s largest e-reader pilots — spearheaded by Worldreader and Clearwater High School (CHS)—have evolved in the last 12-18 months. We examined the technology issues and talked about the value of building meaning relationships with publishers and content providers.

But the true test of whether it would all come together and actually affect change depended on what happened in the classrooms. This is where we saw some striking similarities and differences.

In Ghana, the first hurdle we had to overcome was a language barrier, especially with the younger children. While English is the language used in the schools, the kids were less familiar with words like “Settings” and the differences between “Back” and “Previous Page.”

The older kids in both pilots, though, took to the Kindles relatively quickly and within a couple of weeks made them their own. In both cases, on opposite sides of the world, kids did what kids do. They figured out how to download music, deregister the pilot-controlled account, create a personal log-on, and find social media platforms.

School administrators reined in that activity, reminding student about promises they made when the devices were distributed. In Florida’s case, students signed an Internet use agreement, said Bonnie Kelley, Clearwater High School’s supervisor of library media technology. In Ghana, students and the broader community took a pledge to support the program and care for the devices.

Once the initial excitement of having a 3G and Wi-Fi enabled e-reader in their hands died down, kids and teachers settled into a more normal routine. Electronic books that had been pushed in the classrooms were being read, teachers found new ways to incorporate e-readers into lesson plans, and kids were getting into the habit of using digital materials.

Some other noteworthy things happened as well.

In Clearwater, the Kindles became an equalizer, something that leveled the playing field between higher-achieving students and those that have been traditionally seen as lower-achievers, said John Just, assistant superintendent of MIS for Pinellas County Schools.

“There were students who would see a textbook or a novel in printed form and didn’t connect with it. For whatever reason, they hadn’t been successful in using them,” he said. “This [pilot] created a new opportunity for them. Some of the most compelling feedback we got when we walked around the different classrooms came from those classrooms with students who were struggling and those lower-level reading classes. Kids were using the tools like the dictionary, highlighting sections of the text. Those tools were very helpful for them.”

John also pointed out an interesting contrast to this dynamic.

“In some of the higher-achieving classes, the kids shrugged and said ‘Ah, I kind of like my book,’” John said, adding that those students had previous successes and a comfort level with printed books. “For many of the struggling students who had never, in many cases, had the ability to acquire such a device, it offered a new lease on learning.”

The books the high school students choose to read and how they related to them also raised eyebrows, said Bonnie.

“I didn’t think they would take to highlighting text, making comments, and sharing that with their teachers. But they did,” Bonnie said. “The students connected to the text, and made connections to themselves.”

“The day we distributed the Kindles, I was standing behind a girl and overheard, ‘Oh, look! I have Pride and Prejudice on my Kindle. I can’t wait to read it!” added Bonnie. “I’m a former English and reading teacher, and I know how kids respond to certain books. That was a real shocker.”

Understanding the motivation behind what makes kids latch onto to reading and which books they choose to read is as important as tracking improvements in reading fluency and comprehension, said Colin McElwee, Worldreader’s managing director.

“For a program that’s based around a piece of technology, technology, in this case, is the least important piece. What’s much more important is the content being used in education and the human behavior around that,” Colin said.

Since the kids in Ghana have a much different starting point with books—something highlighted in this video— the way they use the device is slightly different, too. Because they have so little access to printed materials, they are using the Kindles to discover the world and learn about things that had not been readily available to them.

Besides the e-books Worldreader delivered to them, kids are downloading international and regional newspapers and magazines, free samples, textbooks, other local content, and public domain books. They’re interested in sports, religion, fiction, and non-fiction. They are reading at the market, with their families, and teaching each other the Kindle’s ins and outs. Even when school is not in session, they show up, excited about flipping through more virtual ink.

“We’re trying to gauge what they’re interested in reading. We want to know what’s challenging them,” said Colin. “Over time we’ll get much better at knowing what their understanding is of particular passages or texts.”

While anecdotal evidence is nice, the real proof is in the pudding. We’re waiting for final numbers to come in, but our preliminary findings show improvements in reading fluency and reading comprehension. In one primary school, for instance, students improved on average 13% from their scores five months earlier. We’ll update you as we review the stacks of data coming in.

So where do CHS and Ghana go from here? Thankfully, both projects will continue.

In Florida, school administrators are increasing their e-book database, researching how teachers are adopting technology, and extending teacher training and coaching. School administrators are examining ways to pilot similar programs in other schools throughout the district, and will consider the trade-offs between e-readers and tablets, such as Apple’s iPad.

In Ghana, Worldreader is working with the same group of students as they move up a grade, and plans to expand the program to include other grade levels in the future. We’re talking to more publishers and authors as well. We’ve also expanded into Kenya and are looking at other opportunities in Africa and elsewhere, with the aim of reaching a million kids by 2015.

Have you heard of any other large-scale e-reader pilots? Tell us about it on our Facebook page or via Twitter at @worldreaders.

Photo credits: Ghana photos by Worldreader. Clearwater High School photos courtesy of the Pinellas County School’s Communication Office.

By Jennifer Baljko

About 18 months ago, before Worldreader even had office space, the team unpacked 20 Kindle 2s, and a handful of children’s books were uploaded onto the e-readers. With ambitious plans sketched out on paper and a lot hope in their suitcases, Worldreader’s Colin McElwee, David Risher, and Mike Sundermeyer flew from Barcelona to Ghana and started to test what would soon become our iRead pilot.

About the same time last year, using money from a four-year technology fund, Clearwater, Fla. High School (CHS) administrators purchased about 150 Kindle 2s, and handed them to teachers. They wanted to make sure the educators had plenty of time to get used to their new classroom tool. When the following school year started, e-readers would be in nearly all of the students’ hands, replacing the bulky textbooks they lugged around.

A few months later, the pilot programs were officially launched, and have since become the largest institutional e-reader rollouts anywhere in the world (so far, no one else has come forward to prove us wrong). Now that the initial pilots have come to a close and the next steps are already being phased in, we thought it was good time to reflect on how far both programs have come – and how they have evolved – since the early bright-idea days. Last week, we kicked off the three-part series with a look at the technology and networking capabilities. Today, we’ll talk about the publishing and content distribution side of the puzzle.

We all know content is king, and with increased global connectivity via the Internet and mobile phone networks, information is everywhere, coming in from many different sources at any given time. E-book sales are also growing hand over fist as more people transition from printed to digital materials. In fact, Publishers Weekly reported last month that e-book sales for the first half of calendar 2011 rose 161%, to $473.8 million for the 15 major publishing houses that feed data up to the Association of American Publishers.

Although e-books have gained popularity among individual consumers, getting publishing companies, media outlets, and other content providers to donate age-appropriate digital books that have educational value in a classroom setting, without being disruptive to lesson plans, and where hundreds or thousands of students would have easy access, well, let’s just say that takes some persuasion. Impressively, though, both Clearwater and Worldreader have made significant strides on this front, ensuring that their students have a mini-library of books in the palms of their hands. But there’s still work to be done, and many more opportunities stand to take root.

At CHS, the pilot’s main objectives were to start migrating away from printed textbooks and supplemental teaching materials and better utilize technology in the school. This is an issue that soon many school districts, at least in the United States, will confront. State legislators, including those in Florida, are passing laws that will require public school districts to spend some percentage of their book budgets on digital content within a few years time, or redefine the digital and print divide. E-readers, tablets, and perhaps some other device in an early-stage development stage will be finding their way into any number of classrooms in the near future.

Ahead of the curve, a CHS teacher, using the e-reader during the test phase, stumbled upon the availability of the CK-12 series of e-books, which led to the decision to purchase math and language arts textbooks and supplemental science and reading materials, said John Just, assistant superintendent of MIS for Pinellas County Schools.

At launch, roughly 100 books were available to the staff and students at Clearwater High, 60 of which were purchased, noted Jim Bence, the school district’s computer support analyst in the Office of Library Media/Technology. Within the last year, the high school uploaded other free and paid books, mostly classics like Gulliver’s Travels and Pride and Prejudice, and local newspapers, bringing the average up to about 15 to 20 books on each student’s e-reader, he said.

This year, additional textbooks and learning materials in other subject areas, including science and English, are on the e-readers, and future Kindle store purchases are being planned.  When kids and teachers returned to school this year, they had about 50 titles each, on average, added Jim.

“One of the biggest challenges is content. We are on conference call after conference call trying to convince publishers to give us material in the format that we need,” said John. “That is the biggest detriment at this point to making the program an even bigger success. They see this as a big affront to what they are trying to do. People sat across the table from us and said you’ll never be able to do that.”

Yet, they did. And so did Worldreader, which had a different starting point than CHS but ended up with many similar outcomes.

Although Worldreader’s goal is to give people the world over access to books by leveraging existing technology, building a culture of reading has to begin at the school level. Going that route in a developing country often involves forging deep relationships with government organizations and international and regional publishers.

From go, Worldreader teamed up with USAID to fund the program’s measurement and evaluation portion, and has worked closely with Ghana’s Ministry of Education to get the pilot off the ground last November with about 500 students across different grade levels. Conversations about how to expand it  in the next few years are currently underway, said Worldreader’s Managing Director Colin McElwee.

On the content side, while it was clear that we would have access to the same literary classics as CHS and we could find textbooks that would meet the curriculum requirements, we would have to go beyond that if we wanted reading to stick. The handful of children’s books we initially delivered, which included Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know, Folks Tales From Ghana, and a Curious George and Magic Tree House volume, had only whetted the kids’ appetite.

We began having discussions with big-name publishing companies,  including Random House and Penguin, and authors such as Mary Pope Osborne, Holly Black, Cory Doctorow, Keith Thomas, Janet Wong, and Daniel Pinkwater (other notable writers will be announced in the coming quarters).

Early on, too, the team chose to loop in African authors, such as Meshack Asare, Ellen Banda-Aaku, and Chika Unigwe, and publishers like Smartline, Afram, and Sub-Saharan. We wanted to offer a breadth of content that not only had international appeal, but also would give the local market access to their own regional literary icons. More importantly, we realized almost immediately that stories had to relate to the students’ cultural context, which is lacking in most Western literature. Later this week, we’ll look at why that was relevant and what happened when kids got the e-readers in their hands.

Between our launch with just a few books and today, you’ll find 352 international and African titles in our Worldreader database. On average, each student and teacher now has 99 Worldreader-delivered books on his e-reader plus whatever samples and free, public domain books they downloaded individually.

To make donating their books more appealing to publishers and to encourage the idea of building a long-term relationship, Worldreader is providing publishers with market research about which books are being read, Colin added.

“With our publishers in Ghana, we share with them insights about which books the kids are reading and why. We package that information and report it back to the publishers,” Colin said. “Although the publishers are giving us their books for free for the pilot program, they are getting feedback from the market and from a new digital platform. That’s incredibly valuable for them.”

How publishers will continue to adapt to programs like those being pioneered in Clearwater and Ghana will surely be a topic of conversation at the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the industry’s marquee events. Our Director of Digital Publishing Elizabeth Wood will be there, and will certainly have lots to share when she returns.

Until then, we’ll wrap up this series on Friday with a post about the in-classroom e-reader experience and some surprising results coming out of Clearwater and Ghana.

 

 

 Photo credits :

Ghana photos by Worldreader.

Clearwater High School photos courtesy of the Pinellas County School’s Communication Office.

by Susan Moody

Worldreader has one co-founder in Africa and the other in California; and there are some pretty amazing news to share.  Here’s just two quick (but monumental) stories.  Thursday, Colin participated in a joint press event with USAID and Ghana Education Services in Accra.  Colin, Peter Argo (Deputy Mission Director from USAID), and Stephen Adu (Deputy Director General from GES) signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish an alliance for the implementation of the iRead pilot in Ghana. USAID is funding the measurement and evaluation for iRead under the Global Development Alliance Program and the Ministry facilitates the selection and access to the nine schools involved in the pilot.

Mr. Adu expressed his delight at the pilot, recognising that Ghana is leading this project globally.  His hope is that it would facilitate future expansion to cover the whole country.  Similarly, Mr. Argo expressed pride at being able to support the pilot and the coherence with the strategy of USAID to develop new innovative solutions to age-old development challenges.  Colin said it was great pleasure to formally sign these agreements, but more importantly to see the intention to develop this initiative for the future. The acute interest of local media is also indicative that many in Ghana recognise the potential transformative impact this will have on literacy and the education system itself.  Imagine: Ghana could possibly become the country with the highest penetration of e-readers in schools!

And…it’s official!  We’re going to Kenya. David and Zev reached an agreement with Jon and Caren McCormack to provide e-readers to their amazing Kilgoris Project.  Here is a photo of yesterday’s signing ceremony in San Francisco.  We’ll be sharing more news from David and Zev soon including visits with foundations, friends and even a famous author or two.  You can follow them on twitter: @davidrisherWR and @zevlowe to get mini-updates!

by Colin McElwee

Presenting in front of 600 people is always a stimulating experience.  Especially when that audience also happens to be at TEDx, you know your arguments are probably going to be scrutinized a little bit more than at your average get-together.

Last week I was a presenting participant at the TEDx in Barcelona.  TEDx works because it is the literal manifestation of the TED moniker of “ideas worth spreading.” People are brought together around the world who believe they have the potential to make an impact on that same world.  World changing ideas don’t have to be property of small elite groups (think Bilderberg Group), but should be propagated, interrogated and contrasted worldwide.  And TEDx does that well.

Invited by Alfons Cornella who coordinates the Barcelona TEDx, I presented some of the ideas behind what we are doing at Worldreader.org and the importance of keeping things simple, especially when you are trying to innovate in such a complex environment.  The video I shared with the audience illustrates this point.

Whilst researching for the presentation, I was struck by the many observers and activists who would fundamentally revolutionize educational systems in developing countries.  One common argument is that the developed world has conspired to bequeath many developing countries a faulty educational system that was designed in Victorian times and certainly not for their current and/or future needs.  At the very least, we should not be forcing our “mistakes” on others.  Fine words.

This ignores a fundamental point that risks progress: developing countries have in many cases already assimilated these systems, often as a result of their colonial heritage. Therefore, rather than idealistically wish for something better (I have yet to discover much specificity at this point), to accept these faulty systems is a reality.  Revolutionizing incumbent education systems is both a fraught and long process that would last generations with no guarantee of improvement.  Innovative action that works in a way that maximizes the impact within the current system (whilst simultaneously stretching it) has a better chance of being adopted.  Ultimately, innovative action can incrementally impact those we need to reach.  Remember, innovation is an idea successfully implemented, not just an idea.

E-readers are essentially books and hence are valued for what they are: an indispensable and well-understood input into the existing model of educational systems.  This simplicity is a potent yet incremental way of radically improving the educational systems in developing countries from within.

TEDx Barcelona attracted a great audience and was very enjoyable.   As post- conference conversations demonstrated,  it is a great litmus test for ideas that aspire to become innovations.

As John Maynard Keynes said, “The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared to the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

Update: The 18-minute video of the TED presentation is now available:

The 3-minute video shown as part of the presentation is here.