Education Week - March 25, 2015 - 14

Top Private Schools Feature Key Ed-Tech Lessons Learned
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online course-taking than in public
schools. But what's happened in the
last four or five years is that independent
schools have begun to get quite
enthusiastic and aggressive about
becoming creators and suppliers of
online content."
Ed-tech leaders from the public
sector said that elite independent
schools have many lessons to
offer public schools, despite having
advantages such as abundant
resources, considerable curricular
freedom, and highly selective admissions
policies.
But the learning should-and
often does-go both ways, said Kecia
Ray, the executive director of learning
technology for the 81,000-student
Metro Nashville school system
in Tennessee.
"It's interesting to look at what
other people are able to do when
their structure is a little different,"
Ms. Ray said. "A best practice is a
best practice, independent of where
that practice lives."
As the $8 billion education technology
market continues to surge,
public schools have been flooded
with devices, software, and digital
instructional materials. Many public
school students now have an extensive
menu of online course offerings
from which to choose.
Much of that growth has been
driven by widespread adoption
of Common Core State Standards,
new mandates that require school
systems to administer online assessments
and provide virtual
course options, and the desire to
help teachers better tailor their
instruction to students in classrooms
that frequently contain
more than 20 children of widely
varying academic backgrounds and
abilities.
"The immediate needs that have
compelled public schools to adopt
technology are less compelling in
the independent school world," Mr.
Chubb said.
But other arguments for using
ed-tech-developing the skills necAt
Beaver Country Day,
Investing in Innovation
By Benjamin Herold
Nestled into a lush campus in the affluent Boston
suburb of Chestnut Hill, the Beaver Country
Day School offers what some private school
experts describe as the best approach to using
educational technology that money can buy.
With abundant resources that come from a
$43,360 per year annual tuition, near-total curricular
freedom, and a culture that prizes risktaking
and innovation by both students and
staff, the 468-student school, serving grades 6-12,
uses a number of strategies to fully integrate
technology in support of what Head of School
Peter Hutton calls the "new basics:" collaboration,
constant revision, tech and media literacy,
visual communication, and problem-solving.
Zoz Brooks helps teachers incorporate robotics into their lessons.
14 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 25, 2015 | www.edweek.org
Innovator in Residence
Zoz Brooks, an mit-trained robotics
expert and Discovery Channel television
personality, has a dual role at
Beaver: to make sure the school's
administration "has their finger on
the pulse of new things," and to help
teachers "push the envelope and get
out of their comfort zones." Having
lots of resources is nice, he said, "but
being able to go off in a weird direction
with the resources you have is
more important."
essary for modern careers, for example,
or the value of having richer
data on student learning-apply
regardless of sector, he said.
"So our schools want to do it, but
in a way that allows them to maintain
the distinctiveness they've
always promised to families," Mr.
Chubb said.
Creating Digital Content
That certainly describes the experience
of Andover, which serves
grades 9-12.
When asked about their school's
use of technology, Andover officials
excitedly discuss their external
efforts, such as an institutional
partnership with Khan Academy,
a website that provides free online
math exercises and short instructional
videos to roughly 12 million
users per month.
Over the past two years, faculty in
Andover's math department have
created thousands of advanced calculus
problems to be hosted on the
Khan Academy platform for others
to use.
"The professional-development
value of having staff think deeply
about creating content that's going
to be shared with tens of thousands
of users -it's pretty mindboggling,"
said William W. Scott,
the chairman of Andover's mathematics,
statistics, and computer
science office.
But Mr. Scott and his colleagues
have only warily adopted Khan
Academy materials for use with
their own students. "My first take
was more 'this is crap' than 'this is
fabulous,' to be honest," he said.
With experience, however, that
perspective has changed.
First, Andover math faculty
began using in their classrooms
the Khan Academy content they
The school's technology-related efforts include:
had personally developed. Through
that, Mr. Scott said, they came to
appreciate the value of the realtime
feedback and learning analytics
the site provides to students
and teachers. Now, faculty are
slowly expanding their use of Khan
Academy to include the site's general
content in other mathematical
domains.
The school is also gradually widening
an initiative to provide students
with iPads for classroom use
that was launched in 2013.
And Andover is making increasing
use of software applications in
courses such as computer science
and statistics, as well as taking
advantage of online opportunities
that allow students to better access
primary-source documents in the
humanities.
One of the questions that prestigious
independent schools must
wrestle with, Andover officials
said, is why they should change
their instruction if the vast majority
of their students already earn
the highest possible scores on Advanced
Placement exams and win
Teaching Without the Test
Most staff members at Beaver Country Day see standardized
tests as the most profound barrier to replicating their
approach in public schools. At Beaver, technology plays a
big role in assessment, but not in the form of online state
tests for accountability purposes. Final exams at the school
might consist of designing an experiment, delivering a ted
Talk, or conducting a debate using online collaboration tools
and multimedia resources.
Students at Beaver Country Day School, shown here in the school's lobby, do not take standardized tests.

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