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Elliot Soloway: If you want to help students learn, they need the technology.
Kristin Boyer: I really enjoy working with Professor Soloway, because he wants us to
succeed.
Vidal Borromeo III: He has a very clear vision of what he wants and his vision is big.
Elliot Soloway: I always felt that my role at the university as a professor is to help
the students learn. What I found is the students don't just want to develop mobile apps. They
have a social conscience. They want to do something. They want to do something for education;
they want to make a difference in education.
Last school year, I ran a special projects class and those students developed all the
software that the youngster, the third graders in Nan Chiau Primary School are using every
single day. We have science at Nan Chiau and we have English. English is at pilot phase
right now, we only have three classrooms, but we have eight classrooms of science. All
the science teachers are implementing this Learn by Doing inquiry pedagogy. And people
are in different states. You have three classes plus eight times, you've got 11 classes, times
45 kids. You've got hundreds and hundreds of kids all using a smartphone every single
day to do learning.
Elliot Soloway: It looks really small. Do you have a problem seeing it? You think you
can make it bigger?
Kristin Boyer: I am hoping this summer to create an app that can be used in classrooms,
particularly the KWL chart. I will show you one that we’ve already done. The K standards
for what you know, the W standards for things you’re wondering, and the L stands for things
you learned over the course of your class or the unit.
Vidal Borromeo III: For the new versions of MyDesk, the goal for this fall is the team
and I want to firmly get something in place that the apps class for the fall can then
build off of. There's also a school in Dearborn that's going to be using this. So, we actually
have to have a deliverable product by then.
Elliot Soloway: When teachers create curriculum that uses the technology, they don't quite
understand the technology initially. So, what we have learned is you design curriculum,
you put it in the classroom, you get some experience with the kids and then you redesign
it. And it's the cycles of design, classroom, redesign, classroom. That's a curriculum for
technology needs to be built.
Kristin Boyer: So long-term from this experience, I hope to gain experience working programming
as a team, and being able to interact with the people who are going to be directly affected
by the work I am doing.
Elliot Soloway: My real role is to help the students grow, and I think that by offering
a course where they create software that other students in another part of the world use
and then they actually go there and see them, I am fulfilling my mission as a professor
at the University of Michigan.