Recently, I had the privilege to witness students achieving in a high school environment that works. DeSoto High School in the DeSoto Independent School District (DISD), DeSoto, Texas has figured it out, during a streaming presentation quests during the streaming presentation to local and national media at the school. I was fortunate to be in the right place, at the right time, to hear it, and be able to share it with you.

There are a combination of things happening, together, to  help students succeed at DeSoto High School, which uses a College and Career Academy system to support their curriculum. DeSoto’s  five academies— Arts & Performance, Business & Technology, Health & Science, Classical, and Professional are the foundation. So, from the start, students make choices that place them into curriculum and course studies that matter to them. Another puzzle part is having the right people guiding students. One of these influential educators is Melvin Barnes, the school’s Transition Coordinator. He helped lead students in discussing their learning at the presentation I attended. Barnes works with students based on vocation interests, translates that into secondary education opportunities for his students, as well as employment opportunities—in their chosen fields after graduation.

I think that those parts are essential to the DeSoto plan, but there was one added piece that helped make it a student plan. DeSoto High students are using MyGraduationPlan to get them through the courses they need, and keep them on track for that graduation walk. Each student, who talked at the DeSoto presentation shared that this was an integral part of their achievement, because they had learned to plan for success by using it. MyGraduationPlan for DeSoto students answers the planning ingredient.

I was talking to a friend of mine about what I had witnessed, right after the presentation. He said, “Most times I don’t think people talk about expectations enough. Then they are easily saddened when they aren’t realized.” I told him that a closer look at DeSoto and DISD might be in order. It seems they are not only talking about it, but also doing something about it—and the students, not the adults, are the ones with the expectations. And that’s what we’re after, right? While I’ve talked about the academy role in this, I really think that when students plan their own path, it sometimes motivates them beyond any expectations we, as educators, may have for them. I’m all for more education stories like that…

–Ken Royal

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Meet Your New PD Tool

See how these administrators are using social media to connect with peers—and improve how they run their schools.

Tiffany Della Vedova entered the social media universe gradually. She started with ASCD EDge, an online community of some 33,000 administrators and educators where she still regularly blogs. “I had been reading their publications and blog. And I thought, I’m going to join the conversation. I started blogging and reading other people’s blogs. I think people gravitate toward the places that offer them their best human connection.”

Then she began following people from EDge on Twitter, and once she got the hang of it, a whole new world opened up. “I realized it’s like the largest virtual teachers college out there,” she says. “I’ve learned more over the last year than I have in any kind of professional development conference.”

She did so simply by posting questions on Twitter, appending a relevant hashtag, and waiting to see what she got. “We were looking at a new resource for our social studies curriculum and it was all video-based, very multimedia,” she says. “I didn’t know what equipment was going to be necessary. I wanted to see if somebody could give me feedback. So I ‘hashtized’ my question to the social studies chat people. And I said, Is anybody using this…

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DeSoto High School prepares students for the future

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Four-year-old Christopher Gómez lined up a set of specialized word and animal cards, including one with the letter ‘I’ and a picture of an iguana under a camera to compose the sentence, “The iguana can eat.”

Christopher shifted his eyes toward a projection screen, smiled and said, “I like the iguana!” as the reptile appeared to pop off the card and onto the screen to eat an insect. A woman’s voice simultaneously spoke the sentence displayed above the screen.

Teachers at the Baldwin Park public school say “Letters alive,” software that combines interactive 3-D technology with sounds, words and realistic animal actions, is helping the school’s 50 autistic children overcome the challenges they encounter when learning to read.

“A static image has little meaning to Christopher, but a three-dimensional image that interacts with him through movement and sound makes a lasting impression because it becomes functional,” said Mary-Elizabeth Langston, Audubon Park’s primary special education teacher. “I hear the children throughout the day repeating the sounds they learned.”

Audubon Park is the first school in the nation to test the preschool and kindergarten program developed by Logical Choice Technologies, an educational firm based in Georgia.

The program costs $995 and contains the software, a document camera, 26 alphabet cards illustrated with animals and a set of 94 flash cards with common pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and verbs necessary for developing reading skills before a child enters the second grade.

When the animal and word cards are joined in a sentence under the camera, the animals perform the actions, but only if that particular creature is capable of such movement. For example, in the sentence, “The giraffe can fly,” the 3-D giraffe will shake its head from left to right to show it cannot do it.

“Students learn what these actions mean, how they are performed, and how they are spelled based on real animals in their natural habitat,” said Audra Cervi, the school’s reading resource teacher.

The user can also flip the animal card to show all sides of the creature. If the teacher presses a colored tab on the card, a 3-D letter replaces the animal. Teachers can show students all sides of the letter. These features appeal especially to autistic students who focus more on visuals as they learn language.

Teachers at Audubon Park, which acquired the program in October, said so far there has been no measurable improvement in their students’ skills. But Langston said students are more socially engaged since they launched the technology.

“We’re starting to see the difference in how they form sounds and words,” she said. “I’ve noticed more eye contact with others, and there’s a willingness to learn that we had not seen before.”…

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Traditional flash cards literally come to life with new 3-D technology called Letters Alive. Teachers say the cards and noises are so real, kids no longer have to make believe.

“I’ve had different reactions,” said Holly Hammonds, the school’s librarian. “I’ve had one cry before.”

Students are between three and five years old, and are part of Early Head Start, Head Start, and the Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities.

The video game and movie-like look of Letters Alive is keeping kids focused. They don’t even realize they’ll walk away better prepared for kindergarten.

“Rule of thumb is that for five minutes, they’ll be engaged. For them to do that for 25 minutes, that’s the biggest challenge of a teacher,” Hammonds said.

And while this process starts with individual letters, Hammonds progresses to creating words and then sentences, hoping students will achieve beyond state expectations.

“T-O-Y,” spelled one student…

-Shelly Slater

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“I’m sorry class, but we’re going to have fun today.” This is how teacher, musician, composer and game designer John Hunter starts his class in the 2010 documentary World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements, which tells the story of how he uses his World Peace Game to help students work to solve global issues. In an age of smartphones and tablets, Hunter has had much success bringing his multi-level board game to classrooms all over the world.

Tasked with using negotiation and problem-solving skills to get countries to work together instead of resorting to war, children spend hours going through the political simulation, working in “nation-teams” to do what diplomats with years of experience struggle with everyday.

Hunter developed the game in 1978 while creating curricula for gifted students at an urban high school in Richmond, Virginia.

“We were studying Africa, so I thought, ‘Why not put it on a game board?’ So I took the continent of Africa, divided it into countries, divided the kids into teams, and said, ‘Now what should we do with the continent? Well, there are a lot of great things, but let’s look at the problems and fix them, let’s solve things,’” Hunter said.

“So we gathered up all the problems we could find — socially, militarily, economically, politically — and challenged ourselves to actually solve them somehow. And that became the basis of our game.”

Hunter has since updated the game from a two-dimensional game to a four-tiered Plexiglas tower, adding modern-day factors such as drone warfare.

“The game is just a pretext, an excuse for us to develop compassion for others and to try and decrease suffering and increase the caring we have for each other,” Hunter said.

John Hunter is making history … with his revolutionary game during a time of global tension. Hunter presented his game at the TED2011 Conference and has done the same in Norway, Austrailia and other countries. During his presentation at the Pentagon last November, officials there were so impressed with the game that they invited Hunter back, along with his students, to discuss it in more detail.

What’s next for John?

Hunter had to quit his full-time position as a teacher at a Virginia school to travel and spread the word about the World Peace Game. He’s also working on a book about the game, which is scheduled for a 2013 release.

In his own words …

“The fundamental level of all good curricula is based on the relationship between the teacher and the student,” Hunter said. “That is the essence of everything that occurs that is good for the student, that helps the student develop. You have somebody who understands them and can build a curriculum towards them and for them, and facilitates their mastering it in a way that a pre-prepared script cannot.”

On black history…

“The full spectrum of human experiences is in black history. We all hope that we take from it the best of everything that there is. We all hope that we learn from it all the things to avoid. We look to history to help guide our steps so we don’t make the same mistakes — and we do take the best from the past forward.”

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Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his Internet start-up fell through. He was 35.

It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3 a.m., out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. “I realized I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company,” he says.

Exhausted and demoralized, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. A momentary blast of hope—but no, just a message from a fan, something he had been getting more and more of lately. This one was from some guy in Sweden, a fellow software entrepreneur, and it was the usual “Evernote has changed my life” sort of thing. Libin almost missed the last line: “If you ever need any money let me know.”

Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: “It just so happens we could use some cash. How much did you have in mind?”

The answer came right back: “Would half a million dollars be enough?”

Today, the company is swimming in tens of millions of dollars in cash from both VCs and profits. Evernote is buying companies, tripling in size each year, and drawing 40,000 new users a day. If you live in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, where Evernote has reached cult status, none of this probably surprises you. Otherwise, you must be wondering: What the hell is Evernote?

Libin has different ways of explaining it: It’s your brain offloaded to a server. It’s Google for the Web of your life. It’s a spotlight on the dark matter of your universe. It’s a tool for converting your smartphone from a time killer to a time saver.

Learn more about how Evernote works, and hear from some of its biggest fanatics in the tech industry.

OK, so Evernote is a little hard to explain—you have to get to know it to appreciate how subversively effective it is. You could say pretty much the same about Libin, as well as about the team of fellow managers—many of whom have stuck together through multiple start-ups—and the company they have built around memory. It’s a company whose employees romp in spacious offices ringed with conference rooms named after video games. (So much for adulthood.) Whose customers are so dedicated that many eventually choose to pay for the service, even though they can use it for free. That’s starting to change the way children learn in schools. And that has set its sights on affecting the lives of a billion people—a goal that’s looking less fanciful every day.

Such lofty ambitions might have seemed absurd when Libin’s family moved to the Bronx, New York, from the Soviet Union in 1979. Libin was 8 years old. Fourteen years later, he had managed to effect a trifecta of ancestral shame when he left Boston University one course short of his bachelor’s degree, in a fit of pique over a questionable charge on a school bill. “I was the first one in my family for 200 years who had no degree, didn’t play an instrument, and wasn’t a chessmaster,” says Libin, who, whatever his limitations, has raised acerbic self-effacement to an art form.

Degree, schmegree—Libin could code. He had been a computer…

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– David H. Freedman