background preloader

Is Digital Education the Answer

Facebook Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg Is Betting Tech Can Address Educational Equity. Is It That Simple? : NPR Ed. As I'm sure you've heard by now, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used the occasion of their daughter's birth to announce they'll be investing nearly all their fortune, some $45 billion, in good causes.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Betting Tech Can Address Educational Equity. Is It That Simple? : NPR Ed

They announced this, of course, in a lengthy Facebook note. "Personalized learning" makes up the first item on their wish list: "Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities. " Welcome to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” Future of Learning — Bright. Welcome to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” Future of Learning What will school look like in 2050?

Welcome to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” Future of Learning — Bright

Teachers from six countries respond. What will school look like in 2050? I asked TED-Ed Innovative Educators from six countries to share their ideas about the future of learning. Data Fueling Scale and Change in Higher Education. Last month, I spoke at a meeting of university and college leaders in New Mexico.

Data Fueling Scale and Change in Higher Education

After outlining some of the initiatives that we have implemented at Georgia State University to raise our graduation rates by 22 percentage points, I received an interesting comment. The president of a small college with enrollments under 2,000 lamented, “Sure, you can implement these programs at a big university like Georgia State, but how can small colleges do the same?” How times have changed.

When I assumed the position of head of student-success programs at Georgia State eight years ago, the conversation was very different. We Learn More When We Learn Together. Dave wheeler FOR HBR We rarely grow alone.

We Learn More When We Learn Together

In fact, some psychologists have made a compelling case that we only grow in connection with others. However, we don’t need to learn with others in formal training or development programs: we can architect our own opportunities to gain insight, knowledge, and skills that move us on an upward trajectory. We can have more control over our learning at work if we make building high-quality connections a priority. What are high-quality connections? How To Transform a Traditional Class Into an Engaged One #fight4edu #engagedScholar. On Monday December 7, 5:30-7:00 pm (#fight4edu and #engagedscholar), we hosted our first event on The Engaged Scholar, this Group on HASTAC.

How To Transform a Traditional Class Into an Engaged One #fight4edu #engagedScholar

It was our first interactive session of The Engaged Scholar, a workshop designed to turn a traditional classroom into an engaged, student-centered space. Engaged pedagogy is the opposite of millennial bashing. Welcome to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” Future of Learning — Bright. Welcome to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” Future of Learning What will school look like in 2050?

Welcome to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” Future of Learning — Bright

Teachers from six countries respond. What will school look like in 2050? Thoughts on mentoring, and why it matters. Thoughts on mentoring, and why it matters Listen at least twice as much as you talk.

Thoughts on mentoring, and why it matters

Be an advocate when it’s needed. STEM to STEAM: Art in K-12 is Key to Building a Strong Economy. As the nation embarks on a new school year, education leaders from President Obama on down are facing a renewed commitment to the STEM subjects -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics -- as a driver of innovation.

STEM to STEAM: Art in K-12 is Key to Building a Strong Economy

And what better advertisement of the power of STEM education than the recent landing of the Mars Rover? Like the original Apollo missions to the Moon, they powerfully reveal the magic of science and engineering. Just this summer, the Obama administration announced a laudable new "teacher corps" dedicated to excellence in the STEM subjects, and as far and wide as Estonia, a new policy is spurring debate about the value of teaching programming to elementary school students.

How to Provide Kids With Screen Time That Supports Learning. The digital landscape of American childhood is in flux, according to surveys: Most children under the age of 8 now have access to mobile devices in their homes.

How to Provide Kids With Screen Time That Supports Learning

In the last five years, children have spent less time watching television, but more time tapping on tablets and smartphones. And recently the American Academy of Pediatrics has softened its zero-screentime recommendation for children under 2. Given the increased access to digital media, there’s a greater opportunity to pay closer attention to how children use devices and ways that parents and educators can use media as a tool to help children learn, according to Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine, authors of “Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens.” Schoolkids Don't Just Need iPads. They Need Data Plans. On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in San Marcos, California, Guadalupe Lopez is guiding me through Alvin Dunn Elementary’s concrete grid of a campus.

Schoolkids Don't Just Need iPads. They Need Data Plans

Dressed in a black sweatshirt with Minnie Mouse ears on the hood, she’s striding along with the eager confidence of a soon-to-be 7th grader just weeks away from the first day of summer. And she has something special she wants to show me. Charging several steps ahead, she leads me into the school’s cafeteria, where dozens of black and white photos of Alvin Dunn sixth graders cover the wall. The photos, Lopez explains, are part of a research project that she and a small group of her classmates recently completed on why American businesses and government agencies should invest in at-risk youth.

“They’re spending so much on prisons, but they’re leaving us behind,” Lopez tells me, sounding far more sophisticated than she should at 12. Coding Class, Then Naptime: Computer Science For The Kindergarten Set : NPR Ed. Don't teach your kindergartner JavaScript; he can't handle all that caffeine. Jose Luis Pelaez Inc. /Blend Images/Corbis hide caption itoggle caption Jose Luis Pelaez Inc. /Blend Images/Corbis Back when Grant Hosford's older daughter was in first grade, she signed up for an extracurricular class, building robots with a programmable Lego toy called Mindstorms.

Ed-Tech Might Make Things Worse... So Now What? 5 min read The OECD released a “first-of-its-kind” report earlier this week on computers and education, eliciting – as all of its PISA-related reports tend to do – precisely the responses you’d suspect: a lot of “schools are doing it wrong.” There’s always a fair amount of handwringing about PISA scores, as though the performance of a country’s 15 year-olds on this assessment is indicative of – or hell, the final word on – the strength or weakness of its school system.

The interpretation of PISA scores tends to suffer from confirmation bias, simply affirming pre-existing beliefs about education policies and practices. And of course, PISA scores also provide the media with an opportunity to craft scary headlines about an impending doom of dumb. Alice.org. The MOOC bubble and the attack on public education. In the last year, MOOCs have gotten a tremendous amount of publicity. Last November, the New York Times decided that 2012 was “the Year of the MOOC,” and columnists like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman have proclaimed ad nauseum that the MOOC “revolution” is a “tsunami” that will soon transform higher education.

As a Time cover article on MOOCs put it—in a rhetorical flourish that has become a truly dead cliché—“College is Dead. The war against humanities. What I Worry About When I Worry About STEM — Futures Exchange. Are we training our future employees, or are we educating our present and future citizens? My first year as a university tutor in archaeology, I had a student who was a retired engineer. A month into term, he complained that the course was too hard. He’d spent his whole life knowing — not believing, but knowing — that arts degrees were a joke. I thought he was saying that he was being unexpectedly challenged, but he was accusing me of making it harder because I didn’t want to admit it was society’s fluff. Will Technology Replace Thinking?  When you get to be 96 years of age the road ahead is short, so you look back at the road you have traveled for almost 100 years.

The first thing you come up against is technology. One night we took our grandchildren out for dinner. I looked around the table. Jason, the youngest, was playing games with his cellphone; Ryan, 12 years old, had his head under the table and I assumed he was watching his cellphone; Tyler, 16, and his sister Kelsey, 18, were both involved on their cellphones too. ScratchJr Takes Coding into K-2. Silicon Valley Turns Its Eye to Education. Mobile.nytimes. Glogin?mobile=1&URI= Teacherpreneurs: We're Here to Inspire. Imagine, program, share. ScratchJr. New Scientist: Kindergarten Coders Can Program Before They Can Read. France in the Year 2000, Imagined by Illustrators in 1900.

Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning. Will Technology Replace Thinking? Is the Internet Really Making Me Stupid, Crazy, and Constantly Distracted? Why STEM Should Care About the Humanities – The Conversation - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education. Teachers in diverse areas are learning how to promote programming. Glogin?URI= Computing in the Classroom. iPads < Teachers — Bright. Do Tablets in the Classroom Really Help Children Learn? What Can Technology Do for Tomorrow’s Children? — Bright. The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education' What to Learn in College to Stay One Step Ahead of Computers. Edutopia. The Era of the Teacherpreneur. Learning to Program With MaKey MaKey in Elementary School.

Edutopia. Edutopia. STEM to STEAM: Resource Roundup. Technological Vs. Creative Thought. Why Web Literacy Matters, Too — Bright. What Wearable Tech Could Mean for the Classroom. Edutopia. Mobile screens: Do they really turn your kids' brains to mush? Why Higher Ed and Business Need to Work Together. Welcome to Forbes. How Should We Approach Education’s Digital Divide? — Bright. Teaching Machines and Turing Machines: The History of the Future of Labor and Learning. Coding Camp to Baltimore Schools: Bring Us Your Bored! : NPR Ed. Coding Camp for Minority Boys Where Mentors Make a Big Difference. YouthSpark Challenge for Change.

5 Big Ideas That Don't Work In Education : NPR Ed. 10 Emerging Education Technologies. Tools for Tailored Learning May Expose Students’ Personal Details. Facebook Takes a Step Into Education Software. How I Became A Teacher Intrapeneur. 4 Ideas to Inspire #TEWeek Followers. Liberal Arts Degree in Demand. Digital Pedagodgy. What Schools Hope to Achieve by Making Computer Science Widespread.