Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous. If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country’s education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children’s bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities.
From President Obama on down, public officials have cautioned against pursuing degrees like art history, which are seen as expensive luxuries in today’s world. Republicans want to go several steps further and defund these kinds of majors. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts — and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future. For most of its history, the United States was unique in offering a well-rounded education. This School Has Bikes Instead Of Desks--And It Turns Out That's A Better Way To Learn. Elementary school has always looked a little bit like training for a traditional office job: You show up at 8 or 9, sit at your desk, and fill out paperwork for most of the day. An average third grader might spend as much as six hours sitting in the classroom--only a little less time than the average office worker spends sitting at work.
But as more offices realize that sitting all day long is actually pretty terrible for health and productivity, how long will it take schools to catch up? While some elementary schools no longer have recess, and people like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie argue that school days should be even longer, a few schools are already moving in a different direction. Some are testing out standing desks, and realizing that a little bit of activity can actually improve attention spans. Others, like Ward Elementary in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are starting to fill classrooms with exercise bikes, so students can work out while they learn. 10 talks from inspiring teachers. Professor John Keating of “The Dead Poets Society.” Calculus teacher Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver.” Marine-turned-teacher Louanne Johnson of “Dangerous Minds.” Hollywood might want to take note of a new award-winning teacher on the block, Stephen Ritz, who gave this fast-paced, highly inspiring talk at TEDxManhattan.
Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South BronxA parent and teacher in the South Bronx, Ritz has noticed his students getting larger and more sickly over the years, not to mention the fact that they’re parsing fewer options for earning a living. So Ritz began working with his students to grow “indoor edible walls,” beautiful living murals, full of greenery.
“Kids from the poorest Congressional district in America can build a 30 x 15 foot wall — design it, plant it, and install it in the middle of New York City,” says Ritz. Since starting the edible wall project, Ritz has seen his kids’ attendance jump from 43 to 90 percent.
4 | 5 Bold Predictions For The Future Of Higher Education. The future of higher education is a constantly moving target. Everything from the emergence of MOOCs to new learning styles and mounting financial and sustainability pressures are impacting the education landscape. Every day higher education leaders are developing new strategies to leverage across these developing challenges and opportunities. The common denominator amidst all this change: students. What should they learn? How can institutions best attract them? How do you best empower their learning? How do you keep them safe? Here are five bold predictions for how the answers to those questions will define the future of education. 1: Academic Curricula Will Become More Multi-Disciplinary Current models--reliant upon departmental space where curriculum is developed and fostered independent of the university at large--must change. 2: Education Leaders Will Need To Balance MOOCs and Traditional Learning The truth is neither education delivery model is intrinsically better than the other.
Gamification by @victormanriquey. The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies In Education. Interactive Graphic: What iPad Donations Reveal About Schools In America. DonorsChoose.org’s novel approach to providing teachers with up-to-date educational materials landed the company on the cover of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies issue this month. By giving teachers a forum to ask for school project funds, the company has raised $225 million from almost 1.2 million citizen philanthropists. Charles Best, DonorsChoose.org’s CEO, gave Co.Design access to the organization’s data on what kind of projects teachers propose and which projects donors end up funding. DonorsChoose.org intends to use that data, and the many other indices the organization tracks, to “make government education spending smarter, better targeted, and more responsive,” Best says.
We’ve helped DonorsChoose.org get started, pulling five stories from the numbers that indicate regional school subject preferences and overall trends across the site. 1. Well, at least if your teacher uses DonorsChoose.org. 2. 3. 4. 5. Desastre educativo. Confirman que la mayoría de los muchachos de Colombia no aprenden nada o casi nada en la escuela y de allí salen ignorantes a su vida laboral, incapaces de mejorar sus condiciones de vida, condenados a la pobreza. El sistema educativo colombiano, que gasta billones de pesos, emplea a cientos de miles de maestros y acapara los mejores años de vida de millones de jóvenes, es un fracaso.
Las cifras son dramáticas. Entre 65 países, el nuestro ocupa el puesto 62 en matemáticas, el 57 en lectura y el 59 en competencia científica. La OECD anota que los datos de competencias matemáticas de Colombia no son significativamente distintos que los de los tres peores países —Qatar, Indonesia y Perú—. Estamos, literalmente, en el fondo de la tabla. Los resultados de Colombia en 2012, divulgados el pasado martes, son peores que los de 2009 (aunque los funcionarios muestran, con razón, una leve mejoría frente a los de 2006). Existe el riesgo de que tampoco se haga nada en los próximos años. How Skype Became The Ultimate Free Teaching Tool. When I arrived at Loyola Elementary School in the Silicon Valley area, I was met by Ellen Kraska, a Technology Integration Specialist who helps teachers in Los Altos bring all sorts of digital projects--movies, digital storytelling, music--into the classroom. On the day of my visit, Kraska was helping out a 4th grade class with "Mystery Skype"--a game where the students connect via Skype to a mystery classroom somewhere else in the world and use maps and logic to figure out where they are.
I sat in the back of the classroom while the kids played with Google Earth (everyone had their own school-provided laptop), snapped photos of the big screen that showed video of the mystery class, and live-blogged their findings into a Google Docs document. The kids pumped their fists as they came closer to pinpointing the mystery classroom ("Do you live in a state that borders a body of water? " "Do you live in a state with lots of stores? "). A Playful 3-D Puzzle That Becomes A Working Radio. Despite how often we use our electronic devices, most of us don’t have much of an idea of what goes on inside them. Soldering, circuitry, silicon--it all seems technical and intimidating, and until we’re in some sort of post-apocalyptic situation in which I need to fashion an emergency radio out of a coat hanger and some old cellphone parts, I’m pretty much okay with leaving the guts inside the gadgets.
But as part of the designers in residence program at the London Design Museum, Japansese designer Yuri Suzuki, in conjunction with the electronics education group Technology Will Save Us, made those guts the star of the show. Their collaborative project, the Denki Puzzle, turns circuitry into something that you actually want to play with. The Puzzle is a set of custom-designed printed circuit board pieces that can be arranged to create a few basic devices, namely a light and a radio. [Hat Tip designboom] Ayah Bdeir: Building blocks that blink, beep and teach.
Design thinking y educación. Redesigning Education: Building Schools for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. "It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. " --Carl Sagan Not since the Soviets launched Sputnik into Earth's orbit in the 1960s has there been such urgency for America to redesign science and math education programs. Now, in the third millennium, the initiative takes the form of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education. Research demonstrates that interest among American students in STEM subjects has greatly declined, a major issue given that the STEM labor force is an indicator of a nation's ability to sustain itself. The new STEM initiative will launch with a bold mission: to reengage students in the joys of learning science and mathematics at all levels of education. The launch is well underway. In January of this year President Obama announced that $250 million would be invested in training and recruiting 100,000 new science and math teachers.
Education Futures.
5 Lessons In UI Design, From A Breakthrough Museum. Museums today compete for attention in a wildly difficult environment: If you’re a youngster, why stare at a Greek urn when you could blow one up in a video game? One institution thinking deeply about the challenge is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which this month unveiled a series of revamped galleries, designed by Local Projects, which feature cutting-edge interactivity. But the technology isn’t the point. "We didn’t want to create a tech ghetto," says David Franklin, the museum’s director. Adds Local Projects founder Jake Barton, "We wanted to make the tech predicated on the art itself.
" Put another way, the new galleries at CMA tackle the problem plaguing most ambitious UI projects today: How do you let the content shine, and get the tech out of the way? 1. The first gallery that many new visitors will see, Gallery One, is a signature space, meant to draw in a younger crowd. In one display, a computer analyzes the expression on a visitor’s face. 2. 3. 4. 5.
We Are The People We've Been Waiting For. 10 Lessons from Einstein. Re-imagining school | TED Playlists. Heppell.net • learning • ingenuity • research • policy • design • technology • delight • (+ sailing!) 10 New Education Companies to Watch (Plus 3 More for Extra Credit)
Helping Children Around the World to Read and Learn. What Schools Can Learn From Google, IDEO, and Pixar. A community about to build or rehab a school often creates checklists of best practices, looks for furniture that matches its mascot, and orders shiny new lockers to line its corridors. These are all fine steps, but the process of planning and designing a new school requires both looking outward (to the future, to the community, to innovative corporate powerhouses) as well as inward (to the playfulness and creativity that are at the core of learning).
In many ways, what makes the Googles of the world exceptional begins in the childhood classroom -- an embrace of creativity, play, and collaboration. It was just one year ago that 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number-one leadership competency in our complex global marketplace. We can no longer afford to teach our kids or design their schoolhouses the way we used to if we’re to maintain a competitive edge. [Photos by Steve Hall] The Blue Valley Schools Center for Advanced Professional Studies (BVCAPS) takes a similar approach. 10 Ways That Mobile Learning Will Revolutionize Education.
Smartphones and tablet computers are radically transforming how we access our shared knowledge sources by keeping us constantly connected to near-infinite volumes of raw data and information. We enjoy unprecedented instant access to expertise, from informal cooking lessons on YouTube to online university courses. Every day people around the globe are absorbed in exciting new forms of learning, and yet traditional schools and university systems are still struggling to leverage the many opportunities for innovation in this area. Recently frog has been researching how learning models are evolving—and how they can be improved—via the influence of mobile technologies.
We’ve found that the education industry needs new models and fresh frameworks to avoid losing touch with the radically evolving needs of its many current and potential new constituencies. We have been focusing on the concept of mLearning—where "m" usually stands for "mobile" but also just as easily for "me. " 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education. Infographic of the Day: Even Poor Countries Can Excel in Education.
Sitting comfortable in our first-world lives, it's easy to assume that we've got the best of everything. And it's easy to assume that problems of infant mortality, hunger and education are simply a matter of having a roaring GDP. But that's not true at all, as these remarkable interactive graphs show. Produced by The Guardian and the Gates Foundation, the charts are draw from the Millennium Development Report Card. Basically, it shows how well countries are performing on key development metrics, relative to their GDP. The size of the outer ring shows performance on a Millennium Development Goal, such as primary-school enrollment. [Click to see interactive version] The picture flips for infant mortality; you want the pink ring to be tiny. Similarly, hunger. Now, the data viz technique is obviously confusing -- it could certainly be much clearer than trying to see the relative size of tiny rings.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh: Dare to educate Afghan girls. 10x10 - Educate Girls. Change the World. Can These Simple Cartoons Help Redesign Education? Were you bored in school? Guess what, so was Einstein! Does that make you a genius, too? Not likely, but according to a new project called Born to Learn, it does suggest that our educational practices might need a rethink. The project’s main thrust is a series of short, simple animations aimed at raising awareness about how the minds of young humans are "born to learn"--but not necessarily "be taught.
" Here’s their intro: "Your brain is the planet’s most powerful learning machine. The films’ stripped-down visual style certainly goes hand in hand with the simplified (perhaps oversimplified) ideas they espouse. But the general point these videos make about education is still compelling: that integrated, multidisciplinary thinking is not only an essential value to inculcate into our children, but that it probably suits our mental machinery better than rote memorization of silo’d factoids. [This one explains that you can’t learn something unless you take responsibility for doing it.] Private tuition: Premium economy.