Top 10 Posts of 2012: Deep, Meaningful and Creative Learning

Flickr: CriCristina It may come as no surprise that the ideas that are top-of-mind for educators, parents, and policymakers are the very topics conveyed in the most popular MindShift posts this year. Giving kids the tools to create, teachers the freedom to innovate, making students’ work relevant in the real world, giving them access to valuable technology. These are the aspirations that have resonated most with MindShift readers this year. Being able to use the Internet and operate computers is one thing, but it may be just as valuable to teach students how to code. So much about how and where kids learn has changed over the years, but the physical structure of schools has not. The conversation in education has shifted towards outcomes and training kids for jobs of the future, and in many ways the traditional classroom has become obsolete. Can creativity be taught? At its core, the issues associated with mobile learning get to the very fundamentals of what happens in class everyday.

For Low-Income Kids, Is More Time in School the Answer? To help disadvantaged kids who are struggling to keep up in school, some education advocates believe that extending the school day could give them the extra boost they need. They argue that many parents can’t afford to send their kids to the varied extracurricular activities that wealthier children enjoy – leaving poorer kids with a sparse education that focuses primarily on testing. On that premise, five states recently announced that select school districts will participate in a three-year extended time pilot project funded with a mix of federal, state and district funds, along with private philanthropy from the Ford Foundation and National Center on Time and Learning. Extended-time advocates cite studies showing a gap in childhood opportunity that mirrors the widening income gap. But simply tacking on hours at the end of a school day is not the solution, according to some. “The goal is to use the extra time to change the entire school day. Related

Good Read: MOOCs Take on the 1 Percent From Clay Shirky’s blog: “The fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? “That’s because in the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. Read more at: www.shirky.com

What we SHOULD have been taught in our senior year of high school All artwork and content on this site is Copyright © 2015 Matthew Inman. Please don't steal. TheOatmeal.com was lovingly built using CakePHP All artwork and content on this site is Copyright © 2015 Matthew Inman. TheOatmeal.com was lovingly built using CakePHP White Parents Outraged by Course That Teaches Students About Systematic Racism In yet another attempt to pretend as if systemic racism does not exist, white parents of children attending a high school within the Delavan-Darien School District in Wisconsin are outraged by a course that teaches their children that minorities had been historically oppressed by white people. One parent, who wishes to remain anonymous, said the course teaches her child to feel guilty. “It’s meant to divide and victimize non-whites and condition whites to feel guilty and to be more passive,” the parent said. The Delavan-Darien School District superintendent Robert Crist, received a slew of complaints from parents about the course, which entailed an assignment that had students go to the local WalMart and count the number of dolls representative of blacks versus whites. Young America’s Foundation, which also overlooked the curriculum with the parent, called the course race-baiting. The parent believes Jensen’s ideology is politically driven.

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived Additional notes from the author: If you want to learn more about Tesla, I highly recommend reading Tesla: Man Out of Time Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome. There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life.