May 2012
9 posts
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Technology in Education: Great Science Education... →
Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, is president and CEO of Sally Ride Science. Each summer her organization hosts the Sally Ride Science Academy Brought to you by ExxonMobil, a teacher development program to strengthen STEM education in the United States.
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“College is not trade school. Who’s really complaining? The people really who are...”
– Using Standardized Tests To Develop Flexible Minds | Fast Company
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New York City imposes new social media rules for... →
infoneer-pulse:
On Monday, the New York City Department of Education published its first set of guidelines for the use of social media, underscoring the importance for teachers and staff to keep a clear distinction between the use of their personal and professional accounts.
“In an increasingly digital world, we seek to provide our students with the opportunities that multi-media learning can...
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EdX, Coursera, Udacity: When Top Universities...
edX: MIT and Harvard launch a ‘revolution in education’
Coursera: Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, UMich, Berkeley launch online university
Udacity: Start-Up Expands Free Course Offerings Online
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Petridish.org →
Inspire students to study science: Fund science & explore the world with renowned researchers
Explore the world around you
Petridish lets you fund promising research projects and join first hand in new discoveries.
World famous researchers post projects and expeditions that need your help to get off the ground.
Each project has a minimum threshold it must hit in pledges, or it will not be...
April 2012
5 posts
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Making Education Brain Science →
Neurology informs the approach at a Manhattan institution founded by members of the Blue Man Group and their wives for children from pre-kindergarten through third grade.
March 2012
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February 2012
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Using Research to Predict Great Teachers →
What if you could spot a top teacher candidate from an e-mail? It may sound too good to be true, but statistically speaking, it can be surprisingly effective, according to one charter school organization requiring applicants to answer hypothetical e-mails as part of its interviewing process beginning this summer.
January 2012
3 posts
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Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions
One small change can yield big results
By DAN ROTHSTEIN and LUZ SANTANA
When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own. However, this skill is rarely, if ever, deliberately taught to students from kindergarten through high school. Typically, questions are seen as the...
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A merit-based pay system for teachers that has a... →
During her first six years of teaching in this city’s struggling schools, Tiffany Johnson got a series of small raises that brought her annual salary to $63,000, from about $50,000. This year, her seventh, Ms. Johnson earns $87,000.
That latest 38 percent jump, unheard of in public education, came after Ms. Johnson was rated “highly effective” two years in a row under Washington’s new...
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WatchThe speaker is Conrad Wolfram; math is made up of 4 parts, but our schools are only teaching one of them, computation.
The elements of math are (1)posing questions, (2)translating real world problems into mathematical language, (3)performing computation, and (4) translating mathematical answers into real world solutions.
Computers should be doing those calculations. That way, time in math...
December 2011
4 posts
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WatchRethinking Learning in America
Specialist: Frank Moss, former director of the MIT media lab, discusses how kids’ computer skills can be challenged and how this can encourage them with problem-solving skills.
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Japan's Cramming Schools: Testing Times
A controversial institution has some surprising merits
The yells of children pierce the night, belting out the elements—“Lithium! Magnesium!”—as an instructor displays abbreviations from the periodic table. Next, two dozen flags stream by as the ten-year-olds shout out the names of the corresponding countries. Later they identify 20 constellations they have committed to memory. Timers on desks...
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Seven Skills That Schools Should Be Teaching Kids
By Tony Wagner
Critical thinking and problem-solving
Collaboration Across Networks and Leading By Influence
Agility and Adaptability
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Effective Oral and Written Communication
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Curiosity and Imagination
I’ve spent the last two years researching and writing a new book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best...
November 2011
4 posts
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How About Better Parents? - NYTimes.com →
From the article:
The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is...
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Why Science Majors Change Their Minds →
LAST FALL, President Obama threw what was billed as the first White House Science Fair, a photo op in the gilt-mirrored State Dining Room. He tested a steering wheel designed by middle schoolers to detect distracted driving and peeked inside a robot that plays soccer. It was meant as an inspirational moment: children, science is fun; work harder. Read more.
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October 2011
7 posts
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Why Do Some People Learn Faster? →
by Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, a NY Times Bestseller
The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom...
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Top 10 Ways to Wake-up Students in Class →
Many people get a little squeamish, wiggly, and offer a scrunched expression when I respond to the question, “What grades do you teach?” I teach middle school, and with heart and honesty, I find great joys (and challenges) in teaching the group referred to as “tweens” and adolescents.
So, I invite you into the quirky world of middle school. Do not fear…you will become comfortable in a beanbag,...
What Teachers Really Want to Tell Parents →
(CNN) — This summer, I met a principal who was recently named as the administrator of the year in her state. She was loved and adored by all, but she told me she was leaving the profession.
I screamed, “You can’t leave us,” and she quite bluntly replied, “Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can’t deal...
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2011 MIT Sloan EdTech Case Competition →
First annual MIT Sloan EdTech Case Competition
Are you interested in taking on some of the most challenging questions facing education technology companies today? Sign up for the first annual MIT Sloan EdTech Case Competition and put your analysis, strategy, and creative thinking skills to the test! The MIT Sloan EdTech Case Competition is the only case competition focused specifically on...
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Ed Tech Map →
NewSchools is pleased to share this K-12 education technology market map with the entrepreneurial, philanthropic, and education communities. This tool provides a visual representation of ventures currently operating in the education technology market. Funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, NewSchools collaborated with leading experts Michael Horn (Innosight Institute) and Anthony Kim...
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Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed →
Summary
Most entrepreneurs in education build the wrong type of business, because entrepreneurs think of education as a quality problem. The average person thinks of it as a cost problem.
Building in education does not follow an Internet company’s growth curve. Do it because you want to fix problems in education for the next 20 years.
There are opportunities in education in servicing the poor...
September 2011
5 posts
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Nuvu Studio: Innovative Education for the Future →
What is NuVu?
NuVu (pronounced New View) is an innovative educational program whose pedagogy is based on the studio model and geared around multi-disciplinary, collaborative projects. Conceived as a magnet innovation center, NuVu provides students the opportunity to work collaboratively with academic and professional experts to solve real-world problems in an intensive and fun studio...
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WatchMary Giles of Family Fun magazine discusses the importance of stimulating activities for children and shows four fun science experiments that kids can do on their own.
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5 Great Online Learning Blogs →
2. Disrupting Class: Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn post infrequent, but insightful thoughts on current trends in online learning. These guys have a really good handle on the pulse of virtual education at all levels.
3. Virtual School Meanderings: Blogger Michael Barbour authors one of the most regularly updated blogs on online learning that I have found. There is little that goes on...
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Using Simplified Sudoku to Promote and Improve... →
Paper by Khairul A. Tengah Published 2011 in Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College, Columbia University
As part of promoting and improving pattern discovery skills among school children, a Sudoku puzzle can be used as example of a problem solving task. A simplified version of the puzzle will be used first to explain the aim and reinforce the rules of solving the puzzle. Three...
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Angst for the educated →
A university degree no longer confers financial security
Millions of school-leavers in the rich world are about to bid a tearful goodbye to their parents and start a new life at university. Some are inspired by a pure love of learning. But most also believe that spending three or four years at university—and accumulating huge debts in the process—will boost their chances of landing a well-paid...
August 2011
8 posts
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Web-based Electron Microscope for K-12 Students to... →
One of the promises of the Internet is to put resources into the hands of those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access them. We often think of that in terms of information and data. But as the Imaging Technology Group at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign demonstrates, the Internet can also enable people to access hardware resources, not just software or...
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In Future Math Whizzes, Signs of ‘Number Sense’
by Sindya N. Bhanoo published 2011-08-11
Children as young as 3 have a “number sense” that may be correlated with mathematical aptitude, according to a new study.
Melissa Libertus, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, and colleagues looked at something called “number sense,” an intuition — not involving counting — about the concepts of more and less. It exists in all people, Dr....
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The Science of Teacher Education →
Undergraduate program prepares primary and secondary classroom leaders capable of inspiring their students.
by Emily Finn, MIT News Office published 2011-08-03
(Photo: Students in a STEP class build ‘straw towers’ — an activity that program director Eric Klopfer says is really about classroom collaboration, and one that the teachers-in-training could replicate with their own...
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Debunking Five Myths About Project-Based Learning|... →
Misconception #1 PBL is the same as “making something,” “hands-on learning” or “doing an activity.” Fact Check: PBL is often focused on creating physical artifacts, but the artifacts are not as important as the intellectually challenging tasks that led to them. For example, it’s not truly PBL if students are simply making a collage about a story, constructing a model of the Egyptian pyramids, or...
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Does class size really matter? →
In the last ten years, class size in America has declined — and continues to drop. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average class size of U.S. elementary schools has been reduced from twenty-four pupils in 1993 to twenty pupils in 2007. Currently, not all poor kids are in overcrowded classes. In schools that serve rural poor kids, for instance, class sizes...
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Charter Schools: The Long Turnaround
Why the Big Easy has gone furthest with the charter experiment
published 2011-07-30 in print edition of The Economist
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, right at the start of the school year, thousands of students across Orleans Parish saw their classes delayed. Teachers were displaced, and so were parents; the schools themselves were festering, where they were not destroyed....
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Teachers March on Washington →
There are many reasons thousands of teachers traveled across the country to protest in front of the White House on Saturday — including to oppose charter schools, to fight for equal funding for poor schools, and to have more say in public education policies.
But at a noisy rally starting at noon under soaring temperatures, their message boiled down to one point, which was summed up by the sound...
July 2011
16 posts
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School's Out: America's Drop-out Crisis →
Published 2011-07-24
Of all the problems this country faces in education, one of the most complicated, heart-wrenching and urgent is the dropout crisis. Nearly 1 million teenagers stop going to school every year.
The impact of that decision is lifelong. And the statistics are stark:
1. The unemployment rate for people without a high school diploma is nearly twice that of the general...
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Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling →
In 2006, Johns Hopkins University sociologist Karl Alexander and his colleagues concluded a study that had followed Baltimore school children for 24 years. The resulting mass of data from these students shed considerable light on the achievement gap between low-income students and their better-off peers, including the effect we now refer to as “summer slide.” Dr. Alexander recently...
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WatchJeb Bush on Florida’s education reform and the role of government.