Audrey Watters
Audrey Watters's Latest Posts
Teaching Kids About Entrepreneurship, One Ladybug at a Time
We start teaching kids about jobs and professions at an early age. By elementary school, they know what doctors, scientists, farmers and firefighters do. In some cases, there are supporting programs to help kids gain knowledge and hands-on experience needed for those careers and to put them in touch with those who work in the [...]
Can 35,000 People Learn Anything from an Online Class?
This summer, Stanford University announced its plans to make three of its introductory computer science classes available for free to the general public. The classes — Machine Learning, Introduction to Databases, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence — were to be taught by Stanford faculty and held online in conjunction with the regular on campus courses [...]
The Public Library, Completely Reimagined
You’ll hear a lot of talk about the “death of the public library” these days. It isn’t simply the perpetual budget crises that many face either. It’s the move to digital literature, and the idea that once there are no more print books (or rather if there are no more print books), the library as [...]
Is New York City’s General Assembly the University of the Future?
What is a university? There’s a legal answer to that question, of course, as well as historical, philosophical, instructional, and civic. And strictly by some of these definitions, General Assembly doesn’t qualify as a university. There are no degrees awarded. There is no .edu Web domain. There is no football team. And yet the New [...]
Why Aren’t Students Using E-Books?
Kathryn Though we keep hearing about a huge increase in sales of e-books, a recent survey shows that, for students, that needle has not really moved much. The library e-book provider eBrary released some of the preliminary results from its 2011 Global Student E-Book Survey last week. Among its findings: that students’ e-book usage has [...]
Some Help With Solving the Rubix Cube
Remember playing with the Rubix Cube as a kid? The 3D puzzle was invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor Ernő Rubik, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that the toy was licensed and sold widely. Since then, some 350 million Rubix Cubes have been sold. That figure doesn’t include the variations — the 2×2, 4×4, [...]
Plagiarism Differences in High School and College Students
A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy. But another interesting fact emerged [...]
E-Readers Help Spread Literacy, No Apps Needed
Worldreader We often talk about the power of the Internet to spread knowledge and information globally, to make digital content accessible and affordable. But as we’re also often caught up in the “latest and greatest” gadgetry, sometimes we overlook that broad promise of global education and accessibility. Such is the case, one might argue, with [...]
Great New Apps for Music, Middle School, Math, And More
Continuing our monthly Educational Apps series, here are some of the new iOS, Android, and Web-based educational apps that caught our eye this month: THE WORMWORLD SAGA The Wormworld Saga is an online graphic novel about Jonas Berg, a young boy who enters an alternative fantasy world through a magical painting. Author and artist Dan [...]
Not Ready to Hack Into Your Smartphone? Start Here.
For those looking to tinker with electronics, add buzzers, lights or sensors to an object, or teach kids (or themselves) the basics of circuitry, programming, and micro-controllers, it’s not as hard as you might think. There are a number of kits available that make such projects relatively easy and accessible. Arduino, for example, offers a [...]
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