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Some Ask: What’s the Value of Common Core State Standards?
By Claudio Sanchez, NPR At 2 p.m., it’s crunchtime for students who write for the Harbinger Online, the award-winning, student news site at Shawnee Mission East High just outside Kansas City, Kan. They’ve been investigating an initiative to develop common curriculum and test guidelines for states. The young reporters have pored over countless documents about [...]
Combining Robotics With Poetry? Art and Engineering Can Co-Exist
By Barbara Ray At the beginning, people thought she was nuts. Sue Mellon, gifted support coordinator for Springdale Junior and Senior High/Colfax School in the Allegheny Valley School District, thought 7th and 8thgraders could develop a deeper understanding of poetry by playing around with robotics. “Originally, people looked at me like I was crazy,” Mellon said. Now, two [...]
Connected Learning: Tying Student Passions to School Subjects
By Ashley Williams, Youth Radio What if your extracurricular activities weren’t just extra but a part of your academics too? New thinking on education intends to bring students’ interests into the classroom. It’s called Connected Learning and promotes the idea that students will excel in school if what they are learning is relevant to their [...]
How to Inspire Students to Design, Invent, and Make an Impact
Scientist Profile: Inventor By Almetria Vaba Spark your students’ curiosity in engineering and technology by introducing them to the designers, inventors, and clever thinkers featured in PBS LearningMedia. Use their stories to illustrate various themes of study like the engineering design process and the impact of technology. DESIGNING A WHEELCHAIR FOR RUGBY See what happens [...]
10 Ways to Teach Innovation
Getty By Thom Markham One overriding challenge is now coming to the fore in public consciousness: We need to reinvent just about everything. Whether scientific advances, technology breakthroughs, new political and economic structures, environmental solutions, or an updated code of ethics for 21st century life, everything is in flux—and everything demands innovative, out of the [...]
Why Competition Can Be Healthy For Kids
By Amanda Stupi Competition. The word conjures images of people pushing and shoving, trash talking, the exulted winner standing above a field of downtrodden losers. Not exactly what most parents consider healthy or constructive for their kids’ development. Po Bronson presented a very different picture of competition when he spoke with Michael Krasny on KQED’s [...]
Teachers, Students, Digital Games: What’s the Right Mix?
By Holly Korbey When St. Louis fifth-grade teacher Jenny Kavanaugh teaches history, she uses her laptop to look at a map, or to give kids a virtual tour of the historical landmarks they’re studying. “Students can interact with history in very cool ways online,” she said. But when it’s time for math, she puts the [...]
Can Student-Driven Learning Happen Under Common Core?
By Marsha Ratzel Teachers use different strategies to help students learn. With the inevitable arrival of the Common Core State Standards, however, the big unknown is what will happen when the assessments are released and the states and the federal government develop policies to accommodate them. If the assessments fall back on the kinds of [...]
Can Repetitive Exercises Actually Feed the Creative Process?
Flickr:Svintus2010 By Holly Korbey In Sherri Scott’s first grade class, the daily “main lesson” pages students work on — essentially their handmade textbooks made up of words, numbers, and artwork — are copied straight from the old-fashioned blackboard, not created. And that’s the point. “It’s what we do in Waldorf schools,” Scott says. “In the [...]
College or No? Stuck Between Present Realities and Future Promises
By Holly Korbey Higher education options are changing for all students — not only for gutsy school reformers and tech enthusiasts dropping out with hopes to become the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. As MOOCs proliferate and college costs keep rising, more young reformers and “edupreneurs” are looking for a way around a four-year [...]
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