Culture
Teachers’ Ultimate Guide to Using Videos
With one billion monthly users (and growing), YouTube’s popularity is a pretty clear indication that video is a powerful medium. And kids’ unrelenting fascination with videos is motivating many educators to find ways to leverage them for all kinds of purposes. But the best ways of using videos are not always obvious. Teachers want to know: [...]
Internet Access for All: A New Program Targets Low-Income Students
Getty Technology has often been called a democratizer in education, allowing students from all backgrounds to access the same resources and tools. Others see potential for technology to do great harm, widening an already substantial achievement gap related to issues of equity. Access to technology costs money and some fear lower-income schools and students will [...]
Study: Path Through College is Indirect and Stressful for Many Students
Despite a deeply held belief that success in college is crucial for success in life, the traditional path students assume they’ll take is more an exception than the rule, according to a new report. Though most students believe the college path — high school, college with chosen major, internship, job — will smoothly go from [...]
For Low-Income Kids, Access to Devices Could Be the Equalizer
No device should ever be hailed as the silver bullet in “saving” education — nor should it be completely shunned — but when it comes to the possibility of bridging the digital divide between low-income and high-income students, devices may play a pivotal role. Access to the Internet connects kids to all kinds of information [...]
Amplify’s New Tablet Hits the Market
Along with the big release last week of Amplify‘s tablet, produced by the education arm of media conglomerate News Corp, came details of the product that will vie for a spot in the growing education tablet market. Amplify’s tablet runs on the Android platform and comes pre-loaded with a curriculum that’s aligned to Common Core State [...]
Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning
If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution? “Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,” said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive [...]
Remixing Melville: Moby Dick Meets the Digital Generation
In a traditional English class, a teacher might assign Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby Dick in small chunks. Students might complete their reading (or not), discuss major themes and perhaps write an essay at the end of the unit. But if a student never gets past the first few pages, the rest of that unit [...]
Student Mentors: How 6th and 12th Graders Learn From Each Other
When Tracy Edwards posted on Facebook last October that she was searching for a part-time writing instructor for a middle school program, Kip Glazer jumped immediately at the chance. But Glazer wasn’t applying for herself. Instead, she envisioned her 100 senior high school English students, who were about to become virtual writing mentors to 200 [...]
What Does ‘Design Thinking’ Look Like in School?
Getty Images Design thinking can seem a bit abstract to teachers. It’s not part of traditional teacher training programs and has only recently entered the teachers’ vernacular. Design thinking is an approach to learning that includes considering real-world problems, research, analysis, conceiving original ideas, lots of experimentation, and sometimes building things by hand. But few [...]
Nurturing the Next Van Gogh? Start With Small Steps
If it’s true that fostering creativity in learning is not just a nice notion, but an imperative, then educators must find a way to integrate it into a system that has not made this intangible, un-testable attribute a priority. More and more, teachers are becoming alerted to the idea that nurturing creative minds is necessary [...]
Follow MindShift