Here’s what my browser generally looks like: work email in the left-most tab, always open. TweetDeck in the next one, always open. A few Google Docs tabs with projects I’m working on, followed by my calendar, Facebook, YouTube, this publication’s website and about 10 stories I want to read — along with whatever random shiny…
It has become a platitude by now to say that massive open online courses largely failed to achieve the promise many advocates saw to expand access to high-quality education democratically throughout the world. But now two researchers have provided the analysis and data to prove it. Source: Study offers data to show MOOCs didn’t achieve…
Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device. Source: Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should…
Over the past several decades we’ve continuously increased the amount of time that children spend at school, and at schoolwork at home, and at school-like activities outside of school. We’ve turned childhood into a time of résumé building. You don’t build passions by building a résumé, trying to impress other people. You build passions by…
Parents care deeply about helping their kids build a positive and healthy relationship with technology. Last year, we introduced the Family Link app to help parents stay in the loop with how their children are using Android devices. Laptops also play an important role at home, with just over 50% of kids between 6-12 sharing…
Computational thinking has been a hugely successful idea and is now taught at school in many countries across the world. Although I welcome the positioning of computer science as a respectable, influential intellectual discipline, in my view computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation – the machine. The world…
Math trauma manifests as anxiety or dread, a debilitating fear of being wrong. This fear limits access to life paths for many people, including school and career choices. While math trauma has multiple sources, there are some that parents and teachers have power to influence directly: outdated ideas of what it means to be good at math. These…
Lately I’ve been noticing that more and more authors seem to be adapting their adult nonfiction books for younger readers (typically for the middle grade set, ages 8-12). The young readers editions are shorter and often contain more illustrations, photos, graphs, and charts than their adult counterparts, distilling the story and information down into what…
As part of our series of interviews with people across Asia-Pacific who use the Internet as a tool to connect, create and grow, we spoke with DoYoun Han, a science teacher at Hyeongyeong Elementary School in South Korea. In addition to his day job, he runs the YouTube channel 3-Minute Elementary School Science, which shares…
Final-year high school students who sat a national history exam in New Zealand have launched a petition asking the exam be marked based on students’ own definition of an “unfamiliar” word. Source: NZ students start petition after exam word ‘trivial’ confused them I have no words… At least no words that these students would be able…