The cliché is a fifty-year-old asking some ten year old student for help in making the computer work. Having trouble making working with your device or your software? Just grab one of those digital natives to handle it for you!
What makes this worse is that students believe they are experts because adults have been telling them that they are. I’ve had the conversation with several students about why they shouldn’t be force-quitting the appson their iPhones, and the looks I get range from, “Cool, I didn’t know that” to “I don’t believe you, I’m going to still force-quit apps”.
Learning to change your teaching practice in today’s digital-first world is a bit like learning a foreign language, to hear ed-tech vet Ann McMullan tell it. “You don’t speak it fluently on the first day. But you pick up one word, two words, three words, and the more you engage and the more you use…
To explore what machine learning could mean in education, EdSurge convened a meetup this past week in San Francisco with Adam Blum (CEO of OpenEd), Armen Pischdotchian, (an academic technology mentor at IBM Watson), Kathy Benemann (CEO of EruditeAI), and Kirill Kireyev (founder of instaGrok and technology head at TextGenome and GYANT). EdSurge’s Tony Wan moderated the session. Source: Real Questions About…
Still, teachers can staunch boredom. Mehta and Fine (read sidebar) discovered that even in underperforming schools where boredom was near universal, “there were individual teachers who were creating classrooms where students were really engaged and motivated.” These teachers trusted students to sometime control the class. They tried to learn from their students as much as they…
“All this time, I was doing it wrong.” Since Erin and I released Hacking Project Based Learning this past December, we have been happy to hear from teachers and students who are benefiting from what we wrote. At the same time, we have received several messages that look like the one above. These are messages…
In “The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America,” the Berkshire Hathaway CEO lays out a problem that plagues many businesses: prioritizing short-term goals over long-term success. “If management makes bad decisions in order to hit short-term earnings targets, and consequently gets behind the eight-ball in terms of costs, customer satisfaction or brand strength, no…
He finds that math scores went up by 0.20 standard deviations and English scores by 0.18 standard deviations, and the results hold up even when you control for “detailed student demographics, including residential ZIP Code fixed effects that help control for a student’s exposure to pollution at home.” Source: Air filters create huge educational gains…
