It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness.
At Forest Grove Elementary School, along the Ohio River just northwest of Pittsburgh, the Rust Belt is giving way to educational innovation. In a windowless room in the library, first- and second-graders experiment with a strange teaching device that’s half computer and half wooden play table. A giant computer screen looms over the table, and…
It’s high time for students to move beyond an hour of coding exercises and learn computational thinking. That’s the message of a new report from Digital Promisethat examines what’s important to know and be able to do in a “computational world.” Source: It’s Time to Weave Computational Thinking into K-12 — THE Journal The researchers us of…
As solutions go, it is certainly radical: in order to thwart a mass epidemic of cheating by students taking their school leaving exams, Algeria shut down the internet for up to three hours a day this week – for everyone. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” said Lyès Rekkeb, 28, who works for a web design agency….
A decade ago, smart devices promised to change the way we think and interact, and they have – but not by making us smarter. Eric Andrew-Gee explores the growing body of scientific evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds Source: Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?…
Audio books have surged in popularity in recent years, enabled by their ease of use and advancements in smart phones. Gone are the days of numbered cassettes and bulky players. Technology has created more opportunities to listen to good books. But not everyone believes listening to books is a good thing — biases in favor of reading…
I received a tweet asking me for suggestions on keyboarding programs for students. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t respond. I am not a fan, and when schools are saying that they are either a) in a time crunch or, b) having limited use of technology, I struggle that we use this precious amount of time…
