How many kids would benefit from grade skipping? According to the study team at Johns Hopkins, two out of seven children test at a grade level higher than their current one—“staggeringly large numbers of students,” in their words, who might benefit from jumping ahead by grade or class. Advocates of accelerated learning point out that skipping a grade is just one way to jump ahead. In middle and high school, students can more easily move in and out of higher-level classes without missing an entire grade. And technology has eased the way for accelerated learning. Children living in remote parts of the country, for example, can move up by taking AP classes online.
Interesting how things can come full circle and we’re now re-visiting the one room schoolhouse. Arguments about grade levels come up when the date to start kindergartners is discussed, but in the grand scheme of things, no matter where you set the date, each grade level will still have students that can be practically an entire year different in age.
We recently spoke with three inspirational educators about their experience in the Innovator Program and the ideas they brought to life: Charlie Shryock, who created eThanks, an online gratitude site for teachers; Matt Wigdahl who designed a makerspace project called SolverSpace; and Carrie Anne Philbin who created Geek Gurl Diaries to inspire girls to pursue…
The future impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on society and the labour force have been studied and reported extensively. In a recent book, AI Superpowers, Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China, wrote that 40 to 50 per cent of current jobs will be technically and economically viable with AI and automation over the next…
Would you like a text only version of a news site? Well, CNN offers one! The site is available in English and Spanish, and offers text only versions of the news. This could be a good site to use with easily dis-tractable students or as a way to use a summarizing service on news articles.
Fans of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy treasure the bit where a group of hyper-dimensional beings demand that a supercomputer tells them the secret to life, the universe and everything. The machine, which has been constructed specifically for this purpose, takes 7.5m years to compute the answer, which famously comes out as 42….
Hours after her son returned to school, April McElrath of Smyrna, Delaware, posted to a Facebook group she’d joined for help and support. “He tried to start a game before school!!!” McElrath wrote, posting a picture of her sheepishly smiling son Marcus, 11, to the group for parents of children obsessed with the video…
The effects of social media use on teenage life satisfaction are limited and probably “tiny”, a study of 12,000 UK adolescents suggests. Family, friends and school life all had a greater impact on wellbeing, says the University of Oxford research team. It claims its study is more in-depth and robust than previous ones. Source: Social…