Imagine a learning environment where students engage core principals using gameplay, solve problems through team-based collaboration, and use gaming systems in place of standardized textbooks. Is our education system ready for that? Do we have a choice?
Khan Academy has inspired both unconditional love and virulent criticism. But the controversy around the videos has sparked something truly valuable: a national conversation about math instruction and the role of technology, data, and teachers in helping students learn.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 02/06/13
Schools are using a variety of social media tools to help students connect and work together.
Imagine a school where the kids play iPad games to learn about genetics or take on the personas of ghosts to learn about the American Revolution. Those are the approaches to teaching going on at Quest to Learn, a public school in New York City that opened in 2009 expressly to explore how gaming can be integrated with curriculum and where educators work alongside curriculum specialists and game designers to develop instruction.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 02/04/13
With an increasing number of social networks and technologies commanding more and more of our students' time and attention, are we too far gone to successfully integrate smartphones and mobile technologies into classroom learning?
David Sousa, educational consultant, advises teachers to keep brain science in mind when figuring out how to help their students learn.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 01/31/13
"Take a look at the smartphone in your hand," Jaime Casap, global education evangelist for Google, told the crowd during his keynote at the FETC 2013 conference in Orlando Wednesday. "That smartphone is just a phone to a kid. And to many kids, it isn't even a phone. What you have in your hand is going to be their Commodore 64. It's going to be their Apple IIe. When they're in their twenties, it's going to be the thing they buy at a thrift store and put on a shelf in their hipster apartment just because it's cool to have one."
In his keynote address at FETC 2013 in Orlando Tuesday, science writer Matt Kaplan proclaimed, "There is no reason to limit science education to the expertise of the teacher in the classroom." With so much information at our fingertips, he said, we should be both willing and able to integrate multiple fields of study to enhance our students' experience of science.
This year's FETC's technology smackdown offered plenty of free and cheap gadgets and services that imaginative teachers will have fun with in the classroom.
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 01/29/13
Julie Young offers her insights into how distance learning can work best for teachers and students.
- By Christopher Piehler
- 01/28/13