At times 2017 has seemed like a new era for reporting, where newsrooms have had to question and reevaluate their purpose for existing. For the mainstream media, technology has been both a friend and an enemy. So how do we prepare today’s high school journalists (and tomorrow’s mainstream reporters) for such an era? Our guest today: educator, journalist and author of the book "Moonshots in Education," Esther Wojcicki, who most of her students call Woj, has some ideas. Esther has been teaching for...
Oct 10, 2017•24 min
The generation of students attending college today just aren’t that impressed by traditional markers of authority—and they’re not coming to campus to gaze up at wise leaders on a pedestal (well, at least according to surveys). And that’s one reason the president of Bentley University, Gloria Cordes Larson, invites students to call her by her first name. It’s a move that President Larson -- I mean, Gloria -- sees as part of the university’s push to make higher education more of a hybrid experienc...
Oct 03, 2017•19 min
It’s not solely about having a “makerspace” anymore. These days, schools are trying to figure out how to bring making into every facet of the school day, with mobile kits, clubs and more. And when it comes to incorporating making into everyday curriculum, Cicely Day and Knikole Taylor are experts. Cicely Day works in Oakland, California at Burckhalter Elementary School as an instructional teacher leader, where she helps support teachers and students in ELA/math and in the computer lab. Two times...
Sep 26, 2017•23 min
If you’ve ever seen the Toy Story movies, you may remember the neighbor kid, Sid. His room is presented in horror-movie fashion, with dim lighting and discordant music, and the toys are all in pieces, as Sid dismantles them and remakes them in his own crazy way. To Mitch Resnick, an MIT Media Lab professor and early pioneer of the maker movement for kids, this Hollywood’s portrayal is problematic, and part of a larger trend toward overly regimenting education these days. “I worry about the way t...
Sep 19, 2017•27 min
Five years ago, a former high school principal named Brian Greenberg joined forces with an heir to the retail giant Gap, John Fisher, to start a fund to help scale promising charter schools. This week the group, called Silicon Schools Fund, released a report reflecting on its efforts so far, which have supported 31 schools, 24 of which were brand new, with a total of $50 million. The bad news: They admit there isn’t yet enough hard evidence that personalized learning really works. The good news:...
Sep 13, 2017•28 min
A few weeks ago, while perusing Twitter for news stories, a few folks on the EdSurge team came across a Tweet by math blogger, TED talker, and former teacher Dan Meyer. He had recently read an EdSurge article regarding struggles that had taken place during a Fulton County Schools’ personalized learning initiative in Atlanta, and in response, Meyer Tweeted, “Can you send me a calendar invite to the meeting where we question the core assumptions of personalized learning?” Though the “invitation” w...
Sep 12, 2017•42 min
Sometimes it's hard to imagine change—especially when it comes to a 150-year-old system, such as higher education in the United States. But much of the system we see and experience today was designed, and perhaps it can be again. At least, that's what professor Cathy Davidson writes in her latest book, “The New Education.” As director of the futures initiative at CUNY's Graduate Center, Davidson studies and thinks a lot about cultural history and technology. In the book, she outlines several way...
Sep 05, 2017•33 min
Ideological and political conflicts exist across the world, and often appear oversimplified and binary: conservative versus liberal, left versus right, the 99 versus 1 percent. Yet the reality is often much more complicated. And for children born in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East, growing up in the world of ideological tension has been a way of life. While Middle Eastern entrepreneurs have tried to encourage peace and conversation between Israel and Palestine thr...
Aug 30, 2017•16 min
These days algorithms have taken on an almost godlike power—they’re up in the (data) clouds, watching everything, passing judgment and leaving us mere mortals with no way to appeal or to even know when these mathematical deities have intervened. That’s the argument made by Cathy O'Neil in her book “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.” If algorithms are gods, she’s one of the high priests, as a data scientist and mathematician. These days O'Neil...
Aug 22, 2017•28 min
Neal McKenzie says teachers of visually impaired students “have been makers for a long time.” The assistive technology specialist has designed dozens of objects to help his students access content, including an award-winning device to teach Braille. In this special edition EdSurge On Air podcast, EdSurge's own Michael Winters reads McKenzie's article aloud, in which he offers tips for special-ed teachers to incorporate 3D design into curriculum, along with his favorite maker resources.
Aug 16, 2017•7 min
There are plenty of “innovators” and “early adopters” of education technology out there, from educators who make the rounds on the ISTE and SXSWedu conference circuits to consultants and entrepreneurs who push for adoption of certain tools or practices. But what about those who are more skeptical? The “technology adoption life cycle,” inspired by the work of American communication theorist and sociologist Everett Rogers, argues that 50% of adopters fall into the “late adopter” or “laggard” categ...
Aug 15, 2017•30 min
Robert Talbert, a math professor at Grand Valley State University, talks about his new book on flipped learning—a method catching on these days in college classrooms. He describes it as a new philosophy of teaching. Unlike the lecture model, in which students first encountering new material in the classroom, in the flipped model the students’ first encounter with the material happens outside of class, usually in the form of video lectures. And class time is used for more interactive activities t...
Aug 09, 2017•22 min
Virtual schools—a fiercely debated topic. Some, like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and the American Legislative Exchange Council, are in favor. Others, including researchers like Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas, have pushed back. In fact, last January, Pallas called out DeVos for presenting misleading graduation rates quoted from K12 Inc. while presenting her case for virtual school expansion. But politicians and researchers aside, what do the students who attend virtual schools ...
Aug 01, 2017•25 min
If you’ve ever zoned out during a lecture, of if your students are prone to distraction as you click through your PowerPoint deck, that’s partly because we’re hard-wired not to focus intently for longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Our bodies, after all, were evolved to master survival in nature, rather than staring at glowing bullet points on a screen. That’s the argument made by Barbara Oakley, a professor of engineering at Oakland University, who spends a lot of time these days thin...
Jul 25, 2017•26 min
It’s no shock to anyone—there is a gender disparity problem in the computer science world. The computing industry’s rate of job creation in the United States may be three times that of other industries, but the number of females attaining computer science degrees is falling, as U.S. News reports: “In 1984, 37 percent of computer science majors were women, but by 2014, that number had dropped to 18 percent.” However, Reshma Saujani doesn’t think the issues merely lie in offering girls more opport...
Jul 19, 2017•12 min
It’s easy to forget that notions of childhood have changed radically over the years—and not all for the better, says Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Helicopter parenting” and habits around carefully guarding, protecting and scheduling kids have their downsides. The history of the American family and childhood is an area Mintz has long studied. And he keeps that perspective in mind as he works to keep college teaching practices up to date in his other role...
Jul 11, 2017•24 min
On the floor of the ISTE conference, it’s easy to meet educators and administrators from all over the country (and the world at large). You can discuss edtech implementation strategies, hear about favorite tools, and get to know those practices that teachers are excited to bring back to their students. But while EdSurge paced the ISTE floor on June 25-28 in San Antonio, Texas, we decided to ask a slightly different question: What edtech trends, products, and buzzwords do you wish would retire—fo...
Jul 04, 2017•20 min
One problem with college teaching is that professors see themselves as, well, professing— declaring what they know and believe. That’s not how good teaching works, argues Jose Bowen, president of Goucher College. The best teachers have more in common with fitness instructors, he argues. They motivate and guide their students to accomplish their goals. Years ago Bowen coined the term “teaching naked,” meaning teaching without technology like PowerPoint. His latest book, “Teaching Naked Techniques...
Jun 28, 2017•26 min
For those of you who listen frequently, you might be a little confused since normally, we put out only one episode of the EdSurge On Air podcast each week. But this week is special, because we’re coming to you live from the ISTE 2017 edtech conference in San Antonio Texas, where more than 21,000 educators, entrepreneurs and administrators have gathered to share the best in edtech practices and tools. To kick off the festivities, ISTE brought in Jad Abumrad to deliver the conference’s opening key...
Jun 26, 2017•17 min
In today’s day and age, Google, Twitter and Pinterest are three of the largest employers in the United States and internationally. But are students gaining the skills that one might need to eventually apply to one of those tech giants, if the students chose to do so? In fact, in the year 2017, what hard and soft skills should students be developing in order to succeed in the 21st century workplace? What about in the year 2020? 2050? Let’s stick with the “now,” for a moment. In a recent interview...
Jun 21, 2017•17 min
Don’t even think of lecturing to these college students. The 14 students who just finished up the spring session of EdSurge Independent want something more active, and they want to have a voice as colleges rethink how they teach and support people on their campuses. EdSurge sat down with three of these students--Amanda Wahlstedt, Jared Silver and Rosie Foulger--to talk about how they viewed the buzzwords and experiments happening at their campuses, and also to get a sense of what they saw as the...
Jun 14, 2017•27 min
From Apple, Google and Microsoft battling to take over the classroom, to random acts in both K-12 and higher education compromising the private information of millions of vulnerable students, 2017 has been no short of edtech news. But when it comes to the biggest stories of the year thus far, what are the writers themselves—education reporters—reading and thinking about? While at the Education Writers Association conference on May 31 to June 2 in Washington, D.C., EdSurge reporter Jenny Abamu sp...
Jun 06, 2017•29 min
Sara Goldrick-Rab's latest book is based on six years of studying how students struggle with paying for college. She argues that recent experiments in having students sign "income-share agreements," or ISAs, is part of a broader effort to drain public resources from higher education.
May 31, 2017•28 min
There are few individuals out there who can list both “two-time TED speaker” and “doctoral student at Harvard University” on their resume. Clint Smith is one of those people—though when you ask him about his work, he doesn’t immediately voice those accolades. Rather, he talks about his writings, and the time he’s spent teaching poetry to incarcerated men in Massachusetts. There’s also something else he brings up—his beliefs, specifically his concerns that educators across the U.S. aren’t adequat...
May 23, 2017•31 min
There are many unanswered questions about the unprecedented sale of Kaplan University, a for-profit institution with several online programs but falling enrollments, to Purdue University, one of the top public universities in the nation. To try to get some answers, EdSurge recently sat down with Donald Graham, chairman of Graham Holdings Company, the group that sold the 15-campus Kaplan University to Purdue (for just $1). (Editor’s note, Graham Holdings is an investor in EdSurge.) A look at some...
May 17, 2017•18 min
“Personalized learning” is a term that is no stranger to interpretation—even to the point that writers have started to argue about whether it’s worth defining or not (just check out here and here.) But no matter how a school or district defines it, is it worth including technology in that definition—or does edtech merely distract educators from understanding and delivering on what students really need? In early March, three education research experts—Eileen Rudden of Boston’s LearnLaunch, Chris ...
May 09, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Before the “LMS” became an acronym and a hotly contested market of its own, Martin Dougiamas was writing code to share his “object oriented dynamic learning environment” across the web. That project would go on to become Moodle, one of the most widely-used learning management system across the world today. Just don’t let Dougiamas catch you calling his pet project of the past two decades an LMS. Those three letters make him wince—just a bit. “I prefer to say learning platform,” he says in this w...
May 02, 2017•20 min
McComb School District down in McComb, Mississippi doesn’t just believe in the power of technology when it comes to personalized learning. In fact, for superintendent Dr. Cederick Ellis and Summit Elementary School principal Lakya Taylor-Washington, the bigger asset in going personalized comes down to removing arbitrary grade level assignments and creating “learning labs,” a style of competency-based learning that Summit has been experimenting with since 2015. At Summit, “scholars” are grouped b...
Apr 26, 2017•31 min
A for-profit startup recently launched what it calls an alternative to traditional college, that takes only one year to complete, is advised closely by big-name employers, and that costs nothing at first, though students have to later pay back a portion of their incomes. What’s missing are the general-education curriculum. It’s called MissionU, and the reaction has been mixed, and passionate. Some academics have trashed it as a kind of employment service passing itself off as education. While ot...
Apr 18, 2017•47 min
“Flexible.” It’s a word that often pops up in conversations about redesigning learning environments, relating to choices in furniture or movable walls. But according to Danish Kurani, redesigning 21st century classrooms goes much deeper than merely achieving flexibility—it involves going all the way back to considering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Kurani is a licensed architect who focuses his work on learning spaces, and currently teaches a “Learning Environments for Tomorrow” course at the Har...
Apr 06, 2017•18 min
