6 powerful interactive history sites - 1 views
Why America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.
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“This country is a lot better at teaching self-esteem than it is at teaching math.” It’s a funny line, but there is actually something powerful in the plucky confidence of American, Swedish and Israeli students. It allows them to challenge their elders, start companies, persist when others think they are wrong and pick themselves up when they fail. Too much confidence runs the risk of self-delusion, but the trait is an essential ingredient for entrepreneurship.
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technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success.
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The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views
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In this Education Week article, Connecticut educator Christopher Doyle worries that many educators are not taking very good care of themselves – not balancing the intense challenges of work with family, friends, love, sleep, vacations, exercise, good nutrition, emotional health, and civic engagement. “Like American society at large,” says Doyle, “ many of us are overworked, stretched thin financially, and torn between roles as spouses, parents, and employees… Not unlike other professionals devoted to nurture, such as doctors, teachers are measured – and measure themselves – against an idealized image of excellence that involves incessant work.”
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Teachers occupy the middle to lower tiers of the American middle class – whose wages have been stagnant for some time.
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Stressed, workaholic educators are not in the best position to help students achieve some kind of balance in their overscheduled lives.
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Can we keep SEL on course? - kappanonline.org - 0 views
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Think of SEL as an aspiration, not an intervention.
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Describe SEL in positive terms.
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Be skeptical of metrics.
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Recommended in this week's Marshall Memo: "In this column in Phi Delta Kappan, PDK International CEO Joshua Starr says three things worry him about "the rapid and widespread embrace" of social-emotional learning (SEL). First, the concept has become "too fuzzy to be useful" - it can mean growth mindset, grit, anti-bullying, collaborative learning, classroom management, and more. Second, developers are creating social-emotional learning products and hyping them as ways to transform schools (if we purchase and implement them with fidelity). Third, says Starr, 'I worry that the SEL movement hasn't been careful enough to address the racial divisions that permeate American public education… It's no surprise that many critics have begun to push back on the idea that children of color need white educators to teach them to persevere and regulate their behavior.' Starr has these suggestions to get social-emotional learning back on track so that it makes a positive difference in schools"
6 ways to bolster STEM education for the future | eSchool News - 0 views
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analysts predict that over the next five years, major American companies will need to add to their workforce a total of nearly 1.6 million employees versed in STEM: 945,000 who possess basic STEM literacy and 635,000 who demonstrate advanced STEM knowledge. Other data suggest that at least 20 percent of U.S. jobs require a high level of knowledge in at least one STEM field, according to the report.
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Accessible learning activities that invite intentional play and risk.
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Flexible and inclusive learning spaces. Teachers and students need flexibility in structures, equipment and access to materials in both the classroom and the natural world, as well as environments augmented by virtual and technology-based platforms.
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Art Makes You Smart - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.
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Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.
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Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.
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A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop - Scientific American - 0 views
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students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more.
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those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.
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taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention. By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning
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Digital History | Promises and Perils of Digital History - 0 views
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Gertrude Himmelfarb offered what she called a “neo-Luddite” dissent about “the new technology’s impact on learning and scholarship.” “Like postmodernism,” she complained, “the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. . . . Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is ‘privileged’ over any other.”
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“A dismal new era of higher education has dawned,” he wrote in a paper called “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.” “In future years we will look upon the wired remains of our once great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let it happen.”3
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In the past two decades, new media and new technologies have challenged historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past. Almost every historian regards a computer as basic equipment; colleagues view those who write their books and articles without the assistance of word processing software as objects of curiosity.
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The Secret to Raising Smart Kids - Scientific American - 0 views
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more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
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our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
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Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.
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