Group items tagged

There’s an idea that’s been gaining ground in the tech community lately: Everyone should learn to code. But here’s the problem with that idea: Coding is not the new literacy.

Selling coding as a ticket to economic salvation for the masses is dishonest

In OS X you can set up a routine to batch-rename files using Apple's Automator program, where you can make a service plug-in that will offer you options to change names to collecitons of files.

When your workflow is complete, saving it will automatically place it in the /username/Library/Services/ folder, which will make it available via the OS X contextual menu. Now when you go to the Finder, you can select a group of files or folders, and then right-click them and select your workflow from the Services submenu of the contextual menu.

the ability for a game to teach multiple skills simultaneously

does not build video games to ‘teach mathematics.’ Rather, we build instruments which you can play, and we design them so that when you play them, you cannot fail to learn about mathematics. Moreover, each single game can be used to deliver mathematical challenges of increasing sophistication.

I love the instrument analogy because I’m often explaining to my students why the Ancient Greeks saw math and music as part of the same realm–that area of experience that belonged to the god Apollo. Of course, the relationship has to do with intervals. But both math and music are also related to Apollo’s other domains, such as light, prophecy, healing, etc. The connection has been hard to understand from the rigidly measured viewpoint that has dominated Western thinking since Nietzsche inadvertently cemented the Apollonian into strict opposition with the Dionysian in The Birth Of Tragedy.

pupils should be able to use Google during GCSE and A-level exams.

It’s perhaps best to concede that this is something that would work better in some subjects – history and geography come to mind – than others, and only then for particular questions. Colleagues in the languages department might well despair at the thought of exam scripts peppered with inexplicable phraseology gathered from Google Translate.

Why then pretend this isn’t a fact of 21st-century life, an important part of how grownups in the world of work conduct their research? The role of a teacher is varied. We are here to inspire, encourage, excite and prepare pupils for the wider world. It is bizarre to omit this cornerstone of modern life from our pupils’ most important educational experiences.

The AAP's long-standing recommendation has been that kids' entertainment screen time be limited to less than one or two hours per day, and for kids under 2, none at all. But in a world where screens surround us -- in restaurants, gas stations, grocery store lines, as background ambiance at home (heck, even in pediatricians' waiting rooms) -- this recommendation is becoming nearly impossible to follow.

there is no easy answer to the question of "how much." So maybe parents need to start asking two new questions: "what" and "when."

"Quality content matters" says Dr. Chip Donohue, Director of the TEC Center at Erikson Institute, "What they watch is more important than how much"

Too much of the wrong kind of media can hurt infants, but that doesn't mean you need to practice total abstinence

total abstinence, that is to say families following the AAP’s recommendations, was actually associated with lower cognitive development, not higher

sensationalizing flawed studies that find negative relations.

[Students need] three things: they need content knowledge, but that’s the easy part today. It’s online; you don’t need a teacher to acquire content. The world simply doesn’t care how much you know anymore because Google knows everything. What the world cares about, now that content has become a commodity, is what you can do with what you know. And that suggests the two other education outcomes that are absolutely critical, and to simplify them I call them skill and will. Students need a new set of skills to thrive for work learning and citizenship in the 21st century; and they need will, meaning motivation, and arguably the most important is motivation. Because if you are motivated you will continuously learn new skills and new content knowledge, which you will have to in this era, and its the thing we do the most damage to in our schools today.

We’re not giving kids work that is intrinsically interesting in the vast majority of our schools, and we’re spending far too much time on test prep, and the tests themselves are predominantly multiple choice factual recall tests that tell us absolutely nothing about work learning or citizenship readiness in the 21st century. Kids know it, and they’re bored out of their minds.

I think the whole idea of a digital portfolio is part of what I call Accountability 2.0, moving away from an over-reliance on stupid tests and moving towards really looking at student work and having students meet a performance standard for passing on to higher grades and for graduating from high school. And it […] can be an important factor in motivating kids to want to do better work.

these are examples of how technology may make the process a bit more efficient or less dreary but does nothing to challenge the outdated pedagogy. To the contrary: These are shiny things that distract us from rethinking our approach to learning and reassure us that we’re already being innovative

The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well

Well into the nineteenth century, British and American writers, critics and religious leaders regarded novel-reading with a great deal of skepticism.

If our concerns about the enfeebling impact of the Internet and social media aren’t quite as gendered, they’re still grounded in a world view that regards the cultivation of individual morality, intellect, and productivity as a matter of public interest—and that regards shifts in personal media consumption as potentially inimical to the production of smart, informed, and upstanding citizens. But the history of the novel shows that it’s possible for us to move beyond this suspicion—though it took two centuries for novels to move from objects of derision to an accepted part of the modern reader’s diet.

Novel-reading was once regarded as an idle occupation, just as Internet use is now.