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He couldn't find any software to keep those paper check marks on a smartphone, so he wrote his own app about two years ago, in a two-week burst of coding. He called his task-specific app Attendance and put it on the iTunes store for other professors, charging a couple of bucks (and adding features as colleagues suggested them). So far he has earned about $20,000 from the more than 7,500 people who have virtually shouted "Here."

A professor at the University of California at Davis is asking drivers to help him with his research on roadkill by logging any dead squirrel, possum, or other critter they see along the highway. At first he asked people to write down the location and details about the carcass on a scrap of paper and upload the information to a Web site when they got home. Then the research team built an iPhone app to let citizen-scientists participate at the scene. It's more convenient, and it gives the researchers better data, because a phone's GPS feature can send along exact location coordinates

That's just one of many research projects adding smartphone interfaces to so-called "crowd science," in which the public is invited to add structured data to an online database. "For crowd science, I think it's definitely the next step

Panamath measures your number sense and approximate number system (ANS) aptitude. Recent research has demonstrated a relationship between performance on this test and basic mathematical ability. Through a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, we have made this test publicly available free of charge so that researchers can use it in their studies, educators can assess their students, and anyone of any age can test themselves.

Based on impressive results, which showed that students who observed the 3D simulations made a big jump from their pre-lesson to post-lesson test scores while outperforming control groups who received traditional instruction, the company in 2005 received $200,000 from the Illinois State Board of Education to broaden the study to more than 1,000 students in grades 3 to 8.

The results virtually duplicated those of the smaller study. Students who observed the 3D lesson improved an average of 32 percent from pretest to post-test, with substantial gains in every subgroup.

there are ways to be even more efficient, more search-savvy. And it’s our responsibility to teach kids how to find and research information, how to judge its veracity, and when it’s time to ask for a grownup’s help.

CONFIRM CONTENT. It’s common to find the same phrases and sentences on different sites all over the Web because people duplicate content all the time. To determine the original source of the content, you can look at the date it was written, but that’s also not entirely accurate. When authors edit an article, that changes the posting date. So even if it was originally written in 2005, the date will say 2011 if it was edited last week. Again, here’s when you put on your journalist hat. Trustworthy websites typically have an “errata column” or something like it where mistakes or corrections are posted

KEEP IT SIMPLE. Use search terms the way you’d like to see them on a Web site.

The failings of a rote-memorization system are well-known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.

According to research on education, using tests to structure schooling is a mistake.

Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.

This new teaching and learning style, often called “flipped” or “inverted” learning, makes the students the focus of the class, not the teacher, by having students watch a lecture at home and then apply the lesson with the teacher in the classroom.

they should be able to leave my class knowing how to question, research, and test scientific claims regardless of what they choose to do afterwards

At the same time, I also feel that those students who do excel in STEM fields need to have classes that push them and challenge them with real-world problems, and not just memorized facts from a textbook.”

A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.

The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks, allow students to correspond with teachers and turn in papers and homework assignments, and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.

“IPads are marvelous tools to engage kids, but then the novelty wears off and you get into hard-core issues of teaching and learning.”

In a small grove at the entrance to the school, first graders acquire the rudiments of addition and subtraction by collecting pine cones and stones and solving problems contained in notes attached to trees. Another group plays a memory game, using cards with arithmetic exercises whose solutions are found on a game board painted on the playground. The second grade is engaged in a treasure hunt, with arithmetic exercises that send children scurrying from one location to another. The third graders are at the seashore, researching the sand 0f(and not one of them has run into the water 0f). An arithmetic class for the fourth grade is underway in the gym: Small groups of children are scattered charmingly across the floor, playing games with boxes. Here the major attraction is the group standing in a line opposite the teacher, who holds up signs showing numbers that are the result of multiplication. The children’s task is to say which two numbers were multiplied to produce this result. Those who give the right answer also get to shoot a basketball.

The MIND Research Institute has received a $250,000 grant from the Cisco Foundation to provide its visual math education program, ST Math, to 4,000 students in Arizona.