“The 3DS is sufficiently novel and cool to reverse this trend,” he said, predicting that it would sell out through the end of the year. “It will get people excited, and will make kids and parents forget the mobile phone.”

The novel touch-screen device does not require users to wear special glasses to see the 3-D images.

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 contrast, there has been relatively little controversy over a different kind of partnership between a company and a private college: a joint effort of Tiffin University, a small private institution in northeast Ohio, and Altius Education, a for-profit company based in San Francisco.

every Ivy Bridge student is assigned a “personal success coach” — a non-instructional employee — who helps with everything from course selection to academic support to career counseling.

he is cautiously optimistic about the preliminary student success figures.

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.”

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.

These are the addition problems and method we all learned in school.

This app has you adding from left to right instead of starting in the ones place, which goes against everything I learned.

This one is unusual, dividing up some of the numbers into their parts (whole ones, whole tens, etc.), and subtracting the parts.

Many of the methods Winn uses were the brainchild of Carl Munn, a Crawford math teacher who saw that teens were baffled and demoralized by their math tests as early as algebra. So instead of barreling through the state standards, Munn slowed down and focused on fewer topics. He gave teens a chance to fix their mistakes on pre-tests and emphasized how math related to real life. Winn expanded on what Munn designed, spending his Saturdays crafting lessons for calculus at a coffee shop.

He has the fervor of an evangelist

mathematicians might worry that they're just teaching steps, not understanding. But Winn found teens liked steps. They wanted consistency and stability, things they might otherwise lack in their lives.

Einstein's students were developing too many shortcuts and not enough understanding.

While 71 percent of its fourth graders meet state math goals, only 17 percent of its 11th graders do.

At Einstein, the problem became clear when teachers gave fifth graders a simple test. They told them to put down their pencils and estimate answers to simple questions, different ones than they were used to.