For teachers looking to inject some excitement into their geography lesson, Skype might be the answer. Silvia Tolisano recently created a game she calls “Mystery Skype Call” that uses the video conferencing tool and some critical thinking to teach students geography in a new and exciting way.
Read more and see a video on the Spark blog…
It’s no secret that state and local budget cuts have been putting pressure on education. A recently published New York Times article discusses one of the many outcomes of this pressure– decreased class time. It seems many institutions are dealing with a smaller budget by creating a shorter school day. “Thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year.”
This is a surprising development considering our current administration’s stance on education reform. At his 2009 confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared,
“Our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short.”
This view is based on several factors, among them our desire to compete with more education-savvy nations who enforce much longer school days. Many educators will also agree that over the summer months, many students forget what they’ve learned and need to be re-instructed come fall.
South Korea recently announced plans to spend $2 billion (2.2 trillion won) on digital textbooks and supportive cloud computing systems for the nation’s schools by 2015. In addition to the content provided by their paper counterparts, the digital textbooks boast a variety of features to augment the learning experience. For one, they can utilize audio, video, and other multimedia instead of just text and images. They can also provide a much wider breadth of resources, allowing students to browse and download textbooks on demand. They even have the capability to host online classes, giving absent children the ability to make up classes they might have missed. It comes as no surprise that South Korea is the first to propose the switch. After all, the country was the first to provide high-speed internet access to all of its primary and secondary schools. In many schools, tablets are already an integral part of learning.
According to a ministry official: “It will be up to schools to decide which digital textbooks to choose for students in what year in what subject. We don’t expect the shift to digital textbooks to be difficult as students today are very accustomed to the digital environment.”
Free tablets will even be made available to low-income families to make sure all children receive the same benefits. While the cost may seem steep and the goals ambitious, the potential impact of this investment could signal a sea change, not only in Korean schools, but for the future of education around the world.
Read more about technology and education on http://www.sproutfund.org/spark/blog/
Check out the interesting talk Mark Frauenfelder gave at TEDxKids in Brussels a few weeks ago.
Mark Frauenfelder is the Editor in Chief for Make magazine, a publication that uses technology to create do-it-yourself projects. As Mark explains in his talk, this same emphasis on design can augment the educational experience of children when used as a teaching tool. In Mark’s words,
“The problem with a lot of today’s schools is that they train kids to be scholars. They’re always preparing kids. Kids are learning how to research things through books and the internet. They’re writing reports about what they learned. They’re learning math as abstract concepts, not through practical knowledge. So kids are always preparing to do things but they’re not actually doing anything.”
The solution to this problem? To teach a curriculum focused on design and hands-on projects rather than abstract concepts.
