From Techcrunch’s report on a fresh crop of startups that are enabling teachers to make extra cash in their spare time/extracurricular efforts.
Above: Projected transactions from TeachersPayTeachers (a platform for teachers selling teaching materials to each other) jumping up to $10 million for 2012.
Students at students at a high school in Xiaogang City study with the help of of IV drips.
These photos were posted on a popular Chinese networking site last week. They show a group of high schoolers studying in their classroom for the Gaokao (national college entrance exam). An official has verified that the photo is legitimate. Source and verification here.
Taking cramming to a new, pretty unsettling level.
Get Rich U. There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?
Insightful New Yorker take on Stanford’s drive towards an elite practical education (as opposed to the Ivy League’s heavier liberal arts bent).
Also ends with a hat tip to the upcoming “tsunami” of online education.
"Speaking at the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London last week, he said that computer games stimulate the brain’s reward system to produce dopamine, a chemical “which helps orient our attention and enhances the making of connections between neurons, which is the physical basis for learning.”
Mr. Howard-Jones said that research has shown that the introduction of a chance or game element into any reward system increases dopamine production. “For generations, we educators have done everything we can to maintain a consistent relationship between reward and achievement, but the neuroscience is telling us something different,” he said in an interview.
"
~ Harnessing Gaming for the Classroom, the New York Times
No Child Left Behind: 10th Anniversay Bash
“It is time to acknowledge this failure and adopt a more effective course for the federal role in education. Policymakers must abandon their faith-based embrace of test-and-punish strategies and, instead, pursue proven alternatives to guide and support the nation’s neediest schools and students.”— A policy assessment written by Lisa Guisbond, Monty Neill and Bob Schaeffer • Suggesting that No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education law passed under bipartisan circumstances, should go the way of the dodo. The policy, now seen as an example of ineffective government overreach by many, celebrates its 10th birthday today, and politicians who once supported the law — including Rick Santorum, who voted for it and tried to push an intelligent design amendment into the bill — no longer do. Guisbond, Neill and Schaeffer’s report, which suggests revisiting the law based on the lessons learned from the past decade, is available to read over here. source (via • follow)
(Source: shortformblog)
"The Beijing team had to ensure the dialogues and passages that we wrote were appropriate for schoolchildren. Only positive moral values and role models could be portrayed, respect for parents and older people was maintained at all costs, and negative feelings about, for example, up-coming exams was unacceptable… Apparently innocent (to a westerner) words, such as change, exile, boss, needed to be treated with care, and even the word communism would have attracted attention to the context in which it was used."
~ Simon Greenall on Macmillan’s collaboration with Beijing’s Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
More Khan backlash
More blogger & educator backlash on Khan Academy’s supposed power:
- Derek Muller, who wrote a PhD dissertation on learning from science videos, debunks the myth of “if only kids had it explained clearly to them” myth. More here.
- Audrey Watters summarizes teachers’ views about its conservative listen-and-remember learning model, and Khan’s lack of formal training in education. Details here.
Though everyone admits Khan’s videos, the original product, are still a great resource.
Open Courses, Nearly Free [in Haiti]
…10-week online courses to 1,000 students from more than 100 countries. Starting this fall, students will have to pay $10 to $50 for admission.
In each class, 20 to 40 students are assigned weekly reading material and are required to post their responses and comment on others’ responses. The course materials are deliberately low-tech, with no audio or video, so that students can use them anywhere.
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