Colleges are now better able to engage past, current and prospective students through new social video trends like Vine and Instagram. Vine is a mobile application that gives users the capacity to create and share six-second looping video clips. Released in January 2013 and operated by Twitter, maven of micro—social media sharing, Vine “inspires creativity” through “the brevity of videos,” according to Twitter’s official [...]
In trying to explain the ins and outs of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Grades K through 12, it’s just as important to explain what the standards are not as it is to explain what they actually are. Executive Director Jay Diskey of the American Association of Publishers (AAP) PreK–12 Learning Group did just that in a web presentation to educational [...]
Every year, 20 college educations are put on hold for two years. This group of young adults—many under the age of 20 years old—are among the brightest, most creative and most motivated people in the world. They are all recipients of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship. Peter Thiel, a co-founder and former CEO of PayPal and the first investor of Facebook, encourages young [...]
As the new Common Core State Standards (“the Standards,” or just “CCSS”) begin to be implemented in the 45 states that decided take on the across-the-board learning criteria for American students, one policy in particular is rousing the ire and frustration of teachers, parents and students: The Standards hold that 50 percent of elementary, 55 percent of junior high, and 70 percent of high school [...]
Gladiolus. Antediluvian. Chiaroscurist. Kamikaze. Guetapens. Knaidel. What do these words have in common? They are all winning words from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, dating back to the first bee in 1925 (gladiolus) through 2013 (knaidel). For 85 tournaments, the spelling bee never included a vocabulary component—though contestants have always been allowed to ask for the meaning of a word during the competition. This year, a vocabulary quiz [...]
The Washington, DC-based National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) released a stirring report this May entitled “What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready? The English and Mathematics Required of First Year Community College Students.” The two-year study investigated seven rural, urban and suburban community colleges in different states with student populations ranging from 3,000 to 30,000 in order to determine [...]
Since the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed in 2001, standardized tests have been a harsh reality for every public school district in the country. The tests are now a national requirement in order to receive federal school funding. They are meant to work toward closing the achievement gap by ensuring high-quality education for all students and providing yearly progress reports. In some [...]
Bedtime stories aren’t just a relaxing way to fall asleep—reading to children actually helps them with literary comprehension in the future. Now, if you bring that same interactive reading style into the classroom, the results are equally impressive. Peer tutoring, or paired reading, has shown to be a very helpful teaching activity in both elementary and upper-level classrooms. During peer tutoring, the teacher [...]
Though it was years ago, I still vividly remember my third-grade cursive lessons. They were taught once per day, for an hour or so, and involved wide books full of examples and empty lines for tedious repetitions. After third grade, the decision was up to us: print or cursive, as long as it was legible. While I chose to keep a cursive hybrid, [...]
Summer: time to kick back, put those textbooks away, and push school out of mind. But research has shown that this education avoidance contributes to the loss of previously learned knowledge in students, essentially leaving them unprepared for the upcoming school year. How to combat this brain drain malady? Get online—American Library Association’s (ALA) Great Websites for Kids has one such solution. Since its establishment by the Association [...]