Google wants you to find your inner child. The best way to do that? Go on a field trip, even in the city where you interact every day. In light of the thrifty economy, where many schools can no longer afford to take full classes on field trips and workers don’t have much of an expendable income, Google has stepped up with an [...]
by Chelsea In March, Amazon announced it was expanding its business by acquiring Goodreads, a website that allows readers to discover new books and provide commentaries on books either already on shelves or soon to be publicly available. This expansion will surely draw more readers to Amazon; however, Goodreads originally helped not only readers, but a variety of booksellers as well. In a recent Publisher’s [...]
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 [...]
There’s a point in the year that certain high school art-kids dread: school budget analysis. It is the time that many of their beloved programs are predictably brought to the chopping block. Art classes, film programs, writing workshops and music ensembles inevitably have their own individual budgets hacked away year by year, each annual meeting leaving them in a financial state more serious [...]
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 [...]
If you’re not a mystery lover or a shelf browser who gives new authors a try, would you purchase a debut mystery novel from an author named Robert Galbraith? Would you even pick it up to browse? What if it turned out that this new author, supposedly a former member of the Royal Military Police, was actually the beloved J. K. Rowling? In [...]