I can still remember the packets elementary teachers handed out to us on the last day of school. Along with our report card, we were each given a long list of books, separated by grade level with a cover page: “Suggested Summer Reading.” Although other kids usually threw theirs into the garbage, or onto the floor of the bus, or simply left them [...]
The dip in the U.S. economy is having an effect on class sizes. As state revenues go down, the number of students in an average classroom is going up. As a result, classrooms across the country will be more crowded when school starts in the fall. A recent survey by the American Association of School Administrators found that 44 percent of school districts [...]
I was reading eSchool News recently and ran across an article that said the new 21st Century skills guide is available. It hasn’t been updated for six years, so it might be worth getting a copy to scan to see what the Partnership for 21st Century Skills organization views as relevant changes. A revision worth noting in the guide is the Self-Assessment Tool which helps [...]
I only graduated high school two years ago, but my learning experience has already become outdated. In a classroom at Emerson College this past year, I was asked to use social media, much to my bewilderment. My professor set up a crowdsourcing website—a form of media I had never even heard of—for us to compile each day’s notes. Crowdsourcing has been used for many [...]
Parents are making their voices heard regarding the amount of homework their children are bringing home each day. Many school officials are starting to listen. How much is too much? A Duke University psychology professor says students should have 10 minutes of homework each evening for each grade they are in school. So a fifth grader would have 50 minutes of homework a night. As [...]
The American Student Association of Community Colleges (ASACC) seeks to enhance student leadership by helping student governments at member schools address issues that affect students. Founded in 1984 by nine community colleges in the Great Lakes area, ASACC has been steadily growing and making a tangible impact on education legislation. On its website, ASACC credits itself with the passing of Section 127 of [...]
As my husband and I were driving through the tunnel on our way home from the airport, we saw a light flash. "What was that?" he wondered. I shrugged and continued flipping through the radio stations. "I hope it wasn't a camera taking a picture of my license plate because it thinks I'm speeding!" I glanced over. "I'm sure it wasn't. I don't [...]
An extremely popular topic among the education community at present concerns new developments in technology and their implementation in American classrooms. Most media coverage on such topics cites computerized textbooks, electronic homework platforms and instructional video games as the teaching methods of the future. To this end, many public schools are beginning to embrace these new methods as their sole educational tools, even [...]
President Barack Obama is proposing a multibillion-dollar investment in the nation's community colleges, a $12 billion effort over ten years to help the two-year institutions reach, teach, and train more people for "the jobs of the future." Some of the money could be available by the 2010 budget year that begins Oct. 1. Half a billion, or $500 million, would go toward online education [...]
What is literary nonfiction? You may have seen it under different names; in addition to literary nonfiction, it has been called narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction, narrative journalism, factual fiction, documentary narrative, and “the literature of actuality,” according to the University of Oregon’s definition. While we tend to equate “literary” with “fiction” and not truth, this genre of writing is all about the facts. [...]