The Girl Effect...

 

 

 

http://www.girleffect.org/

This momement is a fascinating one in education today.  A number of businesses supporting education technology are choosing to get behind The Girl Effect.  Their main webpage does an excellent job drawing supporters in with personal stories, clear facts and figures, a well thoughout and easy to nativate website, and by sharing emotional and heartfelt pictures of the program in action.

Here are three solid reasons why we want you to invest your time, energy and capital in an adolescent girl:

1. Girls are agents of change

They play a crucial role in solving the most persistent development problems facing the world today. By investing in their economic potential through education and by delaying child marriage and teen pregnancy, issues such as HIV and AIDS can be resolved and the cycle of poverty can be broken. To learn how a girl's success is the world's success, watch the girl effect films above.

2. People assume girls are being reached

They're not. The reality is that children's programmes focus on 0-5 year-olds, youth programmes tend to focus on males and older groups, and women's programmes don't typically capture adolescent girls. Programmes that do reach girls rarely address the ones most at risk. To break the cycle of intergenerational poverty, programmes must be designed for, and measure the impact on, girls.

3. The cost of excluding girls is high

In India, adolescent pregnancy results in nearly $10billion in lost potential income. In Uganda, 85 per cent of girls leave school early, resulting in $10billion in lost potential earnings. By delaying child marriage and early birth for one million girls, Bangladesh could potentially add $69billion to the national income over these girls' lifetimes.

PhEt: Free online interactive simulations

Home Page to their website:
PhEt Interactive Simulations

Photo Examples of learning curriculum:

PhET provides fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena for free. We believe that our research-based approach- incorporating findings from prior research and our own testing- enables students to make connections between real-life phenomena and the underlying science, deepening their understanding and appreciation of the physical world.
To help students visually comprehend concepts, PhET simulations animate what is invisible to the eye through the use of graphics and intuitive controls such as click-and-drag manipulation, sliders and radio buttons. In order to further encourage quantitative exploration, the simulations also offer measurement instruments including rulers, stop-watches, voltmeters and thermometers. As the user manipulates these interactive tools, responses are immediately animated thus effectively illustrating cause-and-effect relationships as well as multiple linked representations (motion of the objects, graphs, number readouts, etc.)

To ensure educational effectiveness and usability, all of the simulations are extensively tested and evaluated. These tests include student interviews in addition to actual utilization of the simulations in a variety of settings, including lectures, group work, homework and lab work. Our rating system indicates what level of testing has been completed on each simulation.
All PhET simulations are freely available from the PhET website and are easy to use and incorporate into the classroom. They are written in Java and Flash, and can be run using a standard web browser as long as Flash and Java are installed.

Why teach with PhET?

Article link to the pedagogy on why teach PhEt?

 

Social Media in Education...2.0 Style

Web 2.0

 

• The volatile modes of online interaction enabled by the new social media perhaps sit uncomfortably within existing higher education practice. The communicative landscapes opened up by social media can be spaces of strangeness and troublesomeness to the academy, both epistemologically and ontologically (Barnett 2005).

• To what extent do the new media challenge our conventional understandings of the way in which knowledge is generated and disseminated within the academy, and to what extent do they challenge or mesh with the changing idea of the university in the age of the digital? Do students possess the forms of ‘technoliteracy’ (Kahn & Kelner 2005) required to manage and produce academic knowledge within such spaces?

References:

Barnett R. (2005) Recapturing the universal in the university, Educational Philosophy and Theory 37, 785-797.

Kahn R. & Kelner D. (2005) Reconstructing technoliteracy: a multiple literacies approach. E-learning 2, 238–251.

Global Best School Buildings

Checkout this link of:
Global Best School Buildings

Here's a sneak peak:

In Espoo, Finland

In Delhi, India

 In Santiago, Chile

In the Cayman Islands

(PS I added this picture where I taught for 3 years.  I really think it

competes with the world's most beautiful K-12 campuses)

 

More on South Korea's Education

 

BBC Article Published on October 18, 2011 by Gary Eason is entitled Digital Textbooks Open a New Chapter Digital Textbooks in South Korea

 

 

Compared to the US's forcast on digital textbook sales:

 

DIgital Classrooms

 

In reponse to our reading "The appropriaion and repurposing of social technologis in higher education" by A. Hemmi, S. Bayne & R. Land:

 

"What kinds of ‘digital pedagogies’work in these spaces, and how are they perceived and experienced by students? Consideration of such issues indicates that significant challenges remain for us as researchers, teachers and learners in a higher education increasingly informed by the digital."

DIGITAL CLASSROOMS

• The Indian state of Tamil Nadu is giving 6.8 million free laptops to school pupils
• Uruguay plans to be the first country where all school pupils are given their own laptop
• Apple says 600 US school districts are switching to digital textbooks on iPads
• Amazon has launched a rental service in the US for digital textbooks for students

SOUTH KOREA

• South Korea is second in global rankings for reading, fourth for maths and fifth for science
• Family spending on education is the highest in the world, as a proportion of household income
• It has been among the most improved education systems in the world. In 1945, 78% of the population were illiterate. It now outperforms all European countries and the US at reading
• In the 1980s, South Korea banned private tutoring
• This year it introduced a ban on corporal punishment

Works sited: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15175962

Creativity and Intelligence

 

 The World We Explore by Sir Ken Robinson Zeitgeist Americas 2012

 

 

Creativity and Intelligence

 

The World We Explore-- Sir Ken Robinson, Educator. Curiosity encourages us to push boundaries into uncharted territories. Where can our hunger for discovery take us - both outside and inside ourselves?