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For teachers looking to inject some excitement into their geography lesson, Skype might be the answer. Silvia Tolisano recently created a game she calls “Mystery Skype Call” that uses the video conferencing tool and some critical thinking to teach students geography in a new and exciting way.

Read more and see a video on the Spark blog…

Story Boxes are popping up all over town—in museums, libraries, and schools. To date, about 130 Story Box units have been produced, and that’s just the beginning. So what exactly are Story Boxes, and what do they mean for children in Pittsburgh?

A Story Box is a 21” x 12” x 4” portable device containing images with “hot spots” that, when pressed, play related audio clips. For example, the “My Favorite Animal” Story Box features photographs of young children with illustrated embellishments to make them look like different animals. By pressing on a child’s photo, the listener can hear audio clips of that child roaring like a tiger, describing a zebra’s fur, or remembering the time they met a unicorn on the beach.

Each Story Box focuses on a specific theme. Story Boxes produced to date have included topics such as:

• What I Am Thankful For
• Unique Things I Know How To Do
• My Favorite Animal
• Bullying
• Martin Luther King
• Personal Narratives
• Impact Of The Arts
• Hope For The Coming Year
• Environmental Documentaries
• Career Profiles

The devices are funded by Spark and produced by The Saturday Light Brigade. The Saturday Light Brigade (SLB for short) began in 1978 as a weekly public radio program focusing on family and community life. Today, SLB has grown into a non-profit with a permanent home in The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. In addition to broadcasting live for six hours every Saturday, SLB also offers technical and self-expression workshops for children and youth from 8 to 18 years of age.

In 2008, SLB began working with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon on a project called HearMe. HearMe and Story Boxes have a lot in common as they both focus on collecting and distributing children’s stories. In many ways, these projects take the original intent of the SLB radio show and mobilize it. Host and Founder Larry Berger explains:

“When SLB began in 1978, it was reasonable for us to use radio to inform and delight an often-unexpecting audience with children’s stories and ideas.  We designed Story Box technology with hopes of achieving this goal in today’s fragmented media environment and fast-paced world.  As mass media shrinks and user-directed content increases, we wanted a simple way to reach people and, frankly, tempt them to listen to voices of children.”

Read more on the Spark blog…

It’s no secret that state and local budget cuts have been putting pressure on education. A recently published New York Times article discusses one of the many outcomes of this pressure– decreased class time. It seems many institutions are dealing with a smaller budget by creating a shorter school day. “Thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year.”

This is a surprising development considering our current administration’s stance on education reform. At his 2009 confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared,

“Our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short.”

This view is based on several factors, among them our desire to compete with more education-savvy nations who enforce much longer school days. Many educators will also agree that over the summer months, many students forget what they’ve learned and need to be re-instructed come fall.

Read the rest of the story on the Spark blog…

Check out the interesting talk Mark Frauenfelder gave at TEDxKids in Brussels a few weeks ago.


Mark Frauenfelder is the Editor in Chief for Make magazine, a publication that uses technology to create do-it-yourself projects. As Mark explains in his talk, this same emphasis on design can augment the educational experience of children when used as a teaching tool. In Mark’s words,

“The problem with a lot of today’s schools is that they train kids to be scholars. They’re always preparing kids. Kids are learning how to research things through books and the internet. They’re writing reports about what they learned. They’re learning math as abstract concepts, not through practical knowledge. So kids are always preparing to do things but they’re not actually doing anything.”

The solution to this problem? To teach a curriculum focused on design and hands-on projects rather than abstract concepts.

read more…