LMNOpets

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…

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…