Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

The school that connects STEM, badging, and life beyond the classroom

As educators, we know that science is not just a body of knowledge, but it is a process that enables people to answer questions through scientific inquiry.  Scientists conduct inquiries using a specific toolbox of skills and knowledge that the Next Generations Science Standards (NGSS) has spelled out for emerging scientists as so-called “science and engineering practices,” or practices that increase in complexity and sophistication across grade levels.

These are important skills for students to master, not least because of the growing demand for science and STEM professionals. Here in California, like other states nationwide, the STEM job market is rapidly growing but students are still graduating without the skills and knowledge needed to fill these high-paying jobs. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that California will have the largest STEM workforce in the country by 2022.

The question is, how do you ensure students are graduating with these skills in a way that sets them up for future college and career success?…Read More

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The major momentum behind micro-credentials

New partnerships and pioneers are giving Digital Promise’s badging movement a new push

Educators are, by definition, continuous learners. They spend their careers striving to become better practitioners, whether through formal professional development activities like workshops and in-service days, or informal engagements like Twitter chats, EdCamps, and virtual coaching and communities. In fact, research conducted by Digital Promise and Grunwald suggests that educators often pursue these learning activities to satiate their own love of learning and desire to better serve their students.

While we know educators are always learning, our systems for recognizing that learning have not quite caught up. Professional development structures typically recognize educators for the time they spend learning in formal activities and rarely acknowledge informal learning. Similarly, these structures often do not focus on competency (whether an educator can apply their learning in their classrooms), which is an important step toward understanding the impact of each learning activity.

Digital Badges, also known as micro-credentials, present one tool to address these imbalances. Micro-credentials provide individuals with portable, shareable badges that recognize the learning activities they participate in or the skills they have developed. As a result, they can both highlight the wide variety of learning activities educators engage in and facilitate the shift to competency-based learning for educators.…Read More