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.

How to stop the global pandemic of superficial learning

The global pandemic of superficial learning characterised by the passive acceptance of information, memorisation of isolated and unlinked facts, and a lack of opportunity to explore subjects in depth – has resulted in millions being left unprepared for deeper challenges beyond passing exams. The book ‘A Year of Making and Learning’ came about thanks to a community of international educators taking collective action against this global challenge.

The book takes the reader on a restriction-less voyage spanning six continents and fifteen countries including rgentina, Australia, China, Finland, France, Germany, India, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Russia, Togo, Ukraine, UK, and USA. In each place, educators share how they go about designing impactful learner-centred experiences with the creative elements of making – in schools, after-school programmes, universities, makerspaces, at home and online.

‘A Year of Making and Learning’ features contributions written in user-friendly language from Wissenschaft im dialog, WMG at the University of Warwick, EcoTec Lab, Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and Jerry Do it Together amongst others.…Read More

A teacher’s 7 tips for remote learning during the coronavirus

Imagine yourself sitting on a beautiful beach in the Philippines, enjoying a relaxing week off from school when your phone buzzes with messages. Your flight back to China has been cancelled. Your school is closed. You need to be ready to support teachers thousands of miles away who must start “home-based learning” on Monday.

That’s what happened to me, and as much as I wanted to chuck my phone into the ocean and go back to my coconut drink and my Michael Connelly novel, I knew I needed to get to work. The coronavirus had caught us by surprise and as a technology coach I knew I needed to work with our administrators, teachers, and learning support team to figure out a way to use the digital tools we had at our disposal to piece together an experience that would enable us to keep students connecting and learning from home.

Related content: 10 resources to keep learning going during the coronavirus…Read More

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Who are the educators driving flipped learning?

Educators searching for flipped learning inspiration can now find it in a list of 100 people who are innovating and inspiring others in their pursuit of flipped instruction.

The Flipped Learning Global Initiative (FLGI), a worldwide coalition of educators, researchers, technologists, professional development providers and education leaders, published the FLGI 100, an annual list identifying the top 100 innovative people in education who are driving the adoption of the flipped classroom around the world.

The list is compiled by the FLGI executive committee, led by Jon Bergmann, one of the leaders of the flipped classroom movement. The FLGI 100 list includes flipped learning researchers, master teachers, technology coaches, literacy specialists, math and science experts and educators from kindergarten to higher education.…Read More

Gale expands historical digital newspaper offerings

New collections include historical archive of The Telegraph – one of the world’s best-known newspapers, a unique collection of Chinese periodicals, and British Library Newspapers

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, has expanded its digital historical newspaper collections with the launch of several new archives. Now available are The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000, a 145-year archive of Britain’s best-selling quality newspaper; China from Empire to Republic: Missionary, Sinology, and Literary Periodicals, a collection of English-language periodicals published in or about China from 1817-1949; and British Library Newspapers, Part V: 1746-1950, which adds newspapers from the northern part of the United Kingdom to Gale’s comprehensive digital collection of British newspapers. All collections are fully indexed and the metadata and data are available for text and data mining and other forms of large-scale digital humanities analysis.

“These collections speak to the range of partnerships Gale has with different institutions around the world – from the British Library to the National Library of China and beyond – and what allows us to bring such unique, global content direct to researchers,” said Terry Robinson, senior vice president and managing director for Gale International. “In addition, we hope having access to these archives as data leads to the discovery of new insights by digital humanities scholars. Analyzing historical newspapers is a great way to uncover rich cultural and societal perspectives across any number of themes.”

The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2000 enables researchers to full-text search more than one million pages of the paper’s back issues, including the Sunday Telegraph from 1961. Providing a balance of personal interest stories alongside incisive analysis, the archive offers a fascinating glimpse into daily life as it was experienced over the past 145 years.…Read More

First-ever Israel EdTech Summit brings a global reach

Debut event featured ed-tech entrepreneurs, educators, and more

The first-ever Istrael EdTech Summit has just wrapped, bringing together a decidedly global group of educators, startup founders, and other critical stakeholders to discuss innovations in the future of ed-tech. The event, held June 8-9, took place at the Tel Aviv Cultural Center.

Throughout the two days, more than 500 attendees from around the world — including China, Brazil, Germany, and the United States — listened to panel discussions on topics such as personalized learning and big data, improving STEM education, and the role of capital in ed-tech investment success. Other sessions focused on closing the skill gap, bridging tech inequality among students, and building out a successful company.

The keynote was delivered by former president of Intel Israel Mooly Eden.…Read More

What happens when student hackers shut down a district’s internet?

Denial of service attacks can shut down internet access and leave IT teams powerless

When Jeff McCune noticed that his district’s 500 Mbps internet connection was full, he knew something was amiss. When he investigated further and saw that the Internet protocol (IP) addresses were coming in from China, Australia, and the Netherlands, McCune realized that the problem was more than just a random overload or ISP outage.

“I was seeing 550 Mbps of traffic coming from a single link and that pushed our usage up over the 10 percent cushion” allowed by its main service provider, said McCune, a network analyst with St. Charles Community Unit School District (CUSD) 303 in St. Charles, Ill. “There was no way anyone from China would surf the website of a school district in Midwestern America that hard.”

To McCune, it appeared the CUSD was being hit by a full-blown Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The hackers cut off the entire district’s internet access for four hours at a time and then repeated the process 10 more times over the following six weeks during the fall of 2014.…Read More

It’s official: China is the wild, wild west of cloud computing

Within hours of Amazon’s announcement of a new Beijing region for Amazon Web Services, IBM jumped into the mix, announcing a new relationship with 21Vianet to offer high-end SmartCloud Enterprise + cloud services from a new 21Vianet-hosted facility in Beijing, Gigaom reports. IBM claimed that while AWS is a “newbie” in China and to enterprise-class workloads generally, IBM has worked with customers in China for years as an enterprise IT provider while AWS “is most known for its support of Netflix.” So there. This is a feisty IBM, obviously stung by losing the $600 million CIA cloud contract to AWS. SmartCloud Enterprise+ is an OpenStack-based cloud for enterprise customers, an IBM spokesman said. IBM characterizes it as an “open standards-based” cloud compared to Amazon’s “proprietary” cloud. You see how this is being played…

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China retains supercomputer crown in latest Top500 list

A supercomputer built by the Chinese government has retained its place at the top of a list of the world’s most powerful systems, the BBC reports. Tianhe-2 can operate at 33.86 petaflop/s – the equivalent of 33,863 trillion calculations per second – according to a test called the Linpack benchmark. There was only one change near the top of the leader board. Switzerland’s new Piz Daint – with 6.27 petaflop/s – made sixth place. The Top500 list is compiled twice-yearly by a team led by a professor from Germany’s University of Mannheim…

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China seeks to reduce internet users’ anonymity

A leading Chinese internet regulator has vowed to reduce anonymity in China’s portion of cyberspace, calling for new rules to require people to use their real names when buying a mobile phone or going online, reports the Associated Press. In an address to the national legislature in April, Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, called for perfecting the extensive system of censorship the government uses to manage the fast-evolving internet, according to a text of the speech obtained by New York-based Human Rights in China. China’s regime has a complicated relationship with the freewheeling internet, reflected in its recent standoff with Google over censorship of search results. China this week confirmed it had renewed Google’s license to operate, after Google agreed to stop automatically rerouting users to its Hong Kong site, which is not subject to China’s online censorship. The internet is China’s most open and lively forum for discussion, despite already pervasive censorship, but stricter controls could constrain users. The country’s online population has surged past 400 million, making it the world’s largest…

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Two Chinese schools said to be tied to online attacks

According to the New York Times, a series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations have been traced to computers at two educational institutions in China, including one with close ties to the Chinese military, say people involved in the investigation. They also said the attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed. Google announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China. Computer security experts, including investigators from the National Security Agency, have been working since then to pinpoint the source of the attacks. Until recently, the trail had led only to servers in Taiwan…

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