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.

Embracing AI for limitless learning potential

Key points:

  • Students will continue to use AI–educators should encourage responsible AI use among students
  • Stopgaps to block AI will only negatively impact underserved students who don’t have ready access to the internet at home
  • See related article: Is AI the future of education?

When ChatGPT was released in November 2022, many educators saw AI as a threat, assuming students were going to use AI to cheat. And they did. But in our haste to identify the pitfalls of generative AI, we have obscured examples of how students have used it to explore new topics, help with projects, and nurture creativity and curiosity. 

With the landscape shifting so quickly, we can no longer ignore the fact that back to school is going to look very different this year. …Read More

High-Achieving Black Students from Colorado Receive More than $2 Million in Sachs Foundation Scholarships Over the Past Year

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., May 19, 2022 — The Sachs Foundation, an organization that has provided college scholarships to Black Coloradans since 1931, announced today that it has awarded more than $2 million in scholarships to talented Black students in the Centennial State over the past year. Sachs Foundation scholars are pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees from universities and colleges in Colorado as well as top institutions from coast to coast, including Yale, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Cornell and prestigious historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard University.

The foundation awarded 52 scholarships over the past year to exceptional Black students from all around Colorado, including Aurora, Castle Rock, Colorado Springs, Commerce City, Denver, Fountain, Gypsum, Lafayette, Lakewood, Lamar and Woodland Park. The students who received Sachs Foundation support this year are not only accomplished in academics but have already made a positive impact in their communities through their achievements in the arts, athletics and volunteer activities. More than half of the students are the first generation in their family to attend college.

To celebrate the students’ excellence this year, the foundation sponsored a brunch for the 2022 Sachs Foundation Scholarship Program students and guests at the Penrose House in Colorado Springs. The guest speaker was Clint Smith, a journalist, educator, New York Times best-selling author, popular YouTube host, award-winning poet and staff writer at The Atlantic.   …Read More

3 questions: Making the 2021-22 school year work for students

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on the MIT News site.

What’s the best way to get K-12 students across the U.S. to bounce back from the pandemic? MIT’s Justin Reich has an idea: Ask them. Reich, an associate professor in MIT’s program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, has co-authored a new report on the return to the classroom in the 2021-22 school year, based on interviews with over 250 educators and 4,000 students, in addition to 10 charrettes involving students, teachers, parents, and school administrators.

A core finding of the report is that the changes students and teachers would like to make to schools are less about Covid-related issues and more about uncomfortable learning environments, resource deficits, stifling curricula, and overly strict behavioral rules. …Read More

Exceptional Black Students from Colorado Receive $2.44 Million in Sachs Foundation Scholarships

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., June23, 2021 — The Sachs Foundation, an organization that has provided college scholarships to Black Coloradans since 1931, announced today that it has awarded $2.44 million in scholarships to talented Black students from the Centennial State over the past year. With funding from the Foundation, Black Coloradans are pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees from prestigious institutions nationwide, including Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale, with about 20% attending prominent historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Howard University.  

Founded during the Great Depression by Pikes Peak resident Henry Sachs, the Sachs Foundation has provided scholarships to thousands of Black Coloradans. Mr. Sachs was inspired to create the foundation when he witnessed firsthand how economic and educational discrimination affected Black citizens, including his friends the Stroud family, whose son Dolphus Stroud received the first Sachs Foundation scholarship. In the years since, the Foundation has funded top Black scholars who’ve gone on to distinguished careers in medicine, science, engineering, public service, the arts and other fields. …Read More

Around the world, net neutrality is not a reality

Net neutrality—the idea that all Internet traffic should generally be treated equally—suffered a setback last week when a federal court struck down the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s latest regulatory effort, the MIT Technology Review reports. Pro-neutrality types have worried that a few giant companies will end up controlling, or at least mediating, the Internet experience for much of the population because of special deals they’ve struck with Internet providers for prioritized or subsidized data delivery. But in the emerging economies of the world, that’s pretty much how things already work, thanks to a growing number of deals Google and Facebook have struck with mobile phone carriers from the Philippines to Kenya…

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NBC hosting education summit in September

American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science on a list of 30 industrialized nations
American students rank 25th in math and 21st in science on a list of 30 industrialized nations

NBC News is convening its own summit with education and political leaders next month to talk about ways to improve schools in light of statistics showing the U.S. lagging in student achievement.

The two-day “Education Nation” event in New York will be carried online and is part of a week of programming concentrating on education issues on NBC News broadcasts such as “Today” and “Nightly News,” as well as the MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo TV networks.…Read More

MIT uses print-reduction software developed by own student

Printer manufacturers such as Xerox and HP now offer comprehensive print-management services to their customers along with hardware, with the goal of reducing printing costs. Yet the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has declined these services in favor of a solution proffered by one of its students, Printerinks.com reports. The university has integrated Virebo software, the creation of medical engineering doctoral candidate Joseph Barillari, across the campus to regulate its printing output. Barillari told Cleantech.com that he devised the print-management software and founded a startup company during a year’s break from his studies. He created Virebo to monitor the output of a printer network to improve its efficiency. The software includes a web-based interface with quickly interpretable data displays. The software went live across the university last October. Barillari intends to make the software available for other customers to download for a fee, with a simplified version freely available. He estimates that the software’s final version will be able to cut 15 percent to 30 percent from the cost of printing…

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Hot campus web sites now about romance, not gossip

“I saw you … looking like a dork. But I don’t care how dorky you can be. I just want you to come be dorky with me, babe.” This is what happens when the romantic impulses of the college student meet the declarative instincts of the social media generation, USA Today reports. “My generation, we think about how we can broadcast our message to the world and share things with the world,” says Keone Hon, a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who last winter co-created the site I Saw You MIT, a knockoff of the popular missed connections site ISawYou.com. The MIT site is one of several college-based imitators that have emerged in the last few months to give students a way to anonymously express interest in a classmate. Harvard, Rutgers, and St. John’s University also have knockoffs. The sites at each campus are extremely popular, attracting dozens of posts—including idle observations, crude come-ons, and lengthy love poems—and thousands of visitors each day…

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