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.

4 ideas to consider when designing a STEM lab

Key points:

  • STEM labs are engaging environments that encourage exploration
  • With the right tools and supports, students develop and grow 21st-century skills

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is focused on developing students’ skills and connecting these subject areas, preparing them for future careers and the real world. It’s a key area of teaching worldwide and thousands of schools are now investing in learning spaces specifically designed to support STEM–called STEM labs.

What is a STEM Lab?…Read More

5 essential STEM education reads

STEM education is a critical part of a comprehensive K-12 education–it helps students build and improve critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, and it teaches students to be persistent when presented with a challenge.

And while STEM education is essential, it’s not always accessible–underrepresented groups, including female students and minority students–often lose interest in STEM subjects as the subjects grow more challenging and as they move through school.

Representation is another obstacle to more ubiquitous STEM participation. When students don’t see STEM professionals who look like them represented in advertising, on TV and in movies, or in classroom resources, they have a harder time envisioning themselves in STEM careers.…Read More

How plagiarism makes the literacy gap worse

Plagiarism is becoming ubiquitous in academia as an increase in AI-powered writing tools become more advanced and available to students. As a result, educators are faced with preventing, identifying, and stopping plagiarism even as plagiarism becomes increasingly harder to detect.

But why should educators even continue to tackle plagiarism? What are the documented and potentially long-lasting impacts of students plagiarizing their work?

According to a recent study, there was a marked increase globally in paraphrasing and text replacement during the pandemic in 2020 compared to 2019. The average similarity score, which is the score that comes from detecting what content was paraphrased versus what is original, increased from 35.1 percent to 49.6 percent. This is especially troubling considering the already negative effects the pandemic had on education. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that the pandemic erased over two decades of progress with drops in both mathematics and reading scores for students at record highs. …Read More

4 Practices for Innovative School Leaders

If your school or district is anything like many others across the country, it has undergone transformational changes at a rapid (perhaps even dizzying) pace over the past two years. The challenges you continue to face demand that you influence more change, driven by creative problem solving and a bit of risk.

While innovation takes a unique form in every school, I’ve drawn upon my experience collaborating with innovative thinkers across the PreK-12 landscape to gather a few key practices that I believe will be critical this year. Consider how these changes can impact your daily work and influence outcomes for the teachers and learners you serve:

Reframe your understanding of personalized learning.…Read More

6 tools to help kids learn coding and robotics

Introducing students to coding and robotics gives them early exposure to STEM in general. This early exposure, according to research, is key to the future of the workforce.

Aside from the cool factor K-12 coding and robotics offers, students will learn a number of skills they’ll take with them well into adulthood, including creativity, problem solving, and the ability to fail without quitting. These skills stick around even if students don’t pursue STEM-related study paths or careers later in their lives.

Coding and robotics can be introduced in any subject, with a little creativity.…Read More

How esports can boost teamwork skills

Teamwork and communication are the top skills employers are looking for, a new survey of hiring managers reveals. That bodes well for the students at a Los Angeles secondary school who are taking part in an innovative program that uses esports to teach critical 21st century skills: Teamwork and communication are also the skills these young gamers have seen the most improvement in so far.

Working with a company called wethink, Horace Mann UCLA Community School launched an afterschool program in January that has students in grades 6-12 practice and reflect on 21st century skills such as problem solving, teamwork, communication, leadership, and character as they compete against each other in the popular online video game League of Legends.

Esports is a perfect vehicle for learning these essential workforce skills, wethink says. Many of the attributes that students will need in the workplace correlate with success in gaming. For instance, to achieve success, players have to learn how to work together to accomplish a common goal.…Read More

A ‘Brilliant’ way to learn STEM

Every now and then, a new resource comes along that’s worth a second–or third, or fourth–look.

You might feel that way about Brilliant–a site that helps users learn not through lecture videos, but through hands-on, interactive learning.

Brilliant works by helping learners of all ages master content instead of simply memorizing. It also provides instant feedback so that learners can improve their knowledge through problem solving. Struggle is part of Brilliant’s instructional strategy, because the path to learning STEM isn’t necessarily 100 percent easy.…Read More

How the 4 Cs prepare students for the real world

As our world continues to become more connected through technology, today’s students have boundless access to a wealth of information. But, to effectively leverage these resources, students need to be able to make meaning of them.

According to educator Thomas Hoerr, the very notion of intelligence has changed. We no longer rely on the limits of our single mind to access the information resources we need to solve problems. Problem solving has always involved teamwork and cooperation. Today, however, open source programs, wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 technologies enable total strangers divided by space and time to collaborate.

Successful problem solving in the 21st century requires us to work effectively and creatively with computers, with vast amounts of information, with ambiguous situations, and with other people from a variety of backgrounds.…Read More

Young Empowered Startuppers’ Online Entrepreneurial Learning & Activity Platform provides competitive advantage for today’s teachers, students and schools.

The latest of the awards was an Award of Excellence in Applied Innovation, with a perfect score of 12/12 from the Institute for Performing and Learning, the judges commented that “it is no doubt this project will be an example to follow in improving the work the Institute for Performance and Learning seeks to explore in the future.” Using a fully integrated online learning and project platform, YES takes students and teachers seamlessly through their entrepreneurial journey from problem solving ideas to viable, pitch-ready ventures. The program meets Canada wide Entrepreneurship Curriculum Requirements and can be delivered flexibly depending on the needs of the students, teachers, and school.  

The platform can be a 100% online plug and play course or be used in a hybrid or flipped classroom model.  The ability to seamlessly move between varying models has made teachers’ work that much easier during the current ever-changing times. “The program leverages the LMS system by offering an experience-based platform where learners receive support and engagement by mentors and administrative staff, as directed by the learner. It also offers an intuitive interface that promotes use of just in time data,” commented the judges from the Institute of Performance and Learning.  

Shauna Stanyer, an entrepreneurship teacher from Holy Cross Regional High School in Vancouver, Canada recently remarked “I really appreciate the content brought throughout the training modules and how it is delivered through the platform. It makes planning an exciting and innovative course easy, while allowing me to focus on the project-based learning with my students.”  The content and curriculum developed for the course are engaging and exciting for students, and teacher feedback on this new tool has been overwhelmingly positive.…Read More

6 ways to embrace the messiness of math education

Math is not easy to teach or learn. So, teachers use a variety of strategies to boost their students’ numeracy skills as they progress through math education.

But some of those approaches could be unproductive, contended Dr. Juli Dixon, Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Central Florida, in a recent edWebinar sponsored by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Mathematics. She described standard practices that can derail rather than support mathematical reasoning, and offered alternative methods that would benefit students far more.

Embracing the messiness of math education…Read More