Well, this is an opinion you don’t often hear in the education world, The Huffington Post reports. Acclaimed professor and educational researcher Sugata Mitra suggested in an interview with British education magazine TES that he no longer thinks it’s entirely necessary for kids to learn spelling and grammar. He credits the proliferation of new technologies, such as the “autocorrect” feature on mobile phones, for phasing out such curricula. “Firstly, my phone corrects my spelling so I don’t really need to think about it and, secondly, because I often skip grammar and write in a cryptic way,” Mitra told the magazine last week…
…Read MorePodcast 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.
Sugata Mitra: Build a school in the cloud
Ted.com reports that onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other — using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more at tedprize.org…
…Read MoreSeven TED 2013 videos you don’t want to miss
These days, it seems even the masses—the Silicon Valley masses, specifically—have an education-focused mindset, and to prove that point, this year’s TED Talks focused on education in particular.
And it wasn’t just the “old guys” talking about data or assessments. Rather, the conference—titled “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered.”—highlighted the brilliant minds of some of the most inventive, and just plain genius, high schoolers in the world.
These young participants mingled with the more seasoned education crowd to come up with some groundbreaking ideas.…Read More
Using computers to teach children with no teachers
A 10-year experiment that started with Indian slum children being given access to computers has produced a new concept for education, reports the BBC. Professor Sugata Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999. He has watched the children teach themselves—and others—how to use the machines and gather information. Follow-up experiments suggest children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly with little supervision. “I think we have stumbled across a self-organizing system with learning as an emergent behavior,” he told the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Global conference. Mitra’s work began when he was working for a software company and decided to embed a computer in the wall of his office in Delhi that was facing a slum. “The children barely went to school, they didn’t know any English, they had never seen a computer before, and they didn’t know what the internet was.” To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet. He has repeated the experiment in many more places with similar results, observing children teaching each other how to use the computer and picking up new skills. One group in Rajasthan, he said, learned how to record and play music on the computer within four hours of it arriving in their village. In Cambodia, he left a simple math game for children to play with. “No child would play with it inside the classroom. If you leave it on the pavement and all the adults go away then they will show off to one another about what they can do,” Mitra said…
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