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.

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

Teaching our children to code: a quiet revolution

In just under a year, England will become the first country in the world to mandate computer programming in primary and secondary schools, The Telegraph reports. Children will start learning to write code when they enter school the age of five, and will not stop until at least 16, when they finish their GCSEs. By the end of key stage one, students will be expected to create and debug simple programs as well as ‘use technology safely and respectfully’. They will also be taught to understand what algorithms are, how they are implemented as programs on digital devices, and that programs execute by following precise and unambiguous instructions. By the time they reach key stage 2, pupils will be taught how to design and write programs that accomplish specific goals, including controlling or simulating physical systems. They will also learn how to understand computer networks and use logical reasoning to detect and correct errors in algorithms…

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Inspired vision: Classrooms of the future

You may recall the dramatic leaps in technology of the Seventies — how we hopped from books of “log tables” to slide rules and on to hand-held calculators within a generation, The Telegraph reports. But walk into a classroom today and you’ll probably be equally impressed by the iPads, interactive, touch-screen whiteboards, and Kindles instead of library cards. You might stumble across Year 4 learning to count in Russian or Year 6 studying climate change. But what will the classroom of the future look like? Jo Heywood, headmistress at Heathfield, an all-girls boarding school in Berkshire, believes that in five years we will be more in thrall to IT than ever, albeit using it more effectively…

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Education can make you taller in old age

The Telegraph reports that researchers found that those who had completed secondary education shrank nearly 2cm less in their dotage than the illiterate, who had not even completed primary school. The team from the Universities of Southern California, Harvard, and Peking say it is the first time it has been shown that choices we make later in life, rather than in early childhood, can influence our height. All humans go through physical changes with age, including an increase in body fat and decrease in bone mass. Previous studies have suggested that we start to get smaller as early as in our 30s, with changes to the spine and bones all having an effect. Men lose on average 3.3cm by their deaths. Using data from a survey of 17,708 adults beginning at age 45, the researchers showed a number of new influences – including eductation – which determined how much we shrank…

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Watch: World’s most dangerous school commute?

For the children of Pili, a village high in the foothills between China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, getting to school isn’t just difficult, according to a report by The Telegraph, it’s life-threatening.

“Dangerous! Careful, hold on to the rope…” the man in the video says. The journey is a total of 120 miles, 50 of which cannot be accessed by vehicles. At one point, the path narrows to just a few inches over a cliff around 1,000 feet above ground. Teachers escort the children on the dangerous trek four time a year, since the youngest students are 6 years old.

“There is only one way to get to the village, and you have to climb up in the mountains,” head teacher Su Qin told The Telegraph. “The village is completely cut off.”…Read More