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.

Wolfram Alpha launches free portal with tools for math instruction

A free resource helps teachers locate interactive tools for math instruction.

Numerous studies have highlighted the importance of U.S. students’ math achievement, and now math teachers have a new resource, aligned with the Common Core standards and available free of charge, that might help them teach abstract math lessons.

Launched on Jan. 18, Wolfram Alpha’s Wolfram Education Portal is a free website, currently in beta testing, that offers teaching tools and materials such as an interactive textbook, lesson plans aligned with the Common Core State Standards, and supplemental materials that include demonstrations, widgets, and videos.

Wolfram Alpha, created by noted scientist Stephen Wolfram, is a free research website powered by a computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing calculations on its own vast internal knowledge base. The site’s Education Portal contains full materials for algebra and selected materials for calculus, but it will continue to grow and include more materials. Wolfram plans to expand the Education Portal to include community features, problem generators, web-based course apps, and the ability to create personalized content.…Read More

Lots of technology, but we’re missing the point

Technology is not a universal problem-solver.
Technology is not a universal problem-solver.

Though I’m a technology junkie, I continue to revel in the fact that so much of the world’s information is never more than a few keystrokes away. I remember the days of those terrible old search engines that returned 10 million results, most of them irrelevant. I marvel now at the ability of Google or Bing or Wolfram Alpha to deliver pretty much what I ask for.

Educators, from K to Ph.D., have assumed that our most foundational task is to put the best technology into the hands of as many people as possible. Once they have the tools, the assumption goes, our students can flourish. Whether delivering unbelievably cheap laptops or sophisticated scientific databases, education is in a providing mood despite the economic downturn. Many are predicting that the result will be a utopia in which education and technology create the super-student of the future.

My institution—Trinity Western University, in Langley, British Columbia—has technology: lots of it, from campus-wide Wi-Fi, to extensive library databases, to laptops in the hands of most students. One would think that utopia was just on the horizon, and the coming techno-student was emerging before our eyes. But, as necessary as technology is to education, something crucial has been left out. The give-them-technology movement is missing the point.…Read More