Teaching Today

A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy

Doctors and lawyers are prohibited from using clients’ information for their own interests, so why aren’t Google and Facebook?<p>We tell online services what we like, who we love, what we are doing, and where we live, work, and play. And they in turn provide us with a window to the world, shaping what …

A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts

At the University of Arizona, school officials know when students are going to drop out before they do.<p>The public college in Tucson has been quietly collecting data on its first-year students’ ID card swipes around campus for the last few years. The ID cards are given to every enrolled student and …

Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm

Many preschool and kindergarten teachers have told me that they are extremely upset—some to the point of being ready to resign—by the increased …

How An Entire Nation Became Russia's Test Lab for Cyberwar

<b>The clocks read</b> zero when the lights went out.<p>It was a Saturday night last December, and Oleksii Yasinsky was sitting on the couch with his wife and …

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters<p>The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech …

Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has called for large technology firms to be regulated to prevent the web from being “weaponised at scale”.<p>Berners-Lee, in an open letter to mark the 29th anniversary of his invention, said: “In recent years, we’ve seen conspiracy theories …

A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin

Students often find themselves uploading their content — their creative work — into the learning management system. Perhaps they retain a copy of the …

How big data is helping states kick poor people off welfare

“These systems make our values visible to us in a way that calls us to a moral reckoning.”<p>Technology is being used to target and punish poor people in America, according to a new book by Virginia Eubanks, a professor of political science at the University of Albany, SUNY.<p>Here’s one example: In …

Inside The Virtual Schools Lobby: 'I Trust Parents'

A free day at the aquarium! For Marcey Morse, a mother of two, it sounded pretty good.<p>It was the fall of 2016, and Morse had received an email offering tickets, along with a warning about her children's education.<p>At that time, Morse's two kids were enrolled in an online, or "virtual," school called …

Classes should do hands-on exercises before reading and video, Stanford researchers say

A study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education of how students best learned a neuroscience lesson showed a distinct benefit to starting out …

Government moves to scrap national standards and charter schools

Minister of Education Chris Hipkins says the Bill ends the previous government’s failed national standards and charter schools experiments.<p>The …

Here's What Happened When the Supreme Court Ruled on Whether Students Can Protest During School

High-school students nationwide have already taken to the streets in response to the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in …

The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’

I teach at a big state university, and I often receive emails from software companies offering to help me do a basic part of my job: figuring out what my students have learned.<p>If you thought this task required only low-tech materials like a pile of final exams and a red pen, you’re stuck in the …

The six big privacy concerns for edtech

Priscilla Regan, professor at George Mason University. (FTC)<p>Priscilla Regan, a professor at George Mason University, has been thinking and writing …

Groundbreaking empirical research shows where innovation really comes from

Breaking down barriers for underrepresented kids could quadruple America’s pool of inventors.<p>Gaps in opportunity for talented kids with low socioeconomic status don’t just hold back poor, female, black, or Latino children as individuals — they also impose potentially enormous losses to society as a …

Second Guessing My Kids of Color?

Blogger’s Note: This post is on race in America. It’s full of ideas I’ve been wrestling with for a long while. Like the issue, there’s nothing neat …

The Very Seriously Humorless Education of Students

I am a junior in college during the early 1980s, sitting attentively in Dr. Richard Predmore’s upper-level English course; I am an English education …

James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.” So opens “A Talk to Teachers,” which James Baldwin delivered to a group of educators in October, 1963. (He published it in the <i>Saturday Review</i> the following December.) That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and …

Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think

Do you remember, as I do, how in the classroom poems were so often taught as if they were riddles? What is the poet <i>really</i> trying to say here? What is the theme or message of this poem? What does this word “purple” or “flower” or “grass” <i>really</i> mean? Like classical music, poetry has an unfortunate …

Does Bad “Grammar” Instruction Make Writing Worse?

<i>By Patricia A. Dunn</i><p>Most students’ writing—in fact, most people’s writing—could use some improvement: in content, organization, coherence, style, and …

Why Revise? Because You Have an Authentic Audience

Undoubtedly, the answer is that millions of people around the world would be listening to the speech, and thus he wanted his writing to be clear, …

How We Are Ruining America

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.<p>How they’ve managed …

The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

<b>Listen to this post as a podcast:</b><p><b>When I worked with student teachers</b> on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise …

The Guilty Secret of Distracted Parenting

Your phone can seem to call to you in an especially seductive way when you are a parent on playground duty. And one reason is, let’s face it, that playground duty can get old long before your children do.<p>At a recent pediatric meeting where we discussed the new recommendations from the American …

For Online Class Discussions, Instructors Move From Text to Video

Postsecondary Learning<p>For Online Class Discussions, Instructors Move From Text to Video<p>By Jeffrey R. Young     Mar 17, 2017<p>hanss / Shutterstock<p>For …

Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions in Overtime Dispute

A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded — or totally necessary — Oxford comma, perhaps the most polarizing of punctuation marks.<p>What ensued in the United States Court of Appeals for the …

Not all heroes wear capes - but some carry tubes (Pi Day 2017)

The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet [Infographic]

Critical thinking skills truly matter in learning. Why? Because they are life skills we use every day of our lives. Everything from our work to our …