Texting education

Teacher opens communication through technology

* By Elaine Marsilio

CORPUS CHRISTI — Sandy Riggs asked her 24 freshmen biology students to text her what they thought DNA precipitation meant during a recent class.

What she got was a flood of text messages — one after the other.

“I never see this with hands,” Riggs said. “This is awesome.”

Riggs doesn’t always give her students assignments involving text messaging.

But the 35-year-old Collegiate High School teacher allows her students to text her about homework, absences, or just life questions and concerns.

Riggs said using texting as an education tool has increased her students’ access to her, their confidence and ultimately gained their trust.

“They know I care. They are going to be more responsive,” she said.

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Schools Factor E-Courses Into the Daily Learning Mix

The school district in Notus, Idaho, a town of about 600 residents in the southwest part of the state, is using online courses to offer classes students otherwise couldn't take.
—Joe Jaszewski for Education Week

By Michelle R. Davis

Educators say 'hybrid' approach is taking off because it offers academic classes not otherwise available to many students.

It isn’t a stretch to say that the 200 students at Notus Jr. Sr. High School live far away from the kinds of services many people take for granted. But even in their rural Idaho school, students’ choices of classes include French and Spanish, college-level study, digital photography, and criminal justice.

That’s because Principal Benjamin M. Merrill has created “Pirate Academy,” a roster of online courses that students can take as part of their regular school day.

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Is Technology Making Children More Empathic?

[T]he traditional classroom curriculum continues to emphasize learning as a highly personal experience designed to acquire and control knowledge by dint of competition with others. The shift into the distributed ICT [Information and Communications Technology] revolution, however, and the proliferation of social networks and collaborative forms of engagement on the Internet are creating deep fissures in the orthodox approach to education. The result is that a growing number of educators are beginning to revise curricula by introducing distributed and collaborative learning models into the classroom. Intelligence, in the new way of thinking, is not something that is divided up among people but, rather, the field of experience that is shared between people.

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An Open Mind

At 83, Marian C. Diamond has been teaching anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, for 50 years. Her class is so popular that it’s difficult for students to get in, though she holds court at the campus’s largest lecture hall, with room for 736.

She begins by opening a colorful hatbox. Dressed in an elegant suit and scarf with her hair swept back into a chig­non, Professor Diamond pulls on a pair of latex gloves and reveals the box’s contents: a human brain. It is in alcohol, she says, “because alcohol will preserve the brain. Need I say more?” The students laugh as they take this in. She has the room in the palm of her hands.

Professor Diamond is one of the tweedy celebrities of cyberspace. Videos of her anatomy course, Integrative Biology 131, have been viewed nearly 1.5 million times on YouTube, where they have been available since 2005 to anyone with an Internet connection. Some of the world’s foremost scholars are up there for viewing, tuition free. From Yale, you can tune into an economics class by a professor with his own home-price index, Robert Shiller, or a course by the Milton scholar John Rogers. The undisputed rock star academic is Walter H. G. Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who flies across the room to demonstrate that a pendulum swings no faster or slower when there is an added mass (Professor Lewin) hanging at the end.

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Distance Education's Rate of Growth Doubles at Community College

Distance education is growing quickly at community colleges, according to the results of a study published by the Instructional Technology Council. For the 2008-9 academic year, enrollment in distance learning at community colleges grew 22 percent over the 2007-8 academic year, up from a growth rate of 11 percent in the previous year.

You can read the entire article here.

Traditional schools aren't working. Let's move learning online.

Deep within America's collective consciousness, there is a little red schoolhouse. Inside, obedient children sit in rows, eagerly absorbing lessons as a kind, wise teacher writes on the blackboard. Shiny apples are offered as tokens of respect and gratitude.

The reality of American education is often quite different. Beige classrooms are filled with note-passers and texters, who casually ignore teachers struggling to make it to the end of the 50-minute period. Smart kids are bored, and slower kids are left behind. Anxiety about standardized tests is high, and scores are consistently low. National surveys find that parents despair over the quality of education in the United States -- and they're right to, as test results confirm again and again.

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Career U. - Making College 'Relevant'

Even before they arrive on campus, students — and their parents — are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What’s the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?

There’s evidence that employers don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”

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