If there is one concern more than any other which parents voice, it is: What will my child do after graduation? What college or career is appropriate? What will they be or become? This concern about the future for their son or daughter is not without merit. Even the most favorable statistics show that the… Continue reading
In just a few short weeks, schools will open for the 2015-2016 academic year, carrying with them the hopes and dreams of their students for their future lives and livelihoods. The choice which school to send your child to is an increasingly difficult one: there are public schools and private ones, there are non-public schools… Continue reading
The current revolution in education is facilitated by technology, but the nature, cause and outcome of the disruption is not as apparent as it seems. When we think of technology in education, we think most often of programs to use iPads for instruction, of teaching coding across the curriculum, or of having students do online… Continue reading
How do modern successful companies prepare for future workforce needs? How do they guarantee that there will be a steady pipeline of qualified candidates ready to fill the burgeoning demand for technically trained individuals? If you’re the Ford Motor Company, you start an initiative called Next Generation Learning to bring real-world problems into the classroom,… Continue reading
A FIRST Robotics Championship is a spectacle to behold. Throngs of students crowd the stands, the blocks of colored t-shirts marking their stake in the match below. The music thunders, the beat is insistent. Flags sway side to side, propelled in rhythm by the students wielding them. And then there are the robots: bots from… Continue reading
Last weekend, Village Glen High School participated in the Regional championship for FIRST Robotics. Competition was tight. The 41 teams that participated were some of the best in Southern California, and some of them had already participated in other Regionals, as they are allowed to do, and won awards there. The level of engineering design… Continue reading
The face of education is changing rapidly to meet the demands of modern enterprise and industry. Just over the last few years alone, there have been new CCSS (Common Core State Standards), Next Gen (Next Generation Science Standards), and we have seen the rise of STEM and STEAM and their variants, some focusing on art,… Continue reading
The path from Piaget to Papert to project-based learning is a direct one. It was the Swiss psychologist, Piaget, who argued that children don’t learn by being passive receptors of information from the environment, but by actively confronting it. His student, Papert, who went on to be a founding faculty member of the MIT Media… Continue reading
Increasingly, we are what we do and say, what we make and communicate. We know Einstein by his physical theories, Walt Whitman by his poetry, Dali by his art just as Mark Zuckerberg is synonymous with FaceBook, Jeff Bezos with Amazon, and Steve Jobs with Apple. On average, we work a third of our lives,… Continue reading
“When people think of an industrial factory, they think dark, dirty and heavy lifting and it’s not that way anymore…People don’t understand that…it’s meant for somebody with higher analytical skills and higher troubleshooting abilities [as well as for somebody] who can turn a wrench.” http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/01/12/apprenticeships-could-provide-a-pathway-to-the-middle-class?int=a40109 We have noted before that more than half of future… Continue reading
