Funding Education Innovation: 3 Ways to Get It Right

Why STEM Matters in 2020

STEM Education, a term initiated by the National Science Foundation, is an educational approach which focuses on one or more of the four disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math. In an era when technical and scientific skills are increasingly important in the work force, exposing children to STEM learning in the early years is key.

Currently, only 26% of STEM jobs are held by women. It is important to ensure that girls as well as boys are exposed to and encouraged in the area of STEM. It’s never too early to introduce STEM to your child and to consider how to sustain interest in STEM in elementary school.

How EdTech Can Impact on Students’ Wellbeing

In most people’s lives, school is the first environment in which we start feeling pressure. Whether the cause is the expectation to perform well or the struggle to fit in and have one’s first social interactions, school is often a source of stress and fear and can prove detrimental to the students’ mental health and well-being.

Creating a safe, positive place to be that fosters confidence and contentment while nipping the causes of anxiety and low self-esteem in the bud is something that everyone can contribute to: a class where students who struggle socially are not made to feel judged or excluded by their peers, staffed by teachers who realise that low-performing pupils need to be helped, not berated, is much more conducive to a good mental state than a highly competitive class where bullying is rife and students feel that they cannot go to the adults in charge with their problems.

Human behaviour, therefore, remains the greatest factor in student well-being and mental health, and technology alone cannot eliminate all obstacles. However, EdTech can be an excellent support tool for those educators and administrators who care about their students’ quality of life.

Why Your Students Need a Makerspace

Makerspaces have become a hot topic in education. While not a new concept, makerspaces are gaining traction for the many benefits they provide students as these spaces are integrated into classrooms and schools.

Makerspaces are designed to challenge students to create and learn through hands-on, personalized experiences throughout elementary, middle and high school. Here are a few of the many benefits of makerspaces.

Why Math Talk is More Than Numbers

It is well known that children who develop arithmetic skills at a young age are more likely to be successful in science, technology, engineering, and math subjects when they are older. It is also known that parents have a strong influence on their child’s ability to develop these skills. 

For instance, children whose parents frequently ask things such as, “You have four pennies… how many would you have if I gave you two more?” are more likely to be successful in math classes and math-related careers later on. But, what is less well known is the fact that spatial reasoning has an impact on these mathematical abilities as well.

How Edtech Will Change School Culture

For more than 100 years, we’ve relied on the factory model for providing education. Born of the industrial age, when efficient systems mattered most in producing a product, the factory model mimicked assembly-line work. 

Schools built large classrooms and filled them with multiple rows of students. Teachers delivered one-size-fits-all instruction, and process was replicated in room after room, hall after hall, and school after school.

Naming the education system after industrialism was more of a metaphor than anything else, but one thing became apparent. Industrialism had served its purpose. Continuing to model an education system after an era that had passed was hurting instruction, not helping it. In education, we deal with people, not parts.

The birth of computers and the Internet renewed interest in education, and many thought that technology would be the panacea schools needed to reinvent themselves. As it turns out, change was not going to come from having computers or other trendy digital devices. Authentic change in education could only come about from how we used the new tools, not which ones we purchased for school.

California State Parks Reaches Major Milestone in K-12 Digital Access

California State Parks is proud to announce it has connected more than 500,000 students to state parks via virtual field trips since 2004. The grassroots program known as Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students (PORTS®) engages undeserved students by creating equitable digital access to state parks at no cost to schools, teachers or students.