Category Archives: Commentary

Reprinted from Huffington Post This teacher bashing must stop! It is an unwise diversion from what matters most: teaching children to love learning and be creative right from the start. As an unabashed ally in the moral outrage that animates Davis Guggenheim’s powerful film “Waiting for ‘Superman’ “, count me as a skeptic of the proposed prescriptions advanced by the movie. Brent Staples of The New York Times gets it just right: “the many complex problems that have long afflicted…

The past few weeks have been big for our industry — conferences from EdNet to Engage, the expansion announcement of E-Rate, a stellar New York Times article on Learning by Playing, the release of Waiting for Superman, and NBC’s Education Nation. Guest blogger, Ellen Galinsky, offers her perspective on Education Nation (reprinted from What It Will Really Mean to “Put Children First”–Reflections on NBC’s Education Nation in Huffington Post): Many of this nation’s movers and shakers in education gathered this…

Last week I attended Back to School – Learning and Growing in a Digital Age, an event which explored federal policy, e-learning, and digital literacy, sponsored by Common Sense Media, PBS Kids, USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, and The Children’s Partnership. The session that impacted me most was Empowering Parents and Kids with Technology. What was fascinating about the speakers on this panel was that collectively they described the evolution of Internet and its perceived challenges facing…

At last year’s Leadership Forum, Participant Media screened an early trailer for Waiting for Superman, which opens tomorrow. Here is some commentary on the film from Diana Rhoten, Co-Founder & Managing Director of Startl: I had the chance to attend the CUSP Conference in Chicago these last couple of days. I am not much of a conference go-er as I typically hate the contrived socializing and obsequious insider-ism that often go along with overpriced conference fees and underwhelming hotel rooms.…

By Esther Wojcicki and Michael H. Levine, reprinted from the Huffington Post American students’ lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling. According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map. Less than one half of today’s high school students study a…

The truly engaging, participatory e-Book technology we’ve been waiting for is finally here. Inkling for the iPad is a great example of meeting today’s kids where they are. Students can engage in interactive digital textbooks that come alive with rich graphics, video, interactive quizzes, and other features that allow them to highlight, underline, collaborate, and share with their friends. Although these are texbooks and designed for older kids, this product has great implications for storybooks and other e-Book experiences in…

In our last post we described how theories of creativity and learning should be integrated with creative problem solving approaches to address our nation’s creativity crisis. Recent advances in technology are enabling creators of children’s digital media to design more experiences that foster children’s creativity and learning. Although children’s digital media producers are beginning to create products for children that are marketed as creative tools, there is still a lack of mechanisms that have fully captured the type of open-ended,…

Public Media’s Impact on Young Readers Time for a Fresh Look Reprinted from EdWeek with permission from Susan B. Neuman For the average middle-class American, it might be hard to comprehend just how devastating the effects of poverty are on children’s early literacy development. But the social and educational deficits poor children must overcome to learn to read are all too clear from numerous research studies. Download the full article

There is something wonderfully simple about my 5-month-old daughter’s inexperience in our digital universe. I was three years old when the nation watched a woman in runner’s uniform hurl a hammer at “Big Brother” during Super Bowl XVIII. The world was invited to watch in awe and wonder how new technologies might empower us and where they could lead us next. At the time, my family had a Hershey computer running MS-DOS that my father built from a do-it-yourself kit…

Gaming for Behavior Change is a nice, brief publication addressing change making gaming. Design shop Method, that is doing some interesting things in this area, offers this description: “An estimated 3 billion hours are currently spent on gaming every week. By age 21, the average American will have spent more than 10,000 hours playing video games – the equivalent to 5 years of work at a full time job! The total amount of time that World of Warcraft has been…