Category Archives: Conferences and Community Events

These videos are courtesy of Scott Traylor, 360kid.com.

Merriam Webster defines an ecosystem as “the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit.” The Kids+Creativity movement in Pittsburgh is creating a new kind of ecosystem for learning in and out of school, beginning with children in the earliest years and continuing through higher education at institutions that work at the cutting edge of innovation in technology and digital media. Once home to Fred Rogers, a media pioneer in his own right, Pittsburgh…

Scholastic has a 90-year history of helping kids learn to read and encouraging them to love to read. A recent New York Times editorial asks, “Should we be alarmed?” about the availability of e-books. I would respond, quickly and succinctly, no — and yes. No—because at Scholastic, we are committed to meeting kids where they are. If they are reading traditionally or electronically, they have the opportunity to be informed and inspired by the power of the book. When we…

If you were challenged to define what math is, what would you say? How about science? What makes the two different, or maybe even the same? I started exploring the idea of what makes up these educational disciplines as a result of hearing the term STEM more and more in the news. STEM is a short-hand way of referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but is this term simply a collection of separate items, or could there be something…

Susan Hildreth is the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. She was appointed to the position by President Obama, and has previously served as the city librarian in Seattle, California’s state librarian, deputy director and city librarian of San Francisco Public Library, as well as on staff at Sacramento Public Library, the Placer County Library, the Benicia Public Library and the Yolo County Library. She has also served as president of both the Public Library Association and…

Last Wednesday, April 27th, New York University held a special event to celebrate the work of University Professor Jerome Bruner. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his landmark publication, The Process of Education. Panel discussions between leading researchers who worked with Bruner in the 1960s and notable authors and academics working in education today, provided the audience with a sense of the legacy of Bruner’s work, along with ideas of how we might yet see it realized 50 years…

Jacob Blackstock is a cartoonist and animator who created Bitstrips for Schools, an online tool that makes it easy for kids to create their own web comics. He explains how his own obsession with comics led to an inadvertent breakthrough: by encouraging kids to produce their own comic strips, teachers are not only fostering creativity and encouraging literacy skills, but engaging students more deeply with content because they are actively collaborating with their peers.   Jacob Blackstock is a cartoonist/animator/entrepreneur…

This post was written for the Learning at Hollywood Forum that took place at USC in May 2011.   My hope for this forum is that it helps realize, in some concrete way, the vision of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. At this moment in time — the birth of the digital era — it is important to have the industry find a way to seize the unprecedented opportunity to entertain, educate, and make a sustainable profit through new media…

This post was originally published for the Learning from Hollywood forum held in Los Angeles in May 2011. My hope for this forum is that it helps realize, in some concrete way, the vision of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. At this moment in time — the birth of the digital era — it is important to have the industry find a way to seize the unprecedented opportunity to entertain, educate, and make a sustainable profit through new media platforms.…

The art and science of storytelling has been at the heart of all good education from the beginning of the humanity. Since before technology, before media, before printing or even writing, education was passed from generation to generation through storytelling. The stories told around the fire before written histories may have had elements of myth and legend and exaggerated truth in them, but they all served the same purpose: the enculturation of the young and the drawing together of the…