Category Archives: Guest Posts

This post originally appeared in TASC’s “The ExpandED Exchange” blog. Read more to find out what our New York Action Team members have been up to! Wouldn’t you love to be a kid in one of these two new pilot after-school programs at Quest to Learn, a tech-powered public middle school in New York City? The program in green design grew out of seventh graders’ desire to invent more sustainable ways to live on this planet. The school’s multi-media news…

Two weeks ago, this blog featured a preview of Robot Heart Stories (R<3S), a 10-day transmedia learning project in which two classrooms in underserved neighborhoods in Montreal (French speaking) and Los Angeles (English speaking) used collaboration and creative problem solving to help a lost robot navigate across North America before hitching a ride back to space with NASA on a launch to the International Space Station, scheduled sometime early next year. The robot (symbolized by a stuffed animal version embedded…

Picture for a second the first thing you ever constructed, designed, prototyped, or invented. If you’re like most of us, there’s a pretty good chance that you built your idea using toys like LEGOs, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, or perhaps, to your parents’ dismay, a mix of all of the above (good luck getting Play-Doh out of those bricks). Over the years, magazines like MAKE have featured lots of DIY toy projects, but very few talk about designing for Creative Play…

This interview with Michael Levine originally appeared in Literacy 2.0 in August, 2011. It appears here with the permission of the author, Robert L. Lindstrom.   In 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced, the venerable children’s TV programmer Children’s Television Workshop (now named Sesame Workshop) spun off a nonprofit research and production institute intended to do for digital media what Sesame Street did for television, namely make the medium both educational and entertaining at the same time. The center…

Looking for a creative way to engage young students with their summer reading? How about encouraging them to re-tell that story themselves via Toontastic, an iPad app that makes it easy to create and share cartoons? The Toontastic team wants to encourage summer readers to share their favorites, and have even lowered the price of the app to just 99 cents for the next three weeks! Andy Russell shares the scoop:   Ah Summer Break… a magical but all-too fleeting…

I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning conference to discuss mobile learning. As our good friends at Project Noah and other games/apps like The Hidden Park have shown, mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad present incredible opportunities for developers like ourselves to get kids out of the house, learning about the world around us, and sharing their findings with peers around the globe. Inevitably, the Million-Dollar-Question arose: How…

Why most U.S. school reformers are on the wrong track, and how to get our kids’ education right for the future What President Obama said: “We need to out-educate.” What Obama should have said: “We can’t win the future with the education of the past.”   This is an unprecedented time in U.S. education, and awareness that we have a problem has never been higher. Billions of dollars of public and private money are lined up for solutions. But I…

Give a young child a couple of toys or a box of crayons and he or she is likely to play for hours, deeply engrossed in an imaginary world. In both art and dramatic play, children construct settings, create fictional characters, and act out fantastic storylines that would be the envy of many Hollywood scriptwriters. Yet, ask that same child to write out a story in a blank notebook or a word processor and you would be lucky to capture…

This past August, the New York Times released an alarming article about plagiarism in U.S. higher education. Citing statistics from a Rutgers University study of 14,000 undergraduates, it reported that over 40 percent of students admitted to having copied text directly from the Internet. More frightening still, 34 percent said they did not consider plagiarizing from the Internet “serious cheating.” As college professors, high school teachers, and parents become increasingly exasperated with a population of copy-and-pasters that fails to see…

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…