Posts by Guest Author
EdTech

50 Educational Podcasts You Should Check Out

Guest Author

Maybe you don’t have time to sit down and sift through the latest education blogs for ideas and inspiration. If the thought of trying to carve out more hours in your day leaves you feeling overwhelmed, this list is for you.

Personalized Learning

How Minecraft is Teaching a Generation About Teamwork & the Environment

Guest Author

Minecraft, as it stands, has sold around twenty million copies across multiple platforms. It's arguably one of the most successful games of all time, and a demonstration of the fact that videogames do not have to be sexually charged gore-fests in order to be accepted by gamers en masse. Summarily, it's a game in which you are placed in a natural, procedurally-generated environment, and you must cut down trees, mine stone and ore, and generally manipulate your environment to build a home for yourself or go on a journey.
Personalized Learning

3 Tech Tools for the Sped Classroom

Guest Author

Being a Special Education teacher is something that takes patience and a warm heart. These teachers are truly in it for the love of seeing a student develop as a person socially and mentally. However, they seem to be in need of and short of resources more than most other classrooms.
EdTech

What Role Does Social Media Have in Education?

Guest Author

Recently, Compass Learning interviewed about 30 educators, including teachers, principals, superintendents, directors of curriculum and learning, and consultants, at the Texas Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development conference held in Dallas. We wanted to know what role—if any—social media (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc.) plays in the classroom, in the school, or in the district. The answers were interesting.
Personalized Learning

New Ideas On What Colleges Want to See Out of Prospects

Guest Author

We all remember the students from our own graduating classes who did it all. Their GPAs were at the top of the class, or very near to it. They might have played two or three different sports, and served as captain in one or two of them. They were members of two or three clubs, with a leadership position in student government or National Honor Society. They were the ones who we viewed as “well rounded,” likely to get into a highly selective college.
EdTech

Q&A: Jenn Karson of Vermont Makers

Guest Author

SparkFun’s Department of Education engages in educational outreach all over the country, and we’re always impressed and excited when we run into people and organizations as enthusiastic about electronics as we are. Over the past few years we’ve met a lot of people involved in the maker movement on the east coast, and Vermont continues to stand out as a state invested in furthering STEAM and electronics education in new ways. (In fact, Vermont’s Department of Education recently instituted a grant structure that will give SparkFun Inventor Kits to Career and Technical Education Centers around the state to provide preliminary Arduino training for FIRST Robotics teams!)
Personalized Learning

Hype vs. Hope: San Jose State + Udacity vs. Linn State Technical College

Guest Author

While it would be a stupendous achievement if Udacity and other MOOC providers are able to develop and deploy a model that can successfully remediate math and reading at scale, we need to step back and look at the bigger picture: A more powerful (and much more realistic) achievement would be to put society’s needs and judgments ahead of those of higher education institutions, and focus on propagating proven programs that prepare students for profitable employment and a life of learning.
Personalized Learning

Classroom Management: The Advantage of Structured Learning in Entrepreneurship

Guest Author

Here’s a novel concept for you: Entrepreneurs can learn from other entrepreneurs in an accredited capacity. When striking out on one’s own, it’s an established practice to seek the advice of those who’ve been there before and have made a success of it. So it makes perfect sense that business students, paying and working hard for an education, would greatly benefit from the insight that successful businesspeople can bestow.