The School to Work Transition in Latin America
This article is part of a series on innovative solutions to tackle the main challenges of Latin American education (part 1 of 6). Latin America’s education systems are facing major challenges. Higher education remains off-limits to all but a small minority, and better early childhood education is desperately needed, given how our most fundamental cognitive skills develop […]
The Power of Reading Aloud
In today’s technology-driven era, reading a book is often considered boring and a chore. Reading for pleasure is an alien concept for many children around the world. A traditional book is lost amid a plethora of digital readers, iPads, and education applications. The fact that adults have very little or no time to read aloud […]
Nurture Creative Thinkers in China
The year 2015 marks China’s new era of mass “entrepreneurship and innovation.” World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) CEO Stavros N. Yiannouka observed in a recent interview that both developed and developing countries of the world are experiencing a bottleneck in economic growth. A transformed economic model is their only way out of it, as […]
Fostering Entrepreneurship in Schools
Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made? is a question prominently placed on the website of my bank. Whenever I need to make any online payments, my head is literally forced to scroll over it. By asking this question my bank follows suit in mythicizing the entrepreneur. I assume it wants to come across as an instance that […]
Ten Ideas to Fight Summer Boredom
To some, such as American musician Brian Wilson, “summer means happy times and good sunshine. It means going to the beach, going to Disneyland, having fun.” To children freshly released from schools, summertime could also mean chronic boredom, interrupted only by a few days of camp here and there. What do they do with the […]
How Chengdu Schools Do Innovation
Sichuan province’s capital Chengdu is a sprawling flat city of ten million ringed in by misty mountains and lotus blossom ponds. It is a two and a half hour flight southwest of Beijing, and it sits on the edge of Chinese civilization, the entry point into the mystic mountains of Tibet and beyond. For thousands […]
Ten Common Myths about Educational Innovations
As we read articles or attend conferences about educational innovation, we find sayings loaded with assumptions which may have been circulating for years without being further examined. Let me start with my top ten list, as an instructional designer and educational technologist, and I hope this can sparkle some thoughts about similar myths you might […]
What Effective Teachers and Successful Entrepreneurs Have in Common
Starting a company is not easy. Building something out of nothing requires effort, grit, and resilience. Successful entrepreneurs have a thick skin, are able to turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’, and can see a golden opportunity in something that others consider a dead-end. It is accepted without question that success as an entrepreneur comes […]
Are Creativity and Innovation Possible in Chinese Schools?
The 1899-1901 Boxer Rebellion was imperial feudal China’s last gasp. The Boxers were a cult of mystics who sought to hack to death all foreigners and foreign ideas, and when the Western powers bloodily put down the uprising they also dragged “the Sick Man of Asia” from the 17th century into the 20th. China’s two best […]
Educating Humans in an Age of Artificial Intelligence
At times it seems we live in a world of science fiction. Space travel is a new commercial industry, auto manufactures are competing to build robotic cars, humans are wearing implanted chips and 3D printed body parts, and tech hubs and accelerators have sprung up in nearly every country. As this new world emerges, educators […]