Remember, Ed-tech is Really a Tool for Teachers
Most writing about education technology focuses on the students’ experience. It emphasizes how computerized and game-based learning platforms can benefit students. These benefits are certainly real, but focusing on students alone reveals only half the picture. An accurate depiction of the potential benefits of digital learning technologies also needs to take into account the ways […]
Danis Tanović: “Our education system has to become a creative one”
In this video, Danis Tanović, Bosnian film director, producer and screenwriter, shares his views on why creativity needs to be at the heart of education. Tanović says that education as we used to have it is not working anymore. Our educational system has to become a creative one. For that to happen, we need to define what […]
Should Teaching “Soft” Skills Be a Priority?
An interview with Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Random House) As someone who analyzes data on student achievement in Latin America for a living, I have always been skeptical of calls for schools to teach so-called “non-cognitive” skills. Learning outcomes in the region are abysmally low. Two thirds […]
Building Compassionate Contexts With Education Technology
The goal of education is ultimately social; we aim to create reflective citizens. We transmit the ways of making sense of the world that we have collectively agreed are in our communal best interest. How can technology make it easier? When we teach academic content, we are not only training individuals in cognitive skills, but […]
Mobile Learning Evolves from Initiative to Ecosystem
On November 6, 2014, I organized a meet-up during the 2014 World Innovation Forum for Education. The audience was small, but diverse and active. Participants came from Egypt, France, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, China, as well as Qatar, where the summit was held. A variety of mobile phones were used by participants of this session, including […]
Three Points to Consider for Education Financing
Why global education still needs a lot more funding I am pleased to participate in the Education Above All Plenary Session at the Sixth Annual World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE) on Wednesday, November 5, here in Doha, Qatar. The plenary session, entitled The Unfinished Agenda, aims to explore a number of issues around the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. A cross-cutting […]
What Is a Culture of Innovation and How Can We Build It?
Like many educators and organizational leaders around the globe, my organization is working hard to design and implement new approaches to education that we believe can be more effective for students than those we currently have in place. Through sheer force of will, many of these new ideas will have the chance to be tested […]
Video Games, Metacognition, and Learning: Lessons for Your Classroom
For many people, the image of teenagers clutching game controllers and staring at screens is troubling. However, it is not necessarily the fact that young people fill their idle time with playful entertainment that concerns adults. Instead, there is something disconcerting about the amount of focused energy that players dedicate to understanding and mastering the […]
Three Questions to Ask Before Choosing Technology for Education
Education technology is trendy. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t read an article or have a conversation in which someone makes the familiar argument that “education is the one industry that hasn’t embraced the technologies of the 21st century.” The world has changed – so the story goes – and while every other […]
Technology in Education: To Guide or Not to Guide
Latin American governments have been implementing a variety of initiatives to improve the quality of education in the last decades. In particular, they have invested heavily to introduce technology in schools. In the past few years, about 10 million laptops have been distributed to students in public schools in the region. Have these investments produced […]