Innovation

Amy Peterson discusses research and the impact of multi-tiered systems of support in educational settings.

Explore expert insights from Jaime Singer on assessing and enhancing your child’s afterschool programs with practical, high-impact strategies.

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach talks about her experiences with professional learners and the communities and opportunities most impacting their work in classrooms all around the world.Sheryl is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of  Powerful Learning Practice,.

By Sean TrainorCommunity colleges have been at the forefront of nearly every major development in higher educationIn January of 2015, President Obama unveiled his “American College Promise” program – a plan to make two years of community college education available free of charge to “everyone who’s willing to work for it.” In offering the proposal, the president did not just venture a partial solution to the student debt crisis. He joined a growing community of thinkerswho see the community college as central to solving a wide variety of problems in higher education, from cost and inclusivity to career-preparedness and community engagement.

Interview Emily Liebtag, Ed.D talked with us about VIF International Education’s support of Connected Educator Month, the impact international educators can have here in US classrooms and how we can all get involved. If you would like to contribute your voice to the global discussion please visit What Does it Mean to be a Global Learner? Emily Liebtag, Ed.D is the Manager of Curriculum and Instructional Services at VIF International Education. Liebtag creates educational resources and professional development focused on global education. Liebtag taught in Durham Public Schools in North Carolina and has studied Elementary Education for the past 10 years. In addition to her work at VIF, she received her B.A. in Elementary Education and her M.Ed. in Science Education from UNC-Chapel Hill and is a Ed.D candidate in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia.

As always, our NPR Ed inboxes are clogged with press releases about the latest amazeballs app or product. Like the following, edited to protect the guilty:…an unprecedented new DOODLEHICKY app optimized for iPhone® and Android™ smartphones that includes real-time monitoring of a child’s learning progress. DOODLEHICKY is the tutoring program that fuses the most effective elements of personalized teaching with a fun and engaging iPad® and Android tablet-based experience for measurably improving student DOODLE performance.

Online education will grow up by scaling down. In spite of the practical and theoretical possibilities of e-learning, the very qualities that have enabled massive open online courses (or MOOCs) to serve prodigious numbers of learners—machine-graded assessment, prescriptive course design, and self-paced enrollment—have also tend to promote antiquated pedagogy, curtail student engagement, and preclude a sense of cohort. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Three decades ago, Chinese cities began turning rural land into industrial parks to attract foreign investors. Today, a new kind of project is blooming in China’s countryside: the vocational education park.Cities around China are carving out tracts of land for school parks – dubbed “education factories” – designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.

I recently had a chance to talk with renowned “rapping” math teacher Mark Rogers from Round Rock, Texas. Rogers shared the story of how he got his start in teaching and discussed the role humanity plays in his day-to-day activities with students. After watching the interview, check out the YouTube video displaying Mark’s creative side in education.