In the Holistic Me program at Coleman, “which focuses on prekindergarden through fifth-grade students,” administrators already noticed a difference in the first year. “Instead of the students fighting or lashing out,” says principal Carlillian Thompson in the video above, they started to use words to solve their problems.” None of the students in the program have received suspensions or detentions, and many have become leaders and high achievers.

...Using these techniques, students learn to resolve conflicts peacefully and to reduce the amount of emotional turmoil in their lives. Rather than further alienating or traumatizing already stressed-out kids, this kind of intervention prepares them for academic and social resilience.

It might sound strange, but in a fast-paced classroom, teachers at Crooked Creek say just having their students close their eyes and listen for a minute can help them improve their ability to focus. It’s part of the school’s efforts to incorporate the tenets of the growing academic field known as “educational neuroscience” into the classroom.

...The idea is to introduce both teachers and students to a basic understanding of how the brain works. If teachers have an idea of what’s going on behind the bad behavior, they can more effectively reach their students because they know it might not just be a child choosing to be defiant or difficult. When students know how parts of their brains work, they might better understand why they might feel frustrated or aggressive. That can help them develop strategies to lower stress so they can work to improve behavior in the future.

In 2007 a meditation programme called Quiet Time was brought in to meet some of these challenges. “When I first heard about it I thought it probably wasn’t going to work,” says O’Driscoll. “We get thrown a new thing every couple of years so I didn’t put too much faith in it.” But in April, just a month after meditation began, teachers noticed changes in behaviour. “Students seemed happy,” says O’Driscoll. “They worked harder, paid more attention, were easier to teach and the number of fights fell dramatically.”
In the first year of Quiet Time suspensions at Visitacion Valley – which has 500 students aged 11-13 – were reduced by 45% (pdf). By 2009-10, attendance rates were over 98% (some of the highest in the city), and today 20% of graduates are admitted to the highly academic Lowell high school – before it was rare for even one student to be accepted. Perhaps even more remarkable, last year’s California Healthy Kids Survey from the state’s education department found that students at Visitacion Valley middle school were the happiest in the whole of San Francisco.

Now, 12 years later, he believes he has revealed the footprint of a bustling iron boom town from the 1200s - and he does not regret his decision.

...Since then he has spent £180,000 in total on the site and enlisted the help of hundreds of volunteers to dig each summer since 2005. 

​They have uncovered eight buildings, including a fortified manor house and various outbuildings which would have sat alongside the medieval city's market.

The season had not started well. The archaeologists were part of a group of close to three dozen researchers digging near the ancient Palace of Nestor, on a hilltop near Pylos on the southwest coast of Greece. The palace was built in the Bronze Age by the Mycenaeans—the heroes described in Homer’s epic poems—and was first excavated in the 1930s. ​The dig’s leaders, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, husband-and-wife archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio, had hoped to excavate in a currant field just downslope from the palace, but Greek bureaucracy and a lawyers’ strike kept them from obtaining the necessary permits. So they settled, disappointed, on a neighboring olive grove. They cleared the land of weeds and snakes and selected a few spots to investigate, including three stones that appeared to form a corner. As the trench around the stones sank deeper, the researchers allowed themselves to grow eager: The shaft’s dimensions, two meters by one meter, suggested a grave, and Mycenaean burials are famous for their breathtakingly rich contents, able to reveal volumes about the culture that produced them. Still, there was no proof that this structure was even ancient, the archaeologists reminded themselves, and it might simply be a small cellar or shed.

Dibble was clearing earth from around a large stone slab when his pick hit something hard and the monotony of the clay was broken by a vivid flash of green: bronze.

...Over the next six months, the archaeologists uncovered bronze basins, weapons and armor, but also a tumble of even more precious items, including gold and silver cups; hundreds of beads made of carnelian, amethyst, amber and gold; more than 50 stone seals intricately carved with goddesses, lions and bulls; and four stunning gold rings. This was indeed an ancient grave, among the most spectacular archaeological discoveries in Greece in more than half a century—and the researchers were the first to open it since the day it was filled in.

..a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet.... Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from.
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The assessments reflected key understandings the students should possess such as being able to find out who wrote a story and whether that source is credible. The authors drew on the expertise of teachers, university researchers, librarians and news experts to come up with 15 age-appropriate tests -- five each for middle school, high school and college levels.

"In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation," the authors wrote.

Michael Lynch, a philosopher who studies technological change, observed that the Internet is “both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer—often at the same time.” Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.

Fake news is no longer a matter of the occasional hoax. There is growing evidence that fake news has the power to shape public opinion and even sway elections. As more Americans get their news online, it is increasingly vital that students know how to verify sources and spot fake news or images, which often appear indistinguishable from a reliable source. This lesson asks students to analyze the consequences of fake news and build the skills needed to question and verify what they view online.

Now with software, we can begin to deliver on Benjamin Bloom’s dream: help teachers identify and meet the needs of each student so that all students can master important concepts. Too often, students struggle in calculus due to gaps in their algebra skills, or in algebra because they never fully mastered fractions. A tool like Khan Academy can provide students with unlimited practice and instructional support for each skill so they can be sure they’ve truly mastered a concept before moving on. And we offer teachers data on how their students are doing so they can identify gaps and provide tailored instruction. That way they can spend less time making differentiated worksheets for each student and more time interacting with and inspiring their students. After all, nothing beats getting more quality time with an incredible teacher.

The term “adaptive” actually covers a number of characteristics in software (indeed, the term is applied quite liberally in marketing new tools). Traditionally, adaptive learning tools focus on the following components (PDF): “monitoring the activities of its users; interpreting these on the basis of domain-specific models; inferring user requirements and preferences out of the interpreted activities, appropriately representing these in associated models; and, finally, acting upon the available knowledge on its users and the subject matter at hand, to dynamically facilitate the learning process.”
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In other words, adaptive software focuses on the domain – the information that’s supposed to be taught; on the student’s responses – often using “bayesian algorithms” to determine the likelihood of a student getting the next question right or wrong; and on the instruction – what sorts of hints or feedback a student might need to move forward.

1. Students who spent more time on the DreamBox software saw larger gains in achievement, and those who followed the company's lesson recommendations saw faster gains.DreamBox operates by engaging students in math lessons, gauging their progress then recommending other DreamBox lessons in order to, theoretically, optimize mastery. Following these suggestions, Harvard found, helps students more so than repeating previous lessons.
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2. Researchers wrote, "The DreamBox progress measure was positively associated with achievement gains on state tests and other interim assessments." Measuring students beginning the year at the 50th percentile in math scores, Harvard found that Rocketship students reached the 54th percentile by the end of the year and that HCPSS students advanced to the between the 54th and 55th percentile. The measured students were using DreamBox the average amount for their schools.

Training and educating customers is one of the best ways to build relationships and develop customer loyalty. It not only provides valuable information to your customers to show them how to use the product, but it also can show them more ways to use your products than they could have previously thought.

The real-world application of a garden to practice math, language arts, science, and all other subjects gives students a reason to learn. Garden-based activities have the potential to engage students in a variety of ways, allowing students to incorporate their own interests and experiences into the class. The hands-on aspect of the school garden is essential in encouraging positive attitudes towards learning. 
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In an evaluation of 7 qualitative school garden studies, all 7 found that children enjoy garden activities and are more excited about learning and school in general when engaged in a garden-based curriculum. In a garden pilot project by Heim, Stang, and Ireland, 95.6% of participating children said they enjoyed working in the garden, 91.3% enjoyed learning about fruits and vegetables, 97.8% enjoyed taste-testing different fruits and vegetables, and 93.4% enjoyed preparing fruit and veggie snacks. Faddegon also found children were excited by the chance to get dirty and explore the garden. Studies by Dirks & Orvis and Murphy & Schweers reported heightened interest and excitement for learning, more positive attitudes toward school, and better interpersonal relationships among students. This improved sociability has the added benefit of building student motivation to learn by encouraging frequent discussion with fellow students.

A three-year, external evaluation of the REAL School Gardens program, conducted by PEER Associates, Inc., found 94 percent of teachers said their students were more engaged as a result of the gardens program. Additionally, 90 percent said the program made them better prepared to help students succeed. ​

In science, it’s often the space between disciplines that yields important developments. For example:

• Chemistry and molecular biology: screening molecules that activate bio-pathways
• Ecology and evolutionary biology: the history and future of biodiversity
• Big data and genomics: biological process modeling and mapping
• Engineering and biology: regenerative health solutions
• Machine learning and cognitive psychology: the tutor that learns you

That’s the argument by officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which on Wednesday announced a plan to create what it calls an "inverted admissions" process, starting with a pilot project within a master’s program in supply-chain management.

Students who do well in a series of free online courses and a related online examination offered through MIT’s MOOC project, MITx, will "enhance their chances" of being accepted to the on-site master’s program, according to a university statement. Students who come to the program after first taking the MOOCs will then essentially place out of the first half of the coursework, so they can finish the degree in a semester rather than an academic year. That effectively makes the master’s program half the usual price.

L. Rafael Reif, president of MIT, said in an interview on Wednesday that he hopes the new twist on admissions will lead to a broader pool of applicants. "We will find people who never thought they would be able to apply," he said. Such students might take the free online courses "because why not?" he adds, "and they will discover that they are much stronger in the global competition than they think."

George Siemens, the academic who offered one of the very first MOOCs and who coined the term, which stands for massive open online courses, applauded MIT’s admissions experiment. "We’re just starting to see the impact in education of the Internet on the legacy structure of higher education," he said. "This reflects an accessibility mind shift," he added.

“We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said no. Books are sharks,” Gaiman told a packed audience at the Royal Geographical Society in London.“I must have looked baffled because he he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.”Adams told Gaiman: “‘Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books and no matter what happens books will survive.’ And he was right,” said Gaiman.“Ebooks are much better at being two or more books and a newspaper, at the same time. Ebooks are great at being bookshelves, which is why they are great on trains. It’s also why the encyclopaedia proved not to be a shark, but to be a plesiosaur.”And stories, said Gaiman, “aren’t books. Books are simply one of the many storage mechanisms in which stories can be kept. People are one of the other storage mechanisms for stories. And stories, like life forms, change.”

“I like the feeling of it,” Schembari said, reading under natural light in a campus atrium, his smartphone next to him. “I like holding it. It’s not going off. It’s not making sounds.”

"If they want to read their e-textbook most students are stuck reading it on their clunky laptop. The phone experience is awful for larger format, fixed-layout textbooks and probably not that effective for reflowable ones."And Wikert thinks the most important point is this:

"Most of these e-textbooks are nothing more than a print-under-glass experience. They're a digital replica of the print edition with no real digital features. The Kindle editions certainly don't leverage the capabilities of the smart devices they're read on, for example. Until the market evolves from today's mostly print replica model and offers compelling reasons for students to go digital, including a more attractive price point, we're unlikely to see movement away from print textbooks."