In the two decades that Jennifer Merriman has been in education, she’s seen a tendency in the field to solve problems by piling more tasks onto teachers who are already straining under the weight of their workloads. That ultimately works against what researchers say is one of the most important pillars of a school’s success: the well-being of its teachers. Findings from the University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre are detailed in a new report commissioned by the International Baccalaureate Organization, where Merriman is the global director of research, policy and design. “If workload is ..read more

In a time when technological advancements shape our daily lives and drive economic growth, focusing on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education in K-12 schools is not just a trend but a necessity. Initiatives like the U.S. Department of Education's YOU Belong in STEM and the National Science Foundation's vision for the STEM Education of the Future underscore a national commitment to equipping students with the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in a tech-centric world, ensuring equitable access to opportunities that foster innovation and sustain the economy. As the ..read more

This was originally published by Early Learning Nation ..read more

Since the sudden rise of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, many teachers and professors have started using AI detectors to check their students’ work. The idea is that the detectors will catch if a student has had a robot do their work for them. The approach is controversial, though, since these AI detectors have been shown to return false positives — asserting in some cases that text is AI-generated even when the student did all the work themselves without any chatbot assistance. The false positives seem to happen more frequently with students who don’t speak English as their first language. S ..read more

Viridiana Martinez’s family immigrated twice when she was in elementary school — once, from Mexico to Canada, and a second time to the United States. With each move, she had to learn a new language and adjust to a different culture. During those transitions, Martinez was both challenged and uplifted, often by kind teachers and mentors whom she met at school. Now a college graduate, the 21-year-old is channeling her lived experiences into a career path. This fall, Martinez will become a bilingual teacher for students in kindergarten through eighth grade in Morgan Hill, a small city near San Jos ..read more

Nikita Dutt, a second-year student at the University of California, Davis, didn’t come to college to work with young children. But since September, she’s spent a couple of hours per day as a tutor through the California Volunteers College Corps, a state-funded partnership program that places college students into paid internships. She earns $700 per month, provided she tutors elementary students for at least 20 hours per two weeks. She works on math with students in Los Angeles and San Francisco, beamed in through a host program that uses virtual-first tutoring. Sometimes, Dutt says, it can be ..read more

Texas is turning over some of the scoring process of its high-stakes standardized tests to robots. News outlets have detailed the rollout by the Texas Education Agency of a natural language processing program, a form of artificial intelligence, to score the written portion of standardized tests administered to students in third grade and up. Like many AI-related projects, the idea started as a way to cut the cost of hiring humans. Texas found itself in need of a way to score exponentially more written responses on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, after a new law ..read more

Balloon archways surrounded the stage as the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Alberto Carvalho, last month announced what he hailed as a pioneering use of artificial intelligence in education. It’s a chatbot called “Ed” — an animated talking sun — which he described as: “our nation’s very first AI-powered learning-acceleration platform.” More than 26 members of local and national media were on hand for the splashy announcement (a detail that Carvalho noted in his remarks), and the event also featured a human dressed in a costume of the shiny animated character of Ed ..read more

The advancements in technology are reshaping how we teach and learn, bringing new opportunities and challenges. To address such challenges, a concerted effort must be made to ensure that newer technologies are implemented thoughtfully and responsibly, with a focus on enhancing the educational experience for all students. Collaboration and open dialogue are key as we navigate this terrain, ensuring innovation meets the needs of today's educational institutions. In almost every collaboration or discussion around what educators, schools and institutions need from their educational technology, thr ..read more

When pueblos in New Mexico looked into running fiber into Jemez Day School, a K-6 school run by the Bureau of Indian Education, they were launching a complicated process. Upgrading the school’s connection meant jumping through hoops, even though there was fiber across the street. Early on, the U.S. federal government’s E-Rate program, which provides “universal service” funding to schools and libraries for telecommunications and internet, also said it wouldn’t pay for another project. The program didn’t want to spend to bring fiber along the same path to tribal schools and libraries and the loc ..read more