iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

As technology evolves, so does its role in industry and society. Its impact is felt across nearly all industries with education being one of the highlights with record worldwide investment in EdTech companies in 2018 so far. With an increase in educational technology-based solution providers, families are increasingly becoming involved in their children’s education. Independent learning methods facilitated by technology allow children to have a more personalized experience as well as allowing for more transparency for parents to monitor progress and even learn together. Here are 5 impacts of educational technology on families:

So what is the “right way” when it comes to using makerspaces? And now that they have been established in schools all across the globe, how can we measure the impact that makerspaces have on student learning and achievement?

My sense is we might also need to rethink dominant approaches to teaching kids to code in this emerging context of fake news and computational propaganda.

As the “Homeland” plot indicates, coding skills can be put to all kinds of purposes. Media-literate young programmers with extreme political views may not have quite the power that “Homeland” suggests. But, as the brilliant and terrifying 2016 documentary film “Zero Days” has shown, the cyber-warfare plots of “Homeland” may not be far from the reality.

Which is why it strikes me that the learning to code movement needs to be clearer in its commitment to new forms of digital literacy and digital citizenship education. England was one of the first countries to embed coding in the curriculum for all schools. For many of its original advocates, knowing how computers, code and algorithms work would be valuable for informed citizenship.

The reality, though, is that coding in the curriculum, and many other learning to code schemes, have tended to overemphasize either economically valuable skills for the software engineering sector, or high-status academic computer science knowledge and skills. There has been far too little focus on enabling young people to appreciate the social consequences of code and algorithms.