iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Since we’re in the midst of the transformative impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the time is now to start preparing for the future of work. Even just five years from now, more than one-third of the skills we believe are essential for today's workforce will have changed according to the Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum. Fast-paced technological innovations mean that most of us will soon share our workplaces with artificial intelligences and bots, so how can you stay ahead of the curve? Start by adopting a commitment to lifelong learning so you can acquire the skills you will need to succeed in the future workplace. 

A new generation of AI-powered robots could help children learn digital-age skills—and may even encourage empathy, says U of A machine learning expert.

An education is supposed to prepare you for the future. Traditionally, that meant learning certain facts and skills, like when Columbus discovered America or how to do multiplication and long division. Today, curriculums have shifted to focus on a more global and digital world, like cultural history, basic computer skills and writing code.

Yet the challenges that our kids will face will be much different than we did growing up and many of the things a typical student learns in school today will no longer be relevant by the time he or she graduates college. In fact, a study at the University of Oxford found that 47% of today's jobs will be eliminated over the next 20 years.

In 10 or 20 years, much of what we "know" about the world will no longer be true. The computers of the future will not be digital. Software code itself is disappearing, or at least becoming far less relevant. Many of what are considered good jobs today will be either completely automated or greatly devalued. We need to rethink how we prepare our kids for the world to come.

In the last decade, educators have focused on boosting literacy skills among low-income kids in the hope that all children will read well by third grade. But the early-grade math skills of these same low-income children have not received equal attention. Researchers say many high-poverty kindergarten classrooms don’t teach enough math and the few lessons on the subject are often too basic. While instruction may challenge kids with no previous exposure to math, it is often not engaging enough for the growing number of kindergarteners with some math skills.

During the last school year, only 40 percent of fourth-graders nationwide scored at a proficient level in a nationwide math assessment. Even more alarming, just 26 percent of Hispanic students and 19 percent of African-American children tested proficient in fourth-grade math. That is significant because strong math skills are needed for some of the fastest growing jobs of the next decade and are requirements for many of the highest paying jobs. Understanding and being able to work with numbers “is a fundamental skill for success in almost any occupation you might choose,” said economist Greg J. Duncan of the University of California Irvine’s School of Education, whose research examines child poverty and education. “It leads to the analytic, higher-level thinking that’s increasingly important.”

Dan Russell's Search ReSearch blog is my go-to resource for learning new strategies and for ideas on teaching search. His search challenge blog posts always provide a new way to think about search. At the end of May he conducted a survey of his readers. The survey was to determine what readers of Search ReSearch think are the most important search skills and attitudes toward search. The results of the survey were posted last week.

In today’s day and age, Google, Twitter and Pinterest are three of the largest employers in the United States and internationally. Are students gaining the skills that one might need to eventually apply to one of those tech giants, if they chose to do so? In the year 2017, what hard and soft skills should students be developing in order to succeed in the 21st century workplace? What about in the year 2020? 2050?

Let’s stick with the “now,” for a moment. In a recent interview, EdSurge explored which skill sets lead to career success for students—but we didn’t talk to anyone in K-12 or higher education. In fact, we interviewed three individuals—Alexandrea Alphonso, Ryan Greenberg, and Trisha Quan—from each of those aforementioned tech companies.

While the thoughts and feelings of each of the folks we interviewed do not represent the opinions of their employers, each of these technology leaders offered their thoughts in this exclusive Q&A on equity and access, areas that formal education didn’t prepare them for, and their advice for teachers working to prepare students for an ever-changing workplace.

If you’re a new iPhone user, there are a few skills you should learn to get the most out of your new device. In time, you can move onto the cool hidden features, but grasping the basics first is vital. Here are a handful of iOS basics that all iPhone or iPad owners should know.

This skills-based jobs approach matters at a time when there is a push to improve the circumstances of those left behind in the American economy, many of whom voted for President Trump.

“We desperately need to revive a second route to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees, as manufacturing once was,” said Robert Reich, a labor secretary in the Clinton administration who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “We have to move toward a system that works.”

The skills-based concept is gaining momentum, with nonprofit organizations, schools, state governments and companies, typically in partnerships, beginning to roll out such efforts. On Wednesday, the approach received a strong corporate endorsement from Microsoft, which announced a grant of more than $25 million to help Skillful, a program to foster skills-oriented hiring, training and education. The initiative, led by the Markle Foundation, began last year in Colorado, and Microsoft’s grant will be used to expand it there and move it into other states.

So what next? Well, the chances are that at least part of the answer could be sitting right by you. They’re called ‘women’. You may have heard of them. And it’s time they were a much bigger part of the UK’s tech sector.

Developing skills for collaboration is a critical component for our students for their future. It is so important that educators provide opportunities for students to work together in our classrooms so that they can develop the necessary skills for working on a team which will also enable students to build social-emotional learning (SEL) skills. As we think about the importance of social-emotional learning and its role not only in education but in the future, this is why we must be intentional about finding ways to engage our students more by learning from one another in their classroom and beyond.

There is so much potential for having students work in teams or in small groups in the classroom. Technology can be an important component of these collaborations by creating access to more resources. There are many great opportunities for students to use digital tools available that help to create extra time in the day and offer various ways for students to collaborate beyond the time and space of the classroom, by fostering connections with other students in classrooms around the world.

Here's the start to an interesting story: a Google program manager, a Twitter engineer, and a Pinterest employee walk into a bar. What are they there to discuss? The skills that K-12 and higher education students should know.

But in reality, it’s not a bar. It’s the EdSurge podcast.

In today’s day and age, Google, Twitter and Pinterest are three of the largest employers in the United States and internationally. Are students gaining the skills that one might need to eventually apply to one of those tech giants, if they chose to do so? In the year 2017, what hard and soft skills should students be developing in order to succeed in the 21st century workplace? What about in the year 2020? 2050?

Let’s stick with the “now,” for a moment. In a recent interview, EdSurge explored which skill sets lead to career success for students—but we didn’t talk to anyone in K-12 or higher education. In fact, we interviewed three individuals—Alexandrea Alphonso, Ryan Greenberg, and Trisha Quan—from each of those aforementioned tech companies.

While the thoughts and feelings of each of the folks we interviewed do not represent the opinions of their employers, each of these technology leaders offered their thoughts in this exclusive Q&A on equity and access, areas that formal education didn’t prepare them for, and their advice for teachers working to prepare students for an ever-changing workplace.

Twenty million students started college this fall, and this much is certain: The vast majority of them will be taking on debt — a lot of debt.

What's less certain is whether their degrees will pay off.

According to the survey Freelancing in America 2018, released Wednesday, freelancers put more value on skills training: 93 percent of freelancers with a four-year college degree say skills training was useful versus only 79 percent who say their college education was useful to the work they do now. In addition, 70 percent of full-time freelancers participated in skills training in the past six months compared to only 49 percent of full-time non-freelancers.

For those keeping count, the world is now entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. That’s the term coined by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, to describe a time when new technologies blur the physical, digital and biological boundaries of our lives.

Every generation confronts the challenges of preparing its kids for an uncertain future. Now, for a world that will be shaped by technologies like artificial intelligence, 3D printing and bioengineering, how should society prepare its current students (and tomorrow’s workforce)?

Chances are your job description has changed over the past five years. Or maybe your role didn’t even exist a short time ago. The workplace of today and the future looks quite different due to technology, the economy, the environment, and politics, according to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a not-for-profit think tank that helps organizations plan for the future.

The evolving workplace is creating a skills divide, says Adam Miller, CEO of Cornerstone, a talent management software and systems provider that partnered with IFTF to create a future skills study. “We have a very large group of jobs that require relatively few high-level skills, and a lot of those jobs will become obsolete in the future, being automated away,” he says. “On the flip side, highly technical jobs are wide open because there aren’t enough people with the skills to fill them. Whether or not employees recognize it, the half-life of their skills is shorter than it used to be.”

If you want to compete and stay relevant in the marketplace, you’ve got to master five “super skills,” according to IFTF:

Summer is almost here and it's a great time to learn a new skill that you can bring into your classroom next fall. One of the skills that seems to be mentioned in almost every education periodical these days is programming or coding. Learning to program isn't as difficult as you might think that is. Each of the following services make it relatively easy to learn to program your own apps. As you learn to program your own app, you'll start to see how your students can do the same and use those skills in your classroom next fall.

There is a deep mismatch between the skills our education systems nurture and the needs of society.

In a typical Western education system, results indicated that “since 1990, even as IQ scores have risen, creative thinking scores have significantly decreased”. Traditional education does not sufficiently value innovative and entrepreneurial thinking – our system even dumbs down the creative genius that we were born with, according to a test developed by NASA.

Yet creative skills and mindsets are indispensable in a workforce that must be responsive to change and capable of finding new solutions to complex problems. The World Economic Forum itself has identified social abilities such as coordinating with others and persuasion, as well as complex problem-solving skills, as essential in the knowledge-based workplace of the near future.

We live in the times of autonomous cars, reusable rockets and artificial intelligence, yet we are still teaching in an education system that was set up for factory workers some 200 years ago. What we should be doing instead is to focus on skill-building and setting any learner – be it in compulsory education or in lifelong learning – up for success.

When preparing students to be ready for the future, the focus often is on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills. But, in a podcast with employees from Google, Pinterest and Twitter, EdSurge found that those in the tech industry believe students need skills beyond just technical expertise.

“I think the one thing to keep in mind is that it’s impossible to say what technical skills people are going to need in 10 or 20 years,” says Ryan Greenberg, a software engineer at Twitter. “I think that necessary job skills actually have to be a little bit higher level than specific technology.”

We gathered four key takeaways from what Greenberg, Google for Education program manager Drea Alphonso and Pinterest software engineer Trisha Quan say are the best skills future-ready students can have.

We’re all getting used to the thought that in a not-so-distant future, competition for jobs won’t just be other humans, it will also be an intelligent robot, self-driving car, or other artificial agent. But in our gut, we know this can’t be the full truth, that there’s a more nuanced story. We at least believe that elite human skills will remain valuable even as automation eats the world. The hard part is figuring out which ones will be the most valuable and where they will be the most prized.

Losing your job to robots is no longer a sci-fi fantasy. Here are eight skills that can keep your job from being handed off to a robot.