iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

As the maker movement in culture moves from MacGyver jokes and what Noah did when Allie left him in The Notebook to something with a bit more academic and cognitive credibility, it has also begun to creep in to the education space.

As with any niche, there is specialized language–jargon–that may keep things murky for you. The 38 terms below by no means represent an exhaustive collection. (There are dozens of gadgets, circuit boards, and digital, robotic, and electrical wizardry we left on the cutting room flow.) But for most teachers in most circumstances, it should serve as a nice starting points.

Remember your seventh-grade Spanish class? Of course you do. But do you remember anything from it? You might’ve left off language-learning with decent proficiency at some point in your educational career, only to forget most of it with disuse in the years since. But picking up where you left off–or backtracking to the very beginning–isn’t a bad idea as an adult. In fact, trying to learn (or relearn) a language as an adult can help your brain in ways that spill over into the rest of your working life–even if you never actually become fluent. Here’s how.

You know the seconds and minutes you waste waiting for the elevator to arrive, for a friend to reply to an IM or for a website to load? A team of MIT CSAIL researchers believe you can put them to good use, so they created a series of apps called the WaitSuite that makes the most of those idle moments by helping you learn a new language. The tools can test your vocabulary without whisking you away to another app. For instance, if you're chatting with a friend, a flash card asking you about a word in the language you're learning will pop up within the IM itself. If you're waiting for a website to load, the card will appear within the browser.

A Six Nations school is doing its part to keep Indigenous languages alive in the most modern of ways — with an app.

As the maker movement in culture moves from MacGyver jokes and what Noah did when Allie left him in The Notebook to something with a bit more academic and cognitive credibility, it has also begun to creep in to the education space.

As with any niche, there is specialized language–jargon–that may keep things murky for you. The 38 terms below by no means represent an exhaustive collection. (There are dozens of gadgets, circuit boards, and digital, robotic, and electrical wizardry we left on the cutting room flow.) But for most teachers in most circumstances, it should serve as a nice starting points.