iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

How to Build Social Closeness in a Time of Distancing An executive at a global company shared with me this week that they are launching a virtual coffee program at their company to help people feel connected working from home. This is a prime example of how to stand up a casual peer coaching program

In one of the episodes of “Brain Games with Jason Silva”, witnesses of a car crash are asked to estimate the speed of the car involved. Some estimated that the speed was about 10–20 mph, while some…

Jeopardy! has been on the air, in one form or another, since the 1960s. The modern Alex Trebek-hosted incarnation of the show—whose famous theme song is now in your head (sorry!)—began in 1984 and still airs about 230 episodes every year.

There is an art to a Jeopardy! clue. Its answers-in-search-of-questions exude a certain tone and tenor that’s different from trivia offerings from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, HQ, The Weakest Link, or even a throwback like You Bet Your Life. But the writer’s room is also a factory, one that must churn out 61 clues per episode, which adds up to hundreds of thousands of clues aired during the show’s long run.

As a society, we tend to focus a lot on answers. Answers are solutions to problems. We tend to give less prestige to questions. Everyone has them. They’re easy. It’s the answers that take the work.

This overlooks the power of questions. Asking questions gives you a better understanding of everything: the situation you are in, the challenges you are facing. Life.

"When new technologies become widespread, they often raise ethical questions. For example:

1. Weapons — who should be allowed own them?
2. Printing press — what should be allowed to be published?
3. Drones — where should they be allowed to go?

The answers to these questions normally come after the technologies have become common enough for issues to actually arise. As our technology becomes more powerful, the potential harms from new technologies will become larger. I believe we must shift from being reactive to being proactivewith respect to new technological dangers.

We need to start identifying the ethical issues and possible repercussions of our technologies before they arrive. Given that technology grows exponentially fast, we will have less and less time to consider the ethical implications."

When I ask teachers what their biggest struggles are, one issue comes up on a regular basis: student motivation. You are able to reach many of your students, but others are unreachable. No matter what you try, they have no interest in learning, no interest in doing quality work, and you are out of ideas.

For a long time, I had no solutions; the problem was too complex. I have had my own unmotivated students, and I never had any magic bullets for them. Still, the issue kept coming up from my readers.

So I decided to do some research, to try to find what the most current studies say about what motivates students. This is what I found:

In the age of information, factual answers are easy to find. Want to know who signed the Declaration of Independence? Google it. Curious about the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel, “The Scarlet Letter”? A quick Internet search will easily jog your memory. But while computers are great at spitting out answers, they aren’t very good at asking questions. But luckily, that’s where humans can excel.

Curiosity is baked into the human experience. Between the ages of 2 and 5, kids ask on average 40,000 questions, said Warren Berger, author of  “A More Beautiful Question,” at the Innovative Learning Conference hosted at the Nueva School. Young kids encounter something new, learn a little bit about it, get curious and then continue to add on a little more information with each new discovery. Warren says that’s where curiosity happens, in the gap between learning something and being exposed to something new.