Capstone: An ESRM Coda

It’s easy to imagine a kid learning coding being stuck in front of a computer for the rest of their lives. However, that doesn’t have to be the case! In fact, coding experience can open up many opportunities and make your child more marketable when they start applying for awards, scholarships, and even jobs! In the digital age, there are plenty of ways for kids to learn coding, free. 

Coding also allows your kid to creatively express him or herself. Your child has an idea for a game? They should make it! Your child has an idea for a website? They should design it! The possibilities are endless when it comes to coding and there are FREE apps, websites, and activities available to kids of all ages.

As the coronavirus continues to spread across the country, students are coming into class with misconceptions about the outbreak—and teachers are trying to figure out how best to explain the facts and debunk rumors.  

Some teachers have made COVID-19 a focus of their lessons.

Discussing the origin and effects of a new virus easily lends itself to science class. But teachers in other subjects—like algebra, statistics, and media literacy—have found ways to address the topic, too. 

Designing a lesson around the outbreak could be a helpful way to answer students' questions and calm fears, said Stephen Brock, a professor and coordinator of the school psychology program at California State University, Sacramento. 

And if students have misconceptions about the virus or how it spreads, providing more information could help kids more accurately gauge threat, he said. 

David Peña-Guzmán starts off his Friday class at San Francisco State University like any other professor might: students file in and pull out thei

PISA scores were recently released, and results of the international test revealed that only 14 percent of U.S. students were able to reliably distinguish between fact and opinion.

This is particularly alarming because we live in an era when, according to Pew Research Center, 68 percent of American adults get their news from social media—platforms where opinion is often presented as fact. While Facebook and other social media outlets have pledged to tackle fake news, the results are lackluster.

Even on seemingly-serious websites, credibility is not a given. When I was in middle and high school, we were taught that we could trust .org websites. Now, with the practice of astroturfing, responsible consumers of information must dig deeper and go further to verify the legitimacy of information.

As a former middle and high school classroom teacher, my first thought is: What can I do to fix this? With social media so tightly woven into the fabric of society, it is unrealistic to think that I can get people to stop using it to obtain information. And, frankly, I’m part of that 68 percent.

So, if we won’t stop getting information from these sources, what is the next best option? We, as educators and parents, must consider how to make a difference.

We can take on the task of educating our students how to distinguish fact from opinion and how to identify false or biased information

This is the latest report in our annual series exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation.

"The fastest way to learn something new — a language, a concept, or an instrument — hinges on how hard it is, according to a study published in November 2019. If a task is too easy or tough to tackle, learners become bored or frustrated, and outcomes suffer.

Optimal learning happens when learners make errors about 15 percent of the time, the study suggested."

What if you saw the Internet's most-read stories all at once. This infographic shows what the internet thinks about based on the most popular media.

As educators, we hold a captive audience with our students. Our fear becomes our students’ fear, and our calm becomes their calm. Of course this is a burden that we have to carry. When most of us signed up to be teachers or administrators, we didn’t think that we would have to lead our students through events like 9/11, natural disasters, school shootings, and pandemics. But we do, and the reality is that this a burden we have to carry. We hold captive audiences whether we like it or not.

Mixkit is a free gallery of extraordinary stock video clips, astounding stock music tracks and remarkable video templates.

This is the age of misinformation and fake news. Here are the best unbiased fact-checking sites so that you can find the truth.

The world's top communicators have stopped using PowerPoint. Why are you stuck in the 1980s?

The public beta version of the Media Bias Chart (version 5.0) is now live. See where the news sources fall on the map of the media landscape.