Education Technology, Continuing Education
Article | August 8, 2022
Since some schools across the UK have started to re-open in phases, it’s opened up a whole new set of questions for families. What will it be like for our kids? How will my child adjust to school after months at home? As well as adjusting academically to full-time education again, the emotional impact will be big too.
We spoke to NHS Senior Clinical Psychologist, Dr Shreena Ghelani, about how parents can help their get kids ready to return to school, whenever that might be. Here’s what she had to say:
Prepare in advance
Before it’s time for them to go back, keep school in the minds of your kids – drive past the school if you can so that they can see that it’s still there.
When they’ve been given a return date, treat it like the beginning of the school year. Do a test run of getting ready in the morning, make sure school uniform fits, practice packing bags and walking the route to school.
For younger children, they may need a settling in period again – parents may have to come into the classroom and ensure their child is settled.
For teenagers – use the time while they’re still at home to keep their friendships alive by video call etc. This will help make returning back to their peer group feel less unfamiliar.
One step at a time
Even when school re starts, you may find that children are more tired than usual by the extra demands and sensory stimulation placed on them. Ease them back in to their routine gently and wait to start other activities (clubs and activities) in a few weeks time.
Manage expectations
When the time comes, you’ll find you’ll feel less stressed if you know there will be bumps in the road.
Allow enough space and time in a new schedule for any hiccups so that you’re not having to manage too many demands (i.e batch cook dinners before hand, don’t agree to extra activities or if possible, adopt flexible working hours).
Try to notice if you’re feeling anxious about the return to school in any way and if so, spend some time thinking about it and unpicking it. If children pick up on your anxieties they may feel anxious too.
Managing worry and anxiety
If you know your child might struggle with going back to school, try developing a toolbox of things they can do when they are worried at school. This might include a song to sing to them selves, visualising a calm place, some affirmation cards, practicing a breathing techniques and identifying safe staff they can tell. You can make this box together and the child can take some bits with them to school.
Speak to your children about the impact of Coronavirus
Let children know that it is likely that other families have been impacted by the virus (whether that’s key worker parents working hard, or family bereavements). Encourage your child to be patient with and kind to other children. Talk to them about what they might still be expected to do – not hug friends, wash their hands often, not share food or toys etc.
For any children with special educational needs, they might need adaptations made for them. This might include visiting the school while it’s empty to familiarise them with the space, a video call with their teacher or a more phased return than other pupils – whatever’s best for them.
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Online Education
Article | July 19, 2022
After almost two years of disruption due to the pandemic, our ongoing recovery has highlighted the value of embracing change and working much more flexibly than before, refusing to give up at the first hurdle and a willingness to work together to achieve a common goal. These transferable skills are becoming ever more important for us to thrive in our increasingly automated world, and they are skills that can be developed and embedded through the medium of mathematics.
Fluency, reasoning, and problem-solving are the three foundations of our mathematics curriculum. By valuing them all, we will ensure that our future workforce has the confidence and skills to work together much more effectively to solve problems, overcome hurdles, and sustain our recovery. Let’s begin with fluency. Although AI is becoming increasingly prevalent, benefiting both our social and working lives, we still need number skills, perhaps now more than ever. Too many high-profile technology projects have failed due to basic mathematical errors. We need our education system to nurture the types of number skills needed in industry, especially a much greater focus on using and applying number skills. We must encourage students to develop their confidence in estimating quantities and a willingness to check calculations, even when they’ve used a spreadsheet or calculator.
From NASA’s disintegrating space probes to trains that don’t fit their platforms and submarines that are just too big, the tech world is littered with avoidable, costly mistakes. Acquiring number fluency means developing a ‘feel’ for numbers so that we can easily spot when something is not quite right; the NASA probe disintegrated due to a simple error converting units, the trains would not fit because no-one checked the platform sizes, and the submarines needed refitting due to an error entering spreadsheet error. Each of those three were incredibly costly, totalling millions, if not billions of pounds, but they were all avoidable too. We must nurture a willingness to estimate and develop a ‘feel’ for numbers, known as ‘number sense,’ alongside the more traditional approach of performing more formal calculations when needed. After all, few people head to the shops armed with a pencil, squared paper, and a ruler in readiness to calculate their change at the cash register.
We need to value number sense and rethink our expectations of the primary curriculum.
Encouraging a different approach towards the teaching and learning of mathematics may also help to address the gender imbalance in the subject. If you filled a room with a hundred math professors, the chances are that less than ten would be female. However, female mathematicians have played key roles in the fight against COVID. Mathematical modellers such as Professor Julia Gog, based at the University of Cambridge, drew on her research as an adviser to the government’s SAGE committee.
Nevertheless, even though more students study A-Level mathematics than any other subject, few female students choose to apply to study mathematics at university. My own research with female A-Level candidates reveals their preference for careers which help others and contribute towards a better society.
However, they often do not appreciate how studying mathematics might help them to realise their dreams by helping thousands, if not millions, of others through research on climate change, medicine, and networks.
We know that the gender gap in mathematical performance starts at a young age, and researchers have suggested that the changing expectations in the curriculum as students progress through their schooling might dissuade girls from continuing to study mathematics at a higher level. At primary school, pupils are expected to master written calculations such as long division and long multiplication to achieve ‘age-related expectations.’ However, to progress further, they also need to be able to solve problems, and this seems to be the point where female students lose out.
It has been argued that the switch from being rewarded for learning procedures to solving problems favours boys over girls, and the persistent gender gap in results for higher-achieving primary pupils appears to add weight to that argument. Effort are being made to encourage more females to consider studying mathematics, including the Maths 4 Girls project which organises school visits from female role models and the careers arm of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications which organises poster competitions to encourage more school students to think carefully about studying mathematics, both projects which I support. Yet more needs to be done.
Our curriculum and assessment system are designed to value number sense, estimating and problem-solving skills and perhaps rethink the time schools devote to rehearsing written calculations. Otherwise, we risk overlooking the huge potential of our current female students to contribute and build on the work of their predecessors, including Florence Nightingale, Mary Boole, Ada Lovelace, and Julia Gog, among many others.
To continue our recovery from COVID and rebuild our economy, we must embrace the potential of mathematics for developing and embedding the skills and attitudes that our students will need to thrive in their increasingly automated world: a willingness to "play" with numbers, estimate and check their answers; an enthusiasm for solving problems and working together; and an understanding that it’s OK to get stuck sometimes. We can overcome the hurdles that we face by working together as a team.
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Education Technology
Article | July 15, 2022
What role will artificial intelligence play in the future of education? For educators, AI can feel like an exciting development — or a terrifying unknown.
AI technology is advancing quickly and creating solutions once thought impossible. It’s widely available in various technologies and, in many places, already being integrated into the classroom. The pandemic spurred the development of educational technology out of necessity, including the development of AI. Suddenly, educators needed ways to obtain more information virtually.
“We were starting to work on AI during the pandemic, but it sped up because there was a huge demand for it. All these things were happening online, and teachers were saying. I don’t know what’s happening in my classroom anymore."
- Mike Tholfsen, principal group product manager at Microsoft Education
With educators busier than ever, Tholfsen says, the greatest benefit AI can offer them is time. AI programs can gather data teachers would traditionally have to gather themselves manually.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Trying to define artificial intelligence is a bit like asking about the meaning of life: You will get a slightly different answer from everyone. At its core, AI is an area of computer science addressing the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers.
Michelle Zimmerman, a classroom teacher, researcher and school leader at Renton Prep Christian School in Washington state and author of the book Teaching AI: Exploring New Frontiers for Learning, notes that psychologists and neurologists in the field don’t even agree on what counts as human intelligence.
The definition also changes over time. Not too long ago, simple calculators were considered AI, while the term now is associated with a variety of innovative technologies, such as those that power content filtering and endpoint security.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning: What’s the Difference?
Though not all AI involves machine learning, it is a popular subcategory of the technology. Machine learning refers to machines that process vast amounts of data and also have the capacity to get better at it the more they “learn,” Zimmerman says.
“You can train models with machine learning to improve things. An example is speech-to-text technology,” Tholfsen says.
“Machine learning needs a lot of data to train it to look for patterns and understand what it is looking for. The more data, the more refined or accurate the results. The results, though, are only as good as the data included,” Zimmerman says.
How Can AI Be Used in K–12 Education?
AI is already playing a role in many classrooms and has promising benefits that can be integrated now and in the future.
Intelligent tutors
What if an AI program could play the role of a teacher or coach, leading students through lessons and even motivating them? Nancye Black, founder of the Block Uncarved and project lead for ISTE’s AI Explorations program, says AI can support learners in a variety of ways. As a Columbia University researcher, she’s exploring how avatar interactions impact students. “There is some really promising research around the use of AI agents supporting girls and students of color, who are able to — in a lower-risk situation — ask for help and have social learning, even when they are learning independently,” Black says.
Reading workshops
If educators could host reading workshops around the classroom with each individual student, they would. Instead, AI-powered products such as Microsoft’s Immersive Reader can help educators focus on improving education for the 1 in 7 learners who have a disability, Tholfsen says. The product uses text decoding solutions to individualize instruction.
"Machine learning needs a lot of data to train it to look for patterns and understand what it is looking for. The more data, the more refined or accurate the results.”
- Michelle Zimmerman Classroom Teacher, Researcher and School Leader, Renton Prep Christian School
Translation capabilities
Translation technology is improving quickly, and these tools include more dialects and language nuances every day. A teacher in New York, for example, used AI technology to host a virtual parent night for families who speak multiple different languages, Tholfsen says. Microsoft Translate allows the teacher to generate a code, which broadcasts to everyone connecting to the stream. It translates the speaker’s language into listeners’ languages without the necessity of a human interpreter. “Listeners can type or speak back in their languages, and it cross-translates, so when you type back in Spanish, it goes to me in English, translates to Mike in Italian, and to the person speaking Arabic or Chinese,” Tholfsen says. “It’s like the Star Trek universal translator.”
Low-vision accessibility
Accessibility checkers are helping educators increase access for low-vision students. “We use AI and computer vision to identify what is in an image and generate a caption,” Tholfsen says. “It’s a massive timesaver to do auto-captioning on images, so people are much more likely to make their content accessible.”
The implementation of AI tools won’t replace educators but will instead help them save time. The tech can be customized to fit any classroom, putting educators in control of the AI tools — not the other way around.
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Online Education
Article | July 19, 2022
As social and emotional learning grow in significance, especially as remote learning becomes mainstream, it is now more crucial than ever to get parents on board with your school's SEL policy. Parents don’t always understand the importance of an SEL policy due to the Few individuals beyond the education community are aware of SEL or social and emotional learning, and those who are frequently have questions about how school SEL programs work.
This could mean In fact, according to the Hechinger Report, SEL has grown to be an educational hot topic, with the conservative section in some places calling it a liberal policy. Regardless of their political views, people rarely have issues with SEL once they have a basic understanding of it. To ensure that parents are fully aware of what SEL programs entail, here are ways to communicate with them.
Create Channels of Communication to Talk About SEL
To successfully convey the benefits of the SEL strategy at your school, you must first develop open lines of communication with parents and the wider community. This ensures that any misconceptions, concerns, and challenges are addressed beforehand. Schools must ensure that parents get a forum to air their views about social-emotional learning skills and be on the same page about building a nurturing environment based on relationships and a sense of belonging.
Outline the Outcomes of an SEL Program
When parents know exactly what the aim of the SEL program is and what the outcomes look like, they are more likely to join the team. Reduce the use of educational acronyms or jargon-based messages as they are more likely to cause a stir. Despite widespread parental support for SEL-oriented skill instruction in schools, the Fordham Institute found that the phrase "social and emotional learning" is not particularly well-liked. However, clearly outlining the skills and what they look like in the real world is a successful approach to convincing parents about SEL.
Promote the Significance of SEL in Today’s World
As we emerge from the pandemic, SEL is especially important, and parents may need to be reminded of how much regular socialization and face-to-face instruction many children couldn't benefit from.
It's crucial for parents to be aware of how schools’ establishing a secure, inclusive, and encouraging setting for children is essential for their success.
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