DailyDirt: Teach Your Children Well

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Mar 11th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Teachers don't have an easy job, but at least they get the summers off (in the US). Technology might be able to help improve things by increasing the amount of teacher-to-student attention time, but investments in classroom technology are also competing for pretty limited resources. It's a tough problem to solve, and here are a few interesting links about education and the American school system.

The Khan Academy is developing some really cool software to help kids learn more effectively and efficiently. And it'll be really cool when the Khan Academy starts training anyone on how to create lessons for anything.... [url]
Bill Gates is concerned that federal and state budget deficits are going to squeeze education investments pretty soon. No solutions are presented by Mr. Gates in his talk, but the Gates Foundation does have a mission to help improve education in the US. [url]
Toledo teachers have a peer review system that helps identify which teachers are good or bad. However, the effectiveness of this system is still debated. [url]
To discover more interesting education-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: bill gates, education, khan academy, new math, teachers

4 Comments

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javabean, 11 Mar 2011 @ 6:12pm

William Gates
of course Will won't comment on how schools could save/shave Millions of dollars off of their budgets. Schools are after-all the last of the BIG Microsoft purchasers. Yes Yes YES i know M$ hasn't gone out of business(yet) but it seems most of the big buyers are leaving M$ in droves do to security/costs/(and My favorite) having to retrain ALL of their employees/users because M$ decided to hide icons/menus.

long live free software to save budgets/sanity!!!!
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davebarnes (profile), 11 Mar 2011 @ 8:16pm

I am sure you meant to write
"teach your children good"�
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RIchZ (profile), 11 Mar 2011 @ 9:50pm

Yeah, they get summers off _without pay_. And, on 9 months of pay for the year, they're expected to pay for summer school to gain education credits and to keep current in their chosen subjects.

Many of them are paid too little to support their families and still pay for summer school, so they end up not getting their skills upgraded, which means they don't qualify for pay raises, and they have to take summer jobs to support their families for the three "vacation" months.

Too many people think they get a 3-month paid vacation, but it doesn't work like that.
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Jose_X, 12 Mar 2011 @ 3:19pm

EUREKA, my money is out
When Gates has transferred the last remaining bits of his monopoly-enabled wealth away from MSFT, he might hit upon his overdue EUREKA! solution that people petition Microsoft to free up their source code (as has been done with Linux and a bunch of software, like android, firefox, ...) so that those schools starved for funds will still be able to educate their students using computers by easily downloading the software for free today. They can pay for services and other value-add later on when their budget position improves.
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