Derek E. Baird is a leading kid culture expert, futurist, and author who helps brands, educators, and parents safely connect with kids and teens through culture, media, and technology.
Results of new research conducted in August 2018 by The Harris Poll for Pearson Education.
The report explores the education, learning and media consumption habits and preferences of Generation Z.
One surprising finding in this report is that Gen Z students still like to have teachers give them printed handouts and paper-based learning resources. So while they're mobile natives, looks like they still enjoy being analog.
This is an interesting and worthwhile report for anyone who works in education technology and is looking to create learning experiences that resonate with Gen Z.
The Regeneron Science Talent Search is the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science, technology, engineering, and mathematics competition for 12th-grade students in the country.
The Science Talent Search has been identifying and celebrating the best and brightest young scientific minds in the United States since 1942. The competition receives more than 1,800 applications each year from high school seniors across the country.
The Society for Science and the Public awards $3.1million annually to deserving high school students, and they want as many students, from all states and all walks of life, know about this opportunity as possible. The competition is completely free for students, and is a great indicator of top STEM talent—thirteen Nobel prize winners participated in this program as high school students.
The Regeneron Science Talent Search 2019 application is now open! High school seniors across the United States are invited to share their original research projects and apply to the nation’s oldest and most prestigious STEM competition, where they could win up to $250,000.
The top 300 scholars receive $2,000 each, and their schools also receive $2,000—that’s funding for STEM education in your community. Forty finalists will be invited to compete in the finals week competition in Washington, DC, all expenses paid. Every finalist receives at least $25,000 and if named in the top 10, could win between $40,000 and $250,000.
Check out last year’s highlights video, learn more about the top 40 finalists’ research projects in this video from the Public Exhibition of Projects, watch the winner’s results and remarks from Malcolm Gladwell in this video from our awards gala to learn more.
The application will close on Wednesday, November 14, 2018, at 8pm ET, but interested students are encouraged to open applications early in order to receive tips and reminders. There is no limit to the number of students who can enter any school, region or state, and students may submit research from any year of high school.
Last summer, millions of kids discovered the power of Augmented Reality (AR) while using apps like PokemonGo, Snapchat and Instagram.
In light of these socio-cultural changes, educators need to “keep abreast of change” and embrace curriculum design which integrates the authentic ways that students use AR in their “out of school” experiences as a tool that connects them with peers and content as a means to achieve, both short and long term, learning goals.
Like other technologies, AR has the potential to be a powerful tool that support the personalized learning goals of students by bringing scannable content to life in an engaging and cost effective manner.
For a generation that’s been raised on interactive technologies, bringing AR into the classroom and curriculum can also help encourage active engagement and contribute to student retention.
You know that talking with your kids about sex and growing up is important, but it’s tempting to put it off. The reality is that these conversations can’t wait. AMAZE.org takes the awkward out of sex ed. Real info in fun, animated videos that give you all the answers teens actually want to know about sex, your body and relationships.
Fun, Factual & Less Weird Sex Ed
AMAZE.org is creating fun, factual and age appropriate online sex education videos for young adolescents. AMAZE has collaborated with a group of incredible young animators who are enthusiastic about their mission to create edgy, innovative and compelling videos to help young people learn about reproductive health.
The series of sex ed videos are being produced in conjunction with youth health organizations Advocates for Youth, Answer, and Youth Tech Health and animation studio, The Moving Company, to help break the ice and start these critical conversations so that kids get the accurate information they need.
Accurate & Non Judgmental Sex Education
In a time where "fake news" fills our kids social feeds, AMAZE.or provides provides kids, parents and teachers a happy medium between accessible, engaging sex ed materials that don't deviate from the purpose of sex ed in the first place: To provide accurate, non-judgmental answers to curious questions.
I was fortunate to work with the AMAZE.org team as a youth and social media analyst during the early phases of this project and I was was really impressed with all the different stakeholders and educators involved to bring AMAZE.org to life.
AMAZE is providing a critical resource for parents and teens and these videos will really help make talking about sex ed, sexual orientation and puberty much less weird and help shift these discussions into a more open, healthy and normalized.
There’s some very cool stuff happening out there with virtual reality in education! I've covered some of these classroom VR experiences in other posts, but Welcome to Mars---a new VR program for schools, created by Lockheed Martin, is among the coolest!
“The first people who will visit Mars are sitting in a school today. In fact, the first astronauts will arrive before today’s kindergartners graduate college. To help inspire these students, Lockheed Martin created a one-of-a-kind virtual reality experience.
The Mars Experience Bus is the first immersive VR vehicle ever built and it replicates the Martian landscape. Riders experience a virtual drive along the surface of the Red Planet.”
Alison Bryant and Paul Levine of children's digital research company PlayScience present their latest findings on kids and digital media at Casual Connect in San Francisco.
Not surprisingly, most children hear about new apps from their friends, especially as they get older, though younger children are more likely to learn about new apps from their parents.
Here's the executive summary of the PlayScience report:
Camp Google is a free summer camp that gets kids learning through fun, interactive science activities and adventures.
Led by experts, the activities have been designed to encourage kids to ask questions, setting them on a lifelong journey of exploration and discovery.
Starting Monday, kids can join Camp Google for free! Khan Academy, National Geographic, NASA, and the National Park Service teamed up to make a great experience!
Creativity is one of the most important competencies of the 21st Century. Yet, the puzzling question is how to nurture it? Children are creative from the day they are born and the film describes how to support creativity across cultures.
The content is based on the report, Cultures of Creativity, published by the LEGO Foundation.
Here's the full report by David Gauntlett and Bo Stjerne Thomsen and 20 leading international experts on play, learning and creativity.
In her talk, Ali Carr-Chellman pinpoints three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves, and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them: bringing their culture into the classroom, with new rules that let boys be boys, and video games that teach as well as entertain.
First Lady Michelle Obama recently announced a National Science Foundation initiative to encourage girls to pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and provide flexibility to working parents in research fields.
This fact sheet takes a look at why bringing girls and women into STEM fields is so important—and what President Obama and his administration are doing to help.
At Google, the only thing we love as much as science is science education. We want to celebrate young scientific talent and engage students who might not yet be engaged with science.
So, in partnership with CERN, the LEGO Group, National Geographic, and Scientific American we’ve created an exciting new global science competition, the Google Science Fair.
Students all over the world who are between the ages of 13 and 18 are eligible to enter this competition and compete for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences, internships and scholarships.
We’ll be accepting submissions from 11 January to 4 April 2011. Students who make it to the finalist stage will be invited with a parent or guardian to our celebratory event at Google headquarters in California in July, where they’ll be able to showcase their project and meet some of the brightest minds in science today. We will select and announce our winner at this event.
The competition is open to students aged 13 to 18 from around the world working on their own or in a team of two or three. For more details, visit the Science Fair Rules page.
Here are some tips for getting started:
Direct students to the sign up page to register either as individuals or teams of up to three.
Get familiar with Google Sites so that your students are prepared to complete their project submission. Their Google Site will become their official project submission. The Materials section is full of resources for using Google products to help students illustrate their work.
Start immersing students in the scientific method using some tips from the table below and in our Science Resources section.
Assist students in developing their project and learn along with them!
Royal Society Publishing science journal Biology Letters is releasing a paper about the way bees use color and space to navigate between flowers. It was written by 25 co-authors, all of whom are between the ages of 8 and 10.
Really: The 25 kids, all from the Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England, designed the experiment from the ground up, and wrote every word in the paper.
The students who published the paper were participants in "i, scientist," a project set up to engage kids with science in a hands-on way. A very hands-on way.
With help from neuroscientist Beau Lotto (whose son is in the class), the 25-person team began by thinking about the way animals—in particular, bees—perceive the world. You can read more about the Blackawton Bees study and other projects by Lotto by clicking here. The Blackawton Bee paper is available here.
This is a briliant and hands on way to teach kids science. Instead of sitting in classroom and listening to a teacher, these kids are getting a hands on experience that makes science move from theory into actual practice and proves that anyone can do science.
Back-to-school pitches go social with Facebook, TwitterLast year, cutting-edge back-to-school marketing for the pop culture-driven brand was all about luring young girls to the Candies.com website. This year, back-to-school marketing is all about driving discussion in online social-media "communities." [USA Today]
Don't Ignore the Least Common Denominator With the boom of smartphones and mobile applications, it's easy to dismiss SMS as soooo 2000 and late. But in this week's reblog, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures stresses the appeal, simplicity, and popularity of the SMS format and begs us to get our heads out of our apps. [MobileBehavior]
Memo to Gen Y: Your Touted Workaholism isn't a badge of Honor I’m getting a little tired of Gen Y bloggers proudly flouting their
“workaholism” in post after post of how they love their jobs, don’t see
a need for work/life balance anymore and question whether or not their
relationships are holding them back. (Spot on Holly!) [Work Love Life]
Hey! Miley: Youth advice slinger Josh Shipp offers unsolicited advice to the Queen of Tween. Yep, he's talking to you Ms. Miley Cyrus. And if you're so inclined, you can also take the "Which Demi Lovato Song Are You" quiz. Although, if you're not a tween, please don't! [Hey Josh!][LOL Quiz]
Night Texting Putting Teen Health at Risk What most don't know is that too much texting can actually be
detrimental to their teens' health. That's because new technologies,
such as cellphones and social networking sites, give teenagers easy
access to their friends 24 hours a day. (I'm sure this is an issue, but I just hope that parents don't overreact.) [Miami Herald]
Teenage Tom Daley Defies Bullies Daley's success led to him being bullied at school. It got worse when
he became more well known and he was eventually forced to change
schools. At the time, his father, Rob, said: "In class they throw pens
and pencils at him. Some have even threatened to break his legs. That
was the last straw." [Guardian UK]
Tweet O' the Week: "The funny thing about the Internet is that we forget that we once thought TV would solve all of our problems too." (via @basler)
I Want My Wireless & Social TVVerizon has launched services that provide mobile application and social networking services on your television. The new service allows customers to access free widgets that connect to social networks Twitter and Facebook, or access a “fantasy football” service from ESPN. Given research showing that Gen Y want more social tv features, this move by Verizon could really pay off.
Meanwhile, a new report by ABI Research states that television manufacturers will ship about 20 million wireless-networked TVs globally in 2011 and consumers will spend about $2.9 billion on video content that's streamed
from the Internet to TVs in 2013, up from about $600 million this year. [GoMo News] [Video Business]
Virtual Worlds for Children: In America, nearly 10m children and teenagers visit virtual worlds
regularly, estimates eMarketer, a market researcher—a number the firm
expects to increase to 15m by 2013. Speaking of virtual worlds, this week Shidonni launched a Spanish-language version of its pet-populated virtual world, Tales 4 Tomorrow an eco-friendly virtual world for kids with a strong animal conservation message (via Premise Marketing on Twitter).[Economist][Virtual World News]
The Ypulse 2009 Totally Wired Teacher Award (sponsored by Dell) will honor a
trailblazing teacher who has successfully pioneered the innovative and
educational use of technology, mobile technology, social media (blogs, wikis, social networking,
photo/video sharing) in the classroom.
The award is inspired by Ypulse founder Anastasia Goodstein’s book, Totally Wired: What Teens & Tweens Are Really Doing Online,
and the challenges she observed around integrating technology into
public school classrooms. We will recognize a teacher who has overcome
these challenges and is inspiring both students and other educators.
The award-winner likely had to
overcome challenges from parents and administrators in order to use the
technology, but because they understand how students use social media
outside of school, they persevered with their initiative and worked
collaboratively with students, ultimately sharing their insight and
knowledge with the larger teaching community.
Representatives from Ypulse and Dell will choose three finalists to
interview by phone. The selected teacher will be honored in person at
the Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup June 1-2 in San Francisco.
All three
finalists will receive a IT solution from Dell to use in their
respective schools. Teachers can nominate themselves. You can get all of the details about how to nominate a teacher (or if you're a teacher, how to nominate yourself!) over on Ypulse.
For example, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) has a STEM education initiative for teachers and they provide an array of professional development resources (many for free) for teachers over on their online Learning Center.
STEM education--for both students and teachers--is at the core of President Obama's educational reform package. These are all great programs and let's face it, when it comes to STEM education programs, the more the merrier.
NASA, who has a vested interest in having a steady flow of qualified people to develop our national space programs, is ready to embark on a new and bold plan to get America's youth--from elementary school to higher education--interested in space exploration.
Their secret weapon? A virtual world build around a mission to Mars.
In an effort to encourage more kids to pursue science careers, NASA has created a Learning Technologies Project Office (LPTO) and partnered with three video game producers to create, Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond.
According to NASA:
The game will enable participants to learn and be tested on real
skills through single-player and team-based missions based on real NASA
technologies, such as the Hubble Space Telescope.
In addition, players
will interact with NASA digital assets, such as hyper-realistic digital
renderings of Mars rovers and telescope images taken of and from space.
The level at which users participate in these missions will depend on age and education, among other factors. So, while the game promises to have a big impact on higher education, it will also be geared toward
students as young as 13 who can participate at a level suited to their
experience."
Today's kids are savvy and have lots of choices when it comes to virtual worlds. If the Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond doesn't feel authentic, they won't use it. So it's really great to see that NASA had the foresight to consult and collaborate
with experts from the MMO/virtual world community to develop this
project.
Given how much Gen Y love video games and virtual worlds, this type of
hands-on, project based learning activity might just be the thing to
get more kids interested in science.
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