This Week with EdSurge

As momentum grows to limit smartphone use in schools, some educators say that the education system can do even more to counter the negative health effects of social media. One award-winning teacher has changed his lessons and the way he teaches to try to help students learn to better focus — even reserving class time for quiet reading away from the distraction of phones.

As more students question the value of college, more high schools are bringing college options into their walls. In the latest installment of our Doubting College series, we visit a high school where students can earn a two-year degree without leaving the building, and where students can also get a jump on other career options that don’t require higher education.

Should AI chatbots be used as tutors? Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, has become one of the most vocal proponents of the idea, and he and his son are featured in a recent demo of ChatGPT’s latest version. But some teaching experts say tutoring should be reserved for humans who can motivate and understand the students they work with. For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we talked with Khan to hear more about his vision of AI tutors and the arguments from his recent book.

Professors are finding that they can’t just go back to teaching as they did before the pandemic and expect the same result. It takes more these days to hold student attention, and convince them to show up. This week we’re rebroadcasting this episode that was reported from the back of large lecture classes to see how teaching is changing. The episode recently won a national award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

One author who spent years researching what brain science says about adolescent learners says their behavior shouldn’t be seen as “deviant” or “immature,” but as a “time of possibility.” And this researcher, Ellen Galinsky, has strong feelings about how to address phones and social media in schools.

Read a partial transcript and see show notes at EdSurge: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-05-21-what-brain-science-says-about-how-to-better-teach-teenagers

Today’s high school students are asking more skeptical questions about whether to go to college, or when to go. For this week’s podcast, we visited a career fair at one public high school to ask about the changing ways that high school counselors and education leaders are presenting those choices, and what these students think about their options.

Some educators are trying a different approach to guarding against AI cheating — a “linguistic fingerprinting” technique that borrows a page from the playbook of criminal investigations.

Felecia Russell was born in Jamaica but moved to Los Angeles as a kid. It wasn’t until she started to apply for college that she learned that she was undocumented, which she worried could derail her dreams. She tells her story in a new book, “Amplifying Black Undocumented Student Voices in Higher Education,” which she hopes will help “diversify the narrative” about immigration and education.

When a professor’s research showed that standard methods of teaching problem-solving weren’t working, he set out to figure out what led to more student thinking. His resulting approach is spreading through classrooms, helped by teachers sharing examples on social media. This is a reissue of an episode that first ran in November.

Two years ago the metaverse was getting all the buzz in education circles (and hardly anyone was talking about AI). We checked back in with two educators at the forefront of building a virtual realm for education to see where they see things going now that the hype has faded.