A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Educator’s Notebook #129 (May 1, 2016)

    • Daniel Willingham
    • 04/25/16

    Researchers at University of Waterloo conducted three studies examining the association between self-reported smartphone use and performance on questions like the ball-and-bat problem. They separated respondents into low- medium- and high-smartphone usage groups. They found no difference between the low and medium groups, but the high usage group was less accurate on the analytic problems.”

    • Associated Press
    • 04/22/16

    “The competition — billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface — involved 16 pilots using willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend.”

    • BackChannel
    • 04/19/16

    Huddled into icy plains of North Dakota, Napoleon is essentially the same place it was 25 years ago. And by most accounts, 50 and 75 years ago. The demographics and economics are static. Most of my high school classmates have taken over their family farms, tilling and planting the land of their parents’ parents’ parents. The same people drive the same block of Main Street to the same three-lane grocery store owned by the same family. The same houses have fresh coats of paint, but the grain elevator still towers over all else… Napoleon would be trapped in the amber of time, in a big glass case, if not for one thing: Access to information.”

    • Boston Globe
    • 05/04/14

    Three out of four American families with school-aged children have at least one playing an organized sport — a total of about 45 million kids. By age 15, as many as 80 percent of these youngsters have quit, according to the Open Access Journal of Sports Medicine. One reason is the gap between the child’s desire to have fun and the misguided notion among some adults that their kids’ games are a miniature version of grown-up competitions, where the goal is to win. In 20 years of coaching youth and high school sports, I can say unequivocally that adult expectations are the number one problem.”

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Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

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