Students come to school with, as Dr. Adolph Brown describes, two backpacks. One of the backpacks contains academic tools, such as pencils, calculators, and textbooks, that represent their readiness to learn. The second backpack represents the invisible emotional weight that burdens each student entering our school buildings. Anxiety, stress, rage, self-doubt, and low self-worth resulting from bullying, child abuse, substance abuse, and neglect cannot be unpacked and shoved into a school locker. This backpack accompanies students throughout the school day and impacts their engagement, attentiveness, and interactions. Educators don’t always see the contents of this backpack, yet they witness its negative impact on student learning every day. So how can educators and leaders reach these students? How can we unburden them and teach them coping and relationship skills that allow them to participate in their education fully?
Twitter has marked the start of UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week 2019 by releasing a handbook to help educators teach media literacy, analyze information they see online, and more.
Sip News by Product Hunt distills the day’s most important technology news into digestible snippets. The format is simple: each day’s headlines are condensed into slideshow stories, composed of quick-hitting explanations and commentary.
In 2007 the Adler Planetarium and Oxford University in the UK founded Zooniverse—the world’s largest platform for people-powered research. Zooniverse connects everyday citizens with researchers to help classify galaxies, find new planets, explore the surface of the Moon, and complete dozens of original projects in astronomy, biology, science, and the humanities.