A Virtual Landscape-Architecture Camp Introduces Girls to Careers They Didn't Even Know Existed

PowerMyLearning, a program that any student, parent, or teacher can use for free, helps students take ownership of their own learning. When most attention is being placed on teacher effectiveness, this program redirects those efforts toward students.

In Oakland, a company created an online crowdfunding platform that allows users to earn interest by financing clean energy projects and gives people with good social intentions a direct line of action. Across the world, there is a growing movement toward people-powered clean energy.

The creators of online classes hoped to provide quality education to the disadvantaged but have instead created an international supplement to classroom learning and tool for professional development.

Low budget schools across the U.S. are having students use their smartphones as learning tools inside and outside the classroom. At no extra cost they can incorporate technology into the curriculum through a myriad of applications, from homework reminder apps to free cloud document platforms like Google Docs.

An Irish-based company, ALISON, provides free, high-quality e-courses to people around the globe in order to help close the gap between education and workplace skills. Particularly focused on providing access to areas where more traditional forms of education and job training are difficult to get, this approach is helping to change lives and the economy for the better.

Hawaii private school students were taught about ecological sustainability, but public school students were not. After losing a school essay contest about sustainability, a high school student convinced Hawaii’s legislature to pass a resolution requiring that every student learn the meaning of the concept. Due to this student’s advocacy, the state is also piloting a program to install solar panels on its public schools to teach children how to be more self-sustaining.

Colorful volumes of books have aided teaching for centuries; however, the scope of engagement in the internet age demands newer methods for pedagogy. Pinterest, a social media-constructed visual bulletin board, has become a venue in which teachers share their pinned visual media, lesson plans, and charts with students and other teachers. The success of Teaching Pinterest expands pedagogy, reduces teacher alienation, enables collaboration with other teachers, and directs readers to other sites that offer teachers’ curriculum ideas for a cost.

Colorado has had challenges teaching climate change to elementary and secondary school students because of political divisiveness. Regional advocacy groups and professionals manage to teach climate change through engaging field trips, filmmaking, and outdoor learning.

Well-trained teachers cannot be replaced solely by technology, as has been increasingly apparent at Carpe Diem schools, where students learn largely via computers enabled with educational software.

Middle School 88 in Brooklyn is part of a broad evolution in teaching math, employing technology through a non-profit called School for One (Teach for One) to provide each student with a personalized lesson generated and monitored by computers to match their learning level.