YouTube University

Newsweek - YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and raucous wedding processionals. But there's more to the site than pointless entertainment; there is a growing collection of university lectures available, including one by a Harvard Business School professor talking about consumer psychology in the recession, and Cambridge University historian David Starkey discussing the history of the British monarchy. Earlier this year YouTube launched a new home for education, YouTube EDU, which started as a volunteer project by company employees seeking a better way to aggregate educational content uploaded by U.S. colleges and universities.

One need not be a student to reap the benefits of higher education anymore. In addition to YouTube EDU, Web sites like iTunes U, TED, and Academic Earth allow millions of people to download lectures by some of the world's top experts—for free. Known as open educational resources—or OER—the movement is turning education into a form of mass entertainment.

Read more....


Emotional Bunny Says: "Guess who's taking free online chemistry courses from MIT?"

Students create countries in social studies class

World geography classes typically don't stray from the 195 established countries that circle the globe.

Some new nations, though, emerged Tuesday: Aquatopia, an underwater country off the coast of Florida; Timpatoint, an arctic nation northeast of Canada; and Marinya, an island nation near the Philippines.

Of course, the countries aren't real. Fifth-graders in Andrea Hollan's gifted class at Allen Park Elementary spent six weeks exploring forms of government, finances, culture, geography and climates of existing nations.

"We looked at what's real, and went from there," Hollan said.

Students then created their own countries, complete with a flag, currency, food and landscape. Students even developed the first steps of a new language, creating words for hello and goodbye.

Read more....

(Image credits: www1.pgcps.org)

How Hawaii's Budget Crunch Led to Furloughed Kids

At Noelani Elementary, the small school near Honolulu where President Obama learned to read and write, the next generation of Hawaii's leaders learned a new word this week: "furlough."

The Noelani students joined nearly 170,000 other children across Hawaii whose teachers on Friday began an unprecedented state furlough program that will close classrooms 34 days over the next two years. The "furlough Fridays" are part of a controversial effort by Gov. Linda Lingle to deal with a projected budget deficit of nearly $1 billion. The cost-cutting measure has angered parents, lawmakers and children. Popular musician and Hawaii public school graduate Jack Johnson sang at a rally Friday morning at the state Capitol to protest the furloughs. During the rally, parents handed a petition bearing thousands of signatures protesting the furloughs to the governor, whose office is on the fifth floor of the state Capitol.

Read more....