sunfoundation:

Which Countries Pay Its Teachers What They’re Worth?

Teachers have a tough job. They work long hours and don’t get paid much. But before this chart, I never realized this was an American phenomenon.

Ima hafta find some cheerful dataviz after this one because this just damn depressing.  

Graduating a two and five year old from command line to GUI

larrymade:

The important takeaway from this is kids don’t see anything as “impossible” and depending on how you present new ideas and challenges makes a big difference in their learning processes.

Apparently Stanford scared the shit out of Harvard with their enormously successful free online CS101 course:

radcoco:

Today, Harvard joined MIT in announcing edX, an online service allowing anyone anywhere to take Harvard and MIT classes online and free of charge. The pilot course is in Computer Science and runs through early June - enroll here.

Joe Moon on What Hacker Apprenticeships Tell Us About the Future of Education

As the historical model of education continues to come into contact with disruptive technologies, those technologies strike increasingly close to the heart of education’s basic value proposition. Institutions like University of Phoenix leverage the internet to provide students with degrees more flexibly and inexpensively. This means lower profit margins per student for Phoenix, but much greater scalability than the traditional university model. Khan Academy and similar online learning programs ignore the degree/certification aspect. Instead, they aim a level deeper—at the actual provision of knowledge and learning—as the target of their technological optimization.

Send Your Kid for Free Coding Classes at the CoderDojo

Our children are the leaders of tomorrow. Whether that excites you, or terrifies you, we need to prepare them for the big, bad world they’ll soon be commanding. With technology starting to affect nearly every aspect of our lives, it’s necessary to ensure they know how to use computers and the internet. However, one non-profit in Ireland recently took things a step further with free classes that teach children to code. Now, thanks to a partnership with GitHub, the organization will soon take on North America.

At any given time I have several Crazy Awesome ideas.  One I’m thinking about:  

Why not take my 10 year old out of school for a year, and do a curriculum entirely based on high-seas piracy?  Because, really, what can’t you learn from pirates?  Geography, physics, econonomics, history, literature, music.  When you consider modern-day piracy, there are lessons to be learned about failed states and indigenous freedom movements and organized crime.   Take all that?  Pair it with real-life sailing lessons.  Voila! Education!  

I’d call it School for Pirates.  

Reboot Stories: Teaching Girls to be Citizen Journalists

rebootstories:

GLOBALGIRL MEDIA puts girls at the center of the story, training a future generation of female citizen journalists.

Last summer, GlobalGirl Media trained 22 high-school-aged girls from underserved communities in South Africa to become participant digital video journalists for the 2010…

<hypnotic message>YOU WANT TO SIGN UP FOR THIS COURSE…</hypnotic message>

What? I didn’t say anything!

Tiny Logics

WOW!!!

eryngium:

Planting seeds that enable small children to grasp the concepts that will help them write good code later in life.

How to initiate kids (or anyone) in coding | Emma Mulqueeny

onaissues:

“This post is a follow on from the one I wrote about how we need to start teaching children to code in their junior years… This would address the issue of fewer female coders than male, and the fact that not enough people are equipped with this super awesome skill whether their career ends up being in programming, car manufacture or shoe design.

 In this post I am going to answer the question: what resources can we use to learn or teach code?”

Get the resources here. 

endangeredtheories:

Source:http://blog.makezine.com

Frustrated with a curriculum change away from traditional CS courses in publicschools, game developer David Braben built an ultra-low cost single board computer on a USB stick to facilitate a return to programming and learning how computers actually work. Connecting directly to a keyboard, with HDMI out to a monitor, the idea is to build courses around the tiny $25 PC, which is cheap enough to get into the hands of most students. And just because it’s inexpensive doesn’t mean it’s a dog. Sporting a 700MHz ARM 11 with 128MB of RAM and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics means it has enough power to run Ubuntu.

WOW.