Tag Archives: education

Portable Planetarium Brings Space to Kids

Space viewer!

The Peterborough Planetarium has been started by just two people with the primary goal to bring an excitement of space and our global environment to kids in Ontario. Being a big fan of outer space and the planet Earth, I think this is great!

Their goal is to introduce kids (and hopefully adults too) to all the amazing things that a love of the stars can bring. From seeing comets to understanding what’s going on at CERN. Who knows, maybe one of the kids will grow up to be the next Neil deGrasse Tyson or Neil Turok?

While we might like to think we have time to learn every single constellation and operate advanced computer-controlled telescopes and other gadgets, most of us won’t get around to it anytime soon, even if the idea really excites us.

What we can get around to is learning a constellation or two, finding out where a cool planet is tonight, or discovering how to see the brightest galaxy through binoculars – things that the following pages can help you learn about.

Then, when a truly big sky event comes up – one that makes the evening news (think meteor shower or eclipse) – you’ll be all-the-more excited to take part.

Read more at the Peterborough Planetarium.

Environmental Education Improving in Ontario

Teaching people about the environment makes a lot of sense since we live in it. Surprisingly, in many school systems knowledge and awareness about the environment is not shared. In Toronto, Evergreen has been working for years to make the environment important in education. Their efforts are paying off as schools throughout the province are benefiting from their programs.

At that institute, Inwood says, “Teachers learn concepts of ‘ecosystems thinking’—the idea that every action we take as humans affects some other form of life on the planet. Then we demonstrate how this can play out in their classrooms.”

Rather than talking to Grade 1 students about climate change, teachers are encouraged to get them excited about picking up litter, or vermicomposting.

Teachers’ growing appetite for eco-education can be partially attributed to policy. In 2009, the Ontario Ministry of Education mandated that environmental education be delivered at every grade, in every subject—not just science.

Read more at Torontoist.

Online Sex Ed Course Decreases STI Risk in Teens

A lack of education around sex can lead to a lot of unwanted things like sexually transmitted infections and diseases to pregnancies. For many people sex is a taboo subject so delivering worthwhile information to teens can be difficult due to parent’s attitudes. One way to get directly to teens is through the internet and, unlike abstinence-only programs (which raise STIs and lower condom use), a new online course helps teens be safer when it comes to sex.

The results of the study showed a 10-per-cent increase in condom use among students who had taken the course and a reduction in self-reported infections for those students who were sexually active when the course started.

Gonzalez-Navarro said there was a significant, positive impact on sexual behaviour among friend groups who had taken the course.

“That was pretty encouraging,” he said. “You get much more effects if you have groups of kids knowing the same things.”

Read more at The Star.

Reading for Faster Freedom in Brazil

Prisoners in Brazil may be able to shorten their stay in jail by reading and writing. It’s only 48 days but it can make a difference, the prisoners need to read from a collection of philosophy, science, literature, or the classics then reflect on them in a submitted paper.

Educational programs like this are a good way to help people returning to society restart with more focus and support.

Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and
write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be
free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,”
said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.

…

“A person can leave prison more enlightened and with a
enlarged vision of the world,” said Sao Paulo lawyer Andre
Kehdi, who heads a book donation project for prisons.

“Without doubt they will leave a better person,” he said.

Read more.

MIT and Harvard to Launch Full Free Courses Online

This is a really cool way to bring post-secondary education to more people via the internet. Harvard and MIT are launching a new initiative built upon MIT’s expertise in online course delivery to launch a new project called edX that’ll give unbridled access to the knowledge in the two acclaimed institutions.

“Through this partnership we will not only make knowledge more available but we will learn more about learning,” Harvard President Drew Faust said this morning at a news conference at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. “Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access.”

Faust predicted the venture would “change our relationship to knowledge and to teaching for the benefit of our students and students and would-be students everywhere.”

Standing beside Faust, MIT President Susan Hockfield said: “You can choose to view this era as one of threatening change and unsettling volatility, or you can see it as a moment charged with the most exciting possibilities presented to educators in our lifetimes. Online education is not an enemy of residential education but rather a profoundly liberating and inspiring ally.”

Read more here.