Benefits of music lessons — from thetechadvocate.org by Matthew Lynch

Excerpt:

Music is a fun and worthwhile discipline to learn. When kids start learning the skill early in their lives, they can become so good at it and even create a career out of this talent. Here are other benefits your child could enjoy once they start taking music lessons.

From DSC:
While all these are true, it also helps a person appreciate the universal language of music. Music speaks deeply. As an example here…

Years ago, when I was working in technical support and customer service (within the corporate world) and ran into some tough, unpleasant, angry doctors or hospital administrators, I would go listen to music at lunch times. I came back refreshed and ready to go again. Music could turn my moods and attitudes around. Plus music was ever-present within our household as my mom and dad met in music school and my mom taught piano for years (often in our home). My dad loved to sing and often practiced at night after work.

Anyway, here’s to music. Thank you LORD for it! May music classes and opportunities continue to play an important role within our learning ecosystems for years to come!

 

Kalamazoo Valley Museum’s newest exhibit teaches community about media literacy — from mmlive.com by Gabi Broekema along with one of our sisters Sue Ellen Christian

Excerpt:

The 14-element interactive exhibit is scattered across two floors of the museum and invites visitors to learn about media literacy through fun games and stories.

This project is the brainchild of presidential innovation professor in communication at Western Michigan University, Sue Ellen Christian. A few years back, Christian wrote the book, “Everyday Media Literacy: An Analog Guide for Your Digital Life,” to teach media literacy to the classes she taught full of students from different majors across the university.

 

2022 Outlook: 6 Legal Trends and Predictions to Have on Your Radar — from jdsupra.com by Vivian Susko

Excerpt:

In January, 2020, we made some bold predictions about what would lie ahead for legal operations in the new decade. Let’s dive back into some of our top forecasts, survey our new landscape, and see which legal trends are currently impacting the industry in 2022. Mitratech expert, Justin Silverman, weighs in on what you can expect to see on the horizon for legal ops.

Points on a radar screen

 

Why gamified learning works so well for gifted children — from raisinglifelonglearners.com by Colleen Kessler

Excerpt:

The gamification of learning can be critical for gifted children in particular, who often struggle to stay focused, engaged, and challenged in a traditional educational environment. Gamification can be so effective in gifted education because the learner forgets they are “working” and instead feels they are “playing.” It allows the gifted brain to relax into the “flow” of learning, and more effectively use their intellect for problem solving and creativity.

Also see:

Synthesis dot com


Addendum on 4/27/22:

Homeschooling our gifted children: The power of artful questions — from raisinglifelonglearners.com by Colleen Kessler

Examples of artful questions for learning:

  • Why do you think that might have happened?
  • What would you have done differently?
  • What did you notice about that?
  • What would you suggest we do instead?
  • That’s a good point. How can you reconcile these two things?
  • Do you have an idea for how we could make this better?

From DSC:
Perhaps we should post those types of questions up on the walls of many board rooms and conference rooms around the nation…or have it be a slide in a presentation…or…

 

“Unpaid internships should be illegal:” Why colleges should reconsider unpaid internships. — from newamerica.org by Mauriell H. Amechi and Iris Palmer; with thanks to Goldie Blumenstyk for this resource

Excerpts:

College leaders must do more to facilitate access to paid work experience, especially for historically underserved, low-income, and racially minoritized student populations.

  • Require all internships offered through career services to be paid. The inequitable practice of not paying interns makes such opportunities impossible to access for many students. Colleges should require that internships they offer be paid for by the employer or through matching funds from the college. Paying interns for their time is the right thing to do and the best way to start creating access for all students.
  • Maintain some on-campus internship opportunities to ease transportation and care needs and offer on-campus care.
  • Provide shuttles, transit passes, or travel stipends to internship sites.
  • Consider working with employers to make internships renewable across semesters.
  • Consider student populations that are typically excluded from internships.
  • Document what works to create sustainable funding streams.
 

EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Learning Spaces Transformation — from er.educause.edu by Jenay Robert

Excerpts:

With an eye toward the future, IT units can help institutions create inclusive, flexible spaces that support a variety of learning activities and modalities. Appropriate technology infrastructure, strategic support from institutional leaders, and financial resources are among the most essential elements for transforming learning spaces.

.

Figure 1. Types of Learning Spaces Being Transformedbar graph showing percentage of respondents who said each type of learning space was being transformed. Small classrooms 52%; Spaces for remote classes 52%; Libraries 50%; Lecture halls 44%; Study spaces 44%; Experimental learning spaces 42%; Discipline-specific labs 39%; Gathering spaces; 36%; Residential spaces 20%; Hallways and foyers 16%.

 

Seeing the possibilities, I finally took a chance. I studied English, political science and finite math, and each class I passed deepened my confidence and self-love.

This growing self-love was key to my academic development. Growing up, I didn’t experience much real love, outside of my mother and a few family members. I most often encountered the kind of false love expressed through violence and monetary possessions. College changed the way I thought about myself and others. I worked hand-in-hand with men from all backgrounds to complete assignments, and even taught other students. Before I knew it, I was getting A’s on my essays and solving quadratic equations in math class.

When people question why it’s important to educate prisoners, I remind them that to see change, we must support change. We must give individuals the opportunity to see themselves as more than the harm they’ve caused, more than what was once broken within them.

Christopher Blackwell

Also relevant/see:

Calvin University's Prison Initiative

 

University Behind Bars

 

We need to use more tools — that go beyond screen sharing — where we can collaborate regardless of where we’re at. [Christian]

From DSC:
Seeing the functionality in Freehand — it makes me once again think that we need to use more tools where faculty/staff/students can collaborate with each other REGARDLESS of where they’re coming in to partake in a learning experience (i.e., remotely or physically/locally). This is also true for trainers and employees, teachers and students, as well as in virtual tutoring types of situations. We need tools that offer functionalities that go beyond screen sharing in order to collaborate, design, present, discuss, and create things.  (more…)

 

2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition

 

2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition — from library.educause.edu

Sections include:

  • Trends: Scanning the Horizon
  • Key Technologies & Practices
  • Scenarios
  • Implications: What Do We Do Now?

 Also relevant/see:

 


Also relevant/see:

2022 Educause Horizon Report Suggests Change Is Here to Stay; No Return to ‘Normal’ — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly

Excerpt:

If the COVID-19 pandemic has been a time of unprecedented change in higher education — characterized by rapid pivots to remote work and learning and an explosion in the use of technology across the institution — the future is about reframing those changes into long-term realities, according to the 2022 Educause Horizon Report Teaching and Learning Edition, released this week. Colleges and universities are shifting their mindsets to “reflect an evolution from short-term ’emergency’ or ‘reactive’ modes of offering education during extraordinary circumstances to making strategic and sustainable investments in a future that will be very much unlike our past,” the report suggested.

6 Technologies and Practices Impacting the Future of Higher Education — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly

 

Zoom Announces New Education Features, Enhancing Hybrid [Hyflex] Learning Experience for Educators & Students — from edtechreview.in by Stephen Soulunii

Excerpt:

According to a news release, the features span Zoom’s Chat and Meeting offerings and are designed to support teachers who need to engage and manage students joining class remotely or submitting homework assignments.

Breakout Rooms Enhancements
Breakout rooms, a popular education feature, also received enhancements in this latest release. Program Audio allows meeting hosts to share content with audio to breakout rooms, adding the ability to share videos with audio. With the LTI Pro integration enhancement, educators can populate breakout rooms from the course roster. This can be used to assign breakout rooms in advance, and then automatically sort students into breakout rooms.

Anywhere Polls
Anywhere Polls will allow polling content to live in a central repository that can be accessed from any meeting on an account, instead of being associated with a particular meeting. This will make it easier for instructors to reuse polls and will also be beneficial for grading. This feature will be available this year.

 

Bridging the digital divide in online learning — from tonybates.ca by Tony Bates

Excerpt:

The problem
At the start of the pandemic, in Oakland, California, 40 miles north of Silicon Valley, only 12 percent of low-income students, and 25 percent of all students, in Oakland’s public schools had devices at home and a strong internet connection.

The outcome
Two years into the pandemic, Oakland has been able to connect 98 percent of the students in the district. As of February, the city had provided nearly 36,000 laptops and more than 11,500 hot spots to low-income public school students.

Also from Tony, see:

Getting into the online learning industry

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post called ‘So you want to be an educational technologist…’ in which gave some advice on how to get into and develop a career as an educational technologist. In that article, I noted that I didn’t have much experience to guide people going into the corporate training area, and this article by Matthew Lynch does exactly that. This article complements nicely what I wrote earlier.

 

Teaching: Fresh Approaches to Faculty Development — from chronicle.com by Beckie Supiano

Excerpt:

Baranovic can’t imagine returning to the old model: He’s sticking to panels in Zoom. Among the benefits, he says: “This arrangement breaks institutional silos, allows faculty to talk more about their experiences, shares effective practices from sources faculty trust (their peers), creates a stronger sense of community, makes it easy for panelists (they receive the questions ahead of time if they want to prepare, but because they’re speaking to experience, they don’t really have to prepare), and creates a form of support that works like therapy but doesn’t feel like therapy.”

Next, Baranovic hopes to turn the panels into a podcast format for professors unable to attend in real time.

From DSC:
As someone who had been involved with Teaching & Learning Centers for years, I can tell you that it’s very disheartening to put together a training session for faculty members and have very few — if any — people show up for it. It’s a waste of time and it leaves the T&L staff and/or IT staff members feeling discouraged and unvalued.

Over the years, I developed a preference for putting things into an asynchronous digital format for faculty members and adjunct faculty members to access per their own schedules. The institutions that I was working for got a greater ROI from those sessions and they were able to visit an internal “course” or website to reference those materials on-demand.

I also like the idea of podcasting here, but that takes a lot of time and effort — and isn’t always possible when you are one person trying to assist hundreds of faculty members (from a technical support and an LMS admin standpoint).

As an Instructional Designer, I also want to comment that it’s hard to help steer a car if you can’t even get into the car. Those institutions that are using team-based approaches will be far more successful in designing and developing more polished, effective, accessible learning experiences. Very few people can do it all.

 

Paralegal Pathways Initiative — from change-center.law.columbia.edu

Excerpt:

Housed at Columbia Law School, the Paralegal Pathways Initiative (PPI) aims to amplify the talents of formerly incarcerated individuals by providing skills-based legal training and connecting them with professional mentorship in preparation for careers in the legal field.

 

Innovative and practical applications of the metaverse — from mckinsey.com

In this episode of the At the Edge podcast, McKinsey expert Richard Ward speaks with McKinsey’s Mina Alaghband.

Excerpts:

One of the things that we’ve learned during the pandemic is that if you put these metaverse design rooms up on the internet, your clients and other expert engineers can log in remotely, and the experience takes on the quality of Zoom in 3-D, which allows a new level of engineering to happen. The beauty of it is that people are able to do highly productive engineering design work without getting on an airplane. And that has a lot of rollover value for what we’re doing long term.

One of the great lessons we’ve had from the pandemic, as horrible as it’s been, is that things that people had said were impossible for decades are now possible. Like the idea that you can’t possibly have everybody not be in the office—it’s been proven wrong.

Also relevant/see:

 

How a Statewide Entrepreneurship Contest Launched 3 Indianapolis High Schoolers into a Million-Dollar Business — from the74million.org by Tim Newcomb

Excerpt:

If not for a statewide pitch competition for entrepreneurial students, three Indianapolis high schoolers likely wouldn’t have started their business. And they certainly wouldn’t have seen that company, Find Ideal Applicants, earn $20,000 in early-stage investment that valued the company at $1.5 million.

State leaders “wanted to see if they could intersect students with entrepreneurship and innovation,” he says. Students learn how to see a problem as an opportunity and come up with a plan. Wettrick says the faster students understand the benefits of learning from their mistakes, the more success they will have sooner in their lives.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian