Storybird: Free digital storytelling

History Tech

Over the next few weeks, I get the chance to spend a lot of time having conversations with teachers about integrating literacy into the social studies. Reading, writing, and communicating. ELA literacy standards. My C4 Framework. The NCSS Inquiry Arc.

I love these kinds of discussions. Teachers brainstorming and sharing ideas. Thinking and talking about effective strategies. Good times. So part of what I’ve been doing the last few days is exploring different tools that support literacy in the classroom. And today, one of my finds.

Storybird.

An online tool that encourages the creation of visual stories in seconds. It’s a simple idea that has attracted more than 5 million stories – making Storybird one of the world’s largest storytelling communities.

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Data is critical to achieving universal primary and secondary education

World Education Blog

By Jo Bourne, Associate Director and Global Chief of Education, Programme Division, UNICEF, and Albert Motivans, Head of Education Statistics, UNESCO Institute for Statistics.

It is time for a dose of pragmatism: 121 million children and young adolescents are out of school and we do not stand a chance of reaching them by continuing to pursue a one-size-fits-all approach to education.

The optimism of ‘build more schools and they shall come’ will not reach refugees, children who work, children who face discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or disability. Even worse, building more schools will not help the estimated 130 million children who fail to learn basic reading and maths skills despite reaching grade 4.

Simply expanding educational systems has clearly failed to reach all children.  As the international community works to establish new development goals, it will be imperative to focus on the children who were left behind.

We believe that robust…

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Problem solving skills with global relevance

World Education Blog

By Jenny Bradshaw and Francesco Avvisati, OECD

The international community is intensively working on a set of goals and targets to be reached by 2030. Among them, the Education for All Steering Committee on Education Post-2015 has identified “knowledge and skills for decent work and life” (Target 4). But which skills are needed for work in future societies? Are they relevant across countries and can they be validly measured on a global scale?

OECD’s PISA student assessment tackles these questions in its tri-ennial assessment of the skills and competencies of 15-year-olds in over 70 countries. There is no doubt that reading, mathematics and science, which form the core of the PISA assessments, continue to be important foundations on which other skills can be built. The challenge is to identify other key transversal skills, and to track whether young people and adults possess them.

Equipping students with the skills to confront and overcome…

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