Month: April 2019

Up Your STEM Teaching Skills – FREE Training

Coordinated by PSAYDN, Afterschool Coaching for Reflective Educators in STEM (ACRES) is offering a free training in the summer or fall of 2019 to afterschool STEM educators to build STEM related knowledge and skills.

The training is approximately 10 hours total and consists of the following components. These are online, except for components two and four, which consist of practice time.

1. Skills workshop (2 hours)
2. Practicing skills and creating a video (2 hours over the course of a month)
3. Coaching session (2 hours)
4. Practice after first coaching session (2 hours)
5. Coaching session (2 hours)

PSAYDN is looking for four to five highly engaged organizations. Participants who successfully complete and evaluate the training will be offered a stipend, earn contact hours and receive a certificate of completion.

Take advantage of this excellent opportunity for STEM educators in Pennsylvania. Contact us today!

Winnie Black or Nate Hafer

Include your organization name, interested staff member names, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Girls Who Code Helps Draft “Landmark” Legislation Aimed at Closing the Gender Gap

Washington became the first state to get on board with Girls Who Code’s policy agenda when Governor Jay Inslee signed into law a bill written with the expressed intention of closing the gender gap in computer science fields. “This is landmark legislation,” Corinne Roller, director of advocacy and public policy at Girls Who Code, tells EdSurge. “It’s going to put Washington ahead of a lot of other states, in terms of closing the gender gap and all the other gaps that we know exist in computer science.”

What Makes Afterschool Professionally Rewarding

As any afterschool professional will tell you, helping your students succeed is one of the most rewarding parts of the job. Sometimes success takes the form of staying out of trouble or overcoming adversity. Sometimes it is finding a new passion, something that will lead to a career or lifelong interest. And sometimes it is being there with them as they bloom into the capable young adults you know they can be.

STEM Academy Robotics Students Make Children’s Toys More Accessible to Kids With Disabilities

One of Pointe Coupee Parish School District’s therapists approached the students in the STEM Academy’s robotics class in December after she noticed some of the children with special needs at Valverda and Rougon elementary schools often could not play with the toys on campus. The result of those discussions was the hive of activity in the STEM school’s robotics class, where the students are in the quality-control phase of their project.

Mighty Writers Brings Mindfulness Training to Its Students

Mighty Writers is an afterschool program that offers free writing programs to neighborhood children, from toddlers to teenagers. It has seven locations – six in the greater Philadelphia area and one in Camden, New Jersey. Mighty Writers uses practices such as journaling, yoga and meditation during its programs to help the students focus. “The kids come in to us during after school hours or after 3 p.m., and when they are coming in from a long day of school and being there for eight hours, they tend to come in scattered,” said Perez. She says that the mindfulness helps to make the students “a bit happier” and “enhances their views of the world around them.”

Hip-Hop Gave Me Purpose – Now It Helps My Students Find Their Voice

So often we forget about the power music possesses in our society, yet it is found in all we do. From faith to movies to family gatherings, music is a central participant in our lives. Music is a universal language and hip-hop provides culture kids can relate to. When we identify with hip-hop we say: “I am Hip-hop,” which is no different than saying “I am Mexican” or “I am Native American.” It is their identity. Giving them the platform to access culture and identity gives students an ownership on their own development.

The Future of Education: How Cities Can Leverage Community Assets, Social Networks and Personal Passions in Extending Their Learning Systems Beyond the Classroom

The education field has paid considerable attention to community impact models that provide an intensive wraparound approach. These systems are highly coordinated networks that bring together providers from the education, health and community spaces to offer integrated support. They seek to overcome interagency conflict and competition by heavily investing in establishing agreements about goals, approaches and memoranda of understanding about respective contributions and coordination of support. The result is a sturdy partnership agreement, but one that requires tremendous coordination and investment by all participating parties, making them difficult to sustain and replicate. They also ultimately provide limited choice in the approach and combinations of care and opportunities families can access. What might a more organic — and potentially more agile — structure to coordinate community assets look like? Three such initiatives — Remake Learning, CommunityShare, and ReSchool Colorado — describe how these networks allow communities and families to leverage regional assets through dynamic and agile systems, what they have learned about building such systems, and what questions these relatively young and evolving initiatives are still wrestling with.

Meet the 18-Year-Old Entrepreneur Fixing Food for Gen Z

Haile Thomas is not your typical Gen Z teenager. The 18-year-old activist, health coach, vegan chef, and public speaker became the CEO of her nonprofit organization, Healthy Active Positive Purposeful Youth (HAPPY), when she was just 12 years old, inspired by witnessing her father fight off Type 2 diabetes with healthy eating and exercise. Since then, HAPPY has reached more than 15,000 children through programs in elementary and middle schools from New York City to Dubai.

Art Can Make Science Easier to Remember

Art and science may seem like polar opposites. One involves the creative flow of ideas, and the other cold, hard data – or so some people believe. In fact, the two have much in common. Both require a lot of creativity. People also use both to understand the world around them. Now, a study finds, art also can help students remember better what they learned in science class.

How Do We Get Middle School Students Excited About Science? Make It Hands-On

Eighth-grader Liam Bayne has always liked math and science – that is one reason his family sent him to the Alternative School for Math and Science (ASMS). But he was surprised and excited when his sixth-grade science class started each new topic with experimentation, not lecture or textbook learning. This style of learning can feel foreign to many ASMS students at first, whether they come from a private or public elementary school, but with time and support they often come to see its value. Kids talk with one another, and ASMS kids know this is not how a lot of friends at other area middle schools are learning. “We’re learning similar things in science except they have the facts memorized, but they don’t really know them,” said Carolyn Heckle, an ASMS eighth-grader. “Here if you have something in your brain, it’s because you did something that made it a memory.”