Originally developed and launched in March of 2020, our trunk on Central America has been revamped over the past few months. This time around, learners solve clues that take them from 3D objects to exciting Smithsonian Libraries and Archives images to Folkways music recordings, all while learning about family histories from the point of view of middle school aged kids. The trunk, titled Nice Tú Meet You, focuses on Latinx cultures from Central America and the Caribbean through the music and storytelling. Four fictional teen narrators take learners along on their discovery of their families' histories, allowing participants to ask questions about their own heritage. Students will also use technology to discover real-world stories about the connection between bananas and the Panama Canal, the history of corn in Mesoamerica, the blending of religions in the Caribbean, and the significance of Bomba music in Puerto Rico. 

The magic “talking box” is the centerpiece of the Nice Tú Meet You Traveling Trunk. This product comes from a British company called Museum In a Box. It is equipped with an RFID reader that communicates with NFC stickers embedded on the objects and cards. Place any item in the trunk on the box and the room is filled with stories and songs of history. In the future, we plan to work with the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office to create 3D printed versions of objects from the Smithsonian’s collection, tightening the connection between classrooms and museum education. 

As former classroom educators, we recognized the importance of ease when it comes to the use of an outside educational resource. It was a top priority to create a resource that seamlessly fit into classrooms and provided the necessary tools for instruction. Early on, we identified points from the National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies to focus on. The trunk comes with a how-to guide that offers multiple ideas for implementing the many included activities. As such, educators are empowered with the ability to use the trunk in a way that best suits them – whole group, small group, one section at a time – without losing any of the trunk’s intended objectives. Each trunk also comes with ‘educator fact sheets’ to quickly bring educators up to speed on the specifics of the trunk’s content. We also work with an evaluator and educator focus groups to help us create a program fit for a middle school classroom and will be tweaking along the way to accommodate feedback from learners and educators across the country. 

Following this will be a trunk dedicated to solving a mystery, highlighting the importance of Information Literacy and finally, an art-based exploration trunk in partnership with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  

To borrow Nice Tú Meet You, head over to our lending system and put in a request. If you need some assistance with the process, check out our how-to tips. If you have any questions or just want to get alerted to when the next Trunk comes out, drops us a line at [email protected]. Happy Traveling! 

Driving tests can be a frightening experience, and it doesn't help that some who are taking their tests are worrying about things that ultimately aren't true.

According to the DVSA, there are certain common myths that learner drivers shouldn't buy into ahead of their tests. For example, a driver will not fail if they don't 'exaggerate' a head turn when checking a mirror.

Buying into these myths could put unnecessary pressure on learner motorists, which may in-turn lead to a more significant mistake which fails them on their test.

According to the motoring experts these are some of the driving test myths that you shouldn't be worrying about, since they aren't true:

• Driving test having pass quotas
• Learners automatically fail if they stall
• Learners automatically fail if they cross their hands when turning the steering wheel
• It’s easier for learners to pass their driving test at certain times of the day
• Learners need to exaggerate moving their head when looking at mirrors

It comes after the DVSA has launched their 'Ready to Pass?' campaign which provides guidance for learners and helps debunk myths to reduce the number who need to take more than one driving test.

DVSA’s Chief Executive, Loveday Ryder commented: "I'd urge learners to use our 'Ready to Pass?' website to make sure they’re ready – and delay their test if they’re not.

"This will help make more tests available and prevent people having to pay to re-test."

Recently, the driving theory test centres with the highest pass rates were revealed, with Scottish centres taking the first, second and third spot.

Learner drivers in Tarbert, Pitlochry and Huntly appear to have done their homework as they boast the best pass rates in the UK, with 91.7 percent, 84.6 percent and 84.2 percent respectively.

Speaking on the 'Ready to Pass?' campaign, Roads Minister, Richard Holden said: "Passing your driving test is a major milestone but thousands of pounds and tests are unfortunately lost due to people not being properly prepared before they try."

"We need to make every test count and I would urge learners to use the ‘Ready to Pass’ campaign and change their test if they aren’t ready."

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The Herald

Bulawayo Bureau 

A Form Four pupil at Bulawayo’s Founders High School, Wayne Ndlovu, was fatally knifed on Monday afternoon in a suspected turf war involving boys from Hamilton High School and Founders in the city.

Wayne who was good in science subjects aspired to be a doctor upon completion of his A’Level studies.

He was stabbed on the neck. The boy was pronounced dead upon arrival at the United Bulawayo Hospitals. Two boys from Hamilton High School have since been arrested in connection with Wayne’s death and they are assisting police with investigations.

The death is a culmination of a series of turf wars pitting pupils from schools in the city.

Wayne’s mother, Ms Nomatter Ndlovu said her family is devastated following the brutal killing of her first-born child.

She described Wayne as a brilliant and academically gifted boy whose future was promising.

“He was an intelligent child, very bright, and could easily adjust to any kind of situation. He did not discriminate against anyone and loved sport and school. He actually wanted to be a doctor in life and that is why he was studying sciences,” she said.

“Now that things have gone this way we don’t know what we are going to do about his shattered dreams. We were actually imagining him as a practicing doctor assisting the community.”

Ms Ndlovu said her son had a heart of gold and a spirit of humanity.

She said soon after the family received the sad news shortly after 4pm on Monday, his father immediately rushed to the scene.

Ms Ndlovu said she was told that her son was attacked while trying to rescue his friend who was being attacked by bullies. 

“I don’t know what was happening, but what we are being told is that Wayne was coming from a different direction when he found his friend being bullied by the Hamilton boys. He tried to rescue the friend and in the process of doing so, that is when he was stabbed,” she said.

Ms Ndlovu said soon after the incident, other pupils rushed to inform the school headmistress and she rushed to the scene.

The school head informed the parents and the boy’s father rushed to the scene.

“When his father arrived at the spot, he tried to render first aid before the arrival of an ambulance. While in the ambulance, the father said, Wayne tried to murmur some inaudible words,” said Ms Ndlovu.

Ms Ndlovu said when she arrived at the hospital, her husband was bloodied 

“When I arrived at UBH I found my husband outside just walking around, I didn’t ask him about the situation. I just kept quiet and when he spoke he said the boy could die and I was so touched,” she said.

Ms Ndlovu said they watched helplessly as nurses frantically tried to save their son.

 “There were so many nurses in the room running around as they tried to save my son. He was put on oxygen, but deep down in my heart, I could feel that something was not right,” she said.

 “Minutes later, nurses opened the curtain for us to see our son lying dead on a blood-stained bed and they were drops of blood on the floor.”

Ms Ndlovu urged authorities to address the issue of turf wars in schools.

Bulawayo deputy police spokesperson Assistant Inspector Nomalanga Msebele said two pupils have since been arrested in connection with Wayne’s murder.

 “I can confirm that as police, we are attending to a case where a 16-year-old pupil from Founders High School was stabbed to death during a fight involving learners from Founders High School and Hamilton High School,” she said.

Asst Insp Msebele said the deceased approached boys from Hamilton and asked them why they had attacked his friend resulting in a fight.

“An altercation ensued resulting in the boys from Hamilton stabbing the deceased in the neck before they fled from the scene. A report was made to us leading to the arrest of two Hamilton High School pupils,” said the police spokesperson.

Asst Insp Msebele said police are concerned about cases of violence recorded in several schools in the city.

She said singled out Milton, Gifford, and Msiteli High Schools as schools where bullying is rampant.

“We encourage school authorities to report all bullying cases to the police. We have done several campaigns to discourage bullying in schools and continue to engage them to address the problem,” said Asst Insp Msebele.

“It is quite disturbing to note that some pupils are carrying dangerous weapons to schools.”

Inside the beating heart of many students and a large number of learners lies an inner cheat.  To get passing grades, every effort will be made to do the least to achieve the most. Efforts to subvert the central class examination are the stuff of legend: discreetly written notes on hands, palms and other body parts; secreted pieces of paper; messages concealed in various vessels that may be smuggled into the hall.

In the fight against such cunning devilry, vigilant invigilators have pursued such efforts with eagle eyes, attempting to ensure the integrity of the test answers.  Of late, the broader role of invigilation has become more pertinent than ever, notably in the face of artificial intelligence technologies that seek to undermine the very idea of the challenging, individually researched answer.

ChatGPT, a language processing tool powered by comprehensive, deep AI technology, offers nightmares for instructors and pedagogues in spades.  Myopic university managers will be slower to reach any coherent conclusions about this large language model (LLM), as they always are.  But given the diminishing quality of degrees and their supposed usefulness, not to mention running costs and the temptations offered by educational alternatives, this will come as a particularly unwelcome headache.

For the student and anyone with an inner desire to labour less for larger returns, it is nothing less than a dream, a magisterial shortcut.  Essays, papers, memoranda, and drafted speeches can all be crafted by this supercomputing wonder.  It has already shaken educational establishments and even made Elon Musk predict that humanity was “not far from dangerously strong AI.”

Launched on November 30, 2022 and the creative offspring of AI research company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a work in progress, open to the curious, the lazy and the opportunistic. Within the first five days of launching, it had 1 million users on the books.

It did not take long for the chatbot to do its work.  In January, the Manchester Evening News reported that a student by the name of Pieter Snepvangers had asked the bot to put together a 2,000-word essay on social policy.  Within 20 minutes, the work was done.  While not stellar, Snepvangers was informed by a lecturer that the essay could pass with a grade of 53.  In the words of the instructor, “This could be a student who has attended classes and has engaged with the Topic of the unit.  The content of the essay, this could be somebody that’s been in my classes.  It wasn’t the most terrible in terms of content.”

On receiving the assessment from the lecturer, Snepvangers could only marvel at what the site had achieved: “20 minutes to produce an essay which is supposed to demonstrate 12 weeks of learning.  Not bad.”

The trumpets of doomsday have been sounded.  Beverly Pell, an advisor on technology for children and a former teacher based in Irvine, California, saw few rays of hope with the arrival of the ChatGPT bot, notably on the issue of performing genuine research.  “There’s a lot of cheap knowledge out there,” she told Forbes.  “I think this could be a danger in education, and it’s not good for kids.”

Charging the barricades of such AI-driven knowledge forms tends to ignore the fundamental reality that the cheat or student assistance industry in education has been around for years.  The armies of ghost writers scattered across the globe willing to receive money for writing the papers of others have not disappeared.  The website stocked with readily minted essays has been ubiquitous.

More recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, online sites such as Chegg offer around the clock assistance in terms of homework, test preparation and writing support. The Photomath app, to take another striking example, has seen over 300 million downloads since coming into use in 2014.  It enables students to take a picture of their maths problems and seek answers.

Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is also less than impressed by claims that ChatGPT is somehow bomb blowing in its effects.  “In terms of underlying techniques, ChatGPT is not particularly innovative.”  It was merely “well put together” and “nicely done.”  Half a dozen startups, in addition to Google and Meta, were using “very similar technology” to OpenAI.

It is worth noting that universities, colleges and learning institutions constitute one aspect of the information cosmos that is ChatGPT.  The chatbot continues to receive queries of varying degrees of banality.  Questions range from astrology to suggest gift ideas to friends and family.

Then come those unfortunate legislators who struggle with the language of writing bills for legal passage.  “When asked to write a bill for a member for Congress that would make changes to federal student aid programs,” writesMichael Brickman of the American Enterprise Institute, “ChatGPT produced one in seconds.  When asked for Republican and Democrat amendments focused on consumer protection, it delivered a credible version that each party might conceivably offer.”

What are the options in terms of combating such usurping gremlins?  For one, its gratis status is bound to change once the research phase is concluded.  And, at least for the moment, the website has a service that occasionally overloads and impairs responses to questions users may pose.  To cope with this, OpenAI created ChatGPT Plus, a plan that enables users to access material even during those rocky fluctuations.

Another relevant response is to keep a desparate eye on the curriculum itself.  In the words of Jason Wingard, a self-professed “global thought leader”, “The key to retaining the value of a degree from our institution is ensuring your graduates have the skills to change with any market.  This means that we must tweak and adapt our curriculum at leastevery single year.”  Wingard’s skills in global thought leadership do not seem particularly attuned to how university curricula, and incompetent reformers who insist on changing them, function.

There are also more rudimentary, logistical matters one can adopt.  A return to pen and paper could be a start.  Or perhaps the typewriter.  These will be disliked and howled at by those narcotised by the screen, online solutions and finger tapping.  But the modern educator will have to face facts.  For all the remarkable power available through AI and machine related learning, we are also seeing a machine-automated form of unlearning, free of curiosity.  Some branches off the tree of knowledge are threatening to fall off.

February is Early Ed Month in Louisiana — an opportunity for business leaders and policymakers to focus on one of the most crucial issues facing our state. Early care and education prepares children for long-term success. It enables parents to go to work or school. It is the invisible infrastructure supporting our businesses by providing a stable workforce.

Yet it is expensive, often the largest part of a family’s budget. It can be difficult to obtain, with almost half of the child care centers in the state maintaining a waitlist. At the same time, child care providers struggle to retain and recruit staff, since most cannot afford to pay much more than $10 per hour.

This year, early care and education in Louisiana faces an additional challenge.

During the pandemic, federal aid poured into the state. Fearing the impact of a workforce unable to go to work and children unable to access high-quality experiences during critical developmental years, state leaders used funds to help 16,000 in-need children access care. At the time, conventional wisdom suggested federal funding would continue, but the government failed to replace that funding.

The Early Childhood Care and Education Commission is asking the Legislature to appropriate $315 million to early care and education this year — $200 million to prevent 16,000 children from losing access and $115 million to expand access to 9,000 more in-need children from birth to age 3. This is a critical need for our state, which loses $1.3 billion in economic activity every year due to child care breakdowns, and in which only 40% of kindergarteners arrive at school ready to succeed.

Nearly 85% of a child’s brain develops by age 3, which is why One Acadiana, United Way of Acadiana, Ochsner Lafayette General, and Our Lady of Lourdes announced an initiative to educate all new moms in Acadiana on the importance of building their babies’ brains.

We cannot afford for 16,000 children and their families to lose access to care, when we desperately need to expand access to more working families.

TROY WAYMAN

One Acadiana

Lafayette

A accurate study from the Institute of English Language and Literature at Freie Universität Berlin has shown that using codified gestures as a teaching method may make it easier for children and adolescents to understand the grammar rules of a foreign language. Researcher Natasha Janzen Ulbricht has been investigating how different hand gestures can contribute to procedural learning during language lessons.

Her study focused on grammatical morphemes, the smallest unit of language that carries meaning, such as the plural {-s} and possessive {-s}. This innovative teaching method was tested in a primary school classroom. Tests carried out after the lessons showed that learners found it easier to internalize grammar rules and were able to apply these rules more readily when gestures which distinguish between grammatical morphemes were used as a learning aid.

The results of the study suggest that this teaching method should be further developed and refined. It also recommends that this approach be included in training programs for language teachers. The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE in February 2023.

Approximately one third of children and adolescents in Germany attend a school where the main language spoken is not their first (or only first) language. This makes it all the more necessary that additional support is provided to help students learn the language and understand its grammar. Gestures could be a useful tool in this respect.

"We have neurocognitive data that support the idea of gestures being closely related to spoken language and evidence that gestures support memory when learning a language," explains Janzen Ulbricht. "Just as written notes can act as memory aids, gestures can provide a stable physical reference for language learners—even though speech is inherently ephemeral."

Words and sentences rely on units of meaning and grammatical elements, known as "morphemes." Janzen Ulbricht says that one of the challenges in acquiring languages in school lies in correctly arranging these units and being able to "predict" the next element in a given context. Codified gestures could help young learners of English who struggle with grammatical morphemes, such as the plural {-s} and possessive {-s} understand what they hear and Improve the predictions they make.

"Gestures offer a means of visually differentiating between grammatical morphemes that differ in meaning but sound the same," says Janzen Ulbricht. Since instructional gestures can be used independently of any given first language, teaching gestures may be particularly useful when teaching multilingual students.

Natasha Janzen Ulbricht is a researcher in English didactics and applied linguistics at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research explores how communicative movements can be used as a teaching tool in the classroom. She is also a specialist in training English language instructors and has hands-on experience in educating teachers in Germany, Zambia, and the US.

A learner driver, who was set to take their test in May, was arrested after being caught high on cannabis.

Officers carried out a roadside test on Garstang Road, Preston last night (Saturday, February 11) on the learner who was being supervised by a qualified driver.

The learner driver failed the test for cannabis and was arrested as a result. People on Facebook responded to Preston Police’s Facebook post praising the officers for catching the ‘idiot’.

One wrote: “I couldn’t provide two hoots why they stopped the car but glad they did, that person does not belong on the road quit making issues where there isn’t any.”

Another said: “What an idiot. Obviously getting some practice in for drug driving on a full licence.”

A spokesperson for the police said: “This driver was being supervised by a qualified driver on Garstang Road, Preston when he was stopped by #HO30. The driver was getting some practice in prior to his driving test in May.

“Unfortunately the driver failed a roadside DrugWipeUK for cannabis.”