Preparing Your Students for the Challenges of Tomorrow

Right now, you have students. Eventually, those students will become the citizens -- employers, employees, professionals, educators, and caretakers of our planet in 21st century. Beyond mastery of standards, what can you do to help prepare them? What can you promote to be sure they are equipped with the skill sets they will need to take on challenges and opportunities that we can't yet even imagine?

Following are six tips to guide you in preparing your students for what they're likely to face in the years and decades to come.

1. Teach Collaboration as a Value and Skill Set Students of today need new skills for the coming century that will make them ready to collaborate with others on a global level. Whatever they do, we can expect their work to include finding creative solutions to emerging challenges.

2. Evaluate Information Accuracy 

New information is being discovered and disseminated at a phenomenal rate. It is predicted that 50 percent of the facts students are memorizing today will no longer be accurate or complete in the near future. Students need to know 

• how to find accurate information, and 
• how to use critical analysis for 
• assessing the veracity or bias and 
• the current or potential uses of new information. 

These are the executive functions that they need to develop and practice in the home and at school today, because without them, students will be unprepared to find, analyze, and use the information of tomorrow.

3. Teach Tolerance 

In order for collaboration to happen within a global community, job applicants of the future will be evaluated by their ability for communication with, openness to, and tolerance for unfamiliar cultures and ideas. To foster these critical skills, today's students will need open discussions and experiences that can help them learn about and feel comfortable communicating with people of other cultures.

4. Help Students Learn Through Their Strengths 

Children are born with brains that want to learn. They're also born with different strengths -- and they grow best through those strengths. One size does not fit all in assessment and instruction. The current testing system and the curriculum that it has spawned leave behind the majority of students who might not be doing their best with the linear, sequential instruction required for this kind of testing. Look ahead on the curriculum map and help promote each student's interest in the topic beforehand. Use clever "front-loading" techniques that will pique their curiosity.

5. Use Learning Beyond the Classroom
New "learning" does not become permanent memory unless there is repeated stimulation of the new memory circuits in the brain pathways. This is the "practice makes permanent" aspect of neuroplasticity where neural networks that are the most stimulated develop more dendrites, synapses, and thicker myelin for more efficient information transmission. These stronger networks are less susceptible to pruning, and they become long-term memory holders. Students need to use what they learn repeatedly and in different, personally meaningful ways for short-term memory to become permanent knowledge that can be retrieved and used in the future. Help your students make memories permanent by providing opportunities for them to "transfer" school learning to real-life situations.

6. Teach Students to Use Their Brain Owner's Manual
The most important manual that you can share with your students is the owner's manual to their own brains. When they understand how their brains take in and store information (PDF, 139KB), they hold the keys to successfully operating the most powerful tool they'll ever own. When your students understand that, through neuroplasticity, they can change their own brains and intelligence, together you can build their resilience and willingness to persevere through the challenges that they will undoubtedly face in the future.

How are you preparing your students to thrive in the world they'll inhabit as adults?


ORIGINAL: Edutopia 

Judy Willis MD's Profile

August 20, 2014

Neuroscientists Join the Open-Source Hardware Movement

Two MIT grad students offer up DIY brain-recording gear

Photo: Open Ephys

Graduate students Josh Siegle and Jakob Voigts were planning an ambitious series of experiments at their MIT neuroscience labs in 2011 when they ran into a problem. They needed to record complex brain signals from mice, but they couldn’t afford the right equipment: The recording systems cost upward of US $60,000 each, and they wanted at least four. So they decided to solve their dilemma by building their own gear on the cheap. And knowing that they wouldn’t be the last neuroscientists to encounter such a problem, they decided to give away their designs. Now their project, Open Ephys, is the hub of a nascent open-source hardware community for neural technology.

Siegle and Voigts weren’t knowledgeable about either circuit design or coding, but they learned as they went along. By July 2013, they were ready to manufacture 50 of their recording systems, which they gave to collaborators for beta testing. This spring they manufactured 100 improved units, which are now arriving in neuroscience labs around the world. They estimate that each system costs about $3,000 to produce.

Neuroscience has a history of hackers, Siegle says, with researchers cobbling together their own gear or customizing commercial systems to meet their particular needs. But those new tools rarely leave the labs they are built in. So scientists spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. The goal of Open Ephys (which is short for open-source electrophysiology) is not just to distribute the tools that Siegle and Voigts have come up with so far but to encourage researchers to put resources into developing open-source tools for the benefit of the whole community. “In addition to changing the tools, we also want to change the culture,” Siegle says.

Photo: Open Ephys Open Ephys just distributed 100 of its acquisition boards to neuroscience labs around the world.

The flagship tool that Siegle and Voigts developed is an acquisition board, which makes sense of the electric signals from electrodes implanted in an animal’s brain. The board interfaces with up to eight headstages that amplify, filter, multiplex, and digitize signals from the brain, and then sends those signals to a computer for further processing. Commercial systems typically have individual ICs perform each of those four functions, but Siegle and Voigts’s system uses a single microchip for the four steps. The chip was recently developed by Intan Technologies, based in Los Angeles. “Once we realized these chips were available, it seemed kind of silly to keep buying the big systems,” Siegle says.

The president and cofounder of Intan, Reid Harrison, says that shrinking and consolidating the gear wasn’t that complicated—it mostly required initiative. “It’s such a niche market that no one else had tried to miniaturize the technology,” he says. “It’s not exactly on the scale of CPUs and cellphones, which drive most IC technology.” However, Harrison says he recognized a need for his small, multipurpose chips. Neuroscientists are always trying to fit more electrodes into an animal’s brain to record more neural activity, he says, which requires ever tinier devices with the electronics close to the electrodes. “You could put 1,000 electrodes in the brain, but you don’t want 1,000 wires on an animal that’s supposed to be mobile,” he says. The Intan chips take information from up to 64 electrodes and turn it into one digital signal, eliminating the confusion of wiring.

The major neural technology companies have designed products that incorporate Intan’s chips, but they also swear by their larger, multichip systems. Keith Stengel, the founder of Neuralynx, in Bozeman, Mont., says that in his big systems, each component is optimized for peak performance. “A lot of our customers have said that you buy a Neuralynx system for the serious work that you’re going to publish, and then you get an Open Ephys system as a second system, for grad students to start their research on,” he says.

 

Illustration: Open Ephys Open Ephys offers building instructions for this head-mounted neural implant system for mice.

Andy Gotshalk, CEO of Blackrock Microsystems, in Salt Lake City, also argues that the commercial products will continue to be the gold standard. “You’re not going to be moving into FDA clinical trials using an Open Ephys system,” he says. The commercial products come with guarantees of quality and reliability, he says, as well as intensive customer support. Gotshalk says his customers are willing to pay a premium for that backing.

Both Stengel and Gotshalk say they welcome Open Ephys to the market and think that its systems can fill a niche. They’re also willing to work with the upstart to make sure their commercial software works with the Open Ephys hardware. Harrison agrees that the community is happy to have another option to work with, and he draws a parallel to the computing industry. “The existing tools are like the PCs and the Macs of the neuroscience world, but now we also have this Linux,” Harrison says. “It’s a lot less expensive, and you can hack it yourself, but it’s not for everyone.”

ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum

By Eliza Strickland
Posted 11 Jun 2014