Day: November 11, 2023

These apps can help you save time and be more productive | Technology

Shelia Pearson

We’ve all probably made a point (more than once) to quit smoking, exercise regularly, or learn a language. We might also have thought about how to be more productive on a daily basis, but didn’t know where to start. There are technological tools available these days that help us keep track of our daily objectives and provide a space to write down a daily ‘to do’ list or our aims for the week. They come with orderly and visually attractive layouts that make it easier to achieve our goals. These tools are designed to keep exhaustive control of what needs to be done each day (some even allow us to limit the time spent on each task), and they collect everything that is pending in thematic lists, and can even oblige the user to feel accountable to the tool.

Getting your life in order

These tools are usually focused on teamwork, but many users use them to organize their daily lives, both professionally and personally. Notion is both a project manager and a space to take notes. It is an all-in-one that the user can design from scratch and choose the layout of the sections and background photographs, label documents,

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Do Educational Apps Actually Help Kids Learn? (Opinion)

Shelia Pearson

The last few years have made clear that education may be increasingly infused with technology but that much ed. tech is disappointing and distracting. Heck, I spent a whole chapter in The Great School Rethink on this very point and on what it’ll take to do better. Well, that’s what makes a new meta-analysis by Jimmy Kim and Josh Gilbert so intriguing. Kim, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Gilbert, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, dug deep into the research literature to figure out what we know about when and why apps actually help students learn. I think it’s fascinating stuff and asked if they’d mind sharing some of the takeaways. They were good enough to oblige. Here’s what they had to say.

—Rick

Can educational apps really help children learn? It’s a question that has become especially relevant since the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of students were forced by school closures into online learning. With the abundance of educational apps available, parents and teachers are wondering whether they are truly effective in improving student learning outcomes such as math or reading test scores.

Researchers often conduct randomized controlled trials, RCTs, to test whether an educational

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