educational

Travel, work, or personal advancement are some of the primary reasons for wanting to pick up or brush up on a language other than your native one. For these purposes and more, Babbel's free language packs for mobile are a great place to start your efforts.

Babbel is an online language-learning company that offers French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Brazilian Portuguese, English, Dutch, Polish, Indonesian and Turkish. Impressive, huh? Here's how to get started:

Step 1: Pick a language and download the corresponding language pack for Android or iOS.

This How To will work with the Babbel Spanish pack for Android, … Read more

Have the world's schools caught up with this social-networking thing? Or even with this Web thing? Or even with this being a teenager thing?

These thoughts cross one's temple on hearing the news that a high school in the Philippines is withholding the diplomas of six boys -- ages 16 and 17 -- who allegedly posted pictures on Facebook that appeared to show them, well, snogging one another, as they say in some European parts.

According to the Inquirer, the boys may not have realized that everyone could see these photos. And, yes, scandal appears to have ensued … Read more

I am sure that the people who run Garrett High School in Indiana radiate intelligence.

Perhaps, though, they have tossed a little inkblot onto their pristine record with the expulsion of senior Austin Carroll. He didn't assault anyone. He didn't toss a projectile, nor brandish a knife. No, it seems that he merely tweeted.

Please prepare your best judgmental pose while I transcribe (mostly) his supposedly most offensive tweet: "F*** is one of those F****** words you can F****** put anywhere in a F****** sentence and it still F****** makes sense."

There, how did that feel? … Read more

Complaining is easy.

When 500 bosses and IT managers were asked what they thought of their IT guys, they seemed to have let their feelings depart swiftly from their hinges.

I am grateful to Wired for having corralled this report before too many IT guys got a hold of it and slapped it over the heads of their bosses. For it declared that 93 percent of respondents believe that their IT guys' know-how contains more holes than the average chunk of Emmental.

The report, commissioned by CompTIA, a nonprofit industry association, made my own laptop quiver with indigestion. For the … Read more

Sal Khan teaches math, science, and history to millions of students, but none has ever seen his face.

Khan is the voice and brains behind the Khan Academy--a free online tutoring site that was born out of a young cousin's struggles with algebra in 1994. His classroom has grown from a few hundred pupils to more than 4 million a month.

Khan, 35, believes he can transform education worldwide, and his approach is now being tested in American schools. Along the way, the former hedge fund analyst has won the support of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and Microsoft co-founder … Read more

For the blind and visually impaired, it can be nearly impossible to follow along when a math teacher spends most of a lecture in front of a blackboard or projector drawing shapes, parabolas, X-Y planes, and other visuals.

It's about time there's an app for that, thought mechanical engineering grad student Jenna Gorlewicz, who'd spent a few years at Vanderbilt's Medical and Electromechanical Design Laboratory miniaturizing endoscopic robotic capsules and was looking for a more people-oriented project.

So Gorlewicz, who says she loves both teaching and math, set out 18 months ago to try to develop a tablet app that uses haptic (or tactile) technology to help the visually impaired learn math and other subjects with a strong visual component.… Read more

All the children I know seem to enjoy a good horror movie.

Not all, though, may enjoy that horror being transmitted to their math classes. For a teacher who allegedly downloaded some colorfully horrific math problems with which to fascinate her third-graders, has been fired.

WUSA9 TV offered a very spooky tale of a teacher at Trinidad Center City School in Washington, D.C. who allegedly presented this problem to his kiddies: "I took a nap in a bog one day and woke up screaming. 3,796 leeches, 2,910 fleas and 1,044 vampire bats were stuck to … Read more

They're different in Australia. This is largely a good thing.

In advertising, too, the country has a tradition of breaking boundaries-- or merely, perhaps, of not noticing them.

Please therefore bathe in (and after) this stunning recruitment ad for the Central Institute of Technology in Western Australia.

Perhaps its location is somewhat forbidding for some. So the Institute (as far as I can judge, this is entirely for real) has created this indescribable (in a good way) movie to help potential applicants get over their inhibitions.

It features Henry and Aaron, two gentlemen who might not be easily accepted … Read more

Looking for a new way to keep your unruly kids occupied? Apple, Samsung, and a bunch of other companies may have just what you need.

Polling a host of families with kids under 12, the people at Nielsen found that tablets are a great way to to keep those kids quiet. A full 55 percent said they serve their children tablets as entertainment while stuck in the car, while 41 percent do the same in restaurants.

So which activities will keep your kids busy so mommy and daddy can get some peace?

Among the parents polled, 73 percent said their … Read more