This week I joined a group of amazing education leaders and student activists to host a worldwide online event on rethinking digital citizenship. The event was designed to call attention to the fact that we need a much deeper conversation about how to help young people be their best selves in the virtual world. Part of that conversation is understanding that the same tools that can be used to bully and spread hate can also be used to uplift and spread light. The determination in how they will be used rests with us. As part of the event, the amazing…

Education has a problem. It’s not a shortage of great ideas. Solutions to just about every challenge in education have already been discovered by a teacher in a classroom somewhere or a researcher in some university. No, the problem that education has is that it is really hard to get good ideas to be widely adopted.

This is a problem I’ve been fascinated with ever since grad school. I watched as research projects, led by the faculty at my university, all met a similar end: a publication in a paper in a journal that sat on a shelf. This valuable…

As an undergrad at Brigham Young University I majored in Humanities. Spanish language teaching to be specific, and proud of it. At the time I chose my major I never expected I would spend most of my career in technology related roles. Last month I was asked to return to BYU to speak to the College of Humanities about how a humanities background has shaped the work I have done.

The invitation forced me to reflect. It might not seem obvious that a liberal arts foundation would be relevant in the tech community. But thinking about tech through the lens…

By Richard Culatta and Sandy Speicher

While there might not be obvious similarities between a Silicon Valley start-up and a public college in Rhode Island, taking a page from the tech- industry playbook may be the key to the future of higher education.

It doesn’t take long during a conversation among app developers before someone mentions the term UX — user experience. The term refers to the interaction between a person and a tool or system. Understanding the user experience guides the decisions that developers make as they design apps: Do users intuitively know how to use a particular app…

by Richard and Shaundra Culatta

There’s an old joke that goes, “You call someone who speaks two languages bilingual. You call someone who speaks three languages trilingual. You call someone who speaks one language American.” Only it’s not really a joke. 66% of children in the world are raised to speak more than one language — but only 6% of children in the U.S. are multilingual. [Associated Press]

10 years ago, when planning our future family, we decided that we wanted to raise our kiddos speaking two languages. There is a mountain of research on the benefits of being bilingual…

As a former language teacher, I love examples of translations that didn’t turn out quite as they were intended. There’s the famous example when the U.S. auto-maker Chevrolet marketed the Nova in Latin America: no va in Spanish means “doesn’t go”. Airports seem to be a great place to find language problems, such as this sign helping people find the restrooms. My point is that language matters. When we translate between one language and another, a lack of precision is obvious and often comical. But our lack of precision around the language we use to describe innovation in education is…

A call for better methods for evaluating educational apps

Richard Culatta and Katrina Stevens, U.S. Department of Education

As increasingly more apps and digital tools for education become available, families and teachers are rightly asking how they can know if an app actually lives up to the claims made by its creators. The field of educational technology changes rapidly with apps launched daily; app creators often claim that their technologies are effective when there is no high-quality evidence to support these claims. …