Education
On a Friday afternoon in the middle of a staff meeting at Aspire Public School’s Monarch Academy, second grade teacher Karen Schreiner felt her phone buzz. It buzzed again. And again. And again. The call was from an area code she didn’t recognize. Schreiner whispered to her principal that she’d be right back and stepped into the hallway. She called back. It was good news—she’d been chosen as one of five recipients of the Teaching for Tolerance Award. “I know…
September is Suicide Prevention Month, and a new bill aims to address the mental health crises faced by many California students. Assembly Bill 2246 would mandate that every California school serving grades seven through 12 adopt suicide prevention policies that specifically address high-risk students, including LGBTQ youth, those experiencing homelessness or foster care, those bereaved by suicide and those with mental illnesses or substance use disorders.
Oakland’s educators met with Silicon Valley technology companies this weekend at a conference to discuss how they can work together to improve science and technology education in the classroom.
For years, Oakland-based Learn Tech Labs co-founders Bella Baek and Jordan Hart heard the same complaint from employers and jobseekers in tech fields. Colleges weren’t teaching graduates practical skills, and coding bootcamps weren’t offering the computer science foundation needed for many programming jobs. Hart says he used to interview people with computer science degrees who had never heard of Git, the industry standard software that allows users to track changes in their code and collaborate. “It wasn’t like they’d been…
Education software company Turnitin is arguably one of Oakland’s biggest technology companies that few people know about. Turnitin, which makes anti-plagiarism software, was founded in 1998 by John Barrie and Christian Storm. Both were doctoral candidates in neuroscience at UC Berkeley when they came up with the idea after seeing a high level of plagiarism in the undergraduate papers they were grading. Using their expertise in brain wiring, Barrie and Storm wrote pattern matching recognition algorithms that can scan text…
It is back to school time and Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) is welcoming their students with a new investment in science and math education, backed by a $2.5 million donation from Salesforce, a cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco.
High school students filled the rooms at the East Oakland Youth Development Center over Labor Day weekend to learn about virtual reality technology. Among the 45 attendees was fourteen-year old Oakland-native Gabriel Sanchez, who participated on a team that was working to incorporate virtual reality (VR) technology in simulating the Oval Office. He said he signed up for another hackathon last year and enjoyed it so much that he decided to be a part of this one. The two-day event…
12 recent graduates of San Jose State University’s Master of Fine Arts program participated in the “Minted” exhibit, which opened at Pro Arts Gallery in downtown Oakland on September 2.
A new program from the Oakland Public Library is helping bridge the tech divide by providing free internet at home for Oakland’s young and old.