Education
East Bay suicide prevention and social services programs are offering a new course that teaches the public how to recognize and respond to mental illness.
On September 9, the Mars Experience Bus made its first California stop on its long national tour at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland to share with children a virtual reality experience of the red planet. The Mars bus stayed on the premises for the weekend, and the Lockheed Martin Center invited the public to enjoy the experience for free. The experience was received with joy by visitors of all ages, as children and parents came down from…
Students in Oakland were among thousands nationwide who found their dreams postponed last Tuesday, when one of the country’s largest for-profit technical colleges, ITT Technical Institute, closed its doors.
The Oakland Unified School Board meeting Wednesday night was packed—and then it wasn’t. Hundreds of parents and children wearing pro-charter school t-shirts and waving roses filled the left hand side of the gym at La Escuelita Learning Center, spilling over onto the right side where union members from the Oakland Education Association sat. Over twenty cards for public comment had been filed on an item that did not appear on the agenda. But as the board opened the floor to…
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…