Author: Nelson Rosario

Seeing a teen type a question into ChatGPT, read a summary, close the tab, and call it studying makes me feel a little uneasy. It happens all the time now. Up until recently, there wasn’t much solid evidence to argue against it. There was only gut feeling and maybe a vague feeling that something about the process seemed too easy to stick. Now there’s study. Four hundred and five high school students in England, ages 14 to 15, were tracked by Cambridge University Press & Assessment and Microsoft Research as part of a study. Two historical texts—one about apartheid in…

The times of year for awards in the world of education technology often blend together. If a press release is sent out, a few trade publications will pick it up. But by Monday of the next week, everyone has moved on. It would have been easy to forget about the fact that Discovery Education won three awards and was named a finalist for four more in the 2026 EdTech Awards. It’s not. EdTech Digest has been giving out the EdTech Awards for sixteen years. They are not given out lightly. Solutions are judged on how well they work with students,…

Researchers at Stanford recently found a certain kind of quiet urgency. It’s not the loud, newsworthy kind, but the kind that builds over time and tends to matter more in the long run. It turns out that preschools that get money from the government do a lot more than teach three- and four-year-olds how to count and share. Some kids would have gotten lost in the healthcare system otherwise, but these kids are being caught. Adrienne Sabety and Maya Rossin-Slater of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research led the study, which also included Aileen Wu as a predoctoral fellow.…

An impressive thing about a community newsletter is that people read it. It wasn’t just skimmed, filed, or forgotten in an inbox; it was actually read, shared, forwarded, and talked about at staff meetings. That’s pretty much what the 672 people who belong to OMEP Aotearoa’s Facebook group do every day. Also, you should ask why. The World Organization for Early Childhood Education (OMEP) is a big name in the field of early childhood education, but not everyone knows what it stands for. In New Zealand, OMEP Aotearoa has worked hard for years to bring together a group of educators,…

There is something almost defiant about the way OMEP Argentina works. Even though Argentina’s government has been completely upended, with ministries being broken up, budgets being cut, and a president wielding a metaphorical chainsaw on live TV, this non-profit group has been holding annual meetings, publishing research, training teachers, and, most surprisingly, making a podcast. It doesn’t make a lot of noise. It works over and over. It has been based in Argentina since 1966. OMEP is the World Organization for Early Childhood Education. The organization has been around since 1948 around the world. That is a very long institutional…

A two-year-old is sitting on a floor mat in a classroom in Lagos right now, looking up at an adult who wants to help but doesn’t know how. That adult hasn’t failed. They just never learned how to do it. That’s the problem OMEP has been working hard to solve in secret for decades. In the last few years, the group has begun to think more broadly about the issue. The OMEP, which stands for “World Organization for Early Childhood Education,” works in almost 70 countries. With the help of governments, researchers, and practitioners, it shapes how kids from birth…

The plot is almost too good to be true: a kid from Cambridge gets into Harvard, does homework in English class, and writes an essay in the form of a film treatment. That homework turns out to win him an Academy Award. But that’s pretty much what happened with Matt Damon. The longer you think about it, the less like a fairy tale it seems and more like the result of someone who was always paying close attention. Even though he moved away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, many things about him still make him feel like he was born there. The…

Researchers into Alzheimer’s seemed to keep coming back to the same two suspects for decades: amyloid-beta and tau. Scientists knew these proteins were there, building up in brains of sick people and doing terrible things. So they went after them. A lot of money was spent on drugs that were supposed to get rid of amyloid. Some of them worked a little. Saddened the most. Something was missing from the field, and it was always there, but not loud. There’s a chance that something was always hidden in the DNA. King’s College London researchers recently shared their findings on a…

There’s something quietly interesting about the fact that one of the most famous screenwriters in Hollywood never finished his English degree. Matt Damon went to Harvard University in 1988 and lived in Lowell House on campus. He was in the class of 1992. Since he was born and raised in Cambridge, Harvard wasn’t really strange to him. It was pretty close to his house. Still, what happened on campus those years was much more important than any diploma. Before going to Harvard, Damon went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where he was said to have been a good student…

There is something really strange about a school district that can say it has nationally ranked magnet schools and a superintendent who was fired because of a criminal charge. That’s the truth about the DeKalb County School District, which has 138 schools in the eastern part of the Atlanta metropolitan area and educates more than 102,000 students. The district has never quite fit into a single, clean story. The district’s main office is on Mountain Industrial Boulevard, close to Stone Mountain, in unincorporated DeKalb County. The address isn’t the flashiest, which makes sense in a way. DCSD has always been…