May 2012
47 posts
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“They laugh at me because I’m different; I laugh at them because they’re all the...”
– Kurt Cobain
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The Ups and Downs of Game-Based Learning →
Games have shown great promise for learning, but it’s not always easy to figure out the logistics of how to use them in class. Every student and teacher’s experience is unique and it takes time to calibrate and tinker to get the best out of the experience.
What’s more, using games might lead to something neither students or teacher anticipated — more work.
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The prevailing conclusion?...
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Game on! UCLA researchers use online... →
Online crowd-sourcing — in which a task is presented to the public, who respond, for free, with various solutions and suggestions — has been used to evaluate potential consumer products, develop software algorithms and solve vexing research-and-development challenges. But diagnosing infectious diseases?
Working on the assumption that large groups of public non-experts can be trained to...
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Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School →
Be aware of the insidious and unspoken lessons you learned as a child. To thrive in the world outside the classroom, you’re going to have to unlearn them.
Dangerous things you were taught in school:
1. The people in charge have all the answers.
2. Learning ends when you leave the classroom.
3. The best and brightest follow the rules.
4. What the books say is always true.
5. There is a very...
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Education System Stifles Creativity, Survey Finds →
Is the American education system stifling creativity? That’s the attitude held by a majority of Americans, according to a new worldwide survey focused on attitudes toward creativity in schools, the workplace, and the home.
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73 percent of respondents agreed that, “as a country, we are not living up to our creative potential.” That sentiment was a bit stronger in the...
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Kids Speak Out on Student Engagement →
A while back, I was asked, “What engages students?” Sure, I could respond, sharing anecdotes about what I believed to be engaging, but I thought it would be so much better to lob that question to my own eighth graders. The responses I received from all 220 of them seemed to fall under 10 categories, representing reoccurring themes that appeared again and again. So, from the mouths of...
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“Learning is experience. Everything else is just information.”
– Albert Einstein
Talking to Kids About 'Gay' →
The truth is that explaining to children (or anyone, for that matter) what being gay means isn’t difficult. It’s about love and attraction. It’s about whose hand someone wants to hold, or whom someone wants to ask to a dance. It’s about emotion and the way people feel. It only gets complicated when adults make it complicated, when parents and other adults try to deny the...
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Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online... →
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.
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But Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite...
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Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren't... →
New research however suggests that rather than describe how humans perform, the bell curve may actually be constraining how people perform. Minus such constraints, a new paper argues, lots of people are actually outliers.
Read more…
by SHANKAR VEDANTAM for NPR May 3, 2012
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100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious... →
While burying yourself in the stacks at the library is one way to get some serious research done, with today’s technology you can do quite a bit of useful searching before you ever set foot inside a library. Undergraduates and grad students alike will appreciate the usefulness of these search engines that allow them to find books, journal articles and even primary source material for whatever...
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Project management software for students
Can the business world’s software serve student projects?
Flipped classrooms? Self-directed education? Group work? Project-based learning? Hey all that’s great, but how do you organize, track, assess and personalize all that information, while providing students with a sense of the “big picture?”
Why not try some of the free online project management software currently...
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What happens when you give Kindles to kids in... →
courtenaybird:
Kids learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they were quick to discover “the multimedia aspects of the e-reader, such as music and Internet features.”
Near-zero theft. Only two e-readers (out of 600) were lost in the whole study, partly because “community involvement was encouraged through e-reader...
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Leave Exclusion Out of the Group Dynamic →
Always a tricky situation for teachers that use group work.
It forced me to confront a reality in my classroom. How often does this happen to students? When I explain a partner activity, I often see students make eye contact around the room, their faces lighting up as they communicate an invitation and acceptance without saying a word. However, some students take a sudden interest in studying...
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Online Video Invades the Classroom →
Teachers become enamored with YouTube, TED, and WatchKnowLearn.
In his 40 years of teaching, Al Hasvitz has always understood the importance of video aids in the classroom. “I am one of the few teachers in the United States who can thread a 16mm projector,” the award-winning social studies teacher from Walnut, Calif., boasts. But today, like most teachers, Hasvitz looks online to find...
