Kaleidoscope Learning

A Confession

Recently, I was cruising Facebook, as I too often do,  when I came across the following meme. It featured Neil deGrasse Tyson, so naturally I stopped in my tracks and read it. Because he is just THAT cool.

Anyway, I confused. I mean, the sun is yellow, right. That’s what the textbook told me. And that’s what I taught. The sun is a yellow star.

It was at this point that I started to freak out a little See, Tyson is one of my favorite scientists; he’s a crazy smart guys. I trust him. He he says the ain’t yellow, then I have a major problem. Because I’m been teaching it WRONG!

Now, as to the confession: My earth science isn’t that strong. Stronger, perhaps, that the average American, especially when it comes to soil science, but that isn’t good enough. I’m a scientist. I’m a TEACHER. I have a responsibility to be correct as often as possible, so that I’m not passing on half-truths to my students. This is a big deal to me. It’s why I read a lot of non-fiction and love professional development.

That said, the wonderful thing about learning is that it never stops. So off I went to do some research. I learned that the sun only appears to be yellow to us due to the Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere scatters the blue light, causing our sun to look more yellow on Earth than it would from space. It is, in fact, a white star, with a temperature of  approximately 6,000 Kelvin. Of course, because the sun has layers of different temperatures, each sends a different wavelength of light and what we see if often this combination, interpreted by our eye, which is itself limited.

Of course, I feel better that lots of people are unsure about the topic and that there is still debate on the matter. I just think that next time I teach the sun, especially middle school or older, we’ll start with the color as a question and challenge so that we can explore how complicated the answer really it.

So that is what I learned today.

Our body language can reveal more about what we know than our verbal language

Many of the studies establishing the importance of gesture to learning have been conducted by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. “We change our minds by moving our hands,” writes Goldin-Meadow in a review of this work published in the current issue of the journalCognitiveScience. Particularly significant are what she calls “mismatches” between verbal expression and physical gestures. A student might say that a heavier ball falls faster than a light one, for example, but make a gesture indicating that they fall at the same rate, which is correct. Such discrepancies indicate that we’re in a transitional state, moving from one level ofunderstandingto another. The thoughts expressed by hand motions are often our newest and most advanced ideas about the problem we’re working on; we can’t yet assimilate these notions into language, but we can capture them in movement. When a child employs gesture, Goldin-Meadow notes, “the information about the child’s cognitive state is conveyed sub rosa — below the surface of ordinary conversation.” Such gesture-speech mismatches have been found in toddlers going through a vocabulary spurt, in elementary-school children describing why the seasons change, and in adults attempting to explain how a machine works.

Goldin-Meadow’s more recent work shows not only that gesture is an index to our readiness to learn, but that it actually helps to bring learning about. It does so in two ways. First, it elicits helpful behavior from others around us. Goldin-Meadow has found that adults spontaneously respond to children’s speech-gesture mismatches by adjusting their mode of instruction.Parentsand teachers apparently receive the signal that children are ready to learn, and they act on it by offering a greater variety of problem-solving strategies.

The act of gesturing itself also seems to accelerate learning, bringing nascent knowledge into consciousness and aiding the understanding of new concepts. A 2007 study by Susan Wagner Cook, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, reported that third-graders who were asked to gesture while learning algebra were nearly three times more likely to remember what they’d learned than classmates who did not gesture. Another experiment conducted by Cook determined that college students who gestured as they retold short stories they’d seen recalled the details of the stories better, suggesting that gesturing as we’re remembering helps retrieve the information from memory.

Published on June 11, 2012 by Annie Murphy Paul in How To Be Brilliant

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 clear, single path to success.

6. Behaving yourself is as important as getting good marks.

7. Standardized tests measure your value.

8. Days off are always more fun than sitting in the classroom.

9. The purpose of your education is your future career.

By Jessica Hagy,  5/02/2012 for Forbes.com

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 instructional videos for his seventh grade students. In fact, he bookmarks more than 80 video websites. But how does he find quality content among all these options?

By Sarah Evelyn Harvey, Contributor

Forbes, TECHONOMY | 4/23/2012

More links: 

WatchKnowLearn

SchoolTube

TeacherTube

YouTube EDU

TED-Ed

via revolutionizeed

A magician-turned-mathematician figures out how many times to shuffle a deck of cards before playing Old Maid

As Diaconis learned the card tricks, he found himself asking questions. How many different ways can you arrange the cards in a deck? What if you ignore the number and suit and only consider card color – then how many different ways can you arrange the deck? Vernon taught Diaconis a sneaky trick to deal the cards out to four players while making sure that all the aces would end up in his own hand. Then Diaconis wondered how he could do the trick with five players.

To answer questions like those, Diaconis eventually realized, he needed mathematics. So he went back to school.

Now he’s a mathematician at Stanford University and one of the world’s greatest experts in probability, the study of chance. But he hasn’t left his magic days behind. Even today, he says, much of his research is motivated by questions about shuffling cards. “Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing,” he says.

By Julie Rehmeyer / September 30, 2009

Science News for Kids

Call it the “learning paradox”: the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/04/25/why-floundering-is-good/#ixzz1tBjaXaGt

By Annie Murphy Paul | @anniemurphypaul | April 25, 2012

for Time

We humans love to learn. We are endlessly curious and eager gatherers of new knowledge. But we do need motivation to learn new things, and that motivation comes from our enlivening experiences and our ability to care. Most people have no reason to get excited or care about vernal pools and their ecology or conservation, because vernal pools mean nothing to them. Even if they stumbled upon a vernal pool in the woods, they would be as likely to find it mucky and gross as they would to find it amazing and compelling. There’s a positive feedback loop that occurs with curiosity. It is fed by care and some knowledge, which then inspires the desire to gain more knowledge and which makes us care even more.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/curiosity-and-care-the-core-necessity-for-learning.html#ixzz1t9V0ZGbk

by Zoe WeilApril 23, 2012 for Care2.

Good news for all those who ever had a teacher or a parent say “If you would just apply yourself you could learn anything! You’re only using 10 percent of your brain!”

All those people were wrong. If we did use only 10 percent of our brains we’d be close to dead, according to Eric Chudler, director of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at the University of Washington, who maintains an entertaining brain science website for kids. “When recordings are made from brain EEGs, or PET scans, or any type of brain scan, there’s no part of the brain just sitting there unused,” he said. 

» via MSNBC via infoneer-pulse