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"Open with a question or two. Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. "The material I want students to learn," he writes in his book Why Don't Students Like School?, "is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting." My colleague Greg Weiner, an associate professor of political science, puts those ideas into practice. At the beginning of class, he shows four or five questions on a slide for students to consider. Class then proceeds in the usual fashion. At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers and understand that they have learned something that day. What did we learn last time? A favorite activity of many instructors is to spend a few minutes at the opening of class reviewing what happened in the previous session. That makes perfect sense, and is supported by the idea that we don't learn from single exposure to material - we need to return frequently to whatever we are attempting to master.But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?Reactivate what they learned in previous courses. Plenty of excellent evidence suggests that whatever knowledge students bring into a course has a major influence on what they take away from it. So a sure-fire technique to improve student learning is to begin class by revisiting, not just what they learned in the previous session, but what they already knew about the subject matter.Write it down. All three of the previous activities would benefit from having students spend a few minutes writing down their responses. That way, every student has the opportunity to answer the question, practice memory retrieval from the previous session, or surface their prior knowledge - and not just the students most likely to

"Generating electricity is not only inefficient, it also makes pedal power less sustainable, less robust and more costly. To begin with, batteries have to be manufactured, and they have to be replaced regularly. This requires energy, which can completely negate the ecological advantage of pedal power. According to this research paper (pdf), the embodied energy of a 150Wh lead-acid battery (like the one offered with the Windstream pedal power generator) is at least 37,500 Wh, which equals 250 full charges of the battery (more sources: 1/2). In other words: if you can deliver 75 watts of power to the battery, you have to pedal for 500 hours in order to generate the energy that was needed to manufacture the battery. Because the life expectancy of a lead-acid battery can be as low as 300 discharge/charge cycles (sources: 1/2), you are basically pedalling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery. If you also factor in the embodied energy of other electronics and parts, the ecological advantage of a pedal powered generator connected to a battery becomes rather doubtful. It might costs more energy than it delivers."

"Generating electricity is not only inefficient, it also makes pedal power less sustainable, less robust and more costly. To begin with, batteries have to be manufactured, and they have to be replaced regularly. This requires energy, which can completely negate the ecological advantage of pedal power. According to this research paper (pdf), the embodied energy of a 150Wh lead-acid battery (like the one offered with the Windstream pedal power generator) is at least 37,500 Wh, which equals 250 full charges of the battery (more sources: 1/2). In other words: if you can deliver 75 watts of power to the battery, you have to pedal for 500 hours in order to generate the energy that was needed to manufacture the battery. Because the life expectancy of a lead-acid battery can be as low as 300 discharge/charge cycles (sources: 1/2), you are basically pedalling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery. If you also factor in the embodied energy of other electronics and parts, the ecological advantage of a pedal powered generator connected to a battery becomes rather doubtful. It might costs more energy than it delivers."

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures,

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures,

"What does that mean exactly? It means you play in a multiplayer world that has the possibility of being permanently destroyed, resulting in server-wide perma death. What's more, the reason it's destroyed would be the players' own fault. It's not that different from our own world in that way. "This ecosystem is your only lifeline in a race against time." It works like this: a new server is started, and players enter at the beginnings of civilization. There's a world-destroying cataclysm looming, like a drought or a flood or a meteor heading for the Earth, several real-time weeks away. In order to prevent that catastrophe from happening, you need to build a civilization and advance technology and resources to the point that the crisis can be averted. However you're not alone in this world. Besides the other players, you'll be sharing the world with a detailed wilderness simulation full of plants and animals. They simulate 24 hours a day, living out their lives with or without human interaction, growing, feeding and reproducing. Together they form an ecosystem rich with resources, resources that you must use to survive and develop a civilization."

"... Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity. ..."

"Carol Dweck, psicóloga de Stanford, ha dedicado años a demostrar que uno de los elementos fundamentales de la educación satisfactoria es la capacidad de aprender de los errores. Sin embargo, acostumbramos a enseñar justo lo contrario. Si un niño comete errores, es que no es muy listo. El listo no comete errores, y además le elogiamos precisamente por ello, por ser listo. Pocas personas son las que elogian a los demás por su esfuerzo, y no por su capacidad innata."

Rigurosa y potente investigación en EEUU que pone de manifiesto que los desfases en el aprendizaje de las ciencias comienzan en Educación Infantil, permaneciendo y aumentando en posteriores etapas educativas. Por tanto, si queremos una educación científica sólida de los ciudadanos debemos empezar por iniciarla y en todo caso mejorarla desde la Educación Infantil

""Dice el refrán que una imagen vale más que 1000 palabras...". Pero en este caso le daremos la vuelta al refrán y diremos "...más de 1000 palabras que te darán una imagen... de mi aula". Así empezamos la primera sesión de tutoría del curso 2015/2016 con 3ºESO. Con esta actividad, que paso a relataros,pretendemos que el alumno rompa el hielo del comienzo del curso escolar desdevarios ámbitos: "el personal, pensando en quién es, que le apasiona, que le cuesta…; el grupal, descubriendo y conociendo a las personas con las que va a convivir los próximos nueve meses; y el espacial, convirtiendo el espacio-aula en un lugar del que también se sienta protagonista junto con sus compañeros... DESARROLLO DE LA DINÁMICA La idea inicial de la actividad nace de otra genial creada y compartida en la red por Estrella López Aguilar y titulada "Yo en 100 palabras". Un comienzo similar con un desenlace diferente. La dinámica se desarrollará en 4 momentos."