Group items tagged

"Children's books are an excellent means of 'travel'. With some good writing and an active imagination, you can go quite a lot of places without getting up off the couch. But did you know that many of the fabulous children's books out there were inspired by and written about real places? From Harry Potter to Beatrix Potter, authors have been drawing their inspiration from real life for a long time. Check out the handy infographic below (photo credit) to learn about traveling as well as a bit more about the real life places behind some of the most popular children's books of all time."

"Like many kids of my generation growing up in India, I was an avid reader of Enid Blyton's novels. Many of her books were written as a series ("The Famous Five," "The Secret Seven" and "Five Find-Outers") and I recall wondering if the lives of characters overlapped in any way. Did a character from one series ever run into one from another, for example? I recall wondering the same thing in later years about P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle and Jeeves series. Today, in a world where communities real and imagined are digitally connected via platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, we can reframe that question in terms of those common nodes (or friends) in those characters' social networks. As it turns out, network theory as an analytic technique, or what I'd call computational literary analysis, is not just a bona fide research endeavor. It's also a great example of how computational thinking (CT) is truly a cross-disciplinary skill that can be weaved to enrich learning in any subject (not just math and science, as is sometimes the assumption). In an earlier article on computational thinking, I offered teasers of how CT could be integrated into language arts and social studies, in addition to math and science. Here's a detailed treatment of one of those examples, drawn from the work of Franco Moretti's group on "Computational Criticism," which is part of the broader Digital Humanities initiative at Stanford. (See this New York Times profile for more on the work of this group)."

"Classic literature can be exciting. You can teach classic literature like a pro with today's insight from Starr Sackstein. What do Rodney Dangerfield, Alfred Hitchcock, and Harry Potter have to do with teaching students about classical literature? You'll have to listen to find out. (I can't believe all of them came up in one episode!) This wide-ranging conversation hits at the heart of teaching literature. Just because a piece was written hundreds of years ago doesn't mean that it be irrelevant to the students who read the text."

"I'm assuming you've seen at least one of the eight Harry Potter films. In the films, one everyday magical experience is that photos are always moving as if they were video screens, even though they are 'printed' on paper. Newspaper photos act out the news event as film too, whilst you walk down the road reading. It seems so magical and yet, like so many things these days , there's an app for that!"

Imagine living in the magical world of Harry Potter, where the school hallways are lined with paintings that are alive and interactive. Now imagine creating an atmosphere like that for your students. Augmented Reality (AR) allows educators and students to do just that: unlock or create layers of digital information on top of the physical world that can be viewed through an Android or iOS device.

"If you think that magic is something you only see in the Harry Potter series and you can't create anything even similarly engaging in your classroom - think again! Augmented Reality has a magical power to make your lessons so exciting that students don't want to stop exploring mathematics when the bell rings."