Group items tagged

"Not sleeping? You might need to turn off blue light on your phone. This week, I was interviewing John Medina, author of Brain Rules, for a future episode of Every Classroom Matters. He made the offhand comment, "blue light wreaks havoc with your brain." We've known this since 2006, This Psychology Today article can help explain why your teenager may be awake ALL NIGHT."

Rotate and examine the Blue Morpho up close. Morpho butterflies are among the most stunning butterflies with bright iridescent blue wings. The underside of the wings, however, is dark brown, which provides the butterfly camouflage when at rest and eating. A row of eyespots on the underside also are designed to fool predators. The blue color derives from iridescence rather than from a pigmentation, and it is the reflection and refraction of light through prismic scales that gives the morpho its incredible color.

"Your two eyes each see an image and your brain takes these two images and creates one image in your mind.  The eye with the red lens filter only sees the blue lines and the eye with the blue lens filter only sees the red lines. When your brain puts the two different images together in your mind it creates a 3-D image.  "

"No matter what you call it - chroma key, green screen or blue screen - it's the film and video technique that gives your local TV weatherperson something in common with the Avengers movies: artificial backgrounds inserted behind the action. You simply record your subject in front of a solid green or blue screen, and then add a touch of software magic to change the background. Dozens of free or inexpensive apps allow you to use the technique on your own clips. It's a great way to jazz up your presentations and other videos - or to keep children busy with a weekend project filming their own toys in action scenes. Here's how to get started."

"Most people don't look forward to Sunday nights. According to research, a huge 76% of American workers say they get the Sunday-night blues. Even if you love your job and usually look forward to getting back into the swing of things, it's easy to feel a little bit dread about the stresses waiting for you on Monday morning. Yet, there are certain things happy people do at the end of the week to combat those Sunday-night blues. Here are 10:"

"Here is some behind the scenes footage of my students using iPads to film an anti-bullying movie that the wrote. You will see them refer to their blue sheets which are their storyboard sketches of the movie."

"The National Association for Child Development and Blue Whale Apps have announced the release of their breakthrough app aimed at assisting children and adults with speech and articulation. The application, "Speech Therapy for Apraxia-Words," which is part of their NACD Home Speech Therapist line, is now available on the App Store, Google Play, Amazon App Store, and Barnes & Noble App Store for the iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook, and Android Tablets."

"It is easy to see that part of this problem is that the more time in school, the more disconnected it gets from how we learn"

" Seymour Papert, whose ideas and inventions transformed how millions of children around the world create and learn, died Sunday, July 31, 2016 at his home in East Blue Hill, Maine. He was 88."

"A little bit late… Here's our monthly roundup of our best new iPhone and iPad apps for children, as covered on Apps Playground in June 2012. We've got a mix of familiar brands, favourite developers and out-of-the-blue indie apps, all of which piqued our interest"

Download the ebook entitled Evolutions: Tech Integration Stories from the American School in Bomby, here.

"Imagine if we taught pilots to fly without ever letting them in a cockpit. Or gave them the keys to a commercial airplane without the required hours-or years-of hands on training and practice. Sure, we'd show them plenty of PowerPoint presentations and make them sit through a few seminars on the theory and physics of flight, but then we'd slap on a graduation cap and let them take off into the big blue sky. Not only would it likely be ineffective, it would be borderline criminal. Yet when it comes to professional development for classroom teachers, that's almost exactly what we do. Most professional development opportunities for educators are still lecture style - telling, showing, and explaining how something can be done. And when the 'learning' is finished, we push teachers onto the runway with a cabin full of students and wish them luck. Predictably, many crash and burn."

"We published a post last year titled, "Why Good Teachers Quit." Nearly 70,000+ social shares-and scores of comments-later, and it's pretty clear that this idea (captured so well by Kay Bisaillon) is resonating with more teachers than we were aware. We've taken a few different approaches to the idea in the past, including 25 Ways To Reduce Teacher Burnout & Secrets For Teacher Survival, as well as The Best Teachers Don't Do What They're Told, as well as a recent post about "teaching differently." So here we are again, taking another look at teacher burnout, this time trying to understand how it happens. If you're increasingly tired, prone to the Sunday night blues, and have had your July's excitement increasingly replaced by a sense of dread, teacher burnout could be the reason why."