Group items tagged

"Procedural crime dramas are very popular and for good reason. They use evidence and science to analyze a mystery and uncover answers - a great metaphor for what a classroom learning experience can be. In this apptivity, we will learn about fingerprints, create digital images of our own, and then use annotation tools to help us identify the cheesecake thief!"

"There is nothing in the world quite like a good book. Reading, whether curled up by the fire, secretly holding a torch under the duvet, or simply drifting through life with your nose firmly wedged between the pages, is one of the most wonderful things in life. As a veritable devourer of books since childhood, I can't help feeling protective of the wonders of musty old pages and tiny, mysterious local book shops, so it is no insignificant thing for me to write a blog extolling the virtues of those half-wonderful, half-devastating recent inventions… paperless books."

"Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process. "

"The source for innovative or creative thinking is as much as mystery as that of curiosity or particular genius. In a traditional classroom, "having a good idea" is strangely not valued as much as the ability to demonstrate proficiency with a specific assessment form. In fact, "good ideas" can often be disruptive to a tightly-sequenced and outcomes-based learning process."

"Some users have noticed that certain older iPhone and iPad models feel slower after updating to iOS 7. We've offered a variety of tips to speed things up, but one persistent issue that has we've been contacted about regards the mysterious keyboard lag and typing delay that seems to only apply to older devices, where there is a sizable delay between tapping a key and the character appearing on screen."

"Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are still a mystery to most adults, so teaching children how they work may seem a strange ambition. Nevertheless, that's the aim of a new app, The Bitcoin Alphabet - for Kids and Everyone Else, released for Apple's iPad tablet this week by author Chris Bozak and publisher iKandy. The app is a mixture of illustrations and text explanations in plain English, and as its title makes clear, it has an eye on parents who don't know their blockchains from their hash rates, as well as their children."

"Why are so many of our high school and college students so, so smart, and yet, at the same time so, so… foolish? It turns out they can't help it. The adolescent brain is a work in progress, "a puzzle waiting completion," says Dr. Frances Jensen, professor and chair of the Department of Neurology at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and the co-author of The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults (Harper), with Amy Ellis Nutt. Recently, Jensen spoke with NEA Today about how the mysteries of the teenage brain can be better understood by parents and educators."

"It's official - the popular podcast Serial has surpassed 5 million downloads, making it the fastest podcast of all time to reach this milestone. This tells us that people really like murder mysteries, but also confirms something else we've known for a long time - listeners want to hear a good story. Unsolved murders are compelling, yes, but Serial is compelling because it puts the listener as close as one can possibly get to an event that happened in 1999."

"If the human mind is sometimes a puzzle. Then the teenage mind is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Lucky for us, one neuroscientist has just published a guide to that perplexing headspace. Dr. Frances Jensen who was once stumped by the behaviour of her own teens shares years of study on the teenage brain, that will warn you and give you hope."

"It's known as the "musician's advantage."  For decades, educators, scientists, and researchers have observed that students who pick up musical instruments tend to excel in academics-taking the lead in measures of vocabulary, reading, and non-verbal reasoning and attention skills, just to name a few. But why musical training conferred such an advantage remained a bit of a mystery. "

"t didn't take long for Michael Godsey, an English teacher at Morro Bay High School in California, to realize that his decision to use a public radio podcast in the classroom was a wise one. It wasn't any old podcast he was introducing to his classes. It was "Serial," the murder-mystery phenomenon produced by reporter Sarah Koenig of "This American Life," which already was transfixing a wide swath of the adult population. "Even if they weren't into it, I told them it was the most popular podcast of all time, and that was interesting," Godsey says. He needn't have worried. The podcast seized his five classrooms of 10th- and 11th-graders. "I had kids cutting other classes so they could come listen to it again," he says. "Kids who were sick, who never did their homework, were listening at home." Godsey is one of a growing number of educators who are using podcasts like "Serial" to motivate their classrooms and address education requirements set by the Common Core state standards. Improving students' listening skills is one of the essential components of the new education mandates, and using audio in the classroom can be an effective way to promote listening."

"This year at ISTE in Atlanta, I shared with teachers one easy way to add QR codes to three-dimensional shapes.   The app Foldify lets users create a template for a variety of three-dimensional shapes.  Instead of drawing a picture or adding family photos, I used a QR code generator on my iPad, saved the pictures to the Camera Roll, and placed them on my Folidify creation.  They are easy to assemble after your print them out and great for having students roll a dice for a mystery writing prompt or math problem."

Clever use of Moodle to introduce middle school students to Moodle and to learning a new language.  This course was found via the Mooch community hub..  To login use your Moodle.org username and password.