Group items tagged

"Serious About a New Language? Begin With Lesson 1"

"Every athlete knows what they should be doing in order to excel… at least in theory. For serious athletes, capturing their own personal fast-paced sports action for later analysis can be a very valuable training tool. Using Ubersense Coach, athletes or their coaches can record high-quality slow-motion video and "give feedback using the app's annotation tools.""

"Learning is all about asking questions and finding answers to them. An inquisitive mind is one that goes beyond the status quo and probes deep below surface meanings. To foster such kind of thinking inside our classroom requires some hard work and a serious investment in time and efforts. We, as teachers and educators, need to prepare the right environment where inquisitive minds can nourish and grow. We need to water this environment with a culture of asking questions."

"School isn't just about learning and books, as teachers are already well aware. For students, going to school also teaches them about a slew of life lessons - and interacting with others is at the top of that list. We all know (having been young ourselves) that kids can sometimes be really mean. Bullying is serious business, and as bullys move online, there are a lot of resources popping up to help out parents, teachers, and students to understand bullying and what to do about it. The handy infographic below looks at some statistics regarding cyber bullying, demographics, and the effects it can have on a student. Keep reading to learn more."

"This week I got an email from Apple inviting me to try out the Beta version of iWork for iCloud. I was keen to see how useful this could be for educators in the classroom, and whether or not it could be a serious contender to my current favorite online productivity suite - Google Drive. So, I logged in to iCloud with Chrome on my Mac and there they were - Pages, Numbers and Keynote - complete with all the documents I had created on my Mac and iPads."

"I am on a serious mission to push our library out onto the platforms my kiddos love most-their phones, and to a lesser extent, their tablets. I so want our library to be in the pockets. As I finished preparing our QR code handout, it occurred to me that most of the codes, in fact most of the handout, could be reused by other libraries."

"Being a boy can be a serious liability in today's classroom. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized and won't sit still. Young male rambunctiousness, according to a recent study, leads teachers to underestimate their intellectual and academic abilities. "Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools," says psychologist Michael Thompson. "Boys are treated like defective girls.""

"Using multimedia resources in class does pose some serious challenges and one of them is finding the right content licensed under a Creative Commons or in public domaine. Of course some of the major search engines offer this service in their advanced options, an instance of this is Google Image and Flickr. But sometimes it becomes time-consuming searching each engine separately for images licensed under CC and this is where Creative Commons search engine comes in handy."

"Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won't commit to. "I give it a few seconds - not even minutes - and then I'm moving again," says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University. Gallery Lynda Barry: The 20 stages of reading: If there are stages of grief and steps to recovery, isn't the act of reading a complicated, evolving thing over time? Cartoonist Lynda Barry, one of scores of writers at the National Book Festival on Sept. 21-22, certainly thinks so. (Related: 12 authors, 12 reasons why they write) Click here to subscribe. But it's not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel. "

"Whether we're talking about preschool, elementary through secondary school, college, or even adult learners, I have serious objections to the idea that learning supposedly only comes via the eyes, the ears, and the seat of the pants. Schools -- and policymakers -- have for too long accepted the belief that learning best occurs while students are seated (and quiet, of course). The theory may have been understandable back when they didn't have the research to prove otherwise. But today we do."

"Your students created a wonderful puppet show or movie and turned it into a stunning video that you want to collect, assess and share ... yet you're not exactly sure how. Sound like a familiar scenario? Simple workflow headaches like this can create serious speed bumps in your iPad program. Let's take a look at a few potential solutions."

"The point was simple: The more frequent the update in direction, the easier it is to adjust and locate one's goal. Even if the student had a serious disadvantage (i.e. the professor could scurry away), the feedback loop was sufficient guidance. Take the analogy back to academic assessments: How often are students updated about their performance in a typical class? How informative is feedback? Assessment software is not the answer. It is only a component. The underpinning instructional strategy necessary to capture technology's potential to accelerate learning is a micro formative assessment. We need to integrate small checks for understanding into almost every stage of our classroom agendas. And it can't be a teacher asking students, "Does that make sense? Any questions?""

""Makerspaces are too complicated for elementary students.  You can only get in depth with middle and high school students" "High schoolers are too jaded for making.  They'll roll their eyes at you if you give them LEGOs" I've heard variations of these criticisms so many times.  Placing some kind of age restriction on when students are capable of/will be interested in making seems to be one of the most popular excuses educators have for not even considering creating a Maker environment in their school. We need to smash these notions and assumptions.  That creativity is tied to a certain age group.  That we outgrow our desire for play.  That young children aren't capable of serious making.  That adults will never have an interest in expressing themselves."

"The premise is simple: start with a quick tour of the facility and very brief show-and-tell of the tools (less than 30 minutes!), follow with a group brainstorming session around project ideas (less than 30 minutes!), then form groups to jump into projects. Even before lunch on the first day, groups were already sketching and tinkering with Hummingbird Robotics kits, MaKeyMaKeys, cardboard and MakeDo's, and more. For two days, I jumped in to help groups, learned new tools myself (LittleBits!), fetched tools and supplies as needed (copper tape! wire strippers!), recommended resources and suppliers (Sparkfun! DigiKey!), and acted as cheerleader for teachers pushing themselves to learn incredible new skills and create amazing artifacts of their learning. The final projects blew ALL of us coaches away! The absolute best part, from my perspective, is that every single project was immediately applicable back in the participant's classroom. Most of them are generally applicable in any learning environment! Serious high school science content, literature and history, elementary grades, even social/emotional learning… This was absolutely the most excellent collection of practical and academically-oriented maker projects I've seen!"

"uilding a giant steel bale feeder is hard. Try it. Problem No. 1: Unless you live in ranch country, you probably don't even know what it's supposed to look like - regardless of whether you can build one. Problem No. 2: Arc welding is involved. Problem No. 3: Getting it right requires some serious math."

"To the annoyance of many teachers, students cannot help but doodle in class. A range of studies now shows that this displeasure is misplaced: the doodles seem to help people concentrate (by preventing them from completely falling into a daydream) and consolidate information. Also, it seems that leaders of all types have doodled for as long as pen and paper have been available. The photograph below is of John F. Kennedy's doodles during the Cuban Missile Crisis."

Teenagers' habit of distributing nude self-portraits electronically - often called "sexting" if it's done by cell phone - has parents and school administrators worried. Some prosecutors have begun charging teens who send and receive such images with child pornography and other serious felonies. But is that the best way to handle it?

Tutorial search engine for the free Photoshop equivalent Gimp. (Free download at: http://www.gimp.org/) This is for those who want to get serious about creating and editing their own images. There's also a version to find Photshop tutorials (Photoshop isn't free though) http://www.vunkysearch.net/ comment by Nik Peachey