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"ome widely held ideas about the way children learn can lead educators and parents to adopt faulty teaching principles Jan 1, 2015 Credit: Kiyoshi Takahase segundo MYTH HUMANS USE ONLY 10 PERCENT OF THEIR BRAIN FACT The 10 percent myth (sometimes elevated to 20) is mere urban legend, one perpetrated by the plot of the 2011 movie Limitless, which pivoted around a wonder drug that endowed the protagonist with prodigious memory and analytical powers. In the classroom, teachers may entreat students to try harder, but doing so will not light up "unused" neural circuits; academic achievement does not improve by simply turning up a neural volume switch. MYTH "LEFT BRAIN" and "RIGHT BRAIN" PEOPLE DIFFER FACT The contention that we have a rational left brain and an intuitive, artistic right side is fable: humans use both hemispheres of the brain for all cognitive functions. The left brain/right brain notion originated from the realization that many (though not all) people process language more in the left hemisphere and spatial abilities and emotional expression more in the right. Psychologists have used the idea to explain distinctions between different personality types. In education, programs emerged that advocated less reliance on rational "left brain" activities. Brain-imaging studies show no evidence of the right hemisphere as a locus of creativity. And the brain recruits both left and right sides for both reading and math. MYTH YOU MUST SPEAK ONE LANGUAGE BEFORE LEARNING ANOTHER FACT Children who learn English at the same time as they learn French do not confuse one language with the other and so develop more slowly. This idea of interfering languages suggests that different areas of the brain compete for resources. In reality, young children who learn two languages, even at the same time, gain better generalized knowledge of language structure as a whole. MYTH BRAINS OF MALES AND FEMALES DIFFER IN WAYS THAT DICTATE LEARNING ABILITIES FACT Diffe

"In case you hadn't noticed, I'm quite a fan of the iPad (the Lollipop Nexus 9's not too bad either). Not because of its design or because its by Apple or any of that, but because of its keen heritage in the learning arena. Any one who knows me will tell you that I am not one for using tech for tech's sake, despite my evangelist moniker. Use of technology in a cross curricular sense should be measured and done with consideration for the best potential learning outcomes. With all that said, I've been doing this for quite some time now and I thought it time that I shared some of the Apps that have stuck by me or have struck me for their ease of use and impact upon learning in the classroom. Rather than blog about each one however or write in depth about each one either, I've done this in the form of a small poster, with the apps icons on. My periodic table of Apps that I developed from Sean Junkins' original is always well received however it really is a bit on the large size. This poster will feature Apps that hold stock in every classroom and can have an impact upon learning."

"Finding new and human ways to connect and empower the next generation to play is one of the ways that Ikea says it hopes to change the world, and bringing extra life to cardboard that would otherwise end up in the recycling bins is part of that push. It's an idea that came about quickly, and was revealed at a panel at Cannes today (20 June). Wunderman, Kantar Consulting and Mini Mad Things decided to put the pedal to the metal and workshop an idea in just five weeks. The catch? The idea had to be 'prototypeable' as the final would be presented on stage at Cannes Lions, alongside Ikea's chief marketing officer. Ultimately, the brief was to come up with an idea that shows how Ikea inspires and facilitates child's play, all while helping to improve home life for parents, whole families and even communities. After evaluating 17 years-worth of online conversation with parents and analyzing 15m rows of dialogue data, the team realized that behavior and development is the most talked about topic within childcare, second only to pregnancy. Pressing further in the research, the team learned that 50% of parents surveyed struggle to find ideas to encourage creative play amongst their children. Ikea, which has been one of the largest distributors of cardboard packaging, and team were able to flip their script so the brand could see the world through a child's eyes and create an interactive mobile app that brings cardboard waste to life. By following simple instructions any piece of cardboard can be transformed into something new. The Ikea Toybox app gives cardboard waste a new lease on life and, as play doesn't require a price tag, families will see big results with small means."

"I truly believe that part of being an advocate for kids is believing that all of them, no matter what, possess redeeming qualities. I know that I see kids do absolutely amazing things with talent and grit and an awareness of other people that I don't remember myself or my classmates having when I was their age. On the flip side, I know we have students who are so angry and struggling and do things that are unkind and frankly, sometimes violent. But, instead of asking why the students are so poorly behaved, I think the better question is what support did we miss as parents/educators/society and how can we bring out the goodness? My point being…no matter the child, if we don't believe that there is a place inside of them that has the potential for greatness then that is more about our shortcomings than it is about them. "

"I asked my students to give reading a chance this year.  I promised them that if they liked reading, I would do my very best to protect that love.  That if they disliked it, or even hated it, I would try to create an experience that would perhaps change their perception even a little bit. I polled them at the beginning of the year and was frankly horrified at what I found.  Out of 130 students, 53.6% of students reported that on a scale from 1 to 10, reading was a 4 or less.  That's 70 students. 70 students that despite their previous teachers best intentions have already decided that reading is really not for them.  Out of those 70 students, 35 students reported that they hated it.  Hated it.  Not just dislike.    But hate. So what do you when you are faced with such insurmountable odds?  What program do you lean on?  What curriculum do you implement? For us; none. It turns out it is much simpler than following a curriculum. What made the biggest difference to all of my reading hating students?"

""Many board members noticed that you were on your phone a lot," he said. "If you can hold out on texting friends or checking your Twitter feed until the breaks, that would be great." Mission failed. Now I did feel like an idiot. But I was also quite angry. The thing is, I hadn't checked my Twitter feed for over two hours. I'd been taking notes. I walked down the hall and began to think. I realized that my friends and I are glued to our phones all day long. That's just the way we are. Phones are crucial to our identities and lifestyle. Telling people in my generation to put our phones away is not a solution. Just ask our teachers how that has worked for them. Even so, the workplace is not ready for how often we are going to pull out our phones. Rather than fight it, I think the other generations are going to have to learn to let go and adapt to us. The reality is that social media breaks take less than 15 seconds and can be re-energizing. That's less time than the widely accepted practice of taking breaks for coffee or snacks. That said, there is no denying that we will need to be mentored so we know when even a 15-second break is unacceptable. The good news is that teachers have been trying to coach us about this for years. We can learn and we can adapt, if the other generations adapt, too."

"It took just one relentless bout of the flu to remind me of the power of empirical evidence and the importance of shooting data. More than numbers, it was the evidence gleaned from my experiences and the images that I gathered along the way that helped my doctor solve the riddle that was delaying my recovery. My kids thought I was crazy, but I took some photos to save the evidence, and my doctor appreciated this. Gross? Absolutely. Helpful? Definitely! The doctor said that the pictures inspired him to take a different approach in my treatment. "Good data gathering," he joked, and I smiled, recalling one of my greatest pet peeves: educators and parents who rant about their disdain for this very important work. To listen to some, you'd think data are only numbers that shady reformers crunch in order to cash in on imaginary problems created by incompetent teachers. This is a dangerous assumption. The fact is that data are information that matter, and if they don't matter or if the conclusions we reach aren't helping us solve important problems, then we need to change the data we're collecting and the way we approach analysis. After all, isn't it a bit silly to blame data for our own faulty decision making?"

Most schools were built upon the idea that knowledge and teachers are scarce. When you have limited access to information and you want to deliver what you do have to every citizen in an age with little communication technology, you build what schools are today: age-grouped, discipline-separated classrooms run by an expert adult who can manage the successful completion of the curriculum by a hundred or so students at a time. We mete out that knowledge in discrete parts, carefully monitoring students progress through one-size-fits all assessments, deeming them "educated" when they have proven their mastery at, more often than not, getting the right answer and, to a lesser degree, displaying certain skills that show a "literacy" in reading and writing. Most of us know these systems intimately, and for 120 years or so, they've pretty much delivered what we've asked them to.

"Our job as educators is more than just standards we teach. We are in the business of helping students know they are more than just a number. More than just data points. They are the story, the song, the art that moves and matters. They are the embodied learning. Our challenge is to help stakeholders care more about the embodied learning, the things that don't have names. The journey that collectively leads to things that matter. Our challenge is to care most about students that are fully alive in their learning. It is up to us to make the things that matter, the most important."

"As the end of the school year draws to a close, administrators start pulling together their PD plans for the summer in preparation for the next year. Meanwhile, teachers sit anxiously by with the dread that can only come with the anticipation of the dreaded PD days that their contract says they must attend. It's not that teachers don't want to grow and improve their craft. They do, and they find it refreshingly professionalizing when they get to. It's just that this ain't their first rodeo. They've been made to sit through pointless professional development in the past and they lament that they're thinking "how long will this last and what will I have to turn in…and when is lunch?" as they trudge toward the library down the hallway that so obviously lacks the normal student energy they've used as fuel for the past 9 months. But it doesn't have to be like that. In fact, if we do things well, teachers are likely to come away from their professional development energized and excited."

"Two years ago I attended an edtech conference focused on the then up-and-coming trend of makerspaces. The opening keynote speaker ended his presentation with a charge for all in attendance: "I hope that makerspaces don't become an edtech fad that goes away as quickly as it has risen to popularity; I hope you all can figure out how to do it right." So what is the "right way" when it comes to using makerspaces? And now that they have been established in schools all across the globe, how can we measure the impact that makerspaces have on student learning and achievement? Most facilitators would agree that standardized test scores may never accurately reflect the impact that makerspaces have on student achievement. Rather, it is a combination of the design thinking processes, service learning experiences, and 21st century skills being developed in makerspaces that are positively impacting student learning."

"Catherine Good has experienced stereotype threat herself, although she didn't know it at the time. She started her academic career in pure math, expecting to get a Ph.D. But somewhere along the way she started to feel like it just wasn't for her, even though she was doing well in all her classes. Thinking that she'd just chosen the wrong application for her love of math, Good switched to math education, where she first encountered the idea of stereotype threat from a guest psychology speaker. "As he talked about students feeling that they don't really belong, I had an epiphany," Good said. She realized the discomfort she'd felt studying mathematics had nothing to do with her ability or qualifications and everything to do with a vague sense that she didn't belong in a field dominated by men. Stereotype threat is a term coined by psychologists Joshua Aronson and Claude Steele. They found that pervasive cultural stereotypes that marginalize groups, like "girls aren't good at math," create a threatening environment and affects academic achievement. Good was so fascinated by how powerful psychological forces can be on learning, including her own, that she switched fields again to study social psychology, and she ended up working closely with Carol Dweck for several years when Dweck's growth mindset work was in its early stages and not yet well-known among educators. Good now works at a psychology professor at Baruch College. Originally, Dweck and Good hypothesized that believing intelligence is flexible - what we now call a growth mindset - could protect students from stereotype threat, an inherently fixed idea."

""In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others. That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit. "

"My objective with this wide-ranging set of skills, and involving the community so closely in their development, is to give kids the chance to practice whatever makes them passionate now and feel encouraged -- even if they're obsessed with making stuff exclusively with duct tape. It's crucial that kids learn how to be passionate for the rest of their lives. To start, they must first learn what it feels like to be simultaneously challenged and confident. It's my instinct that we should not try to introduce these experiences through skills we value as much as look for opportunities to develop them, as well as creativity and literacy, in the skills they already love. MAGICIANS CRAFT ILLUSIONS THAT BAFFLE THE SENSES AND CONFUSE OUR REASONING. THEY PLAN LIKE SCIENTISTS, BUT PERFORM AS ARTISTS. ONLY THROUGH LONG AND DISCIPLINED PREPARATION DO THEY SUCCEED. It's difficult to predict which skills will be valuable in the future, and even more challenging to see the connection between our children's interests and these skills. Nothing illustrates this better than Minecraft, a popular game that might be best described as virtual LEGOs. Calling it a game belies the transformation it has sparked: An entire generation is learning how to create 3D models using a computer. Now, I wonder, what sort of businesses, communication, entertainment or art will be possible? Cathy Davidson, a scholar of learning technology, concluded that 65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet. I bet today's kids will eventually explore outcomes and create jobs only made possible by the influence of Minecraft in their lives. Why take any chances and build your dream house with blueprints alone? The Minecraft kid could easily make a realistic 3D model of one for you to walk through before you build. That's why DIY treats Minecraft as a tool, not a game, and encourages our members to use it to pursue art, architect

"As someone who primarily taught math and science when I was a classroom teacher, I associated robots, robotics curriculum, and robot apps as things that were only used in those subjects. However, this past year my school received a robot grant that provided ten robots for us from the company Sphero. Sphero emphasizes the power of play in education and has a variety of lessons that are aligned to the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards on their website. They also have a number of STEM challenges  in the form pre-designed engineering projects designed for collaborative group work with students and are helpful for teachers using the robots in their classes. Sphero is a robotic ball that can pair with an iPad, tablet, iPhone, or smartphone through Bluetooth, and getting started is relatively easy. Once you are ready to use Sphero, you take it off the charger stand and give it a "tap-tap" to "wake it up." When the robot wakes up, it starts to flash three different colors until it pairs with the device you are using it with via Bluetooth. Once it turns blue, then you know that it is paired and ready to go. There are at least 14 different education related apps that are available with Sphero: some of them use augmented reality technology, some of them teach the basics of coding, while others allow students to draw on a tablet to manipulate the color and movement of the robot. During the last week of June, I did a presentation at the ISTE conference with many other educators from all over the country who also received the robot grant. What amazed me was that people who taught subjects like language arts and social studies found incredible ways to integrate robotics into their curriculum to create some really engaging lessons for their students."

How to Ensure that Making Leads to Learning http://t.co/jqjmk9NJlo #makered

"Welcome to your new classroom. I am sure you are going to explain and teach in a way that I might never understand. You see, I come from a day of filmstrip projectors that beeped, ditto paper that left my fingers blue and the students enjoying the scent, bells that really did ring out a mechanical melody, 16 millimeter films that, if in color, amazed the kids. In fact, if these films were shown backwards it provided bonus entertainment. In recent years I have heard words that are so strange to me. These words include foreign terms such as twitter, blog, wiki, Skype, web 2.0, clickers, and interactive whiteboards. I have heard all this talk about 21st century skills and I am not even sure if I can tell you what they are. So there you have it. I am not one of those digital natives, nor am I a digital immigrant! I may not even be an analog native or immigrant. So, even though I do not know all the new terms, I thought that I might give you a list of ten items I feel just might ensure success no matter what century it is."

"Teaching students that intelligence can grow and blossom with effort - rather than being a fixed trait they're just born with - is gaining traction in progressive education circles. And new research from Stanford is helping to build the case that nurturing a "growth mindset" can help many kids understand their true potential. The new research involves larger, more rigorous field trials that provide some of the first evidence that the social psychology strategy can be effective when implemented in schools on a wide scale. Even a one-time, 30-minute online intervention can spur academic gains for many students, particularly those with poor grades. The premise is that these positive effects can stick over years, leading for example to higher graduation rates; but long-term data is still needed to confirm that. "

"Carol Dweck's famous book, "Mindset", was one that was (is) hugely popular with educators, not only in helping shape their work and thoughts on students, but also pushing learning in educator with their peers.  There were two simple concepts shared that resonated with many readers; the "fixed" mindset and the "growth" mindset. Here is how the two differ according to Dweck: "In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it." The great thing about Dweck's work is that she found that you can move from one to the other.  You may have a fixed mindset, but it is not necessarily a permanent thing.  The other aspect is that you do not necessarily have a "fixed" or "growth" mindset and fall into one of those two categories in all elements.  I have a growth mindset on (most things) education, but have a fixed mindset on fixing things around my house. So what I have been thinking about lately is the notion of the "innovator's mindset".  This would actually go one step past the notion of a growth mindset and is looking at what you are creating with your learning.  SImply it would go look this:"