Group items tagged

Allow Google to search key terms in books...lots of books, to help draw connections from events into popular culture! Just select two different terms, and see how they correlate throughout history

Using comic books in the classroom - one teacher's approach.

Brain-Pickings List of 7 Must Read Books on Education. Asimov to Gardner.

Just in time for my summative book assignment

Awesome list of books for educators to read in a number of great categories including blended learning, congnitive science, creativity/innovation/design thinking.

A look at discussion over discipline.

You should read this article because, like me, if you have been skeptical about the use of iphones in the classroom, you will be enlightened about how to proceed in a way that will make technologies in the classroom understandable to and meaningful for all stakeholders:administrators, teachers, parents and students. Stay tuned for my blog on incorporating ireaders/ereaders in the English classroom. 

Globe and Mail article, excerpt from Lisa Damour's book "Untangled"

"There are many opportunities to differentiate from the start of a PBL unit to its climactic conclusion. In my book, So All Can Learn: A Practical Guide for Differentiation (February 2017), I explain that the key is to think of Differentiation as a lens that's used to view lessons and units for planned opportunities of supports that meet all learner needs. For PBL units, as with traditional units, lesson planning is where the learning experiences take shape. Here are some PBL strategies that can be differentiated to bring out the power of meeting learner needs, so all can learn. Strong PBL units include standard elements that make for rich experiences. They include: Authentic Purpose Entry Event Need to Know protocol Checkpoints Student Voice"

"Digital literacy, as a set of skills that students need to develop and master in order to properly use digital technologies , is an essential component of the 21st century education. Being digitally literate should not be confused with being comfortable  using certain types of digital media such as  social media. And as Danah Boyd argued in her book "Understanding The Social Lives of Networked Teens" teenagers know how how to use Facebook, but their understanding of the site's privacy settings did not mesh with the ways in which they configured their accounts.They know how to get to Google but had little understanding about how to construct a query to get quality information from the popular search engine."

"As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too," says David Brooks in this New York Times column, "and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged." He gives several examples: * Herding cats - Doug Lemov has catalogued the "micro-gestures" of especially effective teachers in his book, Teach Like a Champion 2.0 (Jossey-Bass, 2015). "The master of cat herding," says Brooks, "senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education." * Social courage - In today's loosely networked world, this has particular value - the ability to go to a conference, meet a variety of people, invite six of them to lunch afterward, and form long-term friendships with four of them. "People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation - willing to listen 70 percent of the time," says Brooks. "They build not just contacts but actual friendships by engaging people on multiple levels." * Capturing amorphous trends with a clarifying label - People with this skill can "look at a complex situation, grasp the gist and clarify it by naming what is going on," says Brooks. He quotes Oswald Chambers: "The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance." * Making nonhuman things intuitive to humans - This is what Steve Jobs did so well. * Purpose provision - "Many people go through life overwhelmed by options, afraid of closing off opportunities," says Brooks. But a few have fully cultivated moral passions that can help others choose the one thing they sho

"The Curse of Knowledge The Curse of Knowledge has been variously described in articles by Chip and Dan Heath, Carmen Nobel, and Steven Pinker, and also in books such as The Sense of Style and Made to Stick. It has been applied to a variety of domains: child development, economics, and technology are just a few. All of the resources describe the same phenomena -- that a strong base of content knowledge makes us blind to the lengthy process of acquiring it. This curse has implications for all teachers: We do not remember what it is like to not know what we are trying to teach. We cannot relive the difficult and lengthy process that learning our content originally took. As a result, we end up assuming that our lesson's content is easy, clear, and straightforward. We assume that connecti"

Amazing article that explores the idea that "Leaders must get comfortable with living in a state of continually becoming" We  must strive to be in a continuous process of "seeking, sensing-making, and sharing"

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

A great intro to gamifying your classroom.

"If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately: Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities following directly on their heels (e.g. a ten-minute lecture on Whitman's life and poetry, followed by small-group work in which teams scour new poems of his for the very themes and notions expressed in the lecture, and then share out or perform some of them to the whole group while everyone takes notes on the findings.) set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students' learning, however much I might enjoy it. Ask every class to start with students' Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night's reading or the previous class's discussion. I would ask them to come in to class and write them all on the board, and then, as a group, ask them to choose which one we start with and which ones need to be addressed. This is my biggest regret right now - not starting every class this way. I am imagining all the misunderstandings, the engagement, the enthusiasm, the collaborative skills, and the autonomy we missed out on because I didn't begin every class with fifteen or twenty minutes of this."

A study that shows how curiosity increases the amount of information recalled by the brain, regardless of the subject

Very cool, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of the book I'm reading now, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel Levitin (the author of This is Your Brain on Music).