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The more dire the school circumstances, the more important pleasure is to achieving any educational success

You can force a child to stay in his or her seat, fill out a worksheet, or practice division. But you can’t force a person to think carefully, enjoy books, digest complex information, or develop a taste for learning. To make that happen, you have to help the child find pleasure in learning—to see school as a source of joy

The Museum Box site allows you to build  an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. Students can display anything from a text file to a movie. My students will be using this platform to argue their thesis, rather than writing a traditional essay.

My students have started designing our curriculum units. Seriously. While transitioning to our current unit, we discussed the possibilities as a class.

Before the technology/constructivist shift in my classsroom, I would have taught all of this quite traditionally. We’d read books, answer questions, and then address those questions in class. I’d lecture a lot, with supplemental grammar lessons here and there, and I’d include some type of artistic project to achieve viewing and representing objectives. The whole design would have been extremely teacher centered. And at the end of it all, I’d hope they learned something about writing and thinking. Instead, inquiry and technology are a natural part of our English classes.

No screens in the hour before bed, no screens in the bedroom and no screens as part of the bedtime routine.

“You don’t want to look at a screen before bed because it tells your brain to stay awake.”

His materials promote the formula 5- 2- 1- 0. That means five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, no more than two hours of screens, one hour of physical activity, and no sugary beverages

Our cognitive control is really quite limited: We have a restricted ability to distribute, divide, and sustain attention; actively hold detailed information in mind; and concurrently manage or even rapidly switch between competing goals."

while older adults can fully retain their ability to focus their attention, their capacity to block out irrelevant distractions diminishes with age.

That’s one reason why older adults may have more trouble concentrating on a conversation in a crowded restaurant than younger people.

What goal had I established for Kate’s learning that day? How had I created an environment that supported her ability to achieve that goal? And perhaps most important — assuming that the class had a learning goal that mattered for her — did she know about it?

The more powerful the goals we establish for ourselves, and the more we feel ownership over those goals, the more we are able to pursue them in the face of both internal and external distractions.

Most of us can shut out distractions when we are pursuing something that really matters to us.

Who creates them? How much do they matter? And how well do students understand them?