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Casey Finnerty

Wired Up: Tuned out | Scholastic.com - 0 views

  • Compared to us, I believe their brains have developed differently," says Sheehy. "If we teach them the way we were taught, we're not serving them well."
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Whether their brains have developed differently or not, we still need to teach our students differently than we were taught. They are living in different times with different demands and expectations. If we teach to the demands and expectations of our childhood would not meet our students needs.
  • children were much more likely to have connections between brain regions close together while older subjects were more likely to feature links between parts of the brain that are physically farther apart.
  • "media multi-tasking."
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  • Recent reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project show that 93 percent of youth ages 12 to 17 go online. Of those kids, 55 percent use social-networking sites (like Facebook and MySpace), and 64 percent are creating their own original content (such as blogs and wikis)
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Is this all happening outside of the classroom?
  • Unlike watching television, using the Internet allows young people to take an active role; this move from consumption to participation affects the way they construct knowledge, develop their identity, and communicate with others.
  • "Computers give you different ways to solve problems, the opportunity to run and test simulations, and a way to offload processing. . . . We need kids to think about problems in innovative and creative ways. We need to change the emphasis of education to focus on higher-order kinds of thinking."
  • "It's a shift from how to memorize and retrieve data in one's mind to how to search for and evaluate information out in the world
  • Even if we're duplicating a real-life scenario in a virtual environment, the fact that students are engaged with technology and performing through a semblance of anonymity lends itself to a deeper level of discourse.
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Why do we need anonymity to get to a deeper level of discourse?
  • "If we fail to do so, our kids are going to look at what they're learning in schools and see that it is irrelevant to the future they see before them."
  • Davis says today's teachers are seeking information when they need it instead of waiting for more formal professional development workshops.
    • Casey Finnerty
       
      Sounds like a quick learner. Does this 15 minute approach really work?
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    acob is your average American 11-year-old. He has a television and a Nintendo DS in his bedroom; his family also has two computers, a wireless Internet connection, and a PlayStation 3. His parents rely on e-mail, instant messaging, and Skype for daily communication, and they're avid users of Tivo and Netflix. Jacob has asked for a Wii for his upcoming birthday. His selling point? "Mom and Dad, we can use the Wii Fit and race Mario Karts together!"
Ed Webb

News Blog Articles | Absurdist Literature Stimulates Our Brains | Miller-McCune Online ... - 1 views

  • Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains.
  • our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.
  • "the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities" are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.
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  • we have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what they call "meaning frameworks." Any threat to this process will "activate a meaning-maintenance motivation that may call upon any other available associations to restore a sense of meaning,"
Tony Baldasaro

Weblogg-ed » "Tinkering Toward Utopia" - 1 views

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    During Boot Camp last week, Sheryl turned me on to Phillip Schlechty's newish book "Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organizations" and I had a chance to get through a chunk of it on the cramped, smelly plane(s) to Melbourne. In it, he makes a pretty compelling case that "reform" is really not going to cut it in the face of the disruptions social Web technologies are creating and that we really do have to think more about "transform" when it comes to talking about schools. There are echoes of Sir Ken Robinson here, and I've still got Scott McLeod's NECC presentation riff on Christensen's "Disrupting Class" on my brain as well, especially the "the disruption isn't online learning; it's personalized learning" quote. And while there are others who I could cite here who are trumpeting the idea that this isn't business as usual, I think Schlechty does as good a job as I've seen of breaking down why schools in their current form as "bureaucratic" structures will end up on the "ash heap of history" if we don't get our brains around what's happening.
Jac Londe

CBC News - Health - Brain simulates actions in stories as a person reads: study - 34 views

  • Brain simulates actions in stories as a person reads: study
  • What scientists discovered was that parts of the brain associated with certain activities described in the story would light up as the person read those sections.
  • This study suggests that readers do mental simulation when they comprehend a story,"
Roland Gesthuizen

Everything You've Ever Been Told About How You Learn Is A Lie | Australian Popular Science - 151 views

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    "You know everyone learns differently. Do you think you learn better through words or pictures? Did you know you learn different subjects with different sides of the brain? Welp, they were wrong. Many of the theories of "brain-based" education, a method of instruction supposedly based on neuroscience, have been largely debunked by rigorous science."
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    Thanks for sharing .This is well done! I teach a Psychology course designed to develop students' critical thinking about such "myths." Here is a list of others: Lilienfeld, S. O., Lynn, S. J., Ruscio, J., and Beyerstein, B. L (2010). 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
globalwrobel

Digital Natives: Do They Really THINK Differently? - 41 views

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    by Marc Prensky Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen-all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today's ―Digital Native‖ students. 1 In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today's educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives' brains are likely physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up. And I submitted that learning via digital games is one good way to reach Digital Natives in their ―native language.‖ Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.
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    by Marc Prensky Our children today are being socialized in a way that is vastly different from their parents. The numbers are overwhelming: over 10,000 hours playing videogames, over 200,000 emails and instant messages sent and received; over 10,000 hours talking on digital cell phones; over 20,000 hours watching TV (a high percentage fast speed MTV), over 500,000 commercials seen-all before the kids leave college. And, maybe, at the very most, 5,000 hours of book reading. These are today's ―Digital Native‖ students. 1 In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Part I, I discussed how the differences between our Digital Native students and their Digital Immigrant teachers lie at the root of a great many of today's educational problems. I suggested that Digital Natives' brains are likely physically different as a result of the digital input they received growing up. And I submitted that learning via digital games is one good way to reach Digital Natives in their ―native language.‖ Here I present evidence for why I think this is so. It comes from neurobiology, social psychology, and from studies done on children using games for learning.
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    Hi. I wrote a paper about digital natives as part of an anthropology assignment for a doctoral course. Researchers from around the world have empirically proven that Prensky's theories are false. Additionally, while neuroscience has shown that brains do change as a result of neuroplasticity, to argue that it is generational is also a false claim. Though cognitive theory shows that learners bring their prior experiences to the interpretation of new educational opportunities - impacting attention and interpretation - all generations have had this occur. There is merit to the point that we should take learner's prior experience into consideration when designing instruction; however, Prensky's digital native claims may have done more to create tension between students and teachers than to provide instructional support. If you would like any of the scholarly studies, I have a published reference list at http://brholland.com/reference-list. Beth
Joyce Kolakowski

Energizing Brain Breaks - 342 views

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    Energizing Brain Breaks are 1-2 minute activities to help your students refocus. Now they are available in PowerPoint and SMARTBoard Versions
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    1 or 2 minute activities to energize the brain and refocus
Cammy Torgenrud

Educational Leadership:Closing Opportunity Gaps:The Myth of Pink and Blue Brains - 36 views

  • Few other clear-cut differences between boys' and girls' neural structures, brain activity, or neurochemistry have thus far emerged, even for something as obviously different as self-regulation.
  • Our actual ability differences are quite small. Although psychologists can measure statistically significant distinctions between large groups of men and women or boys and girls, there is much more overlap in the academic and even social-emotional abilities of the genders than there are differences (Hyde, 2005). To put it another way, the range of performance within each gender is wider than the difference between the average boy and girl.
  • epigenetic
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  • Baby boys are modestly more physically active than girls (Campbell & Eaton, 1999). Toddler girls talk one month earlier, on average, than boys (Fenson et al., 1994). Boys appear more spatially aware (Quinn & Liben, 2008).
  • Avoid stereotyping
  • Appreciate the range of intelligences
  • Strengthen spatial awareness
  • Engage boys with the word
  • Recruit boys into nonathletic extracurricular activities
  • Bring more men into the classroom
  • Treat teacher bias seriously
Martin Burrett

Positive Attitude Toward Maths Predicts Maths Achievement in Children - 10 views

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    "For the first time, scientists have identified the brain pathway that links a positive attitude toward maths to achievement in the subject. In a study of elementary school students, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that having a positive attitude about maths was connected to the better function of the hippocampus, an important memory centre in the brain, during the performance of arithmetic problems. The findings will be published online Jan. 24 in Psychological Science."
Martin Burrett

Wondermind - Play games & explore your brain - 154 views

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    A beautifully made science site of games to teach you about the brain. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science
Michael Sheehan

Learning Never Stops: Math, Science, Writing, and Great Recipes - 5 views

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    Brain Genie, a great site to help students with math and science plus a writing site called 750 Words.
Enid Baines

Why Learning and Multitasking Don't Mix | The Creativity Post - 82 views

  • But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts.
  • But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”
  • “Young people have a wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this demonstration helps drive the point home: If you’re paying attention to your phone, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in class.”
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  • Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social media sites are by far the most common digital activities students undertake while learning, according to Rosen. That’s a problem, because these operations are actually quite mentally complex, and they draw on the same mental resources—using language, parsing meaning—demanded by schoolwork.
  • “Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”
  • “there’s nothing magical about the brains of so-called ‘digital natives’ that keeps them from suffering the inefficiencies of multitasking. They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to finish.”
  • mental fatigue
  • takes longer
  • negatively associated with students’ grades
Jac Londe

Blink if your brain needs a rest - 29 views

  • Why do we spend roughly 10 percent of our waking hours with our eyes closed - blinking far more often than is actually necessary to keep our eyeballs lubricated? Scientists have pried open the answer to this mystery
  • While telling a lie, liars have been found to blink less - possibly because the act of deception requires rapt and uninterrupted attention to pull it off. In the seconds after telling a lie, however, the liar will blink far more frequently than a truth-teller. Perhaps the resulting downtime is necessary for the liar to consider whether the deceived person was buying the fib - or whether it was worth telling in the first place. 
Kate Pok

Born to Learn ~ You are Born to Learn - 93 views

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    Cute animations about how the brain learns.
Marc Patton

Scientific Learning - Fast ForWord Reading Program | Educational Brain Fitness Software - 0 views

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    Accelerate Learning Apply innovative technology based on more than 30 years of brain plasticity research to accelerate learning for students of all ages and abilities.
Martin Burrett

Axon - 55 views

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    A logic science game designed to teach about neutrons and the brain. Connect the neutrons to score points a micrometre at a time. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science
BalancEd Tech

The Dyslexic Brain | The Diane Rehm Show from WAMU and NPR - 8 views

Jon Tanner

Brainy Approaches to Learning | Students at the Center - 65 views

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    Brain research about learning and how to be student-centered.
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