It’s a rare joke that is funny. Only situations are funny.
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7 Skills students need for their future - YouTube - 126 views
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Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group has identified what he calls a "global achievement gap," which is the leap between what even our best schools are teaching, and the must-have skills of the future: * Critical thinking and problem-solving * Collaboration across networks and leading by influence * Agility and adaptability * Initiative and entrepreneurialism * Effective oral and written communication * Accessing and analyzing information * Curiosity and imagination
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Blobs - 65 views
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A logical thinking game where players have to 'leap-frog' blobs in the correct order to make them all disappear. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Educational+Games
Screen Leap - Share Your Screen With One Click - 122 views
www.freetech4teachers.com/...hare-your-screen-with-one.html
technology teachers share resources tools
shared by Wayne Holly on 11 Sep 12
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Why was the month of February chosen to have the leap day? - Yahoo! Answers - 70 views
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NookColor Rooting - nookDevs - 70 views
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This site will show you how to turn that Nook Color you got for Christmas into a full-fledged Android tablet. Costs a fraction of what the iPad costs and is rock solid stable. You can use the Android Marketplace to download apps like Edmodo.com for free. Insanely easy to do. This is NOT like jailbreaking your iPod/Pad. The Android Marketplace is completely legitimate and growing by leaps and bounds.
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Storytelling For Assessment by @JamietheColes - 13 views
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"You are obsessed with stories. I am obsessed with stories. We are obsessed with stories. Even when you go to sleep at night, your mind stays awake telling itself stories in your dreams. It's predicted that modern humans began to speak language around 100,000 years ago. It's no great leap of the imagination to assume they started telling stories not long after. We're obsessed with stories. But why? It's how we make sense of the world. We have a deep neurological compulsion to find patterns. "
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Marginal Gains - 5 views
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"Often we look for the big leaps, the silver bullets and the next big thing. But in reality progress and improvement often comes in bitesized pieces on multiple fronts. In this UKEdChat discussion we discuss marginal gains and the little steps that you, your pupils, your school and the wider education world are taking to make improvement to the learning opportunities of our pupils."
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Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 61, Stanley Elkin - 0 views
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to do the kinds of things which people don’t really do in real life but which they do do in fiction—to follow their own irrational—but sane—obsessions which, achieved, would satisfy them. Alas, these guys never catch up with their obsessions.
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There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think, “Jesus Christ, how many more months do I have left?” or years, I hope. I am totally preoccupied with death. I mean my own death. Barth, for example, has said that he comes from very good stock and expects to live a long time. Bill Gass thinks that one of the reasons he takes so much time writing his novels—it took him ten years to write Omensetter’s Luck—is that he has an infinite amount of time left to him. I don’t believe that I have an infinite amount of time left to me. Probably I would be a healthier man if I did believe it.
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it’s not a question of making imaginary leaps or having a third eye. It’s a question of using the two eyes I have—and looking hard and close at things.
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That kind of observation can be taught. I also try to teach them how to recognize a situation, what legitimately is a situation and what isn’t. Those are the only things that can be taught. I can’t teach a person style. I can’t teach him to write, in terms of language. But I can teach them that things look like other things.
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I don’t believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.
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There’s marvelous language in Pricksongs and Descants but it’s subsidiary to the experiment with structure. I tell you this for your own good, Bob. The reason I like Gass so much is that Gass is not fucking around with structure. He is fucking around with language. That to me is legitimate and acceptable, and the furthest out you can go is the best place to be. That’s what’s so magnificent about Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote very conventional plays, but the language wasn’t conventional.
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palimpsest of metaphor right there on the page. One gets a notion of the conceit and one is inspired to work with it as a draftsman might work with some angle that he is interested in getting down correctly.
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Blog the Leap Year - 53 views
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Mark 29th Feb by getting your class to take part in the world's biggest blogging project. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
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A Sound of Thunder - Ray Bradbury - 49 views
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A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.
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There's No Place Like Home - 22 views
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Superimposed over that geography, like a Jackson Pollock painted on a fishnet, is the geography of a man’s life, the griefs and pleasures of various streets,
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We attended church at the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall on 14th Avenue South, where a preacher clutched his suspenders and spoke glowingly of Eternity, and I grew up one of the Brethren, the Chosen to whom God had vouchsafed the Knowledge of All Things that was denied to the great and mighty. The Second Coming was imminent, we would rise to the sky. We walked around Minneapolis carefully, wary of television, dance music, tobacco, baubles, bangles, flashy cars, liquor, the theater, the modern novel—all of them tempting us away from the singular life that Jesus commanded us to lead.
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There were the neon lights of Hennepin Avenue and the promise of naked girls at the Alvin Theater, which our family passed on Sunday morning on our way to church, but that was lost on me, a geek with glasses, pressed pants, plaid shirt, a boy for whom dating girls was like exploring the Amazon—interesting idea, but how to get there? Writing for print, on the other hand—why not? And then came the beautiful connection: You write for print, it impresses girls, they might want to go on dates with you.
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For days after Frankie drowned, I visited the death scene, trying to imagine what had happened. He was paddling a boat near the shore, and it capsized, and he drowned. I imagined this over and over, imagined myself saving him, imagined the vast gratitude of his family. I don’t recall discussing this with other boys. We were more interested in what lay ahead in seventh grade, where (we had heard) you had to take showers after gym. Naked. With no clothes on. Which turned out to be true. Junior high was up the West River Road in Anoka, the town where I was born, 1942, in a house on Ferry Street, delivered by Dr. Mork. That fall of seventh grade, he listened to my heart and heard a click in the mitral valve, which meant I couldn’t play football, so I walked into the Anoka Herald and asked for a job covering football and basketball, and a man named Warren Feist said yes and made me a professional writer. Ask and ye shall receive.
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down to work at 4 a.m. to do the morning shift on KSJN in a basement studio on Wabasha and then a storefront on Sixth Street, the house where I lived next to Luther Seminary and the backyard parties with musicians that inspired A Prairie Home Companion at Macalester College, the dramatic leap to home ownership on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul, where I’ve lived most of the last 20 years, where you drive up from I-94 past Masqueray’s magnificent cathedral, whose great dome and towers and arches give you a momentary illusion of Europe, and up Summit and the mansions of 19th-century grandees and pooh-bahs in a ward that votes about 85 percent Democratic today.
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I drive down Seventh Street to a Twins game and pass the old Dayton’s department store (Macy’s now but still Dayton’s to me), where in my poverty days I shoplifted an unabridged dictionary the size of a suitcase, and 50 years later I still feel the terror of walking out the door with it under my jacket, and I imagine the cops arresting my 20-year-old self and what 30 days in the slammer might’ve done for me
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She was a suicide 28 years ago, drowned with rocks in her pockets, and I still love her and am not over her death, nor do I expect ever to be.
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She says, “Tell me a funny story”—my daughter who never had to fight for a seat. I say, “So ... there were these two penguins standing on an ice floe,” and she says, “Tell the truth,” so I say, “I like your ponytail. You know, years ago I wore my hair in a ponytail. Not a big ponytail. A little one. I had a beard too.” And she looks at me. “A ponytail? Are you joking?
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Clive Thompson on the New Literacy - 3 views
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The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
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The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.
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When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
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Stanford 1st year students - check the applicant profile - http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/basics/selection/profile.html These are among the top tiered students in the country.
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know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.
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(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good
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"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions
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Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment
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Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.
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(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good
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How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds - WSJ.com - 2 views
online.wsj.com/...SB124079001063757515.html
bestpractices review cognition styles learning education
shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jul 09
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what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy
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it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time
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Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.
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students cannot apply generic "critical thinking skills" (another voguish concept) to new material unless they first understand that material
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Trying to use "reading strategies" -- like searching for the main idea in a passage -- will be futile if you don't know enough facts to fill in what the author has left unsaid.
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what is being taught in most of the curriculum -- at all levels of schooling -- is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form
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At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra
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Göbekli Tepe -National Geographic Magazine--"Origin of Religion" - 36 views
ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...mann-text
WHAP World_History_One agriculture religion prehistoric archaeology
shared by James Spagnoletti on 17 Sep 11
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Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages
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Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
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In the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpost.
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Schmidt had come across the Chicago researchers' brief description of the hilltop and decided to check it out. On the ground he saw flint chips—huge numbers of them. "Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.
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found a second circle of stones, then a third, and then more. Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth
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The pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.
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The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's. Bladelike, the pillars are easily five times as wide as they are deep. They stand an arm span or more apart, interconnected by low stone walls. In the middle of each ring are two taller pillars, their thin ends mounted in shallow grooves cut into the floor.
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"They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
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To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies.
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The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual.
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As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.
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The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 56 views
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Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract customers, that's what's colleges are selling.
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The common experience is that getting admitted is the most exhausting part. After that, the struggle mainly is financial. But at the major universities, most professors are too busy to care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of purpose—and not finding it.
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Academically Adrift ends on a depressing note: "A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities." Institutions are inherently conservative; they do not change easily. Many leaps of faith are necessary, and the people involved—teachers, students, parents, administrators, lawmakers, and others—have so many fundamental disagreements about the purposes of higher education that it is hard to know where to begin the conversation. It's far easier to make cuts to an inherently broken system than to begin building something new.
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Göbekli Tepe - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine - 67 views
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The Birth of ReligionWe used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
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Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
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At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
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Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.
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Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages
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Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
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n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo
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To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.
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nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.
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Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
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he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.
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The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.
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They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
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Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.
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Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.
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Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
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A step back in time is a great leap forward for multi-sensory learning - 7 views
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"Imagine lying on the floor of a Tudor hall and gazing up at the expressions of art all around you, listening to the sound of melodies Henry VIII would have heard, or breathing in the scent of seasonal herbs that have graced a kitchen garden for three hundred years. These wonderful experiences would be a treat to the senses for any of us, but for our students who are working towards or at Entry Level 1, multi-sensory learning is an essential part of engaging with the world around them."