Recognize their individuality

The researchers also asked students whether it mattered to them that the instructors knew their names, and more than 85 percent of them said it did

because making good use of the full physical space of a classroom is one of the most straightforward ways to keep both professor and students attentive.

One advantage of the Zoom classes that many of us are teaching right now is that the names are all right there on the screen

Speak to all corners of the room

They bring their unique life stories and experiences, which can help provide new perspectives on familiar questions and challenges.

The obvious solution here is to break that barrier

Use their names regularly.

She encourages children first to recognize and write their own names and then to compare the letters and syllables in their own names with those of the other names on the grid

What is most deserving of our attention in the classroom, of course, are the other human beings in our presence

Be astonished.

Pay attention.

Through the creative turns of language they use to describe the world and our experiences, the familiar becomes unfamiliar again, and we discover in the everyday world fresh food for insight and reflection.

We want them to pay attention to course content, to be astonished by what they find there, and to report back to us and the world what they have discovered.

Find an everyday object that connects to your discipline, or a photograph or image that accompanies an article or book in your field.

Close — and I mean really close — reading.

asked what they had learned from the experience, and especially what they had noticed about the text that they hadn’t perceived before

Engagement with objects.

What? For the first step, students spend time just observing the object and taking notes.

So what? Students write down questions based on their observations and share them with one another.

Now what? The final stage shifts into more whole-class and teacher-centered discussion

Attention through assessments.

For 13 consecutive weeks, she asked students to leave the campus and make a visit to the nearby Worcester Art Museum in order to spend time in front of the same work of art.

As they learned to train their attention on a work of art, their attention brought them insights. They saw more clearly, developed new ideas, and wrote creatively about what they observed.

Clark started an online fundraiser to pay for bikes. He raised more than $10,000, and neighbors donated dozens of bikes and helmets for the rides.

She couldn’t be sure whether her kids were uninterested or whether they lacked the necessary pens, paper and crayons at home.

He decided he would take his students on socially distanced bike rides across the city. “It was a leap of faith. I got extremely nervous. I was trying to find a way to connect with kids,” Clark said.

her young students are musical detectives, in search of learning. She teaches most grade levels and the school chorus.

t he’s found other ways to keep his students engaged and cycling the city. He invited students to a weekly entrepreneurship class for which they rode their bikes uptown from Dunbar to the gym where Clark works, Sweat DC. The students met with the owner of the gym and the owners of a nearby bar, Hook Hall, and the bagel shop Call Your Mother Deli to learn what it takes to run a business.

She wanted them to create their own composition, their own snowy-day song.

When Clark wanted to teach them about resilience, he took them through the hilly streets of Georgetown.

In lessons for older students, some days there were makeshift drums involved or recorders that students had taken home.

she was able to use the treehouse as a key part of her lessons.

She lugged a bookshelf, desk and heater into the 5-by-7-foot space, and ran an Ethernet cable from the house so she’d have Internet.

before climbing into what passes for her classroom in 2020: her daughters’ decade-old treehouse.

So as one class studied architecture this fall, Daney, 54, encouraged them to walk in their neighborhood to take photos of houses of different styles: ranch, colonial, Victorian.

nd he stuck with his usual method of helping students learn about the design process, asking them to prepare a meal. They started with ideas and research, made a plan, carried it out and evaluated it. The result: soups and pastas and pastries.

Kids need connection, he said. “I think they’re starving for conversation,” including with adults.

In fifth grade, students are expected to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide with whole numbers, decimals and fractions. Through a computer application the students have, they can program the robot to move a certain distance, stop, maybe even turn.

With learning all-virtual, he packs a big Ziploc bag — for each student, each quarter — with things like fishing line, foam board, pipecleaners, magnets, Popsicle sticks and rubber bands. Whatever they will need for their projects.

And a lot of the math is a little sneaky. They think they are trying to get the robot to move, when they are actually measuring the angles to get it to move.”  

Others complete their math problems directly on the computer, which can lead to some troubles as they try to show their work.

When Kristin Gavaza interviewed for the music teacher position at Dorothy I. Height Elementary in the summer, she told the principal she had some ideas for how to create a festive concert while students were scattered and learning from home.

The new research could lead to systems that can carry on a decent conversation.

the world’s leading A.I. labs have built elaborate neural networks that can learn the vagaries of language by analyzing articles and books written by humans.

Bert learned how to guess the missing word in a sentence.

Google made more than 3,200 changes to its algorithms in 2018, up from more than 2,400 in 2017 and from about 500 in 2010

testing showed wide discrepancies in how Google handled auto-complete queries and some of what Google calls organic search results

Google said 15% of queries today are for words, or combinations of words, that the company has never seen before, putting more demands on engineers to make sure the algorithms deliver useful results.

ALGORITHMS ARE effectively recipes in code form, providing step-by-step instructions for how computers should solve certain problems. They drive not just the internet, but the apps that populate phones and tablets.

What you’re not doing is inspiring your team to level up. What you’re not doing is inventing a new game. Instead, you’re playing someone else’s game.

There are two traps

First, it’s easier than ever to do A/B testing

Second, it’s easier to stay busy.

Leadership is the art of doing things you’re not sure of, and doing them with enrollment instead of authority.

On the other hand, leadership is voluntary. Those who follow you must be enrolled in your journey and persuaded to follow (and contribute to) your vision.

Digital charisma doesn’t feel like management, and it requires alternative channels. Human channels. Channels that involve actually showing up, not hiding behind a system.

how can you possibly listen back?

We can learn quite a bit from how the modern cultural leaders of Instagram and Facebook use their platform, despite so many of their habits we’d prefer to avoid.

Among other things, I now research and write just about every column using an iPad (I still compose many first drafts by speaking into my headphones, but I’m an odd duck).

Jobs declared the iPad to be the future of computing. “PCs are going to be like trucks,”

Like a phone, in most scenarios I find the iPad to be faster, more portable and easier to use and maintain than any traditional P.C. I’ve ever owned.

The iPad still can’t do everything a laptop can, and I still have to log in to a “real” computer sometimes.

the iPad doesn’t work with antiquated work flows that are built for PCs