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Edmodo has finally created a quiz application!

Edmodo’s quiz feature allows you to create a quiz that mixes multiple choice, short answer, true/false, and fill in the blank.

But like QuizStar, Edmodo also analyzes results for you.

Rules for ALL Online Quizzes 1.  Never, ever, EVER copy a question from a textbook or a quiz you found online. I can almost guarantee that some enterprising student somewhere has copied the question and placed an answer key online.

Getting the Most out of Formative Assessments 1.  Set a time limit that will simultaneously allow students enough time to an

Getting the Most out of Open Note Formal Assessments 1.  If you are going to permit students to use notes and worksheets from class, design your questions so that they must apply the information they have at their fingertips. I

Getting the Most out of Closed Note Formal Assessments 1.  If no notes are permitted, reduce the amount of time students have to take the test. For multiple choice at the high school level, 45 seconds per question is fairly standard.

Experimentation and Feedback As you play around with online quizzes, ask your students to give you feedback. They’ll let you know what’s working and what isn’t.

They do not stop researching and begin another activity because they got distracted;  in our experience, they are more likely to spin themselves in circles making no progress for an entire class period because they do not want to go through a cognitive process that will take “forever.”

· When students are given a research prompt by their teacher, students often do not care enough about the topic to really persevere.

There are very few things in life that our students have to wait for today

ReadTheWords.com been created to cater to these students.

ReadtheWords.com is an AMAZING SERIVCE for young students.

ReadTheWords.com allows me to create listening material for some learners that struggle a little bit. It allows my students to read along with the Virtual Avatar Reader. This saves a lot of time so I can focus on certain children without slowing down the rest of the class.

We create links to audio files that read our upcoming events, and we use it to help visually impaired patrons read anything - articles, letters they have received, emails that can be copy/pasted from their email account...the possibilities are endless! On a personal level, I have been using ReadTheWords toolbar plug in.

service with my university students who are learning English

brings the text to life, and stimulates my second language learners in a dynamic way. I would recommend this program to all foreign language teachers,

I have been assisting students to create audio files of study review materials. This greatly helps them decode and analyze the material for comprehension. I have seen a great improvement on test scores

Students listen to a piece of their own writing, so they can hear if what they wrote sounds correct. It helps students with comprehension, spelling, grammar and structuring sentences.

This service is godsend for many students, especially auditory learners. I cannot even begin to imagine how many people this will help in the future. We just received approval to offer this service to our entire school. (Email webmaster@readthewords.com to get a special deal like we did.

It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.

Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum

Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available

raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities

It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.

n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.

I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i

This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol

Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity

I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries

When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno

Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.

ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."

as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.

In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.

n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.

Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process

Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.

Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61

Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.

If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.

After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.

n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70

In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.

Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.

After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun

Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise

Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality

Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.

Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,

n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.

While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education

By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise

which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").

. On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.

Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85

Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."

The clinical implications of this negative association between MPA and flow suggest that a two-pronged approach focusing on facilitating flow and positive functioning as well as reducing pathological MPA may bring about improvements in the performer’s subjective performing experienc

Seligman’s (2011) most recent model of well-being, from the field of positive psychology, understands well-being as comprising five elements: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievemen

There is a substantial body of Music Performance Anxiety (MPA) research providing evidence that MPA is a debilitating phenomenon (Kenny, 2011) which can affect musicians at any stage of their careers, from highly experienced professional performers (Fishbein, Middlestadt, Ottati, Straus, & Ellis, 1988; Kenny, Driscoll, & Ackerman, 2014) through to child beginners

Anxiety is often described as having an antithetical relationship to the experience of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975), and it has been suggested that fostering techniques for facilitating flow may provide a powerful tool for reducing MPA and encouraging optimal performance

“when performance anxiety was highest, flow was lowest and vice versa … the presence of one minimises the magnitude of the other” (Fullager et al., 2013, p. 251), and a recent study found evidence of a strong, significant negative association between flow and MPA amongst 200 professional orchestral musicians (Cohen & Bodner, 2018), supporting Kirchner et al.’s (2008) earlier findings with music students

Investigations of the efficacy of existing methods for treating MPA indicate that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy based interventions are most effective (for an overview, see Burin & Osorio, 2016).

However, evidence suggests that pharmacological methods, particularly beta-blockers, are most commonly used, often in the absence of medical supervision (Cohen & Bodner, 2018; Kenny et al., 2014) and that the subject of MPA is still stigmatised, with many musicians and teachers unwilling to talk openly about it

Csikszentmihalyi’s nine dimensions of flow as follows

Although there was an increase in flow over time, this was not significant, F(1, 20) = 4.27, p > .05, η2 =.18, and there was no evidence of a significant interaction between group and time, F(1, 20) = 0.56, p > .05, η2 = .03, indicating that the hypothesis that there would be an increase in self-reported levels of flow in the intervention group, was not supported.

Figure 4. Judge-rated musical performance quality and signs of performance anxiety in the intervention group.

These results support the fourth hypothesis that there would be an increase in judge-rated PQ and a decrease in judge-rated SPA.

Results showed evidence of a significant negative association between MPA and flow, and three out of the four study hypotheses were supported: the music performance skills intervention was found to be effective in reducing pre-/post-test MPA in the intervention group compared to the wait-list control group; there were significant improvements in positive and negative affect and state anxiety associated with the performance situation in the intervention group; and there were significant improvements in judge-rated PQ and behavioural signs of performance anxiety. However, there was no significant change in pre-/post-test measures of flow. These findings will now be discussed in more detail.

This supports the understanding of MPA as a specific type of anxiety, where the performer suffers from MPA without necessarily being generally anxious or impaired in any other areas of his/her life (Clark & Williamon, 2011; Hoffman & Hanrahan, 2011) and corresponds to Kenny’s (2011) description of the first and most mild of three types of MPA (for full coverage of this issue, see Kenny, 2011).

Thus, the absence in improvement in levels of flow in the current study could also be due to the low average hours of daily practice reported

The increases in participants’ positive affect and decreases in negative affect after the second simulated performance compared to the first indicate that the intervention was effective in facilitating positive emotion, the first component of Seligman’s (2011) PERMA model of well-being

Evidence of improvements in judge-rated performance quality indicate that the intervention was also effective in facilitating the fifth (Achievement) component of the PERMA model.

“Ironically, it may be that the last people to receive some benefit from the therapeutic value of music may be the musicians themselves” (Brodsky, 1996, p. 95).

Hopefully, such an approach will enable developing musicians to acquire the skills necessary to enjoy satisfying, successful and healthy lives as performing musicians, in which the threat of debilitating MPA and the need to recourse to beta-blockers are a thing of the past.

Cohen, S., & Bodner, E. (2019). Music performance skills: A two-pronged approach – facilitating optimal music performance and reducing music performance anxiety. Psychology of Music, 47(4), 521–538. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735618765349

Rule #2: Concepts before Facts (95% of the time)

Patterns make concepts useful, patternless concepts tend to have a very limited use, so they aren’t studied that much.

But it needs more time to mature in the back of your head while you do other things. Worse, it utterly fails when put under intense stress or time constraints.

Rule #4: Concept Checklists are Useful

Then create a second-order list under each of the larger bullet points with sub-concepts.

Write out (I suggest on a word document, since it allows multiple levels of bullets) all of the major concepts covered in your course.

Heuristics for Learning Better

A concept checklist is a good way to handle those scary, “I don’t understand anything!” moments that many learners face. It allows you to dissolve the frightening implications of total ignorance into a step-by-step guide that can allow you to slowly conquer any subject.

Tactic #1: The 5-Year Old Method

Tactic #2: Metaphors

I recommend brainstorming for metaphors. Start with open-ended questions like: This idea reminds me of…? This idea is used in real-life situations, such as…? What phenomenon mimics this idea? If I wanted to tell a story about this idea, it would go like…?

Tactic #3: Visceralization

combine smell, feeling and motion into an image, not just a picture.

Tactic #4: Deep Linking

if you know you don’t actually have to deeply learn the material, going deeper into a subject can actually make the original idea easier to understand.

How to Learn Faster and Better