It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music which, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things. It is not hard to hear this music, but it is very difficult indeed to learn to hear it as music.
THERE IS A DISTINCTION to be made between the anxiety of daily existence, which we talk about endlessly, and the anxiety of existence, which we rarely mention at all. The former fritters us into dithering, distracted creatures. The latter attests to-and, if attended to, discloses-our souls.
Ryan Goble, who often coaches teachers in what he calls the "mindful" use of technology, has written today's guest post on user-friendly tools that enable the creation of student projects.
Here's the kicker, though: The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen's ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods.
Introduce issues of debate within the discipline and get the students to weigh in based on the knowledge they have from those lecture podcasts, Mr. Bowen says.
"Strangely enough, the people who are most resistant to this model are the students, who are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test," says Mr. Heffernan. "Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive. The only way we're going to stop that is by radically refiguring the classroom in precisely the way José wants to do it."
That's exactly the point. Of course we do need discussions in classrooms, but we also need to enable students to perform well in them, and here is where technology comes in: You can facilitate it in the learning process. - The headline of this article makes things far too easy...
Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects
rash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims
new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about
You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way
but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions.
When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant.
gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory
When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it.
Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.
Good writing, like a good watch, should have no unnecessary parts, and that's what great art shouts at us: Tell the story with no unnecessary parts. William Zinsser
audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs
2nd through 4th graders over 16 weeks as they used webcams to see themselves reading and then he identified their mistakes.
Do you want to get closer to God? Settle down with a good book.
McEntyre notes that, in the ancient practice of lectio di
It can change the way we listen to the most ordinary conversation. It can become a habit of mind. It can help us locate what is nourishing and helpful in any words that come our way—especially in what poet Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said”—and it can equip us with a personal repertoire of sentences, phrases, and single words that serve us as touchstones or talismans when we ne
AMEN--you do not have to be a religious person to get this. Too often, I understand this idea, but forget to share it with my students. Reading as "equipment for living"
"Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive thing, arguing that made-up stories cultivate our mental and moral development. But others have argued that fiction is mentally and ethically corrosive. It's an ancient question: Does fiction build the morality of individuals and societies, or does it break it down?"
Download free eBook versions of 37 literary classics like Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre and more! Each eBook download comes as an easy-to-use PDF file that can be printed or projected on your interactive whiteboard.
AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites.
Sources held in archives, which document so much important first-hand information, are often not searchable by popular search engines. One needs to search within those institutional sites directly, using specific search phrases not readily discernible to non-scholars. The experience can be frustrating, resulting in researchers leaving key sites without finding needed information.
AwesomeStories is about primary sources. The stories exist as a way to place original materials in context and to hold those links together in an interesting, cohesive way (thereby encouraging people to look at them). It is a totally different kind of web site in that its purpose is to place primary sources at the forefront - not the opinions of a writer. Its objective is to take the site's users to places where those primary sources are located.
The author of each story is listed on the preface page of the story. A link to the author provides more detailed information.
This educational teaching/learning tool is also designed to support state and national standards. Each story on the site links to online primary-source materials which are positioned in context to enhance reading comprehension, understanding and enjoyment.
"Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom. "
This site contains hundreds of visual aids (illustrations) that can be used to support instructional tasks such as describing objects and people (i.e., teaching vocabulary) or describing entire events and situations (i.e., teaching grammar).
Illustrations pour l'enseignement des langues étrangères"Ce site contient des centaines de supports visuels (illustrations) qui peuvent être utilisés pour supporter les tâches pédagogiques tels que des objets qui décrivent et des personnes (c.-à-enseignement du vocabulaire) ou décrivant des événements et des situations entières (c.-à-enseignement de la grammaire)."Plus de 400 dessins au trait, consultables et consultable, libres d'utiliser à des fins éducatives, repéré par Larry Ferlazzo.
The illustrations were created as part of the Visuals for Developing Communication Skills in Foreign Language Classes project, initated by Paul Toth, former Director of the Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Center.
if you had doubts about the chance to engage more kids with eReaders, this infographic might change your mind. I am planning a digital reading course next year, and will use this to argue my case to administration