This article makes me rethink my current profession entirely. I wonder how much I can charge people to help them reset their passwords...
In all seriousness, I think this is the wrong article? :)
""I think competitive character people don't want to be manipulated constantly to do what one individual wants them to do," Popovich said, "It's a great feeling when players get together and do things as a group. Whatever can be done to empower those people.""
Applications for classroom and for our job as ITRTs.
...and I just love Popovich.
Do you teach struggling readers?
No matter the content area that you teach, student success is often defined by literacy. Reading comprehension and vocabulary frequently act as roadblocks that prevent students from grasping difficult concepts. Rewordify is a tool that will help you ignore this roadblock, and even teach reading comprehension and vocabulary when used appropriately. I initially read about the tool from this blog post (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2013/08/rewordify-helps-students-read-complex.html#.UhuJ79KsiSp). If you don't have time to check out that entire post, here is a brief summary of the tool and a few possible uses for it:
Tool Description: This online tool allows the user to input a chunk of text and replaces all the "hard words" with synonyms.
This seems like a spectacular tool to promote reading comprehension across the content areas. Here a just a couple ways you could use this tool.
* Have you found a website with incredible information, but the reading level is way too high for your students? Have the students use Rewordify and make the reading level more appropriate for your students.
* This could be a great tool to teach new vocabulary and reading comprehension. Here's one idea on how to do this:
o Have students read a passage and highlight/underline/annotate the passage, including making notes of the words that they don't understand. Then, have the students summarize what they have read. Input the same text into rewordify and have the students read and summarize what they have read a second time. Compare the two summaries and discuss any similarities/differences. Now, have the students create definitions for the words that were highlighted (Students cannot use the provided synonym when completing this portion of the activity).
William Berry
Dept. of Organizational Development, Quality and Innovation
Moody Middle School ITRT - (804) 261-5015
http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/techtips/http://blogs.henrico.k12.v
We could use this to make TEI style testing items and some other interesting things. Keep in mind that images within these items ought to be sortable as well.
"How did Gladwell misconstrue it?
Aside from not having copied the numbers from the actual paper correctly for his book? He says that there is a perfect correspondence between practice and the level of expertise a person attains. And you can't tell that from the paper. The 10,000 hours is an average of differences. You could have two people in any endeavor and one person took 0 hours and another took 20,000 hours, which is something like what happened with two high jumpers I discuss in the book. One guy put in 20,000 and one put in 0, so there's your average of 10,000 hours, but that tells you nothing about an individual.
Now, Gladwell doesn't say there's no such thing as genetic talent. I think other writers are stricter than him. [Matthew Syed's] Bounce is a book that minimizes talent. Gladwell does say elite performers are more talented. One of the things that Ericsson criticizes Gladwell about is to say that 10,000 hours is some kind of rule. The paper just says that these performers by the age of 20, these performers have accumulated 10,000 hours but there's no where that says it's a magical number where that's when they become elite or anything like that. These people, by the time they go into their professional careers, have way more than that. That's just where they were when they're 20 as an average, not even to mention their individual differences."
"InterTwinkles is a platform built from the ground up to help small democratic groups to do process online. It provides structure to improve the efficiency of specific communication tasks like brainstorming and proposals.
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In mid-April, we went live with a half dozen articles which we call "stubs." The idea here is to plant a flag in a story right away with a short post--a "stub"--and then build the article as the story develops over time, rather than just cranking out short, discrete posts every time something new breaks. One of our writers refers to this aptly as a "slow live blog."
By viewing the page source here, you can now make multiple variable webpage generators. They might be useful for things like this which is a for refining project based questions or you could use as elements in a writing prompt. I have another one that randomizes images as well that works slightly differently.