Group items tagged

Interesting article that I'm going to share with my English teachers. If they are interested, I'm going to look for/recommend similar functioning tools that they could use with their students. "Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they've observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Andrew Klobucar, associate professor of humanities at NJIT, notes that students almost universally resist going back over material they've written. But, Klobucar told Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik, his students are willing to revise their essays, even multiple times, when their work is being reviewed by a computer and not by a human teacher. They end up writing nearly three times as many words in the course of revising as students who are not offered the services of E-Rater, and the quality of their writing improves as a result. Crucially, says Klobucar, students who feel that handing in successive drafts to an instructor wielding a red pen is "corrective, even punitive" do not seem to feel rebuked by similar feedback from a computer."

Wonder how you might use this to alter teaching? "In Lupyan's study, participants sometimes heard the name of the static object - like the word 'kangaroo' or 'pumpkin' - played into their ears. And on these trials, the previously invisible object would pop into their conscious visual perception. If they heard a different word, though, they would not see the hidden object. "So it's not that they are hallucinating or imagining a dog being there," Lupyan says. "If they hear the label, they become more sensitive to inputs that match that label." "

"The Spatial History Project at Stanford University is a place for a collaborative community of students, staff, and scholars to engage in creative spatial, textual and visual analysis to further research in the humanities. " Data visualizations that are tied to geography. Quite a few are applicable to US History SOLs

"Flows of Reading takes this process to the next level. We have created a rich environment designed to encourage close critical engagement not only with Moby-Dick but a range of other texts, including the children's picture book, Flotsam; Harry Potter; Hunger Games; and Lord of the Rings. We want to demonstrate that the book's approach can be applied to many different kinds of texts and may revitalize how we teach a diversity of forms of human expression.  We look at many different adaptions and remixes of Moby-Dick from the films featuring Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart as Ahab to MC Lar's music video, "Ahab" and Pitts-Wiley's Moby-Dick: Then and Now stage production to works that evoke Moby-Dick less directly, including Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Battlestar Galacitca's "Scar." "

"Ever wonder why we are made up of the particular ratio of elements that we happen to be made up of? The answer may be very simple. Perhaps we are that way because the universe is that way." This infographic reminded me of this H21 lesson (http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/21/?s=element+survivor&x=-1067&y=-38) and could provide a neat extension/summary for the lesson. After the students create their products and justify their choices, the teacher could show the infographic on this page and have the students compare and contrast their choices to the infographic and discuss "Why do you believe the human body contains these proportions of the listed elements?" Then, after an appropriate amount of time for the discussion, go for the big reveal and show the graphic that displays the abundance of each element in the universe.