""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.
"David Cox sent his students through Function Carnival where they tried to graph the motion of different carnival rides. (Try it!)
Every student's initial graph was wrong. No one got it exactly right the first time. But Function Carnival doesn't display a percent score or hint tokens or some kind of Bayesian probability they'll get the next graph right. It just shows students what their graph means for that ride. Then it lets them revise."
A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, cooperative learning, research process/ report, PowerPoint, podcast, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other web 2.0 projects
"While preparing for the upcoming school year, Twisted Sister's epic protest song began playing as I read the Declaration of Independence. Obviously my mind drifted to imagined Thomas Jefferson and John Adams letting their hair down and dancing around the streets of Philadelphia during a break from drafting the epic document. I realized then that I serendipitously uncovered something that I could use in the classroom - pairing music to primary documents to demonstrate understanding!"
Taylor - I read this and immediately thought of you.
Assignment for student - Remix the text of a primary document or famous historical speech with a song or multiple songs that add to the theme of the document/speech.
Example included in the post.
"Merriam-Webster's website has a neat feature called Trend Watch that highlights words that are trending in news and popular culture. Trend Watch includes an explanation of why each word is trending, a definition for the word, and a picture that is representative of either the word or the cause of the trend."
Plenty of interesting applications for teaching new vocabulary.
"Hemingway is a free tool designed to help you analyze your writing. Hemingway offers a bunch of information about the passage you've written or copied and pasted into the site. Hemingway highlights the parts of your writing that use passive voice, adverbs, and overly complex sentences. All of those factors are accounted for in generating a general readability score for your passage."
"With ScreenCastify installed in Chrome you can record everything happening in a tab in your browser. Voiceovers are supported and a pointer is included by default. Completed recordings can be saved to your computer or uploaded directly to YouTube."
"HHMI's BioInteractive is a good place for science teachers to search for science lesson plans, videos, animations, and slideshows to use with students. You can search the BioInteractive library according to topic, keyword, or resource type."
"My hope is that I'm providing a starting point, not an end point, with each post. I never know for sure if what sparks my own curiosity will kindle a similar fire with readers, but if it does, I want readers to be able to pursue the subject beyond the confines of my short posts and tweets. The history-pics accounts give no impression of even knowing this web of legitimate, varied historical content exists. Given their huge follower counts, this is a missed opportunity-for their readers, and for the historians and archivists who would thrill to larger audiences for their work."
This is why I love "The Vault," and why anyone interested in history should explore its contents every once in a while. I've found great starting points for lessons here. And thinking about it, I know there's a lesson somewhere in this article too. I just don't know exactly what it is yet.
"This game is HARD. It took me at least 10 minutes before I even made it past the first pair of pipes. And it's not just me who finds the game difficult. Other folks have taken to Twitter to complain about Flappy Bird. They say the game is so difficult, that the physics must be WRONG."
This is a really interesting application of logger pro. And just downright fun.
"Function Carnival changes that. Students watch a video. They try to graph what they see. Then they play back the video and see how their graphical model would be represented as an animation. Does what they meant to graph about the world actually match the world?"
This is an explanation of a new online math tool called "Function Carnival." The link to the tool is in the opening paragraph.
Further explanation of the tool can be found here: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=18420