Group items tagged

Gickr.com lets you instantly create Animated GIF online, free, right now! Just upload pictures or grab them from your Flickr. Create funny flashy slideshows with you and your friends, cartoons, previews, banners, etc.

I had another little play with Blabberize and I think I could also use it as a topic specific talking avatar that gives students hints or explanations of different parts of a task or an assignment.

Make a huge poster out of any image you like. It is as simple as selecting your image, uploading to the Web 2 tool, deciding how it gets split and then downloading it again. The tool slices the image into the correct number of individual pages so you just hit print and each one is printed ready to be lined up on the wall.

DragONtape is a Web 2 tool that enables you to create mixtapes of your favorite online or YouTube videos, so you can watch them as one continuous video. 

ScribbleScreen is a presentation tool allowing you to write directly onto the screen, drawing the attention of the audience to items which can be in windows from completely separate applications, high-light items as you speak about them, sketch a quick diagram or type some text.

Wix allows you to browse 100s of site templates and find one that is similar to the one you want. You then customise the template, adding your own media, fonts and colours.

Issuu is a Web 2 tools that allows you to publish PDFs. You can produce the documents in any program that you like

Some people can grab a book, start practicing, and, after some time, master a new language. For the other 99% of us, the best way to learn a language is to use a product that provides some structure. For me, computer-based learning is the best. I can study whenever I feel like it. I can study at my own pace, and I can focus on the topics that I find most meaningful.

The best way to learn a language is to study it every day. That is not to say that you have to study it all day, every day. It just means that all of your high school teachers, and your parents, were right—cramming is not an effective way to learn something. You will learn far more if you study one hour a day five times per week than if you study five hours on Monday and take the rest of the week off. Be consistent.

speaking out is the most important part of learning a language. You can memorize a million vocabulary words, but if you are not actively using them, you will not be able to recall them when you need them most. I don’t know what it is, to be honest, but there is something about actually getting the words to come out of your mouth that makes them stick in your head. Linguists often say, “Once you use a word three times in conversation, you own it.”

You don’t even need a speaking partner. This is one of the only situations in life where it’s perfectly acceptable to have conversations with yourself. Or, even better, sing to yourself. It’s a great way to learn!

Of course, at some point, you are going to want to talk to a real person. For that, turn to the language learner’s best Internet friend—Skype. Skype is a free Internet chat program that has both video and sound. Get yourself a free Skype account, search forums for a language learning partner, and then get talking! There are millions of people on the Internet who want to speak in your target language. Don’t be shy! Get out there and talk to them–it’s the best way to learn a language fast!

The human brain naturally likes to categorize things. If you want the best way to learn a language, be good to your brain and give it what it wants. You’ll be glad you did.

Understand that you can get a great deal done knowing just a little bit of your target language; it’s amazing how repetitive daily conversation is. The quickest way to learn a language, at least at a rudimentary level, is to learn these basic survival phrases.

The key is to remember that you are trying to communicate, not trying to show how eloquent you are. You can be eloquent later.

If you want to speak another language, you have to memorize vocabulary. There is no way around it! The simplest, most effective way to learn vocabulary is to make your own flash cards.

With new vocabulary words, do not make stacks of more than 25-30 cards. It is not efficient to memorize too many words at once. Also, make sure you continue to shuffle the cards as you learn; otherwise, your mind will memorize the order of the words, and you will have difficulty recalling their meanings in a different context.

9. Review Basic English Grammar

review the basics. I’m talking about knowing the difference between nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I’m talking about understanding subjects, predicates and articles. Understand basic sentence structures.

when you learn the sentence structure of a new language, you will not just “know how to use it.” You will have to learn, for example, where to place verbs and nouns in a sentence.

if you can’t recall what articles and verbs are, you will not be able to take advantage these learning tips, and it will take you much longer to figure out how to structure sentences.

Each of us learns differently. Find out what learning style works best for you and focus on learning in that way.

when learning a new language, you should always use a variety of strategies. For example, you should not just read and memorize, even if that is your best learning strategy. Focus on that, but also listen to recordings, speak dialogues, write sentences, and learn grammar rules.

The names of these early activists are all but forgotten today. However, their views on the importance of including, rather than segregating, blind and deaf children, and their powerful advocacy that they should be heard and given appropriate rights, make their views seem strikingly modern.

"Special education" emerged in Britain and Europe during the second half of the 18th Century. Thomas Braidwood established a school for deaf pupils in Edinburgh in 1764, which moved to Hackney in London in 1783 due to increased demand for places.

first school for blind pupils opened in Liverpool in 1791

London's School for the Indigent Blind, founded at St George's Fields Southwark in 1799, was by the 1860s educating 160 boys and girls in reading, writing and "useful" trades, intended to provide for their future employment.

1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the state subsidised school fees for some pupils so that attendance did not push families into poverty - education was neither free nor compulsory until later in the century

Charitable schools were founded primarily as residential institutions intended to provide protection, board, lodging and education to their pupils. Yet the practice of shutting away "blind, deaf and dumb" children in so-called "exile schools" was opposed by an increasingly vocal group of activists in the mid 19th Century.

institutions "immured" their pupils, treating them like prisoners. They were degrading and they perpetuated "pauperism"

The campaigners noted that inclusion promised to benefit all society, not just the deaf and blind themselves.

Organisations such as the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, founded by Elizabeth Gilbert in 1854, established workshops for blind handicraftsmen so that workers received better prices for their products than for those produced in institutions.

Whilst the association encouraged basket making, some campaigners claimed that these traditional trades were symbolic of a system that failed to recognise people's potential or range of talents.

Biography of the Blind, written in 1820 by James Wilson, a self-taught blind man who wrote the book "with a view of rescuing my fellow sufferers from the neglect and obscurity in which many of them are involved."

Charities were not always appreciated. Activists claimed that too much of the money donated to the dedicated charities went on buildings and non-disabled staff, rather than on the welfare of the blind pupils themselves. Many of them imposed social and moral restrictions on who could apply for assistance. Some campaigners argued that it would be better if the donated money was paid directly to blind people themselves, to enable them to live in their own homes and support their families.

The education of blind and deaf children in specialist institutions remained the norm until recent years. Far greater effort now goes into integrating disabled children into mainstream schools, and has been backed up by new laws. But integration is not the same as inclusion, and even in 2014 campaigners are still arguing that there is further to go before disabled children are fully included in schools. They say there needs to be greater recognition that they have a right to an education and should be given support in ordinary classes, not in special units.

"[And] it was extremely hard combining family and career," Bell Burnell said, partly because the university where she worked while pregnant had no provisions for maternity leave.

Born in 1922 in the Bronx, Esther Lederberg would grow up to lay the groundwork for future discoveries on genetic inheritance in bacteria, gene regulation, and genetic recombination.A microbiologist, she is perhaps best known for discovering a virus that infects bacteria—called the lambda bacteriophage—in 1951, while at the University of Wisconsin.Lederberg, along with her first husband Joshua Lederberg, also developed a way to easily transfer bacterial colonies from one petri dish to another, called replica plating, which enabled the study of antibiotic resistance. The Lederberg method is still in use today.Joshua Lederberg's work on replica plating played a part in his 1958 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, which he shared with George Beadle and Edward Tatum."She deserved credit for the discovery of lambda phage, her work on the F fertility factor, and, especially, replica plating," wrote Stanley Falkow, a retired microbiologist at Stanford University, in an email. But she didn't receive it.

Lise Meitner's work in nuclear physics led to the discovery of nuclear fission—the fact that atomic nuclei can split in two. That finding laid the groundwork for the atomic bomb.Her story is a complicated tangle of sexism, politics, and ethnicity.After finishing her doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna, Meitner moved to Berlin in 1907 and started collaborating with chemist Otto Hahn. They maintained their working relationship for more than 30 years.After the Nazis annexed Austria in March 1938, Meitner, who was Jewish, made her way to Stockholm, Sweden. She continued to work with Hahn, corresponding and meeting secretly in Copenhagen in November of that year.Although Hahn performed the experiments that produced the evidence supporting the idea of nuclear fission, he was unable to come up with an explanation. Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch, came up with the theory.Hahn published their findings without including Meitner as a co-author, although several accounts say Meitner understood this omission, given the situation in Nazi Germany."That's the start of how Meitner got separated from the credit of discovering nuclear fission," said Lewin Sime, who wrote a biography of Meitner.

Chien-Shiung Wu overturned a law of physics and participated in the development of the atom bomb.Wu was recruited to Columbia University in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project and conducted research on radiation detection and uranium enrichment. She stayed in the United States after the war and became known as one of the best experimental physicists of her time, said Nina Byers, a retired physics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.In the mid-1950s, two theoretical physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, approached Wu to help disprove the law of parity. The law holds that in quantum mechanics, two physical systems—like atoms—that were mirror images would behave in identical ways.Wu's experiments using cobalt-60, a radioactive form of the cobalt metal, upended this law, which had been accepted for 30 years.This milestone in physics led to a 1957 Nobel Prize for Yang and Lee—but not for Wu, who was left out despite her critical role. "People found [the Nobel decision] outrageous," said Byers.Pnina Abir-Am, a historian of science at Brandeis University, agreed, adding that ethnicity also played a role.

Rosalind Franklin used x-rays to take a picture of DNA that would change biology.Hers is perhaps one of the most well-known—and shameful—instances of a researcher being robbed of credit, said Lewin Sime.Franklin graduated with a doctorate in physical chemistry from Cambridge University in 1945, then spent three years at an institute in Paris where she learned x-ray diffraction techniques, or the ability to determine the molecular structures of crystals. (Learn more about her education and qualifications.)She returned to England in 1951 as a research associate in John Randall's laboratory at King's College in London and soon encountered Maurice Wilkins, who was leading his own research group studying the structure of DNA.Franklin and Wilkins worked on separate DNA projects, but by some accounts, Wilkins mistook Franklin's role in Randall's lab as that of an assistant rather than head of her own project.Meanwhile, James Watson and Francis Crick, both at Cambridge University, were also trying to determine the structure of DNA. They communicated with Wilkins, who at some point showed them Franklin's image of DNA—known as Photo 51—without her knowledge.Photo 51 enabled Watson, Crick, and Wilkins to deduce the correct structure for DNA, which they published in a series of articles in the journal Nature in April 1953. Franklin also published in the same issue, providing further details on DNA's structure.Franklin's image of the DNA molecule was key to deciphering its structure, but only Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work.

Nettie Stevens performed studies crucial in determining that an organism's sex was dictated by its chromosomes rather than environmental or other factors.After receiving her doctorate from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, Stevens continued at the college as a researcher studying sex determination.By working on mealworms, she was able to deduce that the males produced sperm with X and Y chromosomes—the sex chromosomes—and that females produced reproductive cells with only X chromosomes. This was evidence supporting the theory that sex determination is directed by an organism's genetics.A fellow researcher, named Edmund Wilson, is said to have done similar work, but came to the same conclusion later than Stevens did.Stevens fell victim to a phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect—the repression or denial of the contributions of female researchers to science.Thomas Hunt Morgan, a prominent geneticist at the time, is often credited with discovering the genetic basis for sex determination, said Pomona College's Hoopes. He was the first to write a genetics textbook, she noted, and he wanted to magnify his contributions."Textbooks have this terrible tendency to choose the same evidence as other textbooks," she added. And so Stevens' name was not associated with the discovery of sex determination.

the first wife of Albert Einstein should be in this list. People know so little about her, and I think she deserves to be known. 

Vera Rubin, for accurate studies discovering dark matter.

How sadly ironic that the very woman who set the stage for the  DNA structure discovery, which in 1994 helped make it possible to genetically test and confirm BRCA carriers like Angelina Jolie and me (with familial cancer holocausts generation, after generation, after generation), did not have access the test that could have saved her life so she could go on with the research she loved and win a Nobel Prize.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Nordics were indeed tax-and-spend countries.

They have avoided both southern Europe’s economic sclerosis and America’s extreme inequality.

But tax-and-spend did not work: Sweden fell from being the fourth-richest country in the world in 1970 to the 14th in 1993.

Government’s share of GDP in Sweden, which has dropped by around 18 percentage points, is lower than France’s and could soon be lower than Britain’s. Taxes have been cut: the corporate rate is 22%, far lower than America’s. The Nordics have focused on balancing the books. While Mr Obama and Congress dither over entitlement reform, Sweden has reformed its pension system (see Free exchange). Its budget deficit is 0.3% of GDP; America’s is 7%.

Nordics have been similarly pragmatic. So long as public services work, they do not mind who provides them

The performance of all schools and hospitals is measured. Governments are forced to operate in the harsh light of day: Sweden gives everyone access to official records. Politicians are vilified if they get off their bicycles and into official limousines. The home of Skype and Spotify is also a leader in e-government: you can pay your taxes with an SMS message

Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that you can top up.

the Nordics also offer something for the progressive left by proving that it is possible to combine competitive capitalism with a large state: they employ 30% of their workforce in the public sector, compared with an OECD average of 15%

All Western politicians claim to promote transparency and technology. The Nordics can do so with more justification than most.

Denmark, for instance, has a system of “flexicurity” that makes it easier for employers to sack people but provides support and training for the unemployed, and Finland organises venture-capital networks.

Public spending as a proportion of GDP in these countries is still higher than this newspaper would like, or indeed than will be sustainable.

They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies: Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo is now owned by China’s Geely. But they also focus on the long term—most obviously through Norway’s $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund—and they look for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects.

Their levels of taxation still encourage entrepreneurs to move abroad

Too many people—especially immigrants—live off benefits

pressures that have forced their governments to cut spending, such as growing global competition, will force more change. The Nordics are bloated compared with Singapore, and they have not focused enough on means-testing benefits

Nordics are part of the answer. They also show that EU countries can be genuine economic successes. And as the Asians introduce welfare states they too will look to the Nordics: Norway is a particular focus of the Chinese

The main lesson to learn from the Nordics is not ideological but practica

A Swede pays tax more willingly than a Californian because he gets decent schools and free health care

You can inject market mechanisms into the welfare state to sharpen its performance. You can put entitlement programmes on sound foundations to avoid beggaring future generations. But you need to be willing to root out corruption and vested interests.

There are two types of special classes. The type described above is called the E class, and there is one in each year. These classes are smaller than the others, and they have the same teacher for most subjects (who should be a qualified teacher with an extra qualification in special needs, but in practice these are in short supply). Students can move in and out of this class, but in practice they usually stay there for most subjects, occasionally joining another class if they have a strength in a particular area.

high expectations of all students, and these are to meet the objectives set out in the national curriculum.

These mixed ability classes would be difficult for teachers to handle if it weren't for three things: thorough teacher education - teacher training includes a significant focus on differentiation and how to support students at all levels;small class sizes - the estimated average size is 14.1 (although some research suggests class size doesn't affect student performance); anda well staffed student support system - special teachers that provide in class support and take out small groups are qualified teachers with further qualifications in special education.

all classes are mixed ability.

Those with severe or specific special needs still attend mainstream school, but are in a class of their own somewhere in the district. Each school has its own specialism. This may mean travelling a little while to get there, as only one or two schools will have an autistic class for example. 

There isn't really special provision for gifted students

brighter students help struggling students in class which enhances their own understanding

if students are motivated, you can't stop them learning - gifted students will take the books and teach themselves (one of the teachers who told me this had four degrees but had come from a tiny school in the countryside).

Finland has only small differences in performance between schools (a measure closely associated with equality), and most students go to their local schools (to age 15).

Selection only happens in two situations: where students are applying to language emersion schools (and the student has to speak the language to a certain level), and where students are applying for a certain class in a school that is the school's specialism, such as Music or Sports (these classes have the same basic curriculum with additional Music or Sports lessons). There are no grammar schools, and very few private schools (and even these have to follow the national curriculum).