Group items tagged

Article re how the color and shape of rooms affects the thinking that goes on inside the rooms... "They tested 600 subjects when surrounded by red, blue or neutral colors-in both real and virtual environments. The differences were striking. Test-takers in the red environments, were much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory. Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children's toy. In fact, subjects in the blue environment generated twice as many "creative outputs" as subjects in the red one. Why? According to the scientists, the color blue automatically triggers associations with openness and sky, while red makes us think of danger and stop signs. (Such associations are culturally mediated, of course; Chinese, for instance, tend to associate red with prosperity and good luck.) It's not just color. A similar effect seems to hold for any light, airy space."

"The United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) is a registered charity, which has as its sole object the advancement of education in literacy. UKLA is concerned with literacy education in school and out-of-school settings in all phases of education and members include classroom teachers, teaching assistants, school literacy co-ordinators, LEA literacy consultants, teacher educators, researchers, inspectors, advisors, publishers and librarians."

twitter, the plucky social media network with much of Facebook's reach but none of its self-adoration, received a vote of confidence from an unlikely source: the Modern Language Association. Long an indirect but potent tool of torture in English classrooms and University campuses everywhere, the MLA (and other cohorts, including APA and Chicago) released a format for quoting tweets in formal writing.

Our class is very lucky to have two iPad2s and five iPod Touches as we explore what it's like to be an iClassroom. This project is supported by the Manitoba Association of Multiage Educators. Here is a list of the apps we are using in our grade 2 classroom. We wanted to start with a complete list and will work to add descriptions of the apps. Also click on the iClassroom tag on our main page to see all of our blog posts about our iClassroom.

The Chicago Homer is a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. Except for fragments, it contains all the texts of these poems in the original Greek. In addition, the Chicago Homer includes English and German translations, in particular Lattimore's Iliad, James Huddleston's Odyssey, Daryl Hine's translations of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, and the German translations of the Iliad and Odyssey by Johan Heinrich Voss. Through the associated web site Eumaios users of the Chicago Homer can also from each line of the poem access pertinent Iliad Scholia and papyrus readings. The data of the Chicago Homer have also been integrated into WordHoard, an application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged literary texts. WordHoard does not replicate all functionalities of the Chicago Homer but has some features of its own, notably the simultaneous display of all forms of a given lemma, a metrically parsed version of the text, and the display of the scholia adjacent to the text.

"This is what psychologists call "metacognition," thinking about how we think. Trailblazer gave me an x-ray view of my own mental activity. Clicking on random memes triggered a curious search query and-boom-20 pages later I'd find a useful scientific paper. (I'm now more forgiving of falling down a Twitter hole.) Traditional academic citations never capture serendipity, the stumbling, associational nature of how knowledge relates to itself. Trailblazer does."

In a world where "screen time" is becoming simply "time," our policies must evolve or become obsolete. 

New look at screentime from American Association of Paediatrics - finally.

"  For Kane, video is also a key to the project's success.--  "Improving teaching requires adult behavior change.  Imagine trying to get someone to quit smoking by showing them a video of a bunch of happy nonsmokers … and yet that is the way we do professional development for teachers, by showing them some third person teaching instead of showing them their own work." According to Kane, teachers need to see and analyze their own efforts, and then discuss with their supervisors what they are doing well, and what they could do differently to improve. This can be done by showing teachers their own videos and by providing feedback that is related to student achievement. Heather Hill, an associate professor of education at HGSE, developed a rubric for guiding classroom observations that will be used to help score the videos. Project organizers hope the effort will help lead to a new approach to professional development. "We are trying, said Kane, "to get people to quit smoking by taking them into their closet to smell their own clothes."

"Welcome to the AAAS Project 2061 Science Assessment Website The assessment items on this website are the result of more than a decade of research and development by Project 2061, a long-term science education reform initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Here you will find free access to more than 600 items. The items: Are appropriate for middle and early high school students. Test student understanding in the earth, life, physical sciences, and the nature of science. Test for common misconceptions as well as correct ideas. This website also includes: Data on how well U.S. students are doing in science and where they are having difficulties, broken out by gender, English language learner status, and whether the students are in middle school or high school. "My Item Bank," a feature that allows you to select, save, and print items and answer keys. Intended primarily for teachers, these assessment items and resources will also be useful to education researchers, test developers, and anyone who is interested in the performance of middle and high school students in science."

The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Project 2061 (an imitative to improve science, math and technology literacy) -- "A new Web site is taking aim at this challenge, providing educators with quick lists of scientific statements broken down by subject matter, highlighting concepts that tend to be misunderstood by students.... The site (which is accessible after free registration) also provides teachers with some 600 multiple choice questions for tests that could help pinpoint conceptual sticking points. Multiple-choice tests have drawn criticism for being too reductive, and DeBoer acknowledges that "too often test questions are not linked explicitly to the ideas and skills that the students are expected to learn." So to figure out just what kids know-or think they know-researchers involved in the seven-year-long project tested more than 150,000 students in some 1,000 classrooms and conducted interviews with many of them to try to figure out how well the questions were getting at the underlying understandings."

One year ago, I began blogging. It was my first attempt to try something new in quite a while; to share some ideas with the world and to learn for the sake of the students who learn from me.

archive founded by the musicologist Alan Lomax

categories include: animals, the arts, history & biography, literature & languages, mathematics & computers, reference desk, science, social studies

The infants to 5-year-olds in my family child care program have taught me the value of rich and meaningful learning that happens in authentic, everyday experiences. Early educators often spend much time and effort planning such experiences. However, sometimes we support children's learning best by stepping out of the way. This lets us learn alongside the children.

This matrix looks like it could be a VERY useful tool for self-evaluation of technology integration into the curriculum.

Resources supporting the full integration of technology in Florida schools -- there's a great matrix showing levels of integration into the curriculum: Entry, Adoption, Adaptation, Infusion, and Transformation.

Documentary about trash-pickers in Brazil and about the art of Vik Muniz and his series Pictures of Garbage