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."

very interesting read

Easy Bib, Bamboo Paper, Study Blue, Study Tracker, Simple Mind, My Homework, Paper

"The program for this year's ISTE had a few sessions with "Google-proofing" in the title. Since, I suppose no one copies directly from print sources anymore, "Googling" and "plagiarizing" are synonymous. And as professor Hokanson suggests in the quote above, when there is a direct transfer of information from source to student product - with no cognitive processing stop in-between - little learning occurs as a result of the assignment. It is busy work that no one likes."

Greta resource from NASA on water. 

a Biblioburro -- library by donkey -- in Colombia -- good complement to the book, My Librarian is a Camel