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Via @MindShiftKQED: Harvard Wants to Know: How Does the Act of Making Shape Kids' Brains http://t.co/OHOH2iW0

Libguide on Six Reading Habits to Develop in your First Year at Harvard

"Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is a self-contained distance-learning course distributed free of charge on the Web. The course is designed by Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program at Harvard University Graduate School of Education; Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of education at the Rossier School of Education and assistant professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California; and Matthew H. Schneps, George E. Burch Fellow in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution and director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The multimedia course consists of six units, with an introduction and a conclusion. Each unit contains many integrated videos and sidebars of additional information, as well as a list of resources."

"What does it mean to see the world like a designer? What is "maker thinking?" What kinds of thinking dispositions characterize a tinkerer? These are some of the questions at the heart of the Agency by Design project, a multi-year research and development initiative at Project Zero, a research organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "

Maryanne Wolf, author of "Proust and the Squid", discusses deep reading. The page also shows links to other great articles related to the digital landscape. From the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

What holds us back and causes us to resist? The following article is from the Harvard Business review, written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She explains ten solid reasons why we we fear the face of change.

"Peer Instruction actively engages the students in their own learning. Carefully chosen questions (ConcepTests give students the opportunity to discover and correct their misunderstandings of the material, and, in the process, learn the key ideas of physics from one another. "

This is a great read about obstacles and pathways to improved collaboration for teacher teams.

"  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."

Site from our Harvard course

An article about how to preserve the Humanities

highlights a website created by a Harvard professor, which collects clips from movies demonstrating mathematics in action....

the Journal for Emerging Investigators (JEI), a publication founded by a group of Harvard grad students in 2011 that provides a forum for the work of middle school and high school students. It has the same standards as academic journals, and each submission is reviewed by grad students and academics.

measuring creativity.... "A metric that we have applied is originally based on the famous Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). We compared 437 ad campaigns from 90 leading brands in 10 different FMCG categories in Germany. Using an advertising creativity scale developed from communications researchers at Indiana University in 2007 we evaluated and indexed each campaign's creativity levels. Specifically, we measured five dimensions of advertising creativity: (1) originality (was the ad original, rare, surprising, unique?); (2) flexibility (does the ad link the product to different ideas, concepts, or subjects?); (3) elaboration (does the ad contain intricate or numerous details?); (4) synthesis (does the ad blend normally unrelated objects or ideas?); and (5) artistic value (does the ad excel visually, verbally, or graphically?). "