Group items tagged

"Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics. First, their members contributed more equally to the team's discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men."

Wiki providing tools for teams. "Teampedia is a collaborative encyclopedia of free team building activities, free icebreakers, teamwork resources, and tools for teams that anyone can edit.

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

Blog post that pulls together a 7-min TED talk on how successful teams work together, design thinking, and motivation.... and thoughts about how we can encourage feedback loops in our classrooms, leading to success and learning..... Fascinating for anyone interested in team psychology or science.....

A new gaming app is in development that will help scientists to analyse genetic data in the search for cancer cures. Cancer Research UK have teamed up with Google, Facebook and Amazon to develop a game you can play on your mobile that will simultaneously sort through genetic data. "A new gaming app is in development that will help scientists to analyse genetic data in the search for cancer cures. Cancer Research UK have teamed up with Google, Facebook and Amazon to develop a game you can play on your mobile that will simultaneously sort through genetic data.

Cooperative learning requires positive independence which boosts atmosphere of trust among students and helps them accomplish the task in result oriented and timely manner. The team will suffer if one of the students does not manage to do his/her part. The next important factor is that this type of learning encourages face to face interaction. Students must challenge and compromise one another. Team members must periodically identify the changes to achieve better results in their work.

Lots of activities for team and community building involving digital tools, mobile devices and online spaces.

Coaching is a highly sophisticated form of reflective practice. When done well, it can transform a person's professional, and often personal, life, and provides many benefits to the employer in sustaining high performance and morale. The question is, however, whether it's the coaching itself that produces the results, or if it's down to an enlightened management team, which believes in people's development and so encourages coaching, which in turn produces results. When coaching is done badly, though, it has the power to decimate a person's sense of professional worth for years into the future and to incur substantial cost while returning no benefits, or worse, significant professional damage. Leadership can become cynical about the coaching process.  Money is wasted.  Time and attention are frittered away.  Ineffective coaching is counterproductive and should be stopped as soon as it is recognized.

If we value coaching, and we do, the question then becomes: "what are the elements of effective coaching that we can train, support, measure, and improve" - especially those that have the highest leverage for shifting those being coached perspectives and practices. The more I come to understand the power of coaching the more I appreciate that the best leaders see their primary role within an organisation as an influencer and coaching as the structure behind the myriad of interactions. I think an enlightened management team would not only be encouraging coaches but utilizing coaching strategies themselves on a regular basis.

"What are video games doing? If you have an age-appropriate game that's not too easy or too hard, a video game is teaching a child how to cope with failure, deal with frustration, delay gratification, and often doing it in a social context, where they're learning to negotiate with their friends, working as a team, or 'OK, I beat you, you beat me, how do I handle all of these things?' "

"Gone are the days when you can dump out a backpack or flip through a folder to see your kids' work. The answers to "What did you do today?" are locked inside a password-protected device. Often kids have the upper hand in understanding how the device works -- and those 10-inch screens make it difficult to look over kids' shoulders. That's why the Common Sense Media Education team created the 1-to-1 Essentials Program. It's a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive, and free offering that covers everything that administrators, teachers, and parents need to know to maximize the benefits of schools' technology programs. "

I was very happy to discover a research report on the potential of using Facebook as a learning management system. Facebook popularity and the ease with which most teachers and learners can create an account these days was, after all, one of the reasons our aPLaNet project team decided to include Facebook as one of the three Social Networks which may help teacher with their professional development easily and with complete autonomy.

We invite you to join us for the first annual Google Apps for Education Singapore Summit to be held at the Singapore American School on September 8 and 9. This high intensity two day event focuses on deploying, integrating and using Google Apps for Education to promote student learning in K-12 and higher education. The program features Google Certified Teachers, Google Apps for Education Certified Trainers, practicing administrators, solution providers, Google engineers, and representatives from the Google Apps for Education team. 

One of the most misunderstood terms in education is "classroom management," which is often seen as a synonym for discipline. Imagine asking the manager of a store to explain his job and he says, "My job is to discipline the customers." And when the same question is posed to the manager of a team, she says, "I discipline the players." Yet, discipline is the prevailing response of most educators when asked about classroom management.

great videos for teaching and learning -- from the Open University in the UK

50 top choices for different age groups from primary to middle school, selected by a team of 27 expert adults

The 10 elements of high-quality digital learning, as set out by the National Education Reform team in 2010. I really like these!

re Charles & Ray Eames movie/book and its possible uses in the classroom.... "Powers of Ten is a reframing technique that can be used as a synthesis or ideation method. It allows the design team to use an intentional approach to considering the problem at varied magnitudes of framing."

"HIGHRISE is a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. Under the direction of documentary-maker Katerina Cizek, the HIGHRISE team will be making lots of things. Web-documentaries, live presentations, installations, mobile projects and yes, documentary films. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada's Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy - putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, and innovation first."