A tool that would be a useful collaborative space for upper elementary/middle school students. Allows you to add multimedia to a page easily, and organise them as you see fit.
In a similar vein to Blackout Poetry, the Humument takes the art form one step further to and images and colour illustrations to the 'blacked out' words. Beautiful to look at, and is a good example of how open ended a task involving blackout poetry can be. This would be what I would expect of high school students.
This is a 10-15 hr online course that introduces essential concepts of understanding data, organizing and displaying it using Fusion Tables. This would be good for students who are undertaking survey research or other data collection activities.
I love Instagram because it prompts me to take and share pictures of things that I might otherwise glance at then forget about. Before cell phones entered my life I rarely took pictures. Last week I took the picture that you see below. Almost as soon as it appeared in my Facebook feed via Instagram, my friend Kelly commented with, "shouldn't they be more concerned about weight than the number of people?" Kelly is a middle school math teacher so this picture was right in her wheelhouse of math prompts.
here is ample evidence that writing by hand aids cognition in ways that typing does not: It’s well worth teaching. And I confess I’m old-fashioned enough to think that, regardless of proven cognitive benefits, a good handwriting style is an important and valuable skill, not only when your laptop batteries run out but as an expression of personality and character.
So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade
They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience (it more closely resembles print), even without being taught it explicitly
While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility.
The grip that cursive has on teaching is sustained by folklore and prejudice
for typical children, there’s some reason to think manuscript has advantages
freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write
Likewise if they can touch-type instead of wrestling with ascenders and descenders...
the difference in appearance between cursive and manuscript could inhibit the acquisition of reading skills, making it harder for children to transfer skills between learning to read and learning to write because they simply don’t see cursive in books.
There’s good evidence, both behavioral and neurological, that a “haptic” (touch-related) sense of letter shapes can aid early reading skills, indicating a cognitive interaction between motor production and visual recognition of letters. That’s one reason, incidentally, why it’s valuable to train children to write by hand at all, not just to use a keyboard.
even if being taught both styles might have some advantages, it’s not clear that those cognitive resources and classroom hours couldn’t be better deployed in other ways.
In other ways... the time it takes for kids to learn cursive, spread over years, compared to the relatively short time it takes to master touch-typing being a case in point.
that cursive is still taught primarily because of parental demand and tradition, rather than because there is any scientific basis for its superiority in learning
inertia and preconceptions seem to distort perception and policy at the expense of the scientific evidence
How much else in education is determined by what’s “right,” rather than what’s supported by evidence?
Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.
the reasons to reject cursive handwriting as a formal part of the curriculum far outweigh the reasons to keep it.
This must surely lead us to wonder how much else in education is determined by a belief in what is “right,” unsupported by evidence.
it’s often the case that the very lack of hard, objective evidence about an issue, especially in the social sciences, encourages a reliance on dogma instead
There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?
There needs to be wider examination of the extent to which evidence informs education. Do we heed it enough? Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms?