[Via Bright Ideas]
‘Lyn finds fun plus learning equals smart kids’ is an interview by the Melton Weekly with the inspirational 2011 Victoria Teachers Credit Union Outstanding Primary Teacher Award Winner, Lynette Barr. Lynette is a teacher at Rosyln Primary School and uses 3D games to provide engaging, authentic learning experiences for her students. Lynette explains how teaching needs to reflect the needs of the students: => http://bit.ly/irxAgK
Tag Archive for: education
Reluctant Disciplinarian: Advice on Classroom Management From a Softy who Became (Eventually) a Successful Teacher
by Gary Rubinstein
As Rubinstein details his transformation from incompetent to successful teacher, he shows what works and what doesn't work when managing a classroom.
... the increasing importance of informal learning, and the challenge it poses to traditional learning
The powerpoint slides are here => http://bit.ly/lIMYSe
The presentation is here => http://bit.ly/kjmF4h
‘Physically active learning’ improves test scores, sharpens concentration
Advocates point to a growing body of research linking physical activity to cognitive ability
Some experts believe that physical learning could pay serious dividends in the classroom.
Tabatha Gayle crab-walked across the classroom last week, racing two other students to a pile of papers listing different diseases, set in the middle of the floor in Ms. Forcucci’s health class.
While her teammates cheered, Tabatha picked up a piece of paper and scuttled it over to the whiteboard, dropping it into one of five pathogen categories lined up there. Then she ran back to the team, laughing.
Amanda Forcucci’s class at Hamden High School in Hamden, Conn., is doing something called “physically active learning” in the classroom. The idea is to get kids up and moving around during regular academic classes to improve their ability to concentrate.
“It’s fun, and moving around actually will help me remember the types of pathogens,” said Tabatha, 15. “Plus it helped me to get out of a bad mood.”
http://bit.ly/lbgQvL
Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education "statistics" have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN. As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Guggenheim undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying "drop-out factories" and "academic sinkholes," methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.
With another long hot American summer coming to a close, many students are scrambling to get back into “learning mode” before school starts. One of the simplest ways to ease that transition is with podcasts. Whether your passion is American History or Algebra, there’s probably an educational podcast out there for you.
While these programs probably won’t mirror your lesson plan, they will explore topics covered in class. Below is a sampling of some of the exceptional podcasts that both teach and entertain. Best of all – they’re free. Read on for your “2010 Downloading Curriculum.”
Here is the list => http://bit.ly/cp8bZ2
If you haven't already--as a public speaker, you should dedicate yourself to a lifetime study of adult learning principles. It will pay you colossal dividends.
And there's a lifetime of "adult learning stuff" to learn. Today we'll look at one such principle; Elaborative Rehearsal.
It's more than practice. It's a proactive approach of making the most out of past learning in order to maximize new learning.
For your audiences to make the most out of this proven learning and memory technique, you will have to teach them. Most adult learners just aren't aware of these methods. Here are five tips you can pass along to all of your audiences.
1. Proper Note Taking. For a learner's notes to enhance one's memory, it is important that a learner is able to record the speaker's ideas in their own words. And, as a presenter you need to tell them so.
2. Paraphrasing. This is like the above note taking, except that care is given to the actual words the note-taker uses. Ideally, the words the learner replaces the speaker's with has equal or added meaning to the learner.
3. Predicting. It will help a listener to project a speakers message into the future. This "projection" allows a person to simulate the material they are learning in the theater of their mind.
4. Questioning. A good Q and A will help your audience learn your principles better. Challenge your audience to come up with creative and meaningful questions, and then dig into them together.
5. Summarizing. There much talked about the concept but it is seldom used in most learning environments. Plan a specific, "Now what did we learn here today?"
There's a lot more to the idea of Elaborative Rehearsal than these five tips, and we'll discuss them in future articles.
The "take-away" today is the need for the public speaker to "train" their audiences how to use elaborative rehearsal to their greatest learning benefit.
One thing that will help your audiences to be able to "practice" your message is a strong visual representation of your message. The presentation world calls these graphics by many things, Process Models, Method Maps, Matrix's, and Hierarchy Models, etc.
Wayne Kronz
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Wayne Kronz is the host of http://MethodMap.blogspot.com. Visit it today for the best free, online information about the design and use of visual aids in public speaking. You'll discover many actual models you can use in your next presentation plus a host of videos showing you how the top pros are using visual aids in their public speaking. And a lot more! Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash |
U.S. Male-Female SAT Math Scores: What Accounts for the Gap?
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It’s well known that for the SAT mathematics test a) male high school students in the U.S. have higher scores on average than females, b) the gap is large and statistically significant (+30 points), and c) the male-female math test score gap has persisted over time, since at least 1971, and probably much longer (see chart above, data here from the Dept. of Education). >>>
[From THIS is TRUE www.thisistrue.com]
EDUSPEAK: Forget "compare and contrast"; schoolchildren now learn "text-to-text connections". They don't go to "home room" but rather "Achievement Time" or, in some schools, "Time to Care". The temporary classroom is now a "learning cottage" rather than a "trailer". Even the humble essay is gone, replaced by the "extended constructed response".
"If teachers want to talk in those terms among themselves, they're welcome to," says Vocabulary Review publisher Hartwell Fiske. "But introducing children to them is criminal, dehumanizing." Students agree. "It's like renaming a prison 'The Happy Fun Place'," complains a Maryland senior. "Tests should be called tests. 'Brief constructed response'; you just wonder why they don't say 'paragraph'." (Washington Post) ...It's nice that kids still get to learn about George Orwell.
Kitty Boitnott, a media specialist at Chamberlayne Elementary School in Henrico County, VA, has spent the last year as president of the 60,000-member Virginia Education Association (VEA), the largest and oldest professional organization serving public schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
How is Virginia making sure students learn about 21st-century skills?
My most recent job was in Henrico County, VA, where in 2001, Henrico County Public Schools had just entered into the largest laptop initiative in the country with Apple. Every child in high school received his or her own iBook that he/she was allowed to keep 24 hours a day, 7 days a week during the school year. At the middle school level, students starting receiving their own laptops in the middle of their sixth-grade year. And for the first several years of the initiative, every classroom and every library in every school got at least five iMac desktop computers. more » » »
