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Author: ryan

  • Math tricks

    Nix the Tricks

    We are committed teachers who want to take the magic out of mathematics and focus on the beauty of sense-making. We wish for teachers everywhere to seek coherence and connection rather than offer students memorized procedures and short-cutting tricks. Students are capable of rich conceptual understanding; don’t rob them of the opportunity to experience the discovery of new concepts.

    It’s a free eBook about the math
    tricks that masquerade as teaching concepts. I have mixed feelings, it seems
    like I use a lot of tricks. But at the same time, I do understand the concepts
    and why the trick works. Maybe that’s the difference?

    Via: dy/dan

  • Top five edtech buzzwords

    Top 5 buzzwords in higher education technology circles

    Educators, technologists, and campus decision makers who reside in the educational technology bubble speak the ed-tech vernacular like a second language, frequently using words and phrases wholly foreign to many in higher education.

    Agree? Disagree?

  • Note taking skills

    Tips for Developing Students’ Note-taking Skills writes:

    Beyond being an essential basic skill, note-taking offers students the opportunity to make the material their own. That doesn’t involve making it mean whatever they want it to mean, but it does allow them to interact with it in ways that develop the learner’s understanding of it. Now, this doesn’t happen when students equate note-taking with stenography and copy down exactly what the teacher says, and it doesn’t happen when students recopy their notes and think that’s studying. But it does happen when students work on and with their notes—when they put definitions into their own works, when they list relevant pages in the text, when they re-order the material so that it better connects with their knowledge, and when they write summaries and relate details to main points.

  • Dropbox in the paperless classroom

    Dropbox Organization Tips for Teachers and the Paperless Classroom

    Dropbox is an essential for me. I like apps that link with Dropbox in every way and it is an essential part of my paperless routine with my students. This past Sunday at #txeduchat I was asked some specific questions about how I use Dropbox to take my classroom as paperless as possible, so I thought I’d make it my app of the week and teach you some things that might be helpful.

    And if you are a Google Apps for Education school, most of these tips can apply directly to Google Drive.

  • The positive effects of art

    Art Makes You Smart

    A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

    Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

    It will be interesting if this is reproducible (or maybe the
    Slashdot
    comments put a bad taste in my mouth :-).

    Learning to Think Critically – Abstract
    via: Art Makes Students Smart – Slashdot

  • 12 ways to use Google Drive in education

    12 Effective Ways To Use Google Drive In Education

    …I stumbled across a fabulous new visual guide put together by Susan Oxnevad on Glogster. In the graphic, she showcases a dozen different ways to easily and effectively integrate Google Drive into your classroom.

  • Familiarity doesn’t always mean productive or well designed

    Clinging to Outlook, Only 25% of Employees Willing to Use Yahoo Mail

    At this point in your life, Outlook may be familiar, which we can often confuse with productive or well designed.

    How many times have you been faced with a change in software or hardware, and
    just wish you can go back to the old way?

    The next sentence is just all sorts of awesome:

    Certainly, we can admire the application for its survival, an anachronism of
    the now defunct 90s PC era, a pre-web program written at a time when NT Server
    terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to
    yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son’s utter
    uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the
    gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl. There was a similar outcry when we
    moved away from Outlook’s suite-mates in the Microsoft Office dreadnaught. But
    whether it’s familiarity, laziness or simple stubbornness dressed in a cloak of
    Ayn Randian Objectivism, the time has come to move on, commrade.

    Wow.

  • Amazing archive consists of 140,000 VHS tapes

    The Incredible Story Of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV
    News

    In a storage unit somewhere in Philadelphia, 140,000 VHS tapes sit packed into four shipping containers. Most are hand-labeled with a date between 1977 and 2012, and if you pop one into a VCR you might see scenes from the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the Reagan Administration, or Hurricane Katrina.

    It’s 35 years of history through the lens of TV news, captured on a dwindling format.

    I would love to see the archives in December from the 70s and 80s, just for the
    commercials.

  • Google Forms add features

    Google updates Forms with progress bars, data validation, embedded YouTube videos, and custom messages

    Google today announced four new tools for building surveys with Google Forms. You can now display progress bars, set up data validation, embed YouTube videos, and post custom messages when your form is closed.

    Data validation is a feature I’ve been waiting on!

    Via: @mguhlin

  • One iPad per classroom

    The “One iPad” Classroom:

    If you have been allocated just one iPad for your classroom then you have very different issues to 1-to-1 classrooms as the iPad is not designed as a shared device. But don’t despair! There are apps for that!

    Via: @iPadWells via @WiredEducator