Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • 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

  • Thank you NASA!

    NASA spin-off technologies

    In 1957, notable science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein was asked to appear before a joint committee of the House and Senate after recovering from one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct a blocked artery that was causing transient ischemic attacks; in his testimony, reprinted in the book Expanded Universe, he characterized the technology that made the surgery possible as merely one of a long list of spinoff technologies from space development.

    Tang is not one of them.

    Via: NASA spin-off
    technologies

  • PowerPoint and the bored student

    Attention, Teachers! Why Students Are Bored | Grant Wiggins:

    PowerPoint. Yes, I agree that PowerPoint is a very valuable tool, but this only applies in certain situations. When a teacher writes paragraphs upon paragraphs on a single PowerPoint slide, and then proceeds to read them all verbatim to “teach” the class, I completely zone out.

    And please, teachers, take special heed on the PowerPoints. This was the #1 disliked practice in our student survey:

    Too much text on each slide; and reading directly from the slide.

    Via: @mguhlin

  • Videogames don’t affect behavior

    Finally, vindication!

    Game Play Has No Negative Impact on Kids, UK Study Finds

    A massive study of some 11,000 youngsters in Britain has found that playing video games, even as early as five years old, does not lead to later behavior problems.

    via: @avantgame

  • Seven hundred years of lecturing…

    Lectures Didn’t Work in 1350—and They Still Don’t Work Today

    You point out that we’ve been using the lecture-based model since the 1300s. Why have we kept replicating a model that doesn’t suit everyone’s needs?

    It’s a fascinating question. There’s a painting of a classroom by Laurentius de Voltolina from 1350 that shows it’s not working. Students are talking to each other or falling asleep while the teacher drones on. Why has this perpetuated? I don’t know. In our workshops we tell people to go to Second Life and check out a classroom—and they’re exactly like they are in the real world. It’s strange, because this is a place you can move by teleporting, you can do whatever you want. So using space in the same way is strange.

    via: @chamady

  • “So, what do you want to learn?”

    How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses:

    School had never been challenging for her. She sat in rows with the other students while teachers told the kids what they needed to know. It wasn’t hard to repeat it back, and she got good grades without thinking too much. As she headed into fifth grade, she assumed she was in for more of the same—lectures, memorization, and busy work.

    One day JuĂĄrez Correa went to his whiteboard and wrote “1 = 1.00.” Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote “1/2 = ?” and “1/4 = ?”

    “Think about that for a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.

    Via: @schinker

  • Chrome split screen extension

    Purely Paperless: Tech Tip Tuesday: Split Screen Chrome Extension writes:

    One extension that I have been loving lately is the Split Screen extension. With Split Screen, you can view two different web pages simultaneously without have to toggle between two different tabs or constantly resize your screens. As a recovering browser-tab abuser, I am pretty notorious for having WAY too many tabs open at once. Split Screen appeals to the “multi-tasker” in me.

    Via: @CurtRees

  • Learn Python from Google

    Google’s Python Lessons are Awesome:

    The lovably geeky Nick Parlante — a Google employee and CS lecturer at Stanford — has written some awesomely succinct tutorials that not only tell you how you can use Python, but also how you should use Python. This makes them a fantastic resource, regardless of whether you’re just starting, or you’ve been working with Python for awhile.

    via: @seankaiser

  • Selling your vision

    The importance of selling your vision writes:

    A team aligned behind a vision will move mountains. Sell them on your roadmap and don’t compromise — care about the details, the fit and finish. Only work with those that have (as Larry Page puts it) “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” and push everyone on your team until it’s uncomfortable.

    Kevin Rose writes about how he failed at selling his vision. Digg almost failed, and is still not as big as it once was.

  • Storytelling tips from Andrew Stanton

    The 5 Rules of Storytelling Every Teacher Should Know about

    A good story does have to abide by certain rules and these rules are learned through practice. Andrew Stanton, the Pixar writer and director behind both Toy Story and WALL-E, talks some of these rules in his popular TED Talk, The clues to a great story.

    Also related, Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction, including one that’s really hard for me:

    Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.