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… Read more →
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. Read more →
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… Read more →
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,… Read more →
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 Read more →
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 Read more →
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… Read more →
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… Read more →
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 Read more →
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… Read more →