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The YouTube Guide to Self-Directed Learning. These Videos Explore Ideas and Techniques and Offer Real World Examples That can Help Inspire a Self-Directed Learning Mindset in Your Students.

The YouTube Guide to Self-Directed Learning

Text expander for Windows - Breevy. Why type slower... when you can type faster?

Text expander for Windows - Breevy

Breevy is a text expander for Windows that helps you type faster and more accurately by allowing you to abbreviate long words and phrases -- saving you time and money. Simply define an abbreviation for a longer piece of text, like eml for JohnDoe@email.com. Then, in the future, instead of typing that longer piece of text, type the abbreviation you associated with that text in any application, and Breevy will automatically replace it for you, instantly. Think of how much time you'll save! Is it easy to use? Yes! Think of a word or phrase that you often type or find cumbersome to type or remember -- your address, an e-mail signature, a complex word, etc.

The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory. Long dismissed as a waste of time, doodling is getting new respect.

The Power of the Doodle: Improve Your Focus and Memory

Recent research in neuroscience, psychology and design shows that doodling can help people stay focused, grasp new concepts and retain information. A blank page also can serve as an extended playing field for the brain, allowing people to revise and improve on creative thoughts and ideas. Doodles are spontaneous marks that can take many forms, from abstract patterns or designs to images of objects, landscapes, people or faces. Some people doodle by retracing words or letters, but doodling doesn't include note-taking. What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades. Does handwriting matter?

What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades

Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard. But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention. Step 1: What is a PLN? Welcome to our professional learning series on building a PLN.

Step 1: What is a PLN?

This series guides you step by step through the process of setting up your own PLN. Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn. Take the case of chance opportunities.

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn

Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. The 30 Second Habit That Can Have a Big Impact On Your Life  Write or Die: the software that offers struggling authors a simple choice.

This is horrible!

Write or Die: the software that offers struggling authors a simple choice

The novelist David Nicholls says that while working on his latest book Us he used a piece of software called Write or Die, which starts to delete what you are writing if you pause for too long. Hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain. Photo.

hit-the-reset-button-in-your-brain

How to Break the Procrastination Habit. New laws on marijuana were supposed to boost tax revenues and free up cops to go after “real” criminals.

How to Break the Procrastination Habit

But underground sales—and arrests—are still thriving. It’s just after four o’clock on a hot Seattle afternoon, and Thomas Terry is standing in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box. Known for fights that end with police sirens and sometimes ambulances, it’s a spot some locals half-jokingly call “Stab in the Box,” but today the scene is quiet.

A man is walking up the street toward Terry and a few other young men who are gathered in the shade of a brick wall where the parking lot meets the sidewalk. Opinion: For a more productive life, daydream. In 1990, a 25-year-old researcher for Amnesty International, stuck on a train stopped on the tracks between London and Manchester, stared out the window for hours.

Opinion: For a more productive life, daydream

To those around her, no doubt rustling newspapers and magazines, busily rifling through work, the young woman no doubt appeared to be little more than a space cadet, wasting her time, zoning out. But that woman came to be known as JK Rowling. And in those idle hours daydreaming out the train window, she has said that the entire plot of the magical Harry Potter series simply "fell into" her head. Why Walking Helps Us Think. In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself.

Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. Log In. The Pomodoro Technique® - Time Management Skills From MindTools.com. Staying Focused Throughout the Day. Learning Styles Don't Exist. Learn Faster with The Feynman Technique. Articles. Seven Principles of Learning Better From Cognitive Science. I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here are the Facts. How Human Memory Works" The more you know about your memory, the better you'll understand how you can improve it. Here's a basic overview of how your memory works and how aging affects your ability to remember.

Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching. This blog entry is part of a series of topical Practice-Oriented Literature Overviews written by the HILT Research Fellows. How do people (e)learn? Study Skills Connected: Using Technology to Support Your Studies Palgrave Study Skills: Amazon.co.uk: Dr Stella Cottrell, Neil Morris: Books. Review. Free Reference Generator – Harvard, APA, MLA, Chicago...

Free reference manager and PDF organizer.