Cambridge High School Library 2015: LINKED- web sites, apps and Web 2.0 tools that will help with your learning Welcome to the new page of the blog. here we will post great web sites that will help you discover new books, research tools and other Web 2.0 tools. The first is called "What should I read next. You type in the name of an author, or a title of a book that you loved, and it will provide you with a list of titles that are similar in genre and feel. It is fun to use and really useful. Give it a go. Another site that is similar is . My favourite research site is "Mashpedia"- this is a live encyclopeadia . Mashpedia integrates a variety of data from online services and applications like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Google News, Books, and further contextual information into a single interface, presenting an organized outlook of live content feeds for every topic, thus providing a broad spectrum of data and media that eliminate the user's need to visit each service separately. How does it work? Vision
Why I just asked my students to put their laptops away I teach theory and practice of social media at NYU, and am an advocate and activist for the free culture movement, so I’m a pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor, but I have just asked the students in my fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets, and phones in class. I came late and reluctantly to this decision—I have been teaching classes about the Internet since 1998, and I’ve generally had a laissez-faire attitude towards technology use in the classroom. This was partly because the subject of my classes made technology use feel organic, and when device use went well, it was great. Then there was the competitive aspect—it’s my job to be more interesting than the possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating. And finally, there’s not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults, even if young ones—time management is their job, not mine. Despite these rationales, the practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time.
My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me What happens when a father, alarmed by his 13-year-old daughter's nightly workload, tries to do her homework for a week Charles Gullung Memorization, not rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. “Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. I wonder: What is the exact nature of the work that is turning her into a sleep-deprived teen zombie so many mornings? I decide to do my daughter’s homework for one typical week. Monday
No, You're Not Entitled To Your Opinion Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning. Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ A bit harsh? The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. Firstly, what’s an opinion? Plato distinguished between opinion or common belief (doxa) and certain knowledge, and that’s still a workable distinction today: unlike “1+1=2” or “there are no square circles,” an opinion has a degree of subjectivity and uncertainty to it. You can’t really argue about the first kind of opinion. Meryl Dorey is the leader of the Australian Vaccination Network, which despite the name is vehemently anti-vaccine. So what does it mean to be “entitled” to an opinion?
Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways To Learn Faster, Deeper, & Better If someone granted you one wish, what do you imagine you would want out of life that you haven’t gotten yet? For many people, it would be self-improvement and knowledge. Newcounter knowledge is the backbone of society’s progress. Life-changing knowledge does typically require advanced learning techniques. Health Shake a leg. Balance Sleep on it. Perspective and Focus Change your focus, part 2. Recall Techniques Listen to music. Visual Aids Every picture tells a story. Verbal and Auditory Techniques Stimulate ideas. Kinesthetic Techniques Write, don’t type. Self-Motivation Techniques Give yourself credit. Supplemental Techniques Read as much as you can. For Teachers, Tutors, and Parents Be engaging. For Students and Self-Studiers Be engaged. Parting Advice Persist. Sources For This Article This is only a partial list of sources, focusing only on Web sites. Did you enjoy this article?
Sir Ken Robinson: ‘The education system is a dangerous myth’ I’m often asked the same questions: what’s going wrong in education? Why? If you could reinvent education, what would it look like? Would you have schools? Would there be different types? What would go on in them? The fundamental question is this: what is education for? Learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge and skills. Education means organised programmes of learning. Training is a type of education that focuses on learning specific skills. By schools, I don’t mean only the conventional facilities that we are used to for children and teenagers. Happily ever after? We all love stories, even if they’re not true. Young children go to elementary school mainly to learn the basic skills of reading, writing and mathematics. In this story, real intelligence is what you use in academic studies: children are born with different amounts of this intelligence, so some naturally do well at school and others don’t. This story is a dangerous myth. Mass production
100 Incredibly Useful YouTube Channels for Teachers | Online College Courses YouTube has earned a reputation for featuring brain cell-slaughtering fare such as the truly abysmal Fred and playing host to the some of the most depressingly stupid comments this side of Yahoo! News. But for every participant liberally dishing out misspelled racist, sexist and homophobic talking points, there is at least one whose channel genuinely offers something provocative and educational. Multidisciplinary and General Education Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Technology Social Sciences, History and World Issues BarackObama.com: Love him or hate him, Barack Obama is still America’s president. Visual, Performing and Liberal Arts
Parsing Grammar: Diagramming sentences as a way to teach school children about syntax began in the 1800s. What tools does a grammarian need? A brain helps, and so does a computer, but surely one of our most essential tools is some kind of diagramming system. How can we think about a sentence's structure, after all, without displaying it visually? Geographers have maps; mathematicians have equations; composers have musical notation; economists have graphs; and grammarians have trees. It wasn't always so. Just 30 years later, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, possessing typical American marketing skills, created a more appealing version using lines instead of bubbles, like this one generated by an online parser: For a long time, sentence diagramming flourished throughout the American school system, and, despite being condemned as a useless waste of time in the 1970s, it still persists in many schools. In Europe, some linguists saw an opportunity to make the diagrams even better. A version of this post originally appeared on Language Log.