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Explore, Play, Discover: Websites, Activities & More Search form Search Low-cost, teacher-tested activities for the classroom and the curious. Science of Cooking • Explore the science behind food and cooking with recipes, activities, and Webcasts.PreviousNext Explore, Play, Discover: Websites, Activities, and More A Visual Guide to Cognitive Bias You’re biased. I’m biased. We’re all biased when it comes to thinking, remembering, being social, and making decisions. Understanding the different cognitive biases we have can help us design and interpret experiments, interact with each other, and make healthy, rational choices.

21 Skype Lessons For Active Learning, Sorted By Topic Continuing our mini-series on using Skype in the classroom, I wanted to present a few of the many Skype lessons that are currently available for classrooms and everyone else to try out. What is a Skype lesson, you ask? It’s simply a pre-planned ‘call’ where you can watch and learn from others via Skype. Like a Google+ Hangout or other live video-based lesson. Below are just a very small number of Skype lessons you should consider checking out over at the official Skype in the Classroom website.

{FREE} Weather Unit for ages 3-9 1StumbleUpon 0 I’ve covered various topics to teach my preschool and homeschool kids about weather, but I really wanted to make sure I covered it all (if there is such a thing =-) So I put together all the weather stuff I could possibly dream up in this mega 40 page Weather Unit Printable Pack! The Weather Worksheets are educational and fun for toddler, preschool, kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd, grade, 3rd grade, and 4th grade homeschoolers. FREE Weather Unit Pack for Preschool and Homeschoolers A Taxonomy of Reflection: Critical Thinking For Students, Teachers, and Principals (Part I) My approach to staff development (and teaching) borrows from the thinking of Donald Finkel who believed that teaching should be thought of as "providing experience, provoking reflection." He goes on to write, ... to reflectively experience is to make connections within the details of the work of the problem, to see it through the lens of abstraction or theory, to generate one's own questions about it, to take more active and conscious control over understanding. ~ From Teaching With Your Mouth Shut Over the last few years I've led many teachers and administrators on classroom walkthroughs designed to foster a collegial conversation about teaching and learning. The walkthroughs served as roving Socratic seminars and a catalyst for reflection. But reflection can be a challenging endeavor.

200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites... This collection provides a list of free educational resources for K-12 students (kindergarten through high school students) and their parents and teachers. This page is being updated and cleaned up during the COVID-19 crisis. Please tell us if we're missing something valuable. Below you will find free video lessons/tutorials; free mobile apps; free audiobooks, ebooks and textbooks; quality YouTube channels; free foreign language lessons; test prep materials; and free web resources in academic subjects like literature, history, science and computing. Home Schooling Resources During COVID-19

Classroom Strategies Language Arts The Question-Answer Relationship strategy helps students understand the different types of questions. By learning that the answers to some questions are "Right There" in the text, that some answers require a reader to "Think and Search," and that some answers can only be answered "On My Own," students recognize that they must first consider the question before developing an answer.See Question-Answer Relationship strategy > Into the Book has an interactive activity that helps young children learn about inferring. In the interactive, students try to infer meaning in letters from virtual pen pals. They try to answer two questions: "WHERE is your pen pal?"

Advice for effective analytical reasoning Good list of cognitive biases Wikipedia List of Cognitive Biases (Please read this before continuing below.) After reading through the list, one wonders how people ever get anything right. That's called the "cognitive biases bias," or maybe the "skepticism bias" or "paralysis by analysis." There's also the "bias bias," where lists of cognitive biases are used as rhetorical weapons to attack any analysis, regardless of the quality of the analysis. The previous sentence then could be countered by describing it as an example of the "bias bias bias," and so on in an boring infinite regress of tu quoque disputation, or "slashdot."

How To Make Students Better Online Researchers I recently came across an article in Wired Magazine called “ Why Kids Can’t Search “. I’m always interested in this particular topic, because it’s something I struggle with in my middle and high school classes constantly, and I know I’m not alone in my frustrations. Getting kids to really focus on what exactly they are searching for, and then be able to further distill idea into a few key specific search terms is a skill that we must teach students, and we have to do it over and over again. We never question the vital importance of teaching literacy, but we have to be mindful that there are many kinds of “literacies”. An ever more important one that ALL teachers need to be aware of is digital literacy.

A Questioning Toolkit Essential Questions These are questions which touch our hearts and souls. They are central to our lives. They help to define what it means to be human. Most important thought during our lives will center on such essential questions. What does it mean to be a good friend? Googleable vs Non-Googleable Questions When we're working with schools on our Design Thinking School programme, one of the easiest ways to explain what we're looking for in the way a project is set, is whether the statement or questions being asked can be Googled easily: is this a Googleable or Not Googleable topic? The Why Every topic, every bit of learning has content that can be Googled, and we don't want teachers wasting precious enquiry time lecturing that content. We want students, instead, to be using class time to collaborate and debate around the questions that are Not Googleable, the rich higher order thinking to which neither the textbook nor the teacher know the answers. And, where we do have "Googleable facts" for students to learn, the snap-decision shouldn't always be to 'teach' it. Auditory explanation alone (i.e. the teacher speaking) is only one tactic that is ineffective on its own in helping students internalise knowledge, as shown in experiments such as the Harvard "Private Universe" project, for example.

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