World-Shaker

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I’d let them pass the note on principle alone.

(Source: reddit.com)

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Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick

“Of all the subjects on earth, people think math is the most fixed,” Dweck said. “It’s a gift, you either have it or you don’t. And that it’s most indicative of your intelligence.” This attitude presents an especially sticky problem to educators working to boost girls’ interest and passion for science, technology, engineering and math – STEM subjects. For many boys, believing math is a fixed ability doesn’t hamper achievement — they just assume they have it, Dweck said. But girls don’t seem to possess that same confidence, and in their efforts to achieve perfection, Dweck’s research shows they shy away from subjects where they might fail.

“We have research showing that women who believe math is an acquired set of skills, not a gift you have or don’t have, fare very well,” Dweck said. “Even when they have a period of difficulty and even when they’re in an environment that they say is full of negative stereotyping.” This research suggests parents and educators should rethink what implicit and explicit messages are being sent to young girls about achievement.

"Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill’s course, “Information and Contemplation,” goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation—during class—to sharpen their attention. Their professor, David M. Levy, sees these techniques as the template for a grass-roots movement that could spur similar investigations on other campuses and beyond. Mr. Levy hopes to open a fresh window on the polarized cultural debate about Internet distraction and information abundance."

—

You’re Distracted. This Professor Can Help.

And all I could think was “This would be an interesting MOOC.”

"Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters."

— The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens

Earth.

(Source: reddit.com)

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emergentfutures:

Through app, diabetes is gamified as a monster to be tamed

mySugr makes it more fun for diabetics to monitor and treat their condition by treating it as a virtual monster that reacts to their actions.

Full Story: Springwise

I love things like this.

"A first study of 357 children found that the lower a child’s self-esteem, the more the balance of praise tended to tip toward personal — intuitively, adults seem to want to bolster these children’s self-esteem and do so with encouraging words aimed at personal traits that seem lacking. In fact, kids with low self-esteem got more than twice as much person praise than kids with high self-esteem — 30 percent and 14 percent of total praise, respectively. But then a second study of 313 children found that this personal praise predisposed children with low self-esteem to feel even more ashamed following failure. In kids with high self-esteem? Person praise didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help either."

— Kids With Low Self-Esteem: The Parental Praise Paradox

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[leaves this here and backs away]

(Source: reddit.com)

Ten Good Video Sources for Science Students and Teachers →

Oooothese are all going on my OER list! Here are two:

MIT Tech TV is a collection of thousands videos produced by students and faculty at MIT. The videos are arranged into more than 600 collections covering topics in engineering, education, science, the humanities, and more. You can view the videos online and most of them are available to download. Roughly 300 of the MIT Tech TV videos are also available on a YouTube channel of the same name. There are a couple of playlists within the channel that could be of interest to high school and middle school science teachers. MIT Engineering K-12 is a set of twenty-six videos in which MIT students explain and demonstrate things like gas pressure, gravity, Boyle’s Law, and the shape of sound waves. MIT Physics Demonstrations is a playlist of 44 short demonstrations. The videos don’t have narration, just the demonstration. The explanation of the principle demonstrated is found in the description below each video. 

Bright Storm’s YouTube channel offers video lessons for biology, chemistry, and physics. The videos are nothing more than an instructor lecturing with a whiteboard for a few minutes which could be adequate if a student just needs a refresher on a science topic.

teachingtotransform:

did-you-kno:

Source

I should tell my Chemistry classes about this

And they just made it even lighter: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2013/03/graphene-aerogel-worlds-lightest-substance/

You can buy some here: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/e644/

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Using iPads In Scientific Fieldwork

Traditionally, while engaging in fieldwork, students made handwritten notes and drawings. More recent classes have taken photos with cameras / phones and then, after the excursion, labelled these images in Word or something similar. The biggest drawbacks of these techniques have been illegible or poorly sequenced notes, and inaccuracies in image labels due to time delays between fieldwork and accessing a computer.

This year, each of my students took their iPad 2 into the field, using it as the main tool for collecting and organising observations.  This resulted in significant improvements.

in

GUYS. IT’S AN INTERACTIVE 4 BILLION PIXEL PANORAMIC PICTURE OF MARS FROM THE CURIOSITY ROVER.

BOOM! SCIENCED!

Ninja Update: The quality when you zoom is soooo good.

"I think we’re all impressed by how stupid humans are,” remarked James Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, who holds degrees in philosophy and linguistics from Stanford. “It reaches almost epic proportions. We’re stupid in dozens and dozens of ways. “But human minds are plug-and-play devices; they’re not meant to be used alone. They’re meant to be used in networks.” Games allow us to do that – they allow us to use what Gee calls “collective intelligence.” Collectively, we’re not so stupid."

— Using games as an educational tool provides opportunities for deeper learning, panelists at Stanford event say

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A Learning Science Alternative to Bloom’s Taxonomy by Brenda Sugrue

For the pedagogically obsessed STEM educators. You know who you are.

ucresearch:

Watch the full video: Blossoming into Science with actress Mayim Bialik

A fantastic video for girls interested in STEM (4:14 runtime)