Good for quick use on the interactive white board to establish the main and sub-headings in a piece of writing or similar

An unexpected business opportunity arising from the ban on electronics in New York schools

Here we go

UK version: 700,000 births a year, so 1 in 2000 on the same apparent calculation basis as XKCD

"The point is, humans seek novelty yet are pattern-recognition machines. What you put out will initially work quite well as they check it out for the first time, but afterwards, they will learn to filter your marketing efforts out unless they are genuinely useful (more on that later)."

Via HN. Some really clever people are trying to get us to look at things. Continuous novelty is a good one for teaching as well (but within a secure framework).

"In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn."

Piaget in the age of ubiquitous technology?

"A family might combine services from two or three different organizations into a learning plan"

What about the children whose parents don't know how to combine services or how to formulate a learning plan?

1. Images above headlines, else headlines don't get read
2. Captions read more than dense body copy
3. Don't break left margin (l-to-r languages)
4. Images must be relevant, either story appeal or demonstrations

There you are, just saved you 5 minutes. Via HN

"During fractal generation, JP's brain uses the left hemisphere exclusively, and none of the regions in visual cortex are involved in producing the visual images. The regions in the temporal lobe normally associated with memory were not hyperactivated either. We don't quite know what to make of this yet. But it does seem to show for the first time that areas other than memory and visual areas can generate visual features."

Never underestimate the difficulties faced by students who have had head injuries.

"I got my start reading fiction from my local library; the voracious reading habits of a bookish child aren't easily supported from a family budget under strain from elsewhere during a time of cuts. I hate to think what the long term outcome of this short-term policy is going to be, but I don't believe any good will come of it."

This goes under the 'listening to faint signals' heading. Stross has noticed a 28% drop in his public lending rights payments in one year. His selling levels are increasing. His conclusion is that less people are using libraries, probably due to less availability of libraries.

I've always tried to get students to find a place in their house or a library that they associate with Maths homework. Also a time and day. For those who are committed anyway this seems to work.

Good quote

"The more capable and multipurpose our tools become, the more the burden of deciding what they do shifts on us. Physical constraints must be replaced by artificial ones, and the effectiveness of our tools becomes an extension of our own willpower and self-discipline."

"The Reg asked the Department of Education to explain how students would be examined or awarded qualifications if there was no curriculum to test them on - for example whether ICT GCSEs be continue to be awarded in 2013 - but we have yet to hear a reply."

I suspect there will be a GCSE in ICT in 2013... Scratch is built on Squeak, which is a dialect of Smalltalk.

CSS and js zooming presentation application emulating prezzi without the Flash. Via hacker news. Works best in Chrome/Safari. Slow in Firefox 10

"I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making," he said. "I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design."

"Ive, who grew up in Chingford, a town northeast of London, credits his silversmith father with inspiring him as a designer."

...hence you won't see them using infrared but you can using UV. Nice 'cool' bit of science.

"We find that things we look at -- even in a casual, off-hand manner -- are the things we think about. We also find that as we see things, we work on them in our mind in the background. We make a lot more progress letting our subconscious mind work on things while we're busy with more important stuff, like technology development."

So we teach people in rooms painted flat white. New Building Syndrome has to be resisted.

Ubuntu is going for world domination with their Unity interface. PCs in education tend to have weak graphics and be a few years old. Here is a 1 hour lesson exploring Ubuntu default install as you could run of a USB stick.

First draft. Workspaces section needs a little looking at.

Via daringfireball. In the US at University level teachers write their own syllabii and define their own criteria for ordinal scale assessment 'grades'. Wallace's syllabii show an honesty about the teaching role and about the student role that is refreshing.

Can I use any of these to help my students to spend more time doing maths, which we all know is the only way to understand maths and therefore pass the exams?

Caution from Weiten, quoted in an e-mail to the author...

"Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I suspect that empirical tests are nonexistent because the authors of self-help and time-management titles are not at all confident that the results would be favorable. Hence, they have no incentive to pursue such research because it is likely to undermine their sales and their ability to write their next book."

"Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, said measuring a school based on grades was "ultimately juvenile""

Well said Sir

"Because I am dyslexic, I can sometimes spell a word 10 different ways that are not recognized by a spellchecker. I take my different spellings and then input them into Typinator, so when typing as soon as I hit space after spelling words wrong they are auto-corrected. All my Typinator data is stored on Dropbox so that all my machines update text in the same way."

Clever, hadn't thought of macroing the common mis-spellings like this!

Interesting set of questions.

"The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again."

Got to be a maths angle in there that won't demotivate students...

Just in case

Graham Stuart who is the chairman of the education select committee said something close to "if you explain to schools how you measure success, don't blame schools for focussing on that ruthlessly" on Radio 4's Today programme this morning around 8:30.

I scribbled that quote down as fast as I could. It seems to me to describe the situation very well. I'd substitute 'school management' for 'schools' as many schoolteachers are trying to do the best that they can for all their pupils.

"My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills."

To which my standard reply takes the form of two questions:

1) How do we decide what 'math(s) skills' are for our current mode of production?

2) When did you last analyse a situation, set up a set of linked equations to describe the variables, and then solve them analytically?

Link via stuntbox.com

Nice. Via Hacker News. "One of the hardest things to relate to Joe is the idea that you must first click in a text field in order to type.". I've always found that odd as well.

Amazing range of papers here: specifically 'The Economic Lives of the Poor' 2006, A. Banerjee and E. Duflo. I'm wondering if the basic analysis can be applied to the relatively poor in industrial economies when it comes to educational outcomes.

"My daughter realised there was a mistake and moved on, so didn't put a lot of working into the question."

Sir, your daughter did well, excellent insight into the underlying maths. Her ability to 'smell a rat' says much for her problem solving skills.

We have generated a situation where so much depends on very high marks for some candidates. Why can't we bring back S levels? S levels were extra papers set on the same syllabus as the A levels, just devilishly hard (but solvable) questions.

Nice. I like the quote from the classroom wall and I'll be using that one next year

Mind maps a bit like memory journeys? Card sorting and matching?

"By the day of the exam, you could give me any problem from the course and I could rattle off the proof, without mistake and without hesitation."

Ah Oh, what if I set a question that isn't one of the propositions? What if I set a problem that requires using part of one proof in a new context? Is there a toolkit here?

"Keep working on your problem set after you get stuck."

Now, how do I package this excellent advice for a group of teenagers with low confidence in maths?

A nice set. Simplified and re-worded might be useful.

Tarsia mother lode just so I don't loose it

todo

Bit heavy for gcse revision but gets out of the strict hierarchy of mind mapping tools.

GCSE Maths Module 5 is harder both by topic and by the process skills and problem solving skills needed. I'm on a bit of a search for practical teaching ideas...

Java based mind mapping tool with native builds for windows and mac os. Looks interesting, I'm building a Number module mind map with it now...

"Perhaps the most influential thinker about education in the late twentieth century, Paulo Freire has been particularly popular with informal educators with his emphasis on dialogue and his concern for the oppressed."

I'm getting huge mileage from the cuts agenda. Budget 2010 figures for government income and expenditure in the billions. Averages and data presentation. Ironic isn't it?

Was having a browse in the University book shop this afternoon, and came across this book. Some of the activities including the 'desensitisation' activities may have applications / could be mapped to Maths teaching and learning in that age range.

Early success certainly helps.

"The researchers believe worrying competes for computing power in the brain’s “working,’’ or short-term, memory. If working memory is focused on worrying, it can’t help a person recall information the brain has stored. It also affects the working memory’s ability to stay focused."

Interesting research. The 'dissonance' between the message in the text (one of calm focussing) and the very distracting and intrusive adverts on the page is instructive as well!

Do it if you are under 18.

Sometimes I forget how much work there is in the design of the letters and other marks we use to convey meaning. And how reading a few sentences triggers an enormous set of interlinked cerebral processes that just work for most of us.

Ubuntu designers are working on a font for the user interface and I hope for use in documents. Unicode fonts can cover a huge range of languages these days with different traditions of type setting.

"Although private schools do get better raw results in many countries, the OECD found that - when you stripped out the effect of pupils' socio-economic background - the state schools did as well, or better, than private schools in most countries."

That PISA report.

"effective group assignments simply give groups a set of data and require them to make a difficult decision, much like a courtroom jury is given a great deal of complex information and asked to render a “guilty or not guilty” decision.  In this format, student energy is focused on analyzing different pieces of evidence, weighing their merits against one another, and using the concepts from your discipline to argue toward a “best” conclusion together."

Via Jerz. I'll try something along interpreting statistics...

Association that has a list of publications and pointers to research in the field.

"Recently I came across some cassette tapes my mother recorded, spanning from a few months before my birth in 1982 to 1986. The recordings begin with fetal heartbeats and progress through episodes of crying, laughter, play, and different stages of speech development. The material interested me somewhat for its personal value, but moreso as an artifact of impromptu and performative documentation. Which is to say, there is a constant negotiation between the unpredictability of the child's behavior and the expectations which the parent projects onto the process of recording. This friction is reflected in the chaotic quality of the sounds, which move between soothing and anxious textures."

wonderful. I'd love the 'drawing' (if it ever existed) as a poster. Ken Robinson doing his thing. I have always had doubts about standardised testing. Via presentationzen.com

This is amazing. The guy must be working non-stop

...wonderful

Useful, thanks. Editable in OpenOffice Writer as well as Word.

This one will help me to get the projector / IW / classroom PC sorted!

Just browsing these is enough to get your ideas going (flowing?). Number based activities for use in a class, some individual, some pair and some small group. Also stuff for the IW or for on the projector.

Started doing some screencasts, this one is a short run through the 'box' or 'table' method for long multiplication. Produced using gtk-recordMyDesktop in Ubuntu Studio on a recycled laptop, works ok but takes time to render. YouTube does not like the .ogv files so I convert to .avi using the PiTiVi video editor, then upload those. The sound is from the built in microphone, so there is a bit of fan noise.

Cards and sheets used at a user interface conference. Interesting style as well as content. Via Seth Godin. Exercise: look at the introduction page and work out which of the 8 lenses the author is using to ensure I visit this wiki in a) the next few weeks and b) in a year or so?

I fed a scheme of work I found on Maggie H's skillsworkshop.org into wordle... 'Revise' comes out huge! 'Life' is rather smaller, and 'experiments' is tiny. Wordle asks for a user name when you save a completed wordle to the gallery. These names are NOT unique, so I didn't do all the ones with Keith as the user name! I've just worked out how to convert wordles to WMFs so that you can put them into PowerPoints as scalable objects rather than bitmaps.

Roughly 52 million people in England and Wales

Around half a million teachers in England and Wales if you include the FE sector

"Learning occurs best when important information is selected from less important ideas, when selected information is organized graphically, when associations are built among ideas and when understanding is regulated through self-testing" - anyone surprised? Via Jerz' Literacy Weblog

"A UK and Finnish team found those with more education were as likely to show the signs of dementia in their brains at death as those with less. But they were less likely to have displayed symptoms during their lifetime, the study in Brain said."

Available as a standalone desktop application as well as the cloud based account. Need to check this one out as it is brower agnostic unlike Zotero. Installs plug in for OpenOffice and a bookmarklet for whatever browser you use. Doesn't seem to import all the data from e.g. copac though

Interviews with people who arrived in Birmingham - one audio stream and transcriptions.

"For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting." - Steven Pinker about the moral panic over the effect of the Internet on brains. Good reading for e-learning module?

"To maximize your innovation effectiveness, you have to learn to give up your need to control too tightly. You cannot be absolutely certain of innovative outcomes – you need to learn to live with the chaotic, random process that is creativity."

"Her study isolated those children whose parents who had listed "White British" for their ethnic group, and who were on free school meals - the best indicator of social class they could find"

The hole in the wall project, and a new acronym, SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments) - via Marcius

A Montessori answer, based on a pattern language!

"He says it was his father, the film director John Boorman, who spotted the signs - not his teachers, who wrote him off." Nice short video clip.

"If you took all these people out, stopped them from teaching the children and replaced them even with just average teachers, that would be something like half a grade per pupil" - Simon Burgess, Bristol University quoted on a BBC News web site report on poor teachers. So that is the total impact of the teacher, half a grade! I'll have to check out the methodology.

Ivan Illich's essay from the early 1960s.

Comics about scientific and medical issues. Nicely drawn and accessible. Comments on the blog allow for participation in debate.

Studio based learning with networked portable computers.

Donald Clark's blog post about Ebbinghaus' 'forgetting curve' and how to make sure students retain information. Via Seb Schmoller's fortnightly mailing.

This one is useful... practical suggestions.

Basic description of 1959 'Identity and the Life Cycle' paper with the table of eight stages

"The importance of debate as a medium for self improvement and intellectual stimulation, within these shores at least, can be traced back to the coffee house debates of the 17th Century." - 'Tis the season of presentations. I'll be using this in tutorials next week.

I think there is something not quite right with this... Via Dennis Jerz

Not too new age summary of the flow concept.

Nice poster looking at inductive and deductive reasoning in Maths teaching in US schools.