January 10, 2011

By Allan 　

Hi Everyone,

Two items of note for this week (and a video link just for fun):

• New Staff Mix CD “Guilty Pleasures” – Last call to turn in your “Guilty Pleasure” song choice for our new Staff Mix CD. If you want in on the fun (and to find out Night Custodian Dan’s guilty pleasures), tell me or email me one or two songs that you dearly love but are embarrassed to admit you really really like. The deadline is this Thursday, January 13th. Anyone who submits a song will get a copy of the CD.
• What Works for Boys in the Classroom – Findings from a new international study determined that the successful lessons for boys fell into the following eight general categories, each of which expresses a dominant feature of the lesson’s reported success:

• Lessons that produced products
• Lessons structured as games
• Lessons requiring vigorous motor activity
• Lessons requiring boys to assume a role or responsibility for promoting the learning of others
• Lessons that required boy to address “open,” unsolved problems
• Lessons that required a combination of teamwork and competition
• Lessons that focused on boys’ personal realization (their masculinity, their values, their present and future social roles)
• Lessons that introduced dramatic novelties and surprises

You can find the entire report at this link. It’s a pretty interesting read.

• Today’s Schoolchildren Guess What ’80s and ’90s Technology Does – One more item just for fun, cyberpresse researcher Jean-Christophe Laurence showed a group of modern-day schoolchildren from Quebec various gadgets from the ’80s and ’90s and asked them to guess what they were for. They’re often able to figure out eventually that it’s an older form of a tech that they currently know, but Laurence gets some great, creative responses along the way. Of a floppy disk: “this goes into an iPod.” Of a ColecoVision game: “a deck of cards.” Of an 8-track player: “Oh! I thought it was a bomb!”. You may need to click the Full Frame button in the bottom right of the video to read the subtitles.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c[/youtube]

Have a snowy week (maybe) and enjoy the upcoming four day weekend!

Allan

This entry was written by Allan, posted on January 9, 2011 at 8:28 am, filed under Announcements, Articles, Technology, Video. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.