Learning and the Brain

I recently went to a conference called Learning and the Brain in Boston.  There I got to hear numerous incredible speakers including Howard Gardner, Heidi Jacobs, and Dan Willingham.  There were a number of interesting points made about education throughout the lectures – some of which I will be highlighting in future blog posts.

Heidi Jacobs presented some interesting tech tools that I wanted to bring up:

1. Zooburst: If you haven’t visited this website – it’s a must.  It allows for you and your students to create pop-up books.  It is very easy and the capabilities are impressive.  It allows for the creator to time the pop ups and to write their own story.  For the actual pop-up pictures you can upload from the internet.  When you are finished you can print the book or share it.

2. Visual Thesaurus: This website allows for you to type in a word to find words similar to that word.  Something that is unique about this website though is that each time you type in a word you can click on any of the synonymous options and they will bring up a whole new selection of words similar to them.

3. Gap Minder: Have you used gap minder before? It’s rockin.  It’s a graph that presents results from countries all over the world throughout history – and it’s interactive.  Its especially helpful for teaching inference as students can work to create causations.

This was more of a speedy post- I will make sure to go more into depth with future blogs.  Do check out these though!