The Ten Best Inventions of All Time

The ten best of anything can be a matter of opinion. Before sharing this infographic, have your students brainstorm the five or so best inventions. Then backtrack, and figure out what had to be invented in order for these items to be invented. For instance, in order to use Twitter or Facebook, the internet and […]

10-best-worlds-inventions_523ad32731c66The ten best of anything can be a matter of opinion. Before sharing this infographic, have your students brainstorm the five or so best inventions. Then backtrack, and figure out what had to be invented in order for these items to be invented. For instance, in order to use Twitter or Facebook, the internet and the computer had to be invented. This was preceded by the typewriter and the printing press, which were preceded by paper and ink. We have come a long way since carving the ten commandments in stone.

Discuss who invented these and what kind of recognition they received. Had this person not lived, would have have been invented? For instance, the Wright brothers weren’t the only men working on flight, if they hadn’t flown, someone else would have developed the technology. What did others think of the men who created these? Can you imagine living your life by candle light, and hearing about a man trying to create light without fire? Witchcraft!

Blog: http://visual.ly/worlds-ten-best-inventions-all-times

Sir? Would You Mind Taking this Test?

My daughter texted me yesterday morning, wanting to meet at the coffee shop to talk about an article she’d just discovered. She texted me the URL, http://goo.gl/pFc39Z. It’s not a recent article and is actually one of Valerie Strauss‘ (The Answer Sheet) reprints of a blog article [link/pdf], written by Marion Brady (veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author).

The article concerned a forth-term Florida district school board member, a friend of Marion’s, who had taken a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) for 10th graders.  After taking the test, the board member called Brady, and this repeatedly re-elected board member, who helps to oversee 22,000 employees and a $3 billion budget and claims to be “able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities,” said that he “hadn’t done well.”

He confessed that he wasn’t confident about any of the 60 math questions, “but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly.”  On the reading test, he got 62% of the questions right.  In an email to Brady, his friend wrote,

It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of (that) life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.

Strauss later identified and interviewed the school board member, and reported on that interview in “Revealed: School Board member who took standardized test.”

My daughter, who is certified to teach elementary grades and high school history, but has given up finding a teaching job (2008 recession followed by recent school staff cuts imposed by our state General Assembly [see]), expressed outrage.  She is currently struggling to score well enough on the GRE to get into the graduate school of her choice.

That Florida school board member’s experience suggests a question that we are still not asking in any substantive way.  We eagerly, actively, and obsessively ask,

“What kind of teaching best practices lead to higher standardized test scores?”

We are not asking,

“How do higher scores on high-stakes standardized tests lead to satisfying, successful and productive lives and a better world?”

Brady says that decisions about how we assess teaching are,

..shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

How many of us, productive and successful adults, would willingly and confidently take our state’s high-stakes standardized test, especially if our freedom to move forward was based on passing those tests?  

What would our legislative bodies look like, if a requirement for serving elected office was to pass the same tests that they impose on their 15 year old children?

This article has also been written about here:

Actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt also posted a link to the article here.

 

Know Your Toilet

Your student’s may giggle at this infographic, but “no invention has saved more lives than a toilet. Billions still lack one. Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection. All of this, entirely preventable.” This quote is entirely true and taken from visual.ly. Toilets are private today, but are extremely important. How have […]

Your student’s may giggle at this infographic, but “no invention has saved more lives than a toilet. Billions still lack one. Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection. All of this, entirely preventable.” This quote is entirely true and taken from visual.ly. Toilets are private today, but are extremely important.

How have ancient civilizations used the toilet? Is this a modern invention, or did ancient Rome have them? Rome actually did. Forgive me if I am wrong about the specifics (the location), but I seem to remember hearing about a series of seats outside of an ancient coliseum with holes in them, assumed to be toilets. This shows that an ancient civilization recognized the importance of sanitation (although not our more modern concept of toilet modesty).

What are other aspects of bathrooms that may be useful when traveling? When I was in Germany just before the Euro was introduced, I remember there being restrooms in train stations, but having to pay a small amount (I believe it was 5 Pfennig, about 3 cents) to use it. Because it cost a small amount, these public restrooms were very clean. I have also seen pictures of toilets in Japan, and will have to explore how to use them in more detail before I travel there.

Blog: http://visual.ly/know-your-toilets

You Can Get A Better Job

I was scanning through one of my favorite Infographics blogs a feed of infographic-related tweets this morning, taking quick peeks at a variety of projects for design ideas, when I hit this one, “20 Resume Power Words.” There was nothing about the design that caught my eye, so I swiped on to the next one. But then, about three graphics later, my mind finally registered on some of the words, and I backed up to look a little more closely.

  • Conceptualized
  • Trained
  • Built
  • Introduced
  • Strengthened
  • Directed
  • Persuaded
  • Forecasted
  • Projected
  • Assessed
  • Set goals
  • Promoted
  • Oversaw
  • Improved
  • Adapted
  • Solved
  • Initiated
  • Planned
  • Managed
  • Increased

On second glance, I realized that there was not a one of these words that any good teacher couldn’t “use in a sentence” to describe what he or she can do or has accomplished.

If this list can truly energize your resume, then you can get a better job!

Ok, there is no better job than teaching.  There is no more exciting profession, and it’s going to – trust me – get a lot better.  But there are jobs that will, right now, earn you more respect, more support, more hours for lunch, more chances to travel, less stress, less emotional chaos, and in many states, a lot more money.

In North Carolina, a starting teacher now makes less money than what fast-food workers are currently striking to earn.

Ask any sales rep, engineer, plant manager, product designer, or copy writer to conceptualize for, train, build for, introduce to, strengthen, direct, persuade, forecast and project for, assess, set goals for, promote, oversee, improve, adapt to, solve for, initiate, plan for, manage and increase the performance of

Twenty-five 13 year-olds.

‘nough said!

Paper plane can fly forever.

Well, forever if you’re ok with your stove running forever. This is just a neat, and potentially dangerous, experiment where you can make a paper plane fly in a circle indefinitely. The design you see for the plane is pretty complex and not necessarily what you need, but the most important part is having the […]

Paper plane can fly forever.Well, forever if you’re ok with your stove running forever. This is just a neat, and potentially dangerous, experiment where you can make a paper plane fly in a circle indefinitely. The design you see for the plane is pretty complex and not necessarily what you need, but the most important part is having the flaps at opposite angles like you can see towards the end of the crafting. A pretty cool experiment but maybe not the best idea to give a kid unless you can come up with a safe alternative to cranking up the stove.

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Solar Eclipse… on Mars

Here’s some footage from the rover Curiosity over Mars’ moon Phobos passing in front of the sun. Maybe most people already knew this, and I had to look it up, but yes, Phobos is really shaped like that. Our moon is much nicer.

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Solar Eclipse… on MarsHere’s some footage from the rover Curiosity over Mars’ moon Phobos passing in front of the sun. Maybe most people already knew this, and I had to look it up, but yes, Phobos is really shaped like that. Our moon is much nicer.

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Can you trust your eyes?

This has always been interesting to me. Our brains and our eyes work together to create the image we see, but what they come up with does not always match the reality. This video will show you some optical illusions that will trick your brain in to over-compensating and making you see things that aren’t […]

Can you trust your eyes?This has always been interesting to me. Our brains and our eyes work together to create the image we see, but what they come up with does not always match the reality. This video will show you some optical illusions that will trick your brain in to over-compensating and making you see things that aren’t truly there.

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Evaluating Information: The Wrong Way or the Best Way!

A couple of weeks ago, I delivered several presentations to a school district in the mid-west, one of the numerous August back-to-school gigs I’m doing fewer of each year. It was a rewarding day, more so than many. Keeping the attention of hundreds of teachers, just back from vacation, catching up with friends, weighing in the politics of new leadership, and desperately needing to be in their classrooms makes this a pretty tough gig. Not so on this day.

After a presentations about expanding our notions of literacy, a teacher came up asking, “But what’s to be done about students accessing all the information on the Internet that is simply not true.”

I reminded him that I had just made the point that it isn’t just the Internet we need to be worried about. Then I gave him one of my usual responses,

If I was still teaching history, and my students turned in a paper, they would be waiting for the challenge. It happens every time.  It’s part of the ongoing classroom conversation.

Placing a student’s paper on his desk and pointing to one paragraph, I ask, “How do you know that’s true?” If the student can’t answer the question, he’s going to lose points.  Even if the paragraph is true, he’s going to lose points.  My students would be responsible for their information’s appropriateness and the evidence that supports its appropriateness.

I wonder now if this response makes sense only to me, a figment of a private fantasy. So I thought I’d spend some bits trying to unpack this approach into something that better distinguishes a “new way” from an “old way.

The difference is in what we call attention to.  Our tendency, as teachers, is to address the problem by focusing on the mistakes, red-penning what’s not accurate, not reliable, not valid, doesn’t make sense.  It’s logical because whats not true is a fundamental problem to education.  We work to keep wrong information out of our textbooks, whiteboards, libraries and lectures.  We foster a learning environment where we can all take comfort in the assumption that the information is “true.”  

Our position, as teachers, is based on this assumption.

For the problems caused by the Internet, we create checklists to identify the breakage in information.

[ ] Is the author’s name included in the page & can he be contacted?

[ ] Are the author’s qualifications available?

[ ] Is the publisher an educational institution or other reputable organization?

[ ] Is the information fact or opinion?  Is there bias?

[ ] Is the URL domain among the trusted (edu, gov, org)?

If you can check all of the above, then you can use the information.  

We teach research and writing as a practice in avoiding problems,

..but not as a practice in solving them.

If we teach our learners to research and communicate in order to solve a problem, then we entirely change the approach.  We assess their work through conversations about the “best way” rather than the “wrong way,” and learners become active defenders rather than passive accepters of judgement.  The classroom conversation changes.  Students become more active, empowered and invested.  They become stakeholders in their learning, and ultimately, responsible to an authentic context/audience.

They own what they write, present or make, because they did the work and defended it.  They’re accountable.  

They own the learning.

 

Instant Kool-Aid!

Well, not quite. This is what’s apparently called an Iodine Clock Reaction. It’s a classic experiment where you mix two colorless chemicals and then after a short delay, it instantly changes color. You can even do this safely in your own home either by using common store-bought chemicals or buying a kit designed especially for […]

Instant Kool-Aid!Well, not quite. This is what’s apparently called an Iodine Clock Reaction. It’s a classic experiment where you mix two colorless chemicals and then after a short delay, it instantly changes color. You can even do this safely in your own home either by using common store-bought chemicals or buying a kit designed especially for one of these experiments. Enjoy!

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What are the Odds

Today’s infographic involves a lot of math and probability. It shows that there are many things stacked against us being here, as we are, today. Beginning with the probability that our parents met, and then stayed together. The infographic continues with probabilities involving a certain sperm and egg meetings, and on the fact that all […]

Today’s infographic involves a lot of math and probability. It shows that there are many things stacked against us being here, as we are, today. Beginning with the probability that our parents met, and then stayed together.

The infographic continues with probabilities involving a certain sperm and egg meetings, and on the fact that all of our ancestors met and reproduced the right person who led down to us is astronomical. There is an extremely slim chance that all of this happened to create you, the odds are basically 0.

Rather than thinking about these odds that involve tens of thousands of 0s, let’s think about different odds. The odds that you get a certain cookie, the odds that you run into someone in the hall way, or the odds that you get a certain student.

Blog: http://visual.ly/what-are-odds