What do the best classrooms in the world look like? - By Amanda Ripley - Slate Magazine

What do he best classrooms in the world look like? Surprisingly they are conservative and not high tech like the American schools loaded with interactive white boards, Mac Laptops, Projectors and other gizmos, bathed in a wi-fi environment. Long school hours and grueling hard work coupled with demanding parents at home have led to better results as seen in the case of Korean classrooms while Finnish schools in particular are just the opposite - nothing like the pressure cooker atmosphere/environment of the South Korean schools. The Finnish kids in fact start a year later than their American counterparts, do less homework on an average and further standardized tests are rare.

Check out the link below for an in interesting article by Amanda Ripley.

What do the best classrooms in the world look like? - By Amanda Ripley - Slate Magazine

Seeing the world as it isn't

Daniel Simon's recent posting in the Invisible Gorilla Blog is pretty interesting stuff. Read on:

When we look at the world around us, we feel that we are seeing it as it is. Most of the time, we are — but not because our visual system perceives the world precisely as it is. Rather, our visual system makes informed guesses about the contents of the world based on the compressed signal projected onto our eyes. And, for most practical purposes, those guesses are pretty good. Moreover, this “guessing” system work so seamlessly that we rarely notice any discrepancy between our guesses and reality. Only when we “break” the system can we reveal these default assumptions. Check out the link below for an interesting video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9Il_D3Xt9W0

Just as we can’t intuit the mechanisms of vision, we lack insight into the mechanisms of memory, reasoning, and thinking. Only when forced to confront what we’re missing do we realize that we’ve unwittingly made assumptions. We often have no idea how limited our abilities can be. The following change blindness video illustrates one such limitation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FWSxSQsspiQ

Nalabana Bird Sanctuary

I hapened to visit the Nalabana Bird Sanctuary - a famous bird sanctuary in the Chilika Lake a couple of month back and was lucky enough to find some rare species of winged visitors - Pelicans and Siberian cranes visiting the sanctuary.It was a rare sight and there were around eight lac birds which made it to the sanctuary this year. The famed sanctuary can be approached from Barkul, which i located at a distance of about 100 kms from Bhubaneshwar - the capital city of Orissa. One has to take an hours boat ride - a distance of about 10 kms within the lake, from the Barkul ghat. Check out the link below for the photographs.

Is Teacher Training the Solution to Better ICT Usage in Education? « Educational Technology Debate

Check out the link below. Interesting debate.
Is Teacher Training the Solution to Better ICT Usage in Education? « Educational Technology Debate

What Makes a Great Teacher

For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the Obama administration offers states more than $4 billion to identify and cultivate effective teachers, Teach for America is ready to release its data ... Read on by checking out the link below to this interesting article

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/

Check out this interesting videos on the role of the teacher as a motivator
 

The Master Key System

The Master Key System documents minutely not only the methods, but the science behind the methods which propelled Haanel himself to extraordinary levels of success, as businessman, author and personal mentor to some of his era's most successful businessmen.

Internalise this remarkable book and you too will learn The Secret, the secret of thought as creative energy, as power, as the Master Key to your own development. Haanel's Master Key virtually opens the door to cosmic intelligence, allowing you to attract everything you need to achieve your dreams. Originally written as a correspondence course, the book is divided into twenty-four sections, with exercises in each section to train and develop your mind skills. Take a week at a time, study and re-read each section, build your power of concentration and visualization week by week to the level where you'll be able to manifest your desires with lightning speed.

These are the techniques which made millionaires over and over again, before the book basically disappeared about 1933. This is the very book that later re-emerged in Silicon Valley decades later as a 'millionaire-maker' all over again. The legend goes that a certain Bill Gates stumbled upon this book when just a Harvard student and went on to create history! Study and absorb Haanel's amazing teachings, and there is no doubt you too will stumble upon powerful, exhaustive and dynamic ways to create your own dreams!

In Charles F. Haanel's own words, what you will achieve are "results hitherto undreamed of, and rewards hardly to be expressed in words."

Try the link below to download a PDF version of the book

http://thesecret.tv/ebooks.html

Illusion of Knowledge

Interesting write up by Daniel Simons, co-author of "Invisible Gorilla" on how best to detect and overcome the illusion of knowledge. We normally mistake familiarity with deeper understanding and this leads to what is known as the "illusion of knowledge." What is most interesting about the "illusion of knowledge" is that it is so easy to detect but then how seldom do we actually detect and rectify it. The write-up below is an eye opener.

Think you know the best way to study? Better test yourself.

By Daniel Simons, on January 25th, 2011

Imagine you’re taking an introductory psychology class and you have to study for your first test. You’ve read the assigned text, and now you three more days to prepare. What should you do?

1. Re-read the text once more each day
2. Spend each day studying the text to identify critical concepts and the links among them
3. Quiz yourself the first day, reread the text the second day, and quiz yourself again the third day

Do you think you know the answer?

Students in my introductory psychology class regularly come to my office hour after failing the first exam to ask what they did wrong. Some even claim to have spent hours re-reading the text, highlighting important concepts, and even taking notes. Where did they go wrong?

In The Invisible Gorilla, Chris Chabris and I argue that these students fell victim to the Illusion of Knowledge—they thought they had a deeper understanding of the material than they actually did. But why did they have that mistaken intuition? The answer seems to be that they mistook familiarity and fluency for real understanding.

The same principle explains why you might think you know how a toilet works when all you really understand is how to work a toilet—your familiarity with using a toilet leads you to the false impression that you know far more than you actually do. What’s most remarkable about the illusion of knowledge is how easily we can overcome it. What’s most disturbing is how rarely we actually do.

To determine whether you have genuine knowledge about toilets, just ask yourself a few diagnostic questions and force yourself to answer. For example, how does water fill up the bowl? What causes the water to leave the bowl? Why does water leave the tank? Each time you can produce the correct answer, ask yourself a slightly deeper, next-step question. Eventually, you will reach the limits of your knowledge. You’ll know what you don’t know.

The same principle applies to studying and learning a text. If you read the text over repeatedly, you will familiarize yourself with it, but you won’t know the limits of your knowledge. Only by testing whether you can produce the answers yourself can you verify what you know. And, in a study just published online in Science, Karpicke and Blunt find that testing yourself leads to more effective learning and retention than does re-reading the text repeatedly or even mapping the core concepts of the text. It works because it overcomes the illusion of knowledge. Forcing yourself to test your knowledge is the most reliable way to identify the limits of your knowledge.

The reason my students come to me after failing their exam is that they have the wrong intuitions about what makes for effective learning. They thought that reading the text repeatedly would engender the best learning, and it apparently never occurred to them to check their own understanding. The same was true for Karpicke & Blunt’s subjects. They predicted that repeated studying would lead to better learning than would trying to retrieve what they had already learned. That is, they favored the approach that would lead to illusory knowledge rather than real knowledge.

Source cited:

Karpicke JD, & Blunt JR (2011). Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping. Science (New York, N.Y.)PMID: 21252317