Identify a Lie with 6 Simple Questions post written by: Marc Chernoff Email We all fall victim to at least a few lies during the course of our lifetime. Some lies may be extremely troublesome to our personal wellbeing, while other “white lies” may be far more innocuous. Either way, a lie is meant to deceive. So how can we avoid falling victim to a lie in the future? A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.- Mark Twain How do you know this? If you enjoyed this article, check out our new best-selling book. And get inspiring life tips and quotes in your inbox (it's free)... 7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs Charts and graphs have found their way into news, presentations, and comics, with users from art to design to statistics. The design principles for these data graphics will vary depending on what you're using it for. Making something for a presentation? You'll want to keep it extremely simple and avoid using a lot of text. Designing a graphic for a newspaper? However, whatever you're making your charts and graphs for, whether it be for a report, an infographic online, or a piece of data art, there are a few basic rules that you should follow. There's wiggle room with all of them, and you should think of what follows as more of a framework than a hard set of rules, but this is a good place to start for those just getting into data graphics. Check the data This should be obvious. Explain encodings Maybe you use a color scale to indicate magnitude or the size of a square to represent values. Without your pointers, it's a guessing game for the reader. Label axes Include units Include your sources
Every Teacher’s Guide to Assessment It’s not a stretch to say that assessment is a hot button issue in education; however, you’d be hard pressed to find an educator who doesn’t see the value in measuring student progress. Assessments themselves have been vilified, when, in fact, it’s why assessments are given and how the data is used that is really the issue. The Glossary of Education Reform gives this great overview of what high-stakes testing is and how it impacts students, teachers, and schools. Basically, high-stakes testing has consequences for the test-takers and givers—sometimes in the form of a high school diploma, grade advancement, and even teachers’ salaries. But not all assessment is high-stakes, and when done thoughtfully, the right assessment can provide extremely useful information for all stakeholders—students, teachers, parents, schools, and policy-makers Let’s take a look at what assessment is, why it’s important, and how it can be delivered in the classroom in a useful manner. What is assessment? Scoring
Sketchnotes 101: The Basics of Visual Note-taking Welcome to the second article in the the new Core77 "Sketchnotes Channel" (www.core77.com/sketchnotes) where we'll be exploring the application of visual thinking tools in the worlds of design and creative thinking. So you say you're ready to start sketchnoting. Maybe you're not much of a sketcher but you take a lot of notes, and are interested in making them more meaningful and interesting, but you're afraid your drawings are too crude. For you, it's important to stress that sketchnotes—although they are inherently a visual medium—do not require drawing ability of any kind. Maybe you're perpetually drawing and want to try and make your notes more useful and engaging but you are afraid of imposing structure to your normally freeform way of sketching. In the end, it's up to you. So let's get tactical. First you need the right tools for the job. Once you have your kit assembled, you'll need to think about the location you'll be sketchnoting. Think improvisation, not perfection.
Today Is Your Day To Win Home - Visual Thinking Strategies 33 Digital Tools for Advancing Formative Assessment in the Classroom I came across a great blog post the other day – Formative Assessments Are Easier Than You Think – that told the firsthand account of a teacher, Steven Anderson, who implemented formative assessment in his classroom. He used a sticky-note version of an exit ticket to elicit evidence of student learning and in his words, “what a difference that made.” Formative assessment is ‘easier than you think’ and with all the digital tools and apps now available for mobile devices it’s even easier. We’ve shared some digital tools before and with the five tools that Steven shared combined with our earlier suggestions there are now 33 digital tools that we’ve uncovered that are free or inexpensive and help teachers implement formative assessment in their classrooms. Here they are: A few of Steven’s discoveries: Lino – A virtual corkboard of sticky-notes so students can provide questions or comments on their learning. Poll Everywhere – Teachers can create a feedback poll or ask questions. Pick Me!
Here's Why, How, And What You Should Doodle To Boost Your Memory And Creativity Did your boss ever catch you covering an important memo with Escher-like scribbles? In high school, did your teacher call you out for drawing on the desk, your sneakers, your skin? Today, the doodle nay-sayers are being drowned out by a growing body of research and opinion that indicates that connects that seemingly distracted scribbling with greater info retention and creativity. Companies like Dell, and Zappos, and Disney are eager for employees to doodle on the job—they even pay consultants to help them. "I can’t tell you how important it is to draw," says Sunni Brown, whose creative consultancy Sunni Brown Ink, teaches "applied visual thinking"— a.k.a doodling—to coders, designers, and even journalists. Why Doodle Studies have shown that doodling can free up short- and long-term memory, improve content retention and increase attention span. What To Doodle These Brown-recommended doodling exercises will help you rethink the familiar and make unexpected connections. "Atomization."
Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. Neuroscientist Kathleen McDermott of Washington University began by quoting famous memory researcher Endel Tulving, who called our ability to remember the past and to anticipate the future “mental time travel.” McDermott outlined the case of Patient K.C., who has even worse amnesia than the better-known H.M. on whom the film Memento was based.
Thinking Visually 15 no-prep games with just little scraps of paper One of the most flexible and useful resources in the classroom are bits of scrap paper. One thing that has really developed in my teaching over the years is my ability to react flexibly to things that happen in class, such as students knowing more or less about the language point than I expected, having wrong information about the class, students arriving late, or energy levels not being what I expected. One vital part of developing that ability to respond rather than just stick to the lesson plan has been to find and develop games that can be can be added to almost any class as and when needed. Most of these games use things that are already in the classroom or at least the school, such as the students’ fingers and textbooks- perfect for improvising and for the minimal resource situations I have often taught in. Games where you tell them exactly what to write 1. Give out two pieces of paper per student and ask them to write the two categories you will be looking at on them, e.g. 2. 3.