Technology: Good or Bad for Our Attention Spans? – Observations of a Bay Area Technologist There’s no question that technology has made it easier to be distracted – jumping from tab to tab in your web browser or checking email as you wait in line at Starbucks. Second-screen TV viewing (where viewers simultaneously surf the net while watching a program) has become so common that networks have developed apps to encourage it. I have to look no further than myself to know that technology can have a negative impact on your attention span. In the amount of time I’ve lost to Facebook and NYTimes.com, I’m sure I could have written the next great American novel (or at least the next complete one). And when it comes to my ten-month-old son, I’m determined that he not have much screen exposure until the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommended 2 years of age – or longer – because of the connection between technology and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a condition I’ve watched my brother struggle with since he was diagnosed as a teen.
Energetic Blockages and Transmuting Fear Back into Love – Fractal Enlightenment “If you wish to understand the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibrations.” – Nikola Tesla On a quantum level we are all just energy. Our bodies are energy, our feelings are energy and our thoughts are energy. Although the Universe is neutral to all energy, meaning that no thought or emotion is technically “good” or “bad” in a moral sense, there are energies that are of a lower vibration and more dense. So on one end of the spectrum we have high vibration or lighter energy which is energy that is based in “love” (or openness, expansion, acceptance) and on the other end of the spectrum we have the lower vibration which is energy that is heavier and based in “fear” (contraction, closed off, darker & more dense). When we have thoughts on a consecutive basis that are formed from the lower vibration energies we run the risk of forming energetic blockages in our energy field.
20 collaborative Google Apps activities for schools Google Apps are collaborative, which makes them highly powerful. They offer opportunities for students to engage unlike ever before. Here are 20 ideas. Google Apps is beginning to revolutionize education. Don’t Go Back to School: How to Fuel the Internal Engine of Learning by Maria Popova “When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.” “The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started Brain Pickings in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishized “Ivy League education.” I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it should work.
100 Ways To Use Google Drive In The Classroom 100 Ways To Use Google Drive In The Classroom by onlineuniversities.com Students and educators have a wealth of learning and productivity tools available to them online. Google offers some of the highest-quality resources on the web to meet all your study and teaching needs, and all you need to access them is an internet connection.
Disrupting the Space-Time Continuum: Competency-based Learning Explained (part 2) Online & Blended Learning Can Less Successful Students Help with Retention? (by Dr. Smoke and mirrors mask corruption at Pennsylvania’s largest cyber-charter school By Carmel DeAmicis On August 26, 2013 For the last decade, cyber charter schools have been springing up all over the country. Cyber schools give classes over the Internet to students in grades K-12, who get their education entirely online instead of in a brick-and-mortar location. Despite the lack of research into these schools’ educational quality, in recent years some states have removed limitations to their growth.
Why We're More Creative When We're Tired and 9 Other Surprising Facts About How Our Brains Work 12.6K Flares Filament.io 12.6K Flares × One of the things that surprises me time and time again is how we think our brains work and how they actually do. On many occasions I find myself convinced that there is a certain way to do things, only to find out that actually that’s the complete wrong way to think about it. For example, I always found it fairly understandable that we can multitask. Well, according to the latest research studies, it’s literally impossible for our brains to handle 2 tasks at the same time.
What You Need to Know About MOOCs - Technology We'll be updating this page regularly.Please check back for updates. Call it the year of the mega-class. Colleges and professors have rushed to try a new form of online teaching known as MOOCs—short for "massive open online courses." The courses raise questions about the future of teaching, the value of a degree, and the effect technology will have on how colleges operate.
Successful Entrepreneurs Challenge Themselves. Here's 5 Ways to Do That. To be a successful entrepreneur in today’s world, you need to be current, mentally fit and actively involved in running your business. Even more important, you need to stay competitive. The best way to stay competitive is to actively attempt to challenge your preconceived notions. Easier said than done, right?
Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice Edssential article from Robert Bjork : The primary goal of this research, which is funded by the James S. McDonnell foundation, is to promote learning and memory performance within educational contexts through the investigation of principles in cognitive psychology. Studies address issues of transfer-appropriate and material-appropriate processing between encoding and retrieval. Applying tests in order to enhance learning and determining the desirable amount and timing of feedback regarding an individual’s memory performance are methods that are currently under investigation.