MetaFilter posts tagged with teaching and learning

"Let people live in your heart"

madamjujujive — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:21:59 -0800

Children Full of Life - grade 4 students in Kanazawa, Japan learn deep life lessons from their incredible teacher and from each other. I strongly recommend this as awesome, but one caveat: keep tissues handy. (5 parts, 40 minutes total, English)

Comics in the classroom

Brandon Blatcher — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:51:49 -0800

Comics in the Classroom: 100 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teachers

How-to Videos and Wikis

netbros — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:25:24 -0800

Howcast shows engaging, useful how-to videos and wiki guides. A few examples include: How to Do Polyphasic Sleeping, How to Make a Fried Onion Blossom, or How to Do a Frontside 180 Ollie. Founded by veterans of Google and Youtube.

Teaching Art History

netbros — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:17:33 -0800

SmARThistory is an edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts. For a given artwork, smARThistory brings together podcasts, video clips, images, links to other resources, and commentary, providing a rich context for the work. Indexed by timeline, artistic style, artist and theme.

GetBodySmart.com

ignorantguru — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:56:44 -0800

GetBodySmart.com is a wonderful and remarkably complete resource to learn about the systems that keep our body running, including the skeletal , nervous and even urinary systems. What's more amazing is that it's all created by one man in his spare time and for no gain of his own. Read his mission statement here.

Listen Explore Discover Create

netbros — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:09:46 -0800

SoundJunction is all about music. You can take music apart and find out how it works, create music yourself, find out how other people make music and how they perform it, you can learn about musical instruments and voices, and look at the backgrounds of different musical styles. Over 40 musicians talk on film about their experiences. Browse freely about the site or use the Learning Trail Forum to explore particular subjects and issues. If you are a music teacher, there are teacher resources and materials for exams. But what would a site about music be without the music itself?

A Mathematician's Lament

blasdelf — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:34:22 -0800

“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

“A complete prescription for permanently disabling young minds — a proven cure for curiosity. What have they done to mathematics! There is such breathtaking depth and heartbreaking beauty in this ancient art form. How ironic that people dismiss mathematics as the antithesis of creativity. They are missing out on an art form older than any book, more profound than any poem, and more abstract than any abstract. And it is school that has done this! What a sad endless cycle of innocent teachers inflicting damage upon innocent students. We could all be having so much more fun.”

It's a beautiful 25-page PDF, just 392k. (via)

The Michel Thomas Language Method

rongorongo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:00:41 -0800

Polyglot Michel Thomas came to prominence through his work for the French resistance and the successful interrogation of Nazis (who had formerly imprisoned him). After the war he started to develop (and eventually patent) a method for teaching languages that eschewed notes, books, writing, memorisation and homework. Instead, words and phrases would be built up in lego-like constructions to provide “confidence in hours not years”. He gave private lessons to a long list of A-list celebrities including Woody Allen, Natasha Kinsky, Tony Curtis and Grace Kelly. A BBC documentary from 1997 told his story and tested him out with the less exalted audience of 16 year old London school kids pre-selected to be “incapable of learning a foreign language” by their teachers [YT pt 1, 2, 3, 4]. He was secretive about how his methods worked until the end of his life when he finally made his courses available as audiobooks. The courses have been mentioned several times by people here but I thought Thomas was a sufficiently interesting guy to merit a FPP. His UK site offers a freely downloadable lesson if you are curious. He wrote an autobiography and a book describing his methods for the first time is due for publication.

Hi, I'm Muzzy. Big Muzzy.

sveskemus — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 13:12:49 -0800

Over the years millions of children have been introduced to a foreign language by Big Muzzy ^[wiki], a friendly, green, clock-eating monster. Here's the complete British English version of Muzzy in Gondoland on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

Junior Generals

Mitheral — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:47:00 -0800

Junior General is intended to promote the use of historical simulations as a tool for teaching history by providing free resources that anyone can use. To go with their teaching scenarios they make available thousands of paper solders for download and printing. Everything from stone age primatives thru Myceneans, Confederate gunboats to US Iraq infantry and futuristic Cyber Assault Droids. Also available are accessories like castles, houses, trenches, battering rams and hangers.

The Create a Comic Project

Eideteker — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:41:31 -0800

"The Create a Comic Project (CCP) is an activity that teaches children creative writing through comics." In New Haven, CT, John Baird works with children to teach writing, art, and creativity in an afterschool program. The results are often surreal, and frequently entertaining. His inspiration? The Penny Arcade Remix Project. (from today's QC newspost)

Music is the food of intelligent life?

persona non grata — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 22:02:19 -0800

Music makes you smarter if you get an early start. Certainly debatable given the incredibly small sample, but perhaps it's a prelude to an emerging 21st-century collaborative scientific suite or symphony that can explain why we love music so much.

"I have accomplished nothing and I am nothing."

divabat — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 07:15:58 -0800

[T]his pattern, grade for the sake of a grade, work for the sake of work, can be found everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen, the spirit of intellectual thought is lost. I speak today not to rant, complain or cause trouble, and certainly not to draw attention to myself. I have accomplished nothing and I am nothing. I know that. Rather, I was moved by the countless hours wasted in those halls. Today, you should focus on your child or loved one. This is meant to be a day of celebration, and if I’ve taken away from that, I’m sorry. But I know how highly this community values learning, and I urge you all to re-evaluate what it means to be educated.

- from a graduation speech by the valedictorian of Mainland Regional High School, Kareem Elnahal, critiquing his school's education process.

The principal's reaction? “My hope was they did not hear or understand what he was saying. ... He was belittling the diplomas of every one of those kids.”.

Blog qualification

bobbyelliott — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:18:03 -0800

The Scottish Qualifications Authority has recently produced a new qualification on blogging [PDF] and used a wiki to produce teaching and learning material. Wikis look well-suited to this purpose. Could this be the future of curriculum development?

The Socratic Method

MetaMonkey — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 21:58:33 -0800

The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling Transcript of an intriguing experiment to teach binary arithmetic to third graders using the Socratic Method - only asking questions. See also a demonstration of the socratic method with a man who procrastinates. Some background, Who Was Socrates?

Video Games & Education

panoptican — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:04:09 -0800

What can video games teach us about learning and literacy? A lot, says James Paul Gee whose recent book approaches the question armed with three different discourses (situated cognition, new literacy studies, and connectionism). [mi]

The game is a card game.

iffley — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 19:19:39 -0800

How to learn about difficult things

Hey! Get that finger outta there!

vito90 — Tue, 10 Jun 2003 14:01:40 -0800

Imagine drifting off to dreamy anaesthesia -induced sleep for some such surgery and having some medical student cram a digit up one of your holes. Apparently, it happens all the time in the name of "learning".