Posted in Computers and Software on Feb 28th, 2010 No Comments »
Apple iPad Thumbs-Up: Brain Fitness Value, and Limitations The user activity monitoring piece is not exactly an important limitation IMHO. I mean, the iPad isn’t an “integrated learning system” and if it were it would never appeal to it’s target audience: people who want to independently and easily get work done. [via Sanford Shapiro]
Posted in Social Issues and Ideas on Feb 25th, 2010 4 Comments »
Temple Grandin at TED. [via Dilip Muralidaran]
Posted in Education Issues and Ideas on Feb 21st, 2010 3 Comments »
Ways into Shakespeare’s Othello English teacher Sabrina Broadbent leads a masterclass on Shakespeare, using her expertise to engage a group of Year 10 students. Let me state up front, I’m a poor reader, was a poor student, hated Shakespeare, and at this point in my life I’m as cynical as ever about education. But, I [...]
Posted in Reading, Writing, and Math on Feb 21st, 2010 No Comments »
Playing musical instruments may improve reading Learning to play a musical instrument could help to improve children’s reading and their ability to listen in noisy classrooms, according to new research. “Our eyes and ears take in millions of bits of information every second and it is not possible for the brain to process all of [...]
Posted in Social Issues and Ideas on Feb 20th, 2010 No Comments »
‘Family Guy,’ Palin and the Limits of Laughter This is an excellent piece by New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff. Andrea Fay Friedman has her act together as does Gail Williamson, executive director of the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles: “Within ‘Family Guy,’ the character was fully included, well-rounded, dynamic, not dealing with stereotypical [...]
Posted in Social Issues and Ideas on Feb 20th, 2010 No Comments »
‘Family Guy,’ Palin and the Limits of Laughter Andrea Fay Friedman has her act together as does Gail Williamson, executive director of the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles: “Within ‘Family Guy,’ the character was fully included, well-rounded, dynamic, not dealing with stereotypical Down syndrome issues,” Ms. Williamson said. She added: “Am I a fan [...]
Posted in Social Issues and Ideas on Feb 19th, 2010 No Comments »
Finding Help for Learning Disabilities Lesley Alderman at The New York Times has done an excellent job of taking readers through the process of identifying learning disabilities and getting help. This piece should be required reading for everyone in the LD world.
Posted in Reading, Writing, and Math on Feb 16th, 2010 No Comments »
Rock Groups Steven Strogatz has a great column in The New York times on arranging rocks (or any objects) in patterns to better visualize arithmetic. I’ve been coming back to this particular column the past week and enjoying scanning and rescanning it. I’m still a mathaphobe but I do like patterns so thinking of arithmetic [...]
Posted in Computers and Software on Feb 16th, 2010 4 Comments »
Nuance buys up MacSpeech This is interesting news, speech to text is useful for many people including people with various kinds of disabilities.