The unfortunate fact is that few of us ever really come to grips with what it means to study, apart from sitting by oneself with a textbook for hours on end. Despite its obvious inefficiency as a learning method, we’ve all found ourselves doing that kind of “studying” at one time or another. Having taught psychology classes for 40 years, Pierce College professor Marty Lobdell has seen thousands of students laboring, indeed suffering, under similar studying-related assumptions, and in his 8.7-million-times-viewed talk “Study Less, Study Smart,” he sets out to correct them. He has also dispensed his wisdom in a book by the same title.
Disagree though we may about what's wrong with life in the 21st century, all of us — at least in the developed, high tech-saturated parts of the world — surely come together in lamenting our inability to focus. We keep hearing how distractions of all kinds, but especially those delivered by social media, fragment our attention into thousands of little pieces, preventing us from completing or even starting the kind of noble long-term endeavors undertaken by our ancestors. But even if that diagnosis is accurate, we might wonder, how does it all work? These five video talks offer not just insights into the nuts and bolts of attention, concentration, and focus, but suggestions about how we might tighten our own as well.
How should you take notes in class? Like so many students who came before me and would come after, I had little idea in college and even less in high school. The inherently ambiguous nature of the note-taking task has inspired a variety of methods and systems, few of them as respected as Cornell Notes.
ZINA O'LEARY: Core skills for new researchers--how to do a literature review in 10 easy steps.Writing a literature review is quite a challenging process.So in this video we're going to look at how we can source and manage literature effectively, how we can understand the nuances of a literature review.We're going to look at the importance of arguments because it is arguments that drive a literature
Google Scholar crawls the worldwide web for scholarly articles and research so that you don’t have to.
Scholarly Googlebots relentlessly scour the Internet for academic and peer-reviewed resources that fit your topic search and leave you with more time for analysis, writing your thesis and sharing the results with your classes and peers.
Google Scholar is a better resource than just having students Google their topics. We should really help students get in the habit of finding information from sources like this or other paid databases. (Infobase, BadgerLink, Discovery Education)
Writing is a skill that crosses all subject areas and all grade levels. No matter what you teach, it is critical for your students to be able to express their ideas clearly when writing.
There are a multitude of ways for students to improve their writing, including many technology tools that come from Google or that work with G Suite. With these technology tools, the writing process can be improved at all stages from planning to writing to self editing to peer editing to assessment to revising to publishing.
Over the years I have done many blog posts on tech tools for the various stages of the writing process. To make it more convenient, I have pulled together all of those different resources into this one post. See below for an overview of Google tools that can be used to help students and teachers through the writing process.
Wondering what are some Memorization Techniques For Online Learning? Check some Memorization Techniques For Online Learning.
Remember those moments when you try to memorize something and information is too difficult to remember or organize? Usually, you are limited in time too. Well, don’t get frustrated: There are techniques that can help you achieve memorizing without any additional problem.
Peter Baumann suggests that our biases can get a bad rap, but that they’re essential. He sees them as unconscious inclinations that we’ve developed over time, and most of the time, they reflect actual knowledge we’ve acquired about how the world works. They set the frameworks within which we live our lives. Our bias toward feeling safe, for example, keeps us (mostly) out of trouble, while a bias towards certain flavors sets us parameters for selecting the dish we’d like to eat at a restaurant. Of course, our biases are only as intelligent as we are, so occasionally they're pretty stupid.
“Digital literacy involves finding, using and disseminating information in a digital world” (Deakin University, 2016). Digital literacy is also a transversal skill, which means that by having good digital literacy, a person’s ability to learn and improve other skills increases through the use of technology.
In the next 5-10 years, a number of routine jobs will be taken over by automation and artificial intelligence (AI) (ACS, 2016). This automation and AI will also be ingrained in workplaces, homes and everything we do, due to the increased productivity and lifestyle gains that these technologies provide. In order to remain current in the workplace, and to be able to fully function in society, the need for good digital literacy has never been greater.
Information literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information and is the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to all disciplines, learning environments, and education levels. It enables learners to master content, extend their investigations, become more self-directed, and to take greater control of their own learning.
The five core information literacy competencies are the ability to:
identify needed information. access information effectively & efficiently. evaluate information. use information appropriately. understand information related issues.
A little while ago, I decided that I wanted to update my CV. I figured that given I am in tech, it made sense for my CV to be online. I was aware of GitHub Pages, which give you a nice-looking URL. This seemed like a perfect location for me to put my tech CV.
Everyone wants to build good elearning courses, whether for sharing new information or changing workplace behaviors. While not all elearning objectives are the same, there are things you can do in your course design that help your learners recall the information and use it in the real world. To do this, you need to …
Last week I hosted a Practical Ed Tech webinar titled Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know. Afterwards I had many requests for accessing the recording of the webinar. The webinar is now available on demand. If you missed it, the webinar is available as an on-demand webinar right here on Practical Ed Tech.
By Kerry Gallagher, J.D., Larry Magid, Ed.D. and David Sohn, J.D. Click for printer friendly PDF NEW! Click for one-sheet Quick-Guide for Students & Teachers Whether they’re working in class or at home, students are accessing, viewing, creating, and sharing media as part of their day-to-day academic experiences. All of this is made possible by near ubiquitous access to digital devices and internet in schools and homes. While teachers are conscious of plagiarism when student products are in the form of research papers, the complicated areas of copyright, fair use, and open access creative works (such as Creative Commons or public domain) are less familiar but are just as important.
In a fast-paced world where information travels at the speed of light, note taking skills can make all the difference between effective and ineffective learning. Students can perform way better if they master the art of note taking. In this regard, I am sharing with you this wonderful note taking workshop prepared by Learning Commons which features the 6 important note taking skills students need to develop together with the different methods of taking notes and concluding with the five Rs.
The following article is adapted from our upcoming book on future-focused learning. It talks about how to teach learners to build solid research skills for school and for life.
How do we help our learners develop research skills that will serve them practically in school and life? Having this set of information location and management abilities in any digital-age survival kit applies equally to students, teachers, and everyday people. In the classroom, we teach it using the process of Information Fluency.
Many students struggle with college-level reading and writing assignments. Part of it is simply not knowing how to get the essentials from a text. I have been experimenting with a simple method I call GSSW: Gather, Sort, Shrink, and Wrap.
The goal of using this method is that students learn to write an essay, based on the readings, that is exemplary of organized, clear, accurate, and critical thinking.
Students write a lot, and the issue of plagiarism (or, at least, wrong paraphrasing) remains topical. As educators, what can you do to help students avoid the problem?
This collection of resources includes best practice articles, primary source process guides, lesson plans that model historical inquiry, and book-length materials that incorporate primary sources.
When used effectively, primary sources can open a world of possibilities in the classroom. When students have opportunities to approach sources as historians do, history becomes an art and a mystery — rather than a series of lifeless facts. This collection of materials offers ideas for integrating primary sources into your teaching, shares best practices, models the process of historical inquiry, and provides a selection of exemplary lesson plans.
Data is the supportive brick for any presentation or report out there. It offers bits of reality that together form an accurate image.
Without data, marketers would create their campaigns on assumptions and suppositions, instead of knowing exactly what their clients want. Not to mention engineers would construct only hazardous buildings from the beginning. Even consumers need data to know how to use their new products accordingly.
You’ve probably heard about Open Educational Resources & may have used some. The world of OERs is growing constantly, with more resources available daily.
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