Unfolding the Blackbox

A Roadmap for Teachers

2008-02-18T00:01:00.004+02:00

Create an emotionally and physically safe and comfortable learning environment.
Make the content relevant and meaningful to students.
Present the new information linked to prior knowledge or skills.
Identify the immediate relevance and the possible future use of the lesson content.
Thematic instruction is a powerful tool to bind the subject matters together and to find how they relate to each other.
Make learning fun and interesting. Use interesting instructional strategies that make the skills so interesting that they can’t help but learn it;
Provide students with a lot of alternatives or choices in their learning.
Integrate the skills in the learning process. Make use of different modalities (visual, kinesthetic and auditory) at each lesson.
Use hands-on learning, active learning in your lessons. It always arouses interest and joy.
Use discovery learning. Develop problem-solving skills. Donot give them the answers, rather provide them with questions, which makes them find their own answers and construct their meanings.
Infuse some surprise, humor or spontaneity into the learning. Use clothes, songs, games, puppets or props to get their attention.
Let them speak, discuss and share their ideas.
Try to spark interest and confidence by giving positive and inspiring suggestions with your words, intonation of your voice, your body language and your attitude.
Present the information into meaningful chunks so as to make the information useful and manageable to remember.
Provide as many real-life, authentic experiences as possible to minimize the experiential differences between students. Examples may include field trips and experiential learning by using hands-on activities, simulations, websites, models, experiments and guest speakers.
Provide high-volume input for the students because such an environment makes the brain’s cortex more fully functional. The cortex manages higher-level, more meaningful thinking processes including problem-solving, creativity, critical thinking, analysis, synthesis and decision making.
When some control and choices are provided for students, the content relevance is increased, their interest is heightened, stress is reduced, learning styles and ability levels are better accounted for, and both motivation and effort are enhanced.
The more ways we present information, the more senses are involved, the more chances we give our students to understand and remember the material.
Each student should experience a sense of success through their dominant intelligences and should be encouraged to strengthen their weaker intelligences in a multi-sensory, rich stimulating learning environment.
Brain-compatible assessments should be learner-centered , performance and curriculum-based. These assessmens may be formal or informal. Assessment should match the nature of instruction process. If the brain-based instruction involves active participation, emotional engagement, stimulation, activities addressing to senses and different intelligences and integration of music and movement into the curriculum and application of what has been learned, that is, skills and knowledge, then the assessment should be designed accordingly.

Essays, products, performances, oral presentations, portfolios and demonstrations can be given as examples for such assessments.

RSS reminds me of how the brain works :)

2008-02-02T02:06:00.000+02:00

There are two kinds of brain cells: neurons and glia. While 90% of brain cells are glia, the 10% are the neurons - the most studied brain cells. We have about 100 billion neurons. Do you think that you are intelligent because you have bigger brains or more brain cells? The answer is NO. A dolphin has a bigger brain or a rat has more cell density than a human being. Actually you are losing brain cells every day through attrition, decay or disuse. Even if you lose a half million neurons per day, don't worry, it wouldn't be a problem - you remain intelligent till the end of your life. If it is nothing to do with the size of the brain or the number of the brain cells, then, what makes us intelligent?

It's not the size of the brain not the number of the brain cells, but the connections that neurons make with each other makes us smarter. What makes us more intelligent is to grow more synaptic connections between cells and maintaining the existing ones. Learning then means creating synapses, that is, connections... No neuron is the end point for information. A single neuron can receive signals from hundreds or thousands of other neurons and sending them to thousands more. More connections make for more efficient communications which lead to enriched brains with neural forests.

All this in mind you can guess why RSS reminds me of how the brain functions. RSS makes it possible for us to be connected to the sites and keep in touch with the info we are interested in. There are lots of sites on the Net just like billions of neurons in our mind. But the important thing is to know how to make connections among them and use those connections efficiently not to lose the existing ones.

Because of this very reason, I would like to thank both the moderators and the participants of EVO - Blogging for Educators group. You are wonderful! We learn from one another --- A question triggers another. Discussions open up new horizans for us. WE, colleagues from different countries, come together and we get smarter :))

Let's get more connected,

Keep sharing,

RSS - What an amazing tool !!!!!

2008-02-02T01:21:00.000+02:00

Since I attended the EVO 2008 Blog4Educators, I've been introduced invaluable Internet tools or applications and got insights into how blogs or wikis can be used in classrooms. However getting introduced to RSS -- it is like a dream come true! I can't help thinking why no one ever told me this before. But better late than never... I also feel an urge to share this invaluable tool with the people around me...

Let me explain in simple terms what I got as to what RSS is and how it can be used in the classroom. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. Weblogs have a code called XML (referred to as a feed) and copying these codes to your reader - such as Bloglines, Google Reader or Pageflakes - you can subscribe to the content of either a Weblog or a webpage you are interested in. So you no longer have to visit those sites to see what's been updated since they all come to you. You just go to one place, your reader to read all the new content. It's amazing :)) especially when thinking how much time it saves for us.

As a teacher, I may utilize this exciting tool in many ways for different purposes. First of all, I can reach to all of my students' blogs just with a click and see when they have been updated. Besides my students also use RSS feeds to read each other's blogs and it certainly ensures interaction among them. When they put up a post on their blog, they feel sure that their classmates will be informed of it. Futhermore using RSS efficiently surely enhances students' level of network literacy as David Perry clearly states in his article "The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom". Thanks to RSS feeds, they can learn how to search for a specific content and handle with lots of information they gather on the Net - by subscribing to related sites, scanning the information on a regularly updated platform, deciding which ones they need to read critically. Writing and reading in digital space certainly requires learners to have appropriate skills and RSS helps them go their own way and be more organized...

and Embracing the Universe!

2008-01-26T15:44:00.000+02:00

"Unfolding the Blackbox and Embracing the Universe?" How assertive or rhetorical it may sound to you when you think that this is all about the human brain. But I must confess it exactly fits how I feel about it. Just imagine how little we know about how we think, how we learn, how we remember, how we forget or even how we love. The human brain is still a blackbox or a mystery to us with its limitless potentials. It's estimated that we use less than 1% of 1% of our brain's projected processing capacity (It's not a repetition - that's the correct ratio). What does it mean? That capacity - that number far exceeds the number of known particles in the universe...How amazing it is!!! A universe within us...

What I've learned from the brain research made me understand how the brain learns best and it's no longer a black box. At least I began to leave the doors ajar and I encountered a brain with an amazing system on its own...

I'd like to share with you what extend brain-based learning has changed my teaching view as a teacher. I realize that we're doing harm to ourselves by imposing our learners brain-unfriendly educational techniques and policies. The world has a lot of problems today and educational policies should be reorganized to produce good problem solvers. If we educate them in a brain-friendly way, then, they'll be able to not only cope with these problems, but solve them as well...