I can’t seem to stop thinking about the article in the New York Times earlier this week: A Class Field Trip to a Parking Garage? For Some Children, It Can Be Valuable. Recognizing that many of the school’s children don’t have the personal experiences to understand basic cultural references in their school work, teachers have … Read more No Standing
Actually Kerning
This is a cool little game — the Kerning Game. Anyone interested in typography or printing knows about kerning — the variable space between letters that makes a font look coherent and readable. (And anyone old enough to remember keylining, really knows about kerning.) But what I really like about the game is that it … Read more Actually Kerning
Weaving a Visualization
WEAVE, the Web-based Analysis and Visualization Environment, allows users to present large data sets in some really interesting ways. The open source tool from the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research and the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Open Indicators Consortium, allows users to create dashboards of information for exploration and discovery. Particularly good … Read more Weaving a Visualization
Active Readers
In the quest to improve thought and developing meaningful skills for young learners, I am glad their are people like Bret Victor. He has been thinking deep thoughts about how to create more active readers: readers that are engaged with the material, that question hypotheses and model alternatives. And he’s developed some interesting prototypes … Read more Active Readers
Snackable Chunks
In the excitement over the recent Apple textbook announcement, one question seemed to get buried: Do iPads actually further academic goals? Turns out, they probably do. Wired magazine has written about a study by Houghton-Mifflin and Apple (admittedly, these two partners are not agenda-less) regarding success with iPads in the K-12 classroom. But there … Read more Snackable Chunks
Seeing Things Differently
This fascinating video from the BBC shows how people can see the same thing completely differently. Researchers look at how babies acquire language, and how language acquisition impacts what they see. And then they look at the Himba tribe, which has only five words for color, and can distinguish different hues than typical Westerners. Zhicheng … Read more Seeing Things Differently