Posts Tagged ‘choice menus’
Visual Note-Taking
As should be the case, there is ongoing discussion among educators about the skills that should be taught to their learners. One such skill is note-taking. Note-taking is typically classified as a study skill and taught as it has been through the history of institutionalized education – the outline.
When I started researching brain-compatible learning (see neuroscientist John Medina’s Vision Trumps All Other Senses), I was exposed to the mind-map as a tool for organization, comprehension, and note-taking. Mind-maps have several benefits:
http://www.visual-mapping.com/2011/05/study-shows-key-benefits-of-mind.html
. . . and according to Giulia Forsythe:
As Temple Grandin says, “the world needs all kinds of minds.” and some of those minds “think in pictures”. Doodling is a form of external thought that allows you to visualize the connections you are making while thinking. In the conscious mind, doodling can assist concentration and focus but even in the unconscious mind, while doodling and day dreaming connections are made. As Steven Johnson says, the “mind’s primordial soup” can lead to “serendipitous collisions of creative insight”. Doodling has allowed connections to be made between people and ideas, the magical space between. These aspects can lead to better problem solving. By sharing my thinking through visual means, my most important connections have been to people, by way of sharing my perceptions of their ideas, presentations and words back to them.
The purpose of this post is to encourage educators of learners of all ages to their students how to take visual notes. By providing learners with the skills to do so, this adds choice for how they take notes and process information. What follows are some videos and articles that provide rationale and instructional tips for visual note taking.
Additional Resources:
Reading: A Natural Human Phenomenon Given the Right Conditions
The written word is a fairly new development in human evolution given the history of humankind. Even so, it has become a common and natural way of communication for a lot of people in our current times. School curriculum often presents reading and writing as a forced, unnatural skill to be acquired through hard work.
As an elementary student, I was required to do the requisite book reports. I wasn’t interested in the books I was told to read. I learned how to creatively tweak the book cover summaries to write these reports – receiving A’s and B’s for books never read.
Fast forward to 9th grade. I don’t know how but somehow I picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and was hooked into reading. Reading became my survival to my painful and boring high school experiences. I would bring books of my choosing into class, would hide them in the class textbooks and joyful escape into the worlds of these books. Without any prompting or direction, I located and read many of the books by the following authors during high school (note the following are direct links to websites dedicated to that author):
Fast forward – today. We have seen this natural drive to read by this current generation of youth through the Harry Potter and Twilight series. I recently asked a group of about 25 sixth graders if they liked to read and received a resounding, “No!” I then asked if they had read Harry Potter and most had.
So I get frustrated when I read about all these formalized and structured ways to teach reading (and have a gut-level, nauseous reaction to discussions around Success For All and Reading First). I understand that many kids do not have the skills and motivation to independently locate books of personal interest, but I do believe that one of the responsibilities of educators (of all content areas) is to provide learners with reading recommendations.
This past year, I started reading YA novels, finding them intelligent, engaging, and thought provoking. I believe if kids are introduced to the choice menu of these and similar books, then kids will become naturally interested in reading. Some recommendations I would offer (if I was teaching middle or high school) include:
- The Hunger Games Series
- Uglies Series
- Maze Runner Series
- Ship Breaker
- Life as We Knew It Series
- Delirium
- Matched
- Flip
- House of Scorpion
- Looking for Alaska
- The Adoration of Jenna Fox
This is just my own list. Imagine if educators and young adults shared all of their favorite books and discussions about these books became the norm in English classes.
Technology and social networking have the potential to increase interest and engagement in learning. A few years ago I taught gifted education for elementary students. Philip, a charismatic and sports-driven young man, said he was not interested in reading because he did not like the books the teachers gave him to read. I introduced the class to Shelfari.
I don’t know what it was about this Web 2.0 tool but Philip totally took off, becoming motivated to read and add books of his choosing to his Shelfari. These can be viewed at http://www.shelfari.com/phillip12/shelf.
I am waiting for the day that the guiders and managers of education realize that forced education does not become lifelong learning.
The Scale of the Universe in the Classroom
Student-centric learning puts the educator in the role of an ethnographer. In the role of ethnographer, the educator studies the learners – both individually and as a group. The educator can then offer a menu of learning activities based on what is discovered about the learners. Because of technology and the Internet, this menu can be composed some rich and exciting learning delicacies. The learning environment operates in a similar manner as a food cooperative (the ideals of a cooperative, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles)
The Size of the Universe
A few years ago, I worked with gifted 3rd through 5th graders in a pull-out program. What I learned about them, as a group, was a general attraction to science and especially, space and space exploration. I also learned that as much as they loved technology (I had a small computer lab and integrated technology into the curriculum) that when given a choice they would choose hands-on activities over technology. So with that in mind, we began our second year together with an activity, The Thousand Yard Model or, The Earth as a Peppercorn.
The kids talked about this activity for the entire school year – stating it was one of the best school activities in which they had ever participated.
Now, with so many related activities online, I would have offered (and can offer future students with similar interests) the following activities as part of this learning menu:
Online Interactive
Videos
The Known Universe by AMNH
The Grand scale of the Universe
Artistic Interpretations
. . . and for the more artistic and mathematics oriented learners, here is a TED talk:
part of the transcript:
And here is a similar sculpture. That’s the Sun at that end. And then in a series of 55 balls, it reduces, proportionately, each ball and the spaces between them, reduce proportionately, until they get down to this little Earth. This one is about the Moon. And then the distance to the Earth, in proportion also. This is a little stone ball, floating. As you can see the little tether, that it’s also magnetically levitated.
And then this is the first part of — this is 109 spheres, since the Sun is 109 times the diameter of the Earth. And so this is the size of the Sun. And then each of these little spheres is the size of the Earth in proportion to the Sun. It’s made up of 16 concentric shells.
Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D.
