Classroom Organization: Google Classroom

We often work with students who struggle with difficulties with executive functions, which make it hard for them to manage their time, organize their materials or plan their studying and homework. As a teacher, one has to be the ultimate multitasker who can organize, prepare, track and document everything from attendance to assignments to grades for a classroom full of students. Even for those with impeccable executive functioning skills, this can be a major challenge. When I was a classroom teacher I jerry-rigged my Google Apps account into my own learning management system to help me streamline my home-school communications, track my grades and prepare, organize and distribute my lesson materials. However, as of this past summer an educator no longer has to attempt their own variation of a learning management system, because Google has now launched Google Classroom. Not surprisingly, Google’s version is much more insightful and user friendly than my makeshift attempt. Google Classroom is a learning management system that was designed to simplify a teacher’s process for creating, distributing, and grading of classroom assignments. The added benefit is that it does so in a completely paperless way. Google Classroom is available for free for anyone who has access to Google Apps for Education. 

Now, with the advent of Google Classroom, teachers can easily create assignments, distribute materials to all students, provide feedback and track grades all in one paperless space. It also offers a space to store student work, and organizes each student’s assignments into their own drive for easy accessibility. On the assignments page, students are able to see what has been assigned and when it is due, which they can access from both home and school. In addition, teachers are able to easily see who has completed their assignment and make notes and provide feedback to any students who appear to be struggling. When work is completed, teachers can grade the assignment and track all grade metrics right in the Google Classroom framework. All of these combined features make classroom management a much more effective, seamless process. 

The video above does an excellent job of highlighting the simplicity of using Google Classrooms, as well as the key features that will help streamline any teacher’s organizational burdens. A summary of the features of Google Classroom is also available as an online document. Many schools already have proprietary systems in place to manage some or all of the functions of Google Classroom. But for those teachers for whom such a system is not available, or who want specific features that Google offers, Google Classroom can be an excellent asset.

Software for the Classroom: Review of Animation-ish

Ages: Kindergarten through grade twelve 

Content Areas: Cross Curricular

Cost: Varies depending on the license purchased. More pricing information can be found on their website. Of note, a 15 day free trial is also available.

Technical Requirements: Animation-ish can be run on Windows, Mac, and Drawing Tablets

Description: One of my personal all-time favorite children’s authors has launched an award-winning software program titled Animation-ish. Peter H. Reynolds is the bestselling author and illustrator behind the incredible titles Ish, The Dot and The North Star. Mr. Reynold has moved beyond books and into the digital space with the launch of Animation-ish, which is described as “an easy-to-use animation software program that inspires creativity and enables children to show what they know.” Students can use this program as an alternative to writing a story (allowing a teacher to asses ability regardless of writing or graphomotor challenges), to create a presentation (which could be of benefit for students with language difficulties) or to animate a project. 

Not only will your students be able to bolster their digital literacy skills by learning how to independently create their own animations, but they can use it a medium to demonstrate their knowledge across curricular areas. As such, this would be an invaluable tool for teachers trying to embody the "multiple means of expression" aspect of Universal Design for Learning or differentiated instruction. Furthermore, embedded into the software program are a number of curricular based activities that they have aligned to the national educational standards. 

Technology has always been a professional interest of mine and, as a teacher, I would attempt a video or animation project with my class each year. However, so many of the video creation tools available are really designed for professionals, which can be a barrier to implementation in the classroom. What Animation-ish does is provide a child-friendly, simple way to have your students demonstrate their learning via video creation. This will serve as a highly motivating way for learners to showcase what they know, especially when compared to traditional assessment measures such as tests, papers or physical projects.

If you are curious about what this software can do, or apprehensive about the tech skills you must possess to integrate this modality into your classroom,  the team behind Animation-ish has published an exceptional Quick Start guide. Furthermore, professional development is a critical aspect of learning a new tool and a variety of lessons on how to use the different features of the program have made available on the Animation-ish website in order to help you. Beyond this resource, Mr. Reynold also offers a variety of tools for creating a creative classroom, which you may want to explore.  Most are literacy based and infuse elements of high quality art.

Get a Sense of Your Number Sense with Panamath

Research suggests that students’ achievement in math class may be related to their innate number sense, and it’s no wonder. Number sense, the intuitive recognition of numbers and numerical relationships, is something that animals—including humans!—throughout the world are born with. Panamath, whose name comes in part from the acronym for the Psychological Assessment of Numerical Ability, is an organization hoping to understand the relationship between in-born number sense and math achievement. Through a grant from the National Science foundation, they’re investigating number sense. And if you’re curious about how yours stacks up, their online test is an interesting (and free) resource.

The test is simple enough for even a young child to take: A series of colored dots flashes across the screen and test-takers must decide whether they saw more blue or yellow ones. Both accuracy and decision speed are measured. When the test is over, one can view one’s results compared with other same-age testers. Individuals may wish to take the test out of curiosity, but teachers and clinicians can download it in order to save students’ results. As more is learned about the relationship between number sense and math instruction, gauging a student’s innate skills could be very useful for shaping lessons.

Results not as high as you’d hoped? Never fear! Number sense, like just about every human ability, can be improved. Here are a few ideas for helping kids sharpen their number sense:

Represent Numbers with Different Objects

Pick a number, starting with a small number like five for very young kids. Ask your child to collect different objects and put them in groups that contain that number. (For example, your child might find five rubber bands, five grains of rice, five cotton swabs, etc.) Write the number on a several paper plates and load them with the objects. Point out that groups of ten marbles, ten pieces of puffed rice cereal, ten large crackers, and ten toy cars may take up different amounts of space, but they still contain the same number of objects. Leave the display out for a few days to help your child create an association between the number symbol and the number of items in the group, then try again with a different number.

Comparison Game

Play a guessing game in which you compare groups of different-sized objects with your child. For example, ask your child to cover her eyes and lay out four wooden blocks and seven beads. Then ask your child to look quickly at both groups and point to the one that has more. Next, count the groups to see if she was right. Make the game more challenging by laying out more objects and objects that are closer in size.

Practicing Estimation

There are infinite ways to do this with children. At the grocery store, ask your child to decide which line has the fewest people in it, then count the people in your line and other lines while you wait for the cashier to determine whether your child’s guess was right. Enjoying a treat of candy? Ask kids to guess how many pieces of each color they see or how many pieces there are altogether. Make the estimation games trickier by introducing proportions: Is your child’s little sister half as tall as he is? A third of the height of her father? Measure everyone to see. Is the area of the living room twice the area of your child’s bedroom? More? Less?

Motion Math Games

Evidence suggests that the digital games developed by Motion Math may help kids improve their number sense. The easiest of the games is appropriate for three- or four-year-olds, while other offerings will challenge and entertain kids through early middle school.

How Much is a Million? by David M. Schwartz

This outstanding picture book was made to help children understand large numbers, which can be difficult to conceptualize. No time to get to the library? The book is (of course) available as a charming video  on YouTube.

For even more ideas, investigate the “Number Sense and Place Value” series by NRICH, which contains a wealth of activities for helping very young and elementary-aged children to improve their number sense



This post contains our own ideas as well as inspiration from Panamath (www.panamath.org) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

News You Can Use

Our electronic mailbox is full of useful information on a wide array of topics, ranging from an analysis of upcoming changes to the SAT exam to worthwhile charities that are helping students who learn differently. Here are our top picks:

• Inspirica, which provides one-on-one tutoring and test preparation in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, has created a presentation entitled A Glimpse into Upcoming Changes and Recent Update: SAT-ACT, which explores the reasons behind the newly announced changes to the high stakes exams taken by essentially every college bound student. 

• Prompted by the interest of her own daughter, who has an autism spectrum disorder and a fascination with American Girl® dolls, a Westchester, New York mom has created a re-sale shop for these historical dolls and their extensive books and accessories, with the nonprofit mission of developing job skills and employment opportunities for young women with autism spectrum disorders. They welcome donations of gently used American Girl®merchandise. Call Marjorie Madfis at 914-428-1258 for more information.

• Resources for Children with Special Needs, a New York nonprofit, now has a You-Tube channel with presentations on topics including how to choose a summer camp, how to prepare for a successful IEP meeting, and how to organize your documents to better advocate for your child. Some of the selections are available in Spanish.

• Active Minds, a national nonprofit dedicated to utilizing the student voice to raise mental health awareness among college students, is one of the sponsors of Stress Less Week, April 20-26 - when college students are coming to the end of their year and can face particular stress and anxiety. The purpose of this event is to spread awareness about stress and anxiety disorders and create a supportive environment, where students can speak up about their difficulties and receive support from the campus community.

If your school, nonprofit, or organization has a new program, publication, or upcoming event that would be of interest to our readers, please let us know, so we can include it in a future listing.

Photo: Michael Coghlan/Flickr

Great Sources for Frontloading Videos – Part 2

Our regular readers will remember last Monday's post on this topic in which we introduced MinutePhysics and MinuteEarth as sources for frontloading videos for middle and high school students. As we explained in the previous post, frontloading is an effective instructional technique in which students are given a brief overview of a topic before learning it more thoroughly. Frontloading gives students an idea of what to expect, helps them to focus on the salient information more readily, and aids in memory.

Here are two more sources for great videos, all available free! Handwritten Tutorials will be useful to students of high-level biology and anatomy, while CrashCourse offers a broader range of courses on science, literature, and history.

Handwritten Tutorials  – high school, college, and nursing/medical school

Martin Wardle, the brainy artist behind Handwritten Tutorials, follows three guidelines as he conceives and draws up his lectures: they should be under ten minutes long, free, and enjoyable to watch. Martin has uploaded more than 75 videos in which he quickly draws all of the most important aspects of topics like anatomy, biochemistry, neuroscience, and more, narrating all the while. The explanations are easy to understand and the helpful sketches make things crystal clear. Want to take a closer look, make your own notes, or spend a bit more time studying? Students can even download the completed drawing as a PDF from the Handwritten Tutorials homepage.

CrashCourse – high school and college

Teenagers who are fans of author John Green’s quirky humor will love this channel just as much as they love his popular novels, which we have recently reviewed in our Recommended Reads series. Brothers John and Hank Green take on the task of explaining U.S. and world history, chemistry and biology, literature, ecology, and psychology on this channel, which has dedicated playlists for each topic. The videos tend to be longer, between ten to twelve minutes, because they cover more ground than the Minute videos described above. The Greens’ fast-paced delivery, visuals (comprised of diagrams, photos, maps, and animations), and joke-a-second, cerebral humor will pique adolescents’ interest in the topic before they get into the nitty-gritty of learning it in detail. There are over 100 videos to choose from.

We hope that you’re as impressed by these videos as we are! We think any of them would make a wonderful starting point for more in-depth learning.

Great Sources for Frontloading Videos – Part 1

One of our favorite strategies here at the Yellin Center is frontloading. Frontloading is a great way to boost comprehension in almost all learners, and especially in students who struggle with attention and comprehension. The principle is simple: A preview of a concept, in which a learner is exposed to some of the most important ideas, tends to help students understand and absorb the information when they’re presented with more thorough instruction later. For example, if a student reads a short summary of a science chapter before reading the chapter itself, she tends to understand the complicated ideas in the chapter more easily. She knows, for example, which information is most important. She also has a sense of where the chapter is taking her as she reads and so can more easily build a schema in her mind.

Frontloading can take many forms, but one of our favorite ways to frontload is to take advantage of the treasure trove of information available on the internet. Videos are a great way to frontload for lots of reasons: they’re visual, engaging, move fairly quickly, and hold students’ attention. We want to share some great sources for frontloading videos, all of which are available, for free, on dedicated YouTube channels. Not only are the videos below great sources for information about physics and earth science, they’re all humorous and are characterized by quick but precise explanations and explanatory visuals, too. Students who spend a few minutes watching a video preview before they attempt to read a textbook chapter or attend the next day’s lecture on the same topic will more readily understand and remember the relevant information.

MinutePhysics – middle and high school

As the name suggests, this channel hosts a series of videos that explain topics important in physics, such as gravity, wave/particle duality, the mechanics of the sun, and even Schrodinger’s cat. At the time of this writing, there were 123 videos available, though new ones are added all the time. Most videos are between one and two minutes long.

MinuteEarth – middle and high school

Just like MinutePhysics, this channel is a gold mine for students learning earth science and geology. Viewers can learn about the properties of sand, how trees survive winter, where Earth’s water came from, and other topics, all in less than three minutes per video. So far the channel has 33 videos, but their collection is growing.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post in which we’ll share other favorite video sources!

Hip-Hop and Shakespeare: Best Friends? Yes, According to MC Lars

When you catch your teenager nodding in time to his headphones, don’t accuse him of shirking his English homework. If he’s listening to MC Lars, chances are he may be diligently contemplating themes in Moby Dick. Don’t believe us? Visit Lars’s homepage. The first thing you’ll notice is a cartoon drawing of Edgar Allan Poe (and his trusty raven, of course). MC Lars’s popularity, mostly outside of classrooms, is proof that intellect and hip-hop are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they can go together as well as his well-crafted lyrics pair with his infectious beats.

When MC Lars was sixteen and a self-described geeky white guy, he starred in his first hip hop performance. Back then, of course, he was known as Andrew Nielson, and his audience was made up not of dancing club go-ers but his teachers and classmates at an assembly at his high school. Nielson’s class had been assigned to write a parody of Macbeth, and, intrigued by the rhythmic witches’ chant, he wrote some lyrics and laid them over a self-made house beat. “Rapbeth” was the first hip-hop performance of Nielson’s career, though it was a while before MC Lars made it big. He had to graduate from Stanford first, where he majored in 19th century American literature but also spent hours in Stanford’s campus radio station poring over their hip-hop vinyl collection.

Lars’s tracks are catchy, often humorous, and always smart. They’re also family-friendly; though songs like “Hey There Ophelia” may leave younger kids unschooled in Hamlet scratching their heads, rest assured that his lyrics are never offensive. Lars has written about topics as diverse as the absurdity of airport security, the self-defeatism of some environmentalists, and the baffling nature of hipsters and of emo music. But as educators, we admit that we’re partial to his more scholarly tracks about things like manifest destiny, the metric system, Harper’s Ferry, and, of course, literature.

MC Lars loves showing audiences how hip-hop and literature really aren’t strange bedfellows. He’s done seminars on the topic and even gave a Tedx Talk at USC on the topic. Currently, he’s working on a book on the history of hip-hop culture. He’s also putting together a pilot for an educational hip-hop TV show for children, and does educational hip-hop outreach work (did you know there was such a thing?) with various historical organizations to raise awareness and preserve American literary history.

Eager for a taste? MC Lars shares lots of his videos freely; “Ahab,”  a hip-hop retelling of Moby Dick by Ahab himself is one of our favorites. (Some of our favorite lyrics include “The first one to spot him gets this gold doubloon / Now excuse me while I go be melancholy in my room,” and “He charged the boat, and it began to sink / I’m like, ‘How about that? Hubris really stinks.’”) And we love “Flow Like Poe”  off of his most recent album, The Edgar Allan Poe EP. Though MC Lars plays at venues and concerts around the world, this track premiered at the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 2012. 

So hip-hop-wary parents: Let your kids listen to MC Lars. He’s a living, breathing, rapping embodiment of the way passion and creativity can revolutionize education.

Recommended Reads: Divergent by Veronica Roth

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Ages: Teen and young adult                                                  

Sequels: Divergent is the first in a trilogy. Look for Insurgent and Allegiant once your teenager whips through this first installment.

Plot: Sixteen-year-old Beatrice lives in dystopian Chicago, a world of absolutes. After undergoing an aptitude test to determine which of five traits they possess, all sixteen-year-olds must choose the faction (i.e. social group) to which they will devote the rest of their lives. Their choice can be based on the trait they’ve been shown to have, or the trait they most wish to cultivate. Beatrice grew up in Abnegation, the faction chosen by people dedicated to selflessness and charity. Her aptitude test reveals that she is an aberration, however, meaning that she displays equal aptitude for more than one trait. Beatrice’s tester, alarmed, warns her that if anyone finds out that she is divergent, she is as good as dead. (Sounds a bit dramatic, but the reasons are explained later.) 

Resolved to hide this fact, Beatrice enters the choosing ceremony still torn between factions. Knowing that she has qualities of both Abnegation and Dauntless (the brave faction), which should she select? She surprises everyone by pledging herself to Dauntless in a last-minute decision and begins a highly competitive, brutal initiation process that only a fraction of the candidates will pass and some will not survive. Beatrice invents a new identity, changing her name to Tris and adopting a new wardrobe, style, and attitude in attempts to leave her past behind her. Tris learns to use weapons and fight, but also to take risks and face her fears. And, of course, she falls for one of her instructors, a slightly older Dauntless named Four. Just when it seems that Tris will finally triumph over the initiation and those who wish her harm, she stumbles upon a sinister plot hatched by the leaders of the Erudite faction, domain of those who prize intellect and learning above all else. Tris must put her life on the line and fight to save her family, her friends, and her whole world.

Adult themes: Some mild sexual references and themes of violence

Our Take: Divergent is the first book of yet another dystopian trilogy. But it is an unquestionably engrossing read that fans of books like The Hunger Games and Uglies will devour. The premise is intriguing and most of the characters are reasonably well developed. The book’s strongest asset, though, is its page-turning plot, which will feel compelling even to those who have read many books of this genre before. It’s predictable in some places but there are still a few surprises here. Young readers will enjoy exploring themes like control, fear, bravery, individuality, loyalty, and strength of all sorts with Tris’s story.

Good to Know: Divergent will hit big screens in March of 2014, with Kate Winslet in the role of primary antagonist Jeanine. Watch a trailer here.

Logic Games and Brain Teasers to Sharpen Higher Thinking Skills

Practice is essential to honing any skill. Whether you want to juggle a soccer ball, master French, or solve algebraic equations with lightning speed, you've got to put in the time first. Research has long demonstrated that this principle holds true for higher thinking skills, too. Solving problems, deriving and applying rules, recognizing concepts, and using reason and logic are just some of the aspects of higher thinking, so it’s easy to see how those components are useful in school. People who practice using logic and problem solving skills are often better at thinking their way through problems more efficiently and flexibly. And games can be a great way to practice.
 

Here are some fun sites that provide opportunities for you, or young people in your life, to practice using logic to solve puzzles and brain teasers. (All games are free, unless specified.) Have fun!


The Set Game  – grade 4 and up

In this challenging game, players must group images on digital cards together to form a set based on concepts like the shapes, number of shapes, and features of shapes. This is a great exercise for concept-building, and the website provides a different challenge each day. Want more? The Set Game is also available through several apps and other websites, and the original card game version can be purchased from toy stores as well.

Traffic Jam  – grade 1 and up

This classic is now available online! Traffic Jam gives young minds a workout by challenging them to plan several steps ahead as they work to free the red car from a traffic jam. Cars on a grid block the red car’s path out of the jam, and users can only move the cars forward or backward to create a path. It will take several well-planned moves to do it! The site above shows the minimum number of moves required for solving the puzzle, so if kids figure it out in more moves than specified, ask them to try again with fewer moves. ThinkFun makes a concrete version of the game, for those looking for a more tactile experience.

Samorost  – grade 3 and up

Samorost is a delight. Players must help our hero Gnome navigate his way through a deliciously whimsical world to save his planet from an asteroid by solving a series of puzzles. Part of the puzzle, however, is figuring out what the puzzles are. We won’t give away too much, but rest assured that your kids (and probably you, too) will love clicking their way through this game to try to unravel its mysteries. Solved it? Check out Samorost 2, Machinarium, or some of Amanita Design’s other games. Although Samorost is free, some of Amanita’s other offerings require a fee.

One Hundred Doors – (age depends – see below)

Available for iDevices and Android through Google Play (search “100 Doors”), this game is downright addictive. The concept is simple: players must figure out how to open the door in front of them using clues they see around them. The reward for opening a door? Another door, which is slightly harder open. Sometimes players can find keys by knocking over objects with the swipe of a finger. Sometimes a code, hidden somewhere in the room, must be entered into the keypad. Sometimes ordinary objects will, upon closer examination, be arranged in a pattern that is critical to solving the riddle. The bottom line is that you should be ready for anything with 100 Doors! The first few doors don’t take much brainpower to conquer, but the puzzles get harder and harder as the game progresses. Younger kids will be able to pass the first few levels easily but may become frustrated with the later levels, so playing this game with a parent who can provide clues or making it a teamwork exercise with a friend could make it more enjoyable for everyone. Be warned, though: the later levels are bound to challenge even brainy adults! (Really stuck? You can find videos explaining how to solve each level on YouTube; simply type in the name of the game and the specific level.)

photo credit: flickr

Banned Books Week Is Here

What do Harry Potter, Catcher in the Rye, A Wrinkle in Time, A Light in the Attic, and Call of the Wild have in common? For one, they’re all great works of literature. And, according to the American Library Association, they’re all frequently challenged books, too.

We think the freedom to read what we choose is worth celebrating! If you’re looking for ways to observe Banned Books Week, which runs from September 22 to September 28 this year, the ALA’s website dedicated to reading and intellectual freedom is a great place to start. Below, we've outlined a few other ideas as well. Happy reading!

Events

Looking for a way to celebrate the right to read in your area? Check out the Banned Books Week Events page for a list of happenings at libraries and bookstores around the country. Don’t see an event near you? Start your own.

Embrace Social Media

Make distracting services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram work for you by using them as platforms to examine and discuss censorship. Start by reviewing a list of frequently challenged books with students. Help your younger child pick an appropriate book for story time and take teenagers to the library so they can check out a copy of a book that sounds compelling. Then post a picture of your child with her nose buried in these “controversial” volumes. Invite her to write a captions for the picture to share her thoughts about the book or the idea of censorship. If you tweet, be sure to use #bannedbooksweek to ensure your child’s post is associated with this event.

Virtual Read-Out

Speaking of social media, the Banned Books Week organization has established a dedicated YouTube channel to allow readers from all over the world to submit videos in which they explain why the freedom to read is valuable to them and read a short excerpt from their favorite banned book. To add your voice or your child’s voice, visit the site  to learn about the criteria for participation and fill out the form for video submission.

First Amendment Film Festival

Love intellectual freedom but not exactly a bookworm? Consider arranging your own film festival to explore the topic of censorship through film. Alone or with students or friends, watch a selection of fictional films and documentaries from an ALA list, such as Good Night and Good Luck, Inherit the Wind, Smothered, and Tell It Like It Is.

Show Your Colors

Turn freedom into a fashion statement! You can make this simple by helping kids use fabric paint to design their own tote bags or t-shirts promoting the idea of the right to read or their favorite banned book. Alternately, you can turn to the pros. Some of our favorite banned book products include a bracelet  made of tiles displaying the covers of various banned books; a tote bag from New York’s iconic Strand bookstore; and a large selection of bookish merchandise from Out of Print, including t-shirts, phone cases, stationery, and more.

Get the Math Makes Algebra Relevant

Math, particularly algebra, can sometimes seem irrelevant to frustrated middle and high school students. It’s hard to see how solving for a variable or graphing a line could ever be useful. They’d much rather flip through a fashion magazine, shoot hoops, or listen to music. Thanks to Get the Math, however, algebra students can see real-life examples of how the math they’re learning is indispensable to those very industries and try their hand at solving the kinds of problems professionals face every day.


Get the Math, funded by WNET, plays host to a series of videos to set up real world math challenges. Algebra students can watch teams of teenagers travel to restaurants, music studios, video game designing companies, gyms, and other interesting workplaces where they meet young, dynamic professionals. After explaining their jobs, the pros present teams with practical challenges they’ll need algebra to solve. For example, fashion designer Chloe Dao wants a shirt to retail for less than $35, but it currently costs more than $40. So she presents the teams with the list of material and production costs, provides the mark-up, and sets them loose to change the design so the shirt will be more affordable. Video game designer Julia Detar of Arkadium challenges the teams to save a spaceship from colliding with an asteroid in a game she’s designing. The asteroid is traveling on a coordinate grid along a linear path. The teams are given only a few points and must figure out the asteroid’s trajectory, then plot a course to guide the spaceship to safety.

The introductory video ends once the problem has been presented, allowing viewers to tackle the problem themselves. The Challenge link provides access to screens that review the information in the problem, and they can enter and check their answers, too.

Once they’ve got it (or once they’re stumped), the final video in the series captures the team working in partner pairs. They discuss how they will solve the problem and critical information appears in captions at the bottom of the screen to make it easier to follow. Once the teams are happy with their answers, they present their solutions to the featured professional for feedback and reflect on the experience. Most of the time, both partner pairs will arrive at different correct solutions, highlighting the important lesson that real world math isn’t black and white. In redesigning the shirt, for example, one team opted to forgo the beading to bring down the cost due to a bad experience she’d had with beaded clothing. The other team chose to replace one type of fabric with a more durable and cheaper variety, hoping to both reduce the price and make the shirt less fragile.

Telling kids they’ll need math one day is nothing new. But hearing that message from a professional in a field of interest can be more powerful than hearing it from a parent or a teacher. We like the sense of empowerment students will feel when they realize that they’re learning the kind of skills that will make them valuable additions to the workplace. We hope to see this promising interactive site expand!

Memory Strategies: Use Music, Mnemonics, and YouTube to Improve Learning

A frequent issue mentioned by students who come to The Yellin Center for help with school is that they can’t remember information they studied when test time rolls around. They often suspect they have memory difficulties, but we frequently find that poor memory is not the problem. Even the strongest memories in the world can’t handle a limitless number of facts; these students are usually in need of better memory strategies. The more strategically they learn information, the easier it will be to “find” when taking exams.

Testing is particularly difficult for medical or law students, or even high school students in chemistry or history classes, because there is so much material to remember. We often recommend that students use mnemonics to help them recall lists of facts. For example, to remember the taxonomy for biology, if students can remember the sentence “King Philip Cuts Open Five Green Snakes,” they’ll have access to the first letter of each of the taxonomic levels in order (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species).

Another way to recall information is to turn it into song lyrics to go with a catchy tune. We think this is a great idea, and we’re not the only ones. A recent news story tells of a young British doctor doing just that to help the staff at his hospital remember to use the asthma treatment guidelines when treating wheezing patients. When traditional reminders weren't working, Dr. Tapas Mukherjee made a YouTube video  in which he sang his new asthma-related lyrics to the tune of Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and crossed his fingers. Within two months, doctors at his hospital reported that they all knew the guidelines. More importantly, they performed much better on measures that tested their knowledge of specifics. For his efforts, Dr. Mukherjee won the British Thoracic Society Innovation in Education Award in 2012 and the National Health Service Expo/Network Casebook II Innovation Award this year.

There are plenty of other great examples of students using song to help get troublesome facts to stick. One is a video made by Canadian medical students. (Those unfamiliar with second-degree AV block, a disorder that causes irregular heartbeat, may find it a little tough to follow but will still get the idea). Another winner is “This is Why We Clot,” described on the page as “Drug Life’s hot new single about the use of anticoagulants.” To see a model of how this tactic could work with younger children, watch the silly “Place Value Song” from Teacher Tipster  below to see how Mr. Smith uses a song to help his youngsters learn how to grasp the concept of tens and ones.



The most memorable study song, of course, is the one a student invents himself. So next time your student has to learn a list of prepositions, recall a series of events, or perform a multi-step procedure, help him turn the information into a song. Teachers can try this out in the classroom by putting students in groups; finished songs can be recorded and played or performed live for the class. Turn studying into a rockin’ good time!