Disce verum

As #eme6414 comes to a close, the butterfly metaphor comes to mind. Okay, I was out in my fenced garden for a little bit, to water heat-wilted strawberries, blueberries, and green beans, and let my cat wander around and chew some lemongrass.  This brown and white butterfly has been flitting around a butterfly bush and Mexican sunflower, which is especially huge this year (while veggies that did well last year are struggling along...maybe they've had enough of the pandemic, too).  But this little brown butterfly...it's deceptively plain from a distance. Close up, and it's kind of magical.  And here's my garden's first milkweed plant, a gift from my daughter's Brownie and Daisy troop leader as part of a pollinator project. It actually attracted monarch caterpillars. There were three yesterday--I didn't see them today, and checked under every leaf. I'm hoping they had their fill and are making their chrysali. 

Teachers and homeschool parents! Do you know about the  New York Times ' Learning Network?  I just discovered this--bumped into it, might be more appropriate--and it's an amazing resource that I plan to add to both my mom and teacher toolkits.  Here's their Twitter, for following purposes: @NYTimesLearning And here's a sample video from their YouTube channel, which is packed with lesson-ready videos organized by categories (English Language Arts, Social Studies, ELL & Arts, Science & Math, and Current Events): Their website features contests, like the above Reading Contest in the cover photo, as well as writing prompts, quizzes, and writing curriculum like "Writing for Podcasts," and units on Argumentative Writing and International Writing.  Since 2009, they've published a Word of the Day  column. A bit more recent is the month-by-month Vocabulary Challenge , for kids who really love their words.  Here's the Vocabulary Challenge Calendar for t...

This past week, I got a somewhat horrifying screen time report from Apple.  During the lost year of 2020, I had spent what I thought was an obscene amount of time on my phone, i.e., 3.5 hours, thanks to doomscrolling from 6am - 11:30pm, and then maybe escaping thereafter to watch Ted Lasso  Season 1, the melodrama of  The Undoing (or maybe some Bridgerton ). I thought 3.5 was a lot .  But 7!--seven! Yes, seven hours, and some change to spare....yikes. That's way too much screen time--way, way too much. Nearly a work day.  That report was pretty awful to get. But it was also pretty perplexing.  Where and how did those seven hours go? What apps Hoovered them up? And how and why did I really not notice this happening?  No binge watching this summer--the most recent show I watched was the Italia-England soccer match. That and a clip of Questlove's  Finding Your Roots episode .  No audiobooks or e-books, my love of which the pandemic bulldozed ...

A few SEL-related resources I came across on social media this past week which I thought were pretty interesting.  Burnell, Kaitlyn. (2020). How narcissism relates to social media. Character & Context: The Science of Who We Are and How We Relate. (Hall et all, Eds.) Burnell is a doctoral student in Psychological Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she studies the implications of social media on adolescent psychosocial development. This article discusses her recent research findings vis-à-vis the relationship between narcissism and social media use:  P eople who post a lot on social media may tend to be higher in narcissism, particularly in terms of higher grandiosity. But, the strength of the relationship between narcissism and social media use was small-to-moderate. So, posting a lot on social media does not necessarily mean that a person is narcissistic. In addition, our findings involving vulnerability suggest that some people who are higher in nar...

Take-the-Poll Challenge, #eme6414 ! It only takes a second.⏱️ https://t.co/jXCRtEmMfc pic.twitter.com/obj77s7ZWi — disceverum (@disceverum) July 25, 2021 Which social media toll did you you end up using and enjoying the most this summer? Which were you maybe surprised to have used and enjoyed the most these past three months?  That's my question for Week 12, this final week of Web 2.0.  N.B. that Twitter limits polls to four options. Your options on for this Twitter poll challenge are (naturally) Twitter, then Instagram, Diigo, and Pinterest.  If you found yourself really using and enjoying another social media tool, I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions here on the blog and/or as a comment on the Tweet!  Off (or on) the record, I think I found myself enjoying Pinterest most--which was surprising, as I wasn't a Pinterest user before. So much so that I have plans to incorporate Pinterest into my future teaching.  Which tool(s) have you used this summer...

Stanford University Lytics Lab -  Links to their research (Understanding Online Learners, Evaluating Digital Instruction, Building Learning Tools), publications, and external conferences and journals. [ Stanford ] Learning Analytics 101 from NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development -  Videos and hyperlinked readings help to break down LA for newbies [ NYU ] Office of Educational Technology, Learning Analytics - According to their mission, the OET "develops national educational technology policy and establishes the vision for how technology can be used to transform teaching and learning and how to make everywhere, all-the-time learning possible for early learners through K-12, higher education, and adult education."  [ tech.ed.gov ]  MIT Open Courseware, The Analytics Edge - Open-access course from MIT's Sloan School of Management on the "analytics edge" and "the key quantitative methods that created the edge (data-mining, dy...