Teachers tap into brain science to boost learning

Teachers tap into brain science to boost learning



PBS NewHour- Education

JUDY WOODRUFF: Next: neuroscience and education.

Thousands of teachers around the country are learning about an alternative teaching program that aims to use scientific discoveries about the brain to improve the way children learn in the classroom.

Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters reports from Philadelphia.

JASSELLE CIRINO, Teacher, Francis Scott Key Elementary: When I say class, you…

CLASS: You stop what you’re doing. Look at the teacher.

JOHN TULENKO: Today is Wacky Wednesday in Jasselle Cirino’s third grade classroom, which explains the blue wig.

JASSELLE CIRINO: So I want you to teach your neighbor.

JOHN TULENKO: But the rest of what you’re about to see is what her classroom looks like every day.

JASSELLE CIRINO: I want giant gestures.

JOHN TULENKO: She uses a set of techniques some call whole brain teaching.

JASSELLE CIRINO: A lot of times in traditional teaching, you’re just lecturing, and you’re talking and talking. And what we like to say, whole brainers, we like to say that the more you talk, the more students you lose. And so we use different methods to engage multiple parts of the brain. And that way, you get 100 percent engagement.

JOHN TULENKO: These days, scientists can look further into the brain than ever, pinpointing the neurons and circuits that control how we think and act. All that’s sparking a movement that’s changing the way some teachers teach.

Are there parts of the brain that you’re aiming at?

JASSELLE CIRINO: Yes, the hippocampus, the motor cortex, the prefrontal cortex, which is the brain’s boss, so something like class, it turns on the prefrontal cortex, which makes the brain’s decisions.

So it says, hey, pay attention. I’m about to tell you something. So, once I have their attention, I teach the material usually through mirrors.

This deals with the mirror neurons in your brain. And so what I say, they repeat. To learn anything, you have to repeat something. You have to repeat something that’s modeled to you. That’s where it starts.

JOHN TULENKO: A lot of times in your class, I saw you gesture, and then you asked your students to gesture.

JASSELLE CIRINO: Right. That’s for engaging their motor cortex. When you act things out while you’re reading, you comprehend more. And we use brainees. These are gestures that are tied to writing skills.

JOHN TULENKO: Can you give me some examples?

JASSELLE CIRINO: Sure. For example is an example. But or however. If, then, so more of like a cause and effect. Adjective. A noun is a person, place or thing, compare, contrast, simile, metaphor, I mean, the list goes on and on.

JOHN TULENKO: I saw you a bunch of times where you would stop, and then you would say to the group, teach.

JASSELLE CIRINO: Teach.

JOHN TULENKO: What’s going on there?

JASSELLE CIRINO: So I have taught them the lesson, but now they need to teach that main point to each other. They’re getting another repetition of the material, but, this time, a lot of times it’s in their own words. And they’re learning how to put things in their own words.

You’re writing while you’re doing it. You’re gesturing, so you’re remembering it in different parts of the brain. You’re not just listening. You’re also speaking. You need to be doing all of these things at once in order to engage the whole brain.

JOHN TULENKO: We wanted to know if science actually backed up any of this. So we brought a video of Jasselle’s class to Daphna Shohamy, a neuroscientist at Columbia University.

DAPHNA SHOHAMY, Columbia University: I buy it. It makes great sense to me.

I mean, the brain is really in many ways wired for actions. Right? It’s — it’s really not wired to sit passively and absorb any information. But I think where — you know, where I wouldn’t fully agree is the idea that more activity is always good. More brain activity in more places doesn’t equal more learning or a better memory.

JOHN TULENKO: OK. How can children learn better?

DAPHNA SHOHAMY: Right, right. Yes, it’s the million-dollar question. I think we have some answers.

The brain learns when things are surprising and interesting.

JASSELLE CIRINO: What is going on here?

DAPHNA SHOHAMY: So if I give you a $20 bill, now, all of a sudden, you will sort of have a burst of activity in your dopamine neurons. They fire.

But if I do that regularly, like every five minutes, I give you $20, your dopamine neurons will stop firing. So what these neurons are doing is they’re signaling how unexpected an event was in the world. They’re not signaling how good or bad it was. They’re signaling how unexpectedly good or unexpectedly bad it was.

So keeping things a little bit noisy and a little bit different is actually really beneficial for learning in many different ways.

JASSELLE CIRINO: Hold your horses.

JOHN TULENKO: Neuroscience says there’s something else important going on here.

JASSELLE CIRINO: When you’re learning things, just even in life, you connect it with a type of feeling. And so the main emotion we want you to feel in a whole brain classroom is fun.

Seriously?

DAPHNA SHOHAMY: Our brain was evolved to survive. We need to remember things that were of emotional and social significance. That’s probably much more important than remembering any bit of information that was communicated to us within a lecture.

JASSELLE CIRINO: We’re done being blah. It’s time to get fuzzy.

CLASS: Fuzzy!

JOHN TULENKO: Here are a few other things neuroscientists think the rest of us ought to know about the brain, that stress damages neurons and impairs learning. Brain training games claim to be effective, but, in fact, the jury’s still out.

What does help is regular physical exercise. Staying active keeps the brain developing and delays cognitive decline as we get older.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I’m John Tulenko reporting for the NewsHour.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As for results, a study on the effect of whole brain teaching in one California elementary school found test scores in math and language arts rose by an average of 11 percent.

The “dreams” of Google’s AI are equal parts amazing and disturbing - Quartz

The “dreams” of Google’s AI are equal parts amazing and disturbing - Quartz:



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WRITTEN BY

Adam EpsteinJune 19, 2015

American sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick once famously asked, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? While he was on the right track, the answer appears to be, no, they don’t. They dream of dog-headed knights atop horses, of camel-birds and pig-snails, and of Dali-esque mutated landscapes.

Google’s image recognition software, which can detect, analyze, and even auto-caption images, uses artificial neural networks to simulate the human brain. In a process they’re calling “inceptionism,” Google engineers sought out to see what these artificial networks “dream” of—what, if anything, do they see in a nondescript image of clouds, for instance? What does a fake brain that’s trained to detect images of dogs see when it’s shown a picture of a knight?

Google trains the software by feeding it millions of images, eventually teaching it to recognize specific objects within a picture. When it’s fed an image, it is asked to emphasize the object in the image that it recognizes. The network is made up of layers—the higher the layer, the more precise the interpretation. Eventually, in the final output layer, the network makes a “decision” as to what’s in the image.

But the networks aren’t restricted to only identifying images. Their training allows them to generate images as well. Here’s what it outputs when it was asked to create images of the following objects:

(Google)

Cool, right? And it gets a lot more interesting. Google engineers decided that instead of asking the software to generate a specific image, they would simply feed it an arbitrary image and then ask it what it saw. Here’s how Google describes the experiment:

We then pick a layer and ask the network to enhance whatever it detected. Each layer of the network deals with features at a different level of abstraction, so the complexity of features we generate depends on which layer we choose to enhance. For example, lower layers tend to produce strokes or simple ornament-like patterns, because those layers are sensitive to basic features such as edges and their orientations.

When feeding an image into the first layer, this is what the network created, something akin to a familiar photo filter:

(Google)

(Google)

Then things got really weird. Google started feeding images into the highest layer—the one that can detect whole objects within an image—and asked the network, “Whatever you see there, I want more of it!”

This creates a feedback loop: if a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.

The result is somewhat akin to looking into the subconscious of an AI. When an image of clouds was fed to a network trained on identify animals, this is what happened:

(Google)

Here are some closeups of details from the second image:

(Google)

Show an artificial neural network a normal, cloudy sky, and it’ll tell you there are dog-fish and pig-snails floating around out there. It’s what one imagines an AI might see on the computing equivalent of an acid trip.

Not only does “inceptionism” teach Google a lot more about artificial neural networks and how they operate, but it also reveals some interesting new applications for the technology. As the Google engineers put it, the process “makes us wonder whether neural networks could become a tool for artists—a new way to remix visual concepts—or perhaps even shed a little light on the roots of the creative process in general.”

Below are some more images the networks created in their feedback loops (in addition to the one at the top of this story). You can see theentire gallery here.

40K: Safe, Sane and Consensual, or The Arrogance of Unacknowledged Playstyles - Bell of Lost Souls

I don't play Warhammer 40K, but the message can be applied across most games.





40K: Safe, Sane and Consensual, or The Arrogance of Unacknowledged Playstyles - Bell of Lost Souls: "See, everyone learns a different way, and everyone assumes their way of learning is the best. There are three styles of learning, and each can be combined with the other to greater or lesser degrees.

The first is visual. Visual learners learn by seeing and reading. They like books and words, pictures and illustrations. As a result, pure visual learners tend to be good readers or artists. The second is auditory. Auditory learners learn through hearing; they like teachers to tell them how to do stuff. Pure auditory learners tend to be great at music too – for obvious reasons. They also memorise things better when they make them into a song (where a visual learner will do much better by simply writing their ideas down). The final style is kinaesthetic. These people learn by doing things with their hands, or by moving. Pure kinaesthetics tend to be great at things like sport or carpentry, sculpting or dance."



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Marvel Universe Upcoming movies (2015-2019)

From: http://screenrant.com/avengers-age-of-ultron-ending-explained/
The Avengers: Age of Ultron is now in theaters, followed by 
Ant-Man on July 17 2015, 
Captain America: Civil War on May 6 2016, 
Doctor Strange on November 4 2016, 
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 on May 5 2017, 
Spider-Man on July 28, 2017, 
Thor: Ragnarok on November 3 2017, 
Avengers: Infinity War – Part 1 on May 4 2018, 
Black Panther on July 6 2018, 
Captain Marvel on November 2 2018, 
Avengers: Infinity War – Part 2 on May 3 2019 and 
Inhumans on July 12, 2019.

Learned Something New Today

I was reading a Facebook post and saw the term SJW GHH. Of course, I had no cluse what that meant. So, some diligent goolge searching found that SJW = Social Justice Warrior.
OK.
GHH?
Well, that took a little more digging, but this story seems to sum it up the best.
It's from http://www.arghink.com/2007/04/09/the-glittery-hooha-an-analysis/

The fact it's an 8 year old post and I'm just now shearing about it probably says something, but we'll save that examination for a later date....

Modern Literary Terms: The Glittery HooHa

April 9, 2007

I’ve been working on the Fun Book on Sundays, and I ran into a snag because my hero, who is supernaturally irresistible (stick with me, it works) sleeps with at least twelve women before he goes to bed with the heroine. That’s believable given his character, but here’s the kicker: my heroine won’t sleep with him because he’s promiscuous–she’s no dummy–and he actually gives up other women to have her and keep her. I mean, what are the chances?

So I talked this out with a pal of mine, somebody who’s very savvy about literary convention and respectability, Lani Diane Rich.

“Sam nails everything that moves and then gives it all up for Char,” I told her. “Who’s going to believe that? I’m in so much trouble here.”

“Oh, no, you’re fine,” Lani said. “Char has a Glittery HooHa.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve never heard of the Glittery HooHa?” Lani patted my arm. “Oh, honey.”

I’m going to quote directly now, because nobody explains the origin of the Glittery HooHa like Lani:

Once upon a time, in a land called Television Without Pity, the peasants gathered to discuss a particular type of character on soap operas. She was always blond, always beautiful, and always good-natured and kind, and always stupid beyond the telling of it. Did someone get approached by a masked man wearing dark gloves who needed help getting a puppy out of a wolf trap, only to happily agree to assist and disappear? It was her. Did someone get drunk on her honeymoon, pass out in a strange bed, and wake up only to assume on very little evidence that she’d slept with another man? Then lie about it? Then get caught lying? Then find out it was all a set-up by her Evil Twin, who had always been evil and had, in fact, done this before? It was her. Did someone get trapped in their own microwave oven?

Guess who?

And yet… there is a man. We’ll call him… Hero. Hero is handsome, he is strong, and… well, yes, okay, he’s kinda dumb, too, but still he manages to rescue her every single time she’s in trouble… which is approximately twice a show. He stays by her side and loves her through thick and thin. He disentangles her hair from the curling iron. He drops his Very Important Job to rush off and rescue her from the cardboard box on the pier where the Villain left her, warning her NOT TO SAY A WORD lest he do BAD BAD THINGS to her favorite hamster, so she kept quiet, even though the Villain was long gone, and many a passerby had passed her by. The Hero is loyal and loving
and doesn’t seem to mind the fact that she is so FREAKIN’ stupid. How can this be??

Well, my friends, it comes down to the power of the Glittery HooHa, or the GHH for short. A woman with an HH as G as this girl merely needs to walk around as glitter falls from her netherparts, leaving a trail for Hero to follow. And once he finds her, it only takes one dip in the GHH to snare him forever, for yea, no matter how many HooHas he might see, never will there be one as Glittery as hers…

I love Lani Diane Rich.

So, the Glittering HooHa or the GHH. Does my girl Char have one?

Char’s a redhead, not a blonde, and she’s a forty-two-year-old professor of Ancient Near Eastern History, so she’s not dumb although she has had her nose buried in her work for over twenty years which probably isn’t the brightest way to plan your life, and she owns a dog not a hamster, and she doesn’t end up in cardboard box on a pier although she does end up in an ancient temple with a pissed-off goddess . . .

“I don’t see it,” I told Lani.

But as she explained further, the GHH is more universal than the dumb blonde, it is, in fact, applicable to the romance heroine in general. “Char definitely has a GHH,” she told me. “Sam’s toast. One dip and he’s done.”

When I thought about it, I realized she was right about the romance heroine. Take J. T. Wilder, the hero of Don’t Look Down. He sleeps with a hot actress his first day in the story, even though he’s already met our heroine, Lucy, but the next day, he feels that something was missing. He can’t put his finger on it (stop snickering) but of course we know now it’s the GHH. Shortly thereafter, he and Lucy get horizontal and by damn, that’s it for J. T. My writing partner, we’ll call him Bob, took awhile to get used to this, probably because I didn’t know about the GHH and couldn’t explain it to him that way. In fact in his first draft of the day-after-Althea scene, J. T. was thinking he’d had a very good time.

“Nope,” I said.

“You’re kidding me,” Bob said. “He had great sex with a hot actress.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t that great,” I said.

“Yes, it was,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”

“No, it really was.”

“Bob.”

“She’s an actress.”

“Bob.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No.”

So he sighed and wrote in the part about how something had been missing–“Yeah, right,” he said–and saved us from some angry mail although we still got a lot because J. T. dared to sleep with anybody but Lucy in the book. I guess J. T. wasn’t looking at the ground and missed the glitter on that first day.

So now I’m looking at Sam, who is irresistible to women and who in turn sees no point in resisting them, and at Char in her mud brown sweater and sensible shoes, and I’m thinking her GHH better have Super Glitter (which, come to think of it, it does), and that I’m going to have to write the hell out of this because even with a supernatural GHH in front of him, Sam is not going to find fidelity easy.

But at least I have literary convention on my side.

How credit scores are calculated

How credit scores are calculated:



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Excerpt from article (http://www.bankrate.com/finance/debt/how-credit-scores-are-calculated-2.aspx)

Fair Isaac says there are five factors that influence your FICO score.

5 factors that influence your FICO score:

Payment history: 35 percent. The bad news: While regular, on-time payments will keep your score high in this category, just one slip up can undo a lot of your hard work. "Being 30 days or later on one account can cause your score to dip as much as 100 points," says Cunningham.

Amounts owed: 30 percent. Surprisingly, the amount of your income does not impact the typical FICO score (though some creditors will ask for the information for their own models). Instead, the formula looks at how much you owe and compares that against your credit limits, says Watts. Want a better score? Keep that number at or below 25 percent, says Janet Garkey, special materials editor with the Credit Union National Association's Center for Personal Finance. Ever hear the rumor that lenders will be upset if you have a lot of credit that you can tap? It's not entirely false, says Watts. While your FICO won't be affected if you have large amounts of credit available, "some lenders may raise their eyebrows," he says.

Length of credit history: 15 percent. This is the one category over which you really have no control. Lenders want to know how long you've been playing the credit game -- and as far as they're concerned, the longer the better. For creditors, time equals stability. So if you have a good long-term history with a credit card, even if you're not using it, this could be a good reason to keep it open and active.

Interest in obtaining new credit: 10 percent. So how do they know that you're looking for credit? They keep a record of every time someone looks at your credit report. These requests to see your history are known as "inquiries." But there are two kinds, and it pays to know the difference. A hard inquiry is when you actually apply for credit and the potential lender pulls your report. That will actually lower your score. While there seems to be no hard and fast rules for just how much it could hurt you, it's best to avoid hard inquiries if you're about to go shopping for a home or auto loan. (Fun fact: If you're shopping for a mortgage, all the mortgage-related hard inquiries within a two week period will be treated as one -- allowing you to shop around for the best deal.) The same is true if you're hunting for a car loan or home equity loan. If you're not actually asking someone to consider you for a loan, that's called a "soft inquiry." Some examples: a current creditor wants to look at your report; you ask to see your own credit history or a potential creditor wants to scope you out without your permission. Soft inquiries don't affect your score because they do not indicate you're out shopping for more debt. To keep your score high, apply for credit only when you need it. If you're getting ready to make a big purchase, like a home or car, hold off on applying for other types of credit. "You don't want to have lots of activity before you make a major life purchase," says Steven Katz, spokesman for TransUnion, one of the three major credit bureaus.

Mix of credit/miscellaneous: 10 percent. This is kind of a catch-all category, says Watts. But the main factor to analyze is whether your financial history shows a mix of different kids of loans, like mortgages, revolving loans and installment loans. If it does, you demonstrate that you can "responsibly manage more than one type of credit," says Watts.

Your best score

One thing many consumers may not know: Your scores also can vary depending on which bureau the lender contacts. That's because not every credit issuer will necessarily report to every bureau, so the information used to calculate a score could be different.

"A pretty savvy consumer will know all three scores" and will apply for a card that uses the best score, says Arnold.

As careful as creditors and credit bureaus are, mistakes happen. So if you're thinking about making a big buy where a few percent in interest can mean thousands in (or out) of your pocket, pull your credit history and buy your score well in advance.

Allow at least three to six months before you start shopping, says Katz. That way, if you find an error, you've got plenty of time to get it cleared up before a potential lender sees your report.

Says Katz, "Don't wait until immediately before the purchase."

Read more: http://www.bankrate.com/finance/debt/how-credit-scores-are-calculated-1.aspx#ixzz3QLGnM0cW
Follow us: @Bankrate on Twitter | Bankrate on Facebook

Welcome - CompareCollegeTX.com

Welcome - CompareCollegeTX.com:



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This is very useful for comparing Texas colleges. The public ones, at least. I wonder if this exists for other states.