Friday Four – Is it Spring yet?

Well, it appears that spring may actually have arrived in New England and baseball season can finally start. To celebrate the arrival of the Vernal Equinox, I offer up this week’s interesting finds. Enjoy!

• Here is a recent post from Annie Murphy Paul (@anniemurphypaul) on the power and use of feedback in the classroom based on research by John Hattie. If you do not already follow Annie on Twitter or subscribe to her blog, I would encourage you to do so. She is a wonderful resource for information about thinking and learning for those who do not have the time to scour through lots of research on their own.
• Tired of hearing about the five or six or seven “C’s” of essential learning for the 21st century learner? (When will we finally admit that the “C’s” are timeless and have not all of a sudden become important?) Bo Adams (@boadams1) may have a simpler solution that he posits in this post from his blog.
• Looking for a way to easily create multimedia presentations either to use in class or for your students to create instead of a poster or traditional paper? Check out Soo Meta a website where you can pull together images, video clips and all sorts of content and create short little videos. Thanks to Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne) and his blog freetech4teachers for bringing this neat tool to my attention.
• The final piece this week is a long but interesting research report that I came across via one of Annie Murphy Paul’s blog posts (I can not find her post unfortunately so you may have to search her blog if you are interested in her summary of the piece) that is titled “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology.” Daniel Willingham, whose work I really like, is one of the authors which immediately drew me to the piece.  From the abstract…”In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students.”  There conclusions may surprise you on a few of the techniques they studied.

Enjoy the weather!