Merlin Mann stated that employees’ motivation increases when they get to “build a robot” once in a while. That is, do something creative beyond regular work. Can we do this at school? Offices have “casual Fridays,” can we have “curiosity Fridays?”
Tagged WithResearch
Experiment-Based Curiosity Project
How I’d build a curiosity project around an experiment rather than just research.
A Clock Math Project?
A reader wrote in, asking how to differentiate for a task like reading analog clocks. What to do with a student who has mastered this skill? What’s a good math clock project?
Creating Better Research Questions
Once students have a topic they’d like to research, how do we help them form more interesting questions?
Inductively Evaluate Website Reliability
Last time, we discussed a few ways to help students search Google. Google helps us find related websites, however its ranking system does not necessarily return the most reliable pages. The final step requires our human mind to make difficult decisions that computers can only approximate. Simply choosing the top result is not enough. We must teach our students to evaluate websites.
The Eight Great Gripes of Gifted Students
In a 1985 study, Judy Galbraith identified eight great gripes of gifted students. Let’s think about what we can do to meet these needs. It will require more than just making our lessons academically challengeing.
Teaching Search Skills
We begin our year with an ancient tools projects. Students build the tools that early man would have access to. Naturally, many students want to build spears. We type “spears” into Google. Guess what comes up? That’s right: page after page about Britney Spears.