Cheery Friday Greetings from Learning How to Learn! Jul 29, 2016

Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

An App to Help with Daily Math Practice

Last year, Learning How to Learner Greg Edmunds was struggling to learn Mandarin, even as he was carrying out a 70 hour a week work schedule. This led Greg to our Learning How to Learn course, which ultimately lead him to design and develop a series of learning apps (something he had known nothing about).

Greg has developed a wonderful new app, Smartloq Math, to to leverage smartphone behavior and break what you are learning into micro-practice events, to keep people practicing consistently throughout the day…every day. Here’s an excellent review about how good this app is. If you (or some kids you know) are looking to brush up on math, give this a try!

Acting After Illness

Here is actor David King’s story of recovery after a brain bleed produced his darkest hour. Our MOOC Learning How to Learn helped lead him back to acting! If you are in London on the 8th and 9th of August, you can see David back to work at the Ecetera Theatre Camden–all ticket sales go to support brain and spinal research.

MOOC of the Week

Barb’s currently taking the Coursera MOOC Emergence of Life, by Bruce Fouke of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The MOOC has just started, so feel free to join us!

How to Read More Books

We’re keen fans of writing coach Daphne Grey-Grant–here’s a great blog post from her on how to read more books. Incidentally, you may wish to subscribe to Daphne’s free “power writing” newsletter–her recommendations have helped Barb a lot over the years in both her book writing and research. (Here’s Daphne’s always popular video in Learning How to Learn on how to improve your writing ability.)

An Excellent Guide to Help You Master the SAT/ACT, and other book ideas to improve your learning

We have always admired Robert and Elizabeth Bjork–their groundbreaking work has done much to improve our understanding of memory and learning. Along those lines, Dr. Nicholas Soderstrom, a post-doc in the Bjork lab, has written the excellent book Study Smart:10 Ways to Master the SAT/ACT Using the Science of Learning. This book will not only help you master the ACT/SAT—it will also help improve all of your learning, especially related to preparing for standardized exams. What we particularly like about this book is that it gives you all the ideas in a condensed, but very easy-to-read book. To learn more about the book, click here.

Incidentally, the Bjorks’ work was featured in How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, by New York Times’ journalist Benedict Carey. If you like to read books on learning, this is a good one to tuck under your belt, along with the ever popular Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. (A complete list of books and tools we recommend to help with your learning is in the course resources section, here.)

Incidentally, we should mention that Barb’s A Mind for Numbers, the foundation for Learning How to Learn, is becoming a big hit in Japan–it is already going into its fourth printing since it came out in May. (直感力を高める　数学脳のつくりかた).

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

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