Barb in Oslo! Teaching Students How to Learn

31st August 2018

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

This week’s book recommendation is Saundra McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation. We thought we knew a lot about how to help students succeed, but Saundra’s inspiring book reframed the topic even more positively for us, and gave us a lot of great new strategies.  (Barb was lucky enough to speak with Saundra about her book a few days ago—Saundra herself is a force to be reckoned with in helping reshape attitudes towards student learning.)

Barb Giving a One Day Workshop on Learning in Oslo, Norway

On Monday, September 10th, Barb will give a Learning How to Learn workshop for parents and teachers right in the city center of Oslo from 8:00 am to 2:45 pm. The organizer has set aside a small number of free seats for students of Learning How to Learn, so if you are interested in joining Barb in this workshop in Oslo, send an email here.

A Podcast on Metalearn

Discover the challenges of becoming a thought leader,  and the processes behind teaching children to learn effectively in this wide-ranging conversation between Barb and Nasos Papadopoulos.

A Podcast Conference Entirely Focused Around Educational Podcasts

Whether you are a podcast fan or a podcast creator (or both!), there is a  new podcast conference for you called “Sound Education” that is entirely focused around educational podcasts.  The conference is organized by Zach Davis from the podcast Ministry of Ideas. There are a lot of exciting panels and talks on the schedule, including Dan Carlin from the hit podcast Hardcore History as the keynote. Hat tip to LHTLer Erik Jones, who notes: “It’s an event I think many lifelong learners who listen to podcasts would be really into.”  The conference will be held at Harvard Nov 2 and 3—go here for more: https://www.soundeducation.fm.

Digital Text is Changing How Kids Read—Just Not in the Way That You Think

Here is a wonderful article by Holly Korbey on the Mindshift website about how kids’ reading habits are changing. Key graf: “For many parents and teachers worried that spending so much time with video games and Snapchats will shred kids’ attention spans—the average 8-12-year-old spends about six hours a day in front of a screen, and teenagers spend more than nine — Willingham thinks they may be concerned about the wrong thing. He isn’t convinced that spending so many hours playing Super Smash Bros will shorten kids’ attention spans, making them unable to sustain the attention to read a book. He’s more concerned that Super Smash Bros has trained kids’ brains to crave experiences that are more like fast-paced video games.” [Hat tip Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success.]

Interested in Teaching Students about Entrepreneurship?

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) has great free books for teachers and an abundance of new media, courses, and workshops available to educators at FEE.org/educate.

Summary of How to Develop a Perfect Memory

Polymath Arthur Worsley has just finished a 5,000-word book summary of Dominic O’Brien’s How To Develop a Perfect Memory. It breaks down the 5 tools O’Brien used to become the 8-time World Memory Champion: The Journey Method, Linking, Association, The Dominic System and Reviewing. And to make it even easier for people to get started, Arthur has created 6 dynamic templates that set up the 3 basic memory systems (Journey, Number Shape and Dominic) and then automatically create 3 bonus systems (Playing Cards, Chess and Binary Number) that are downloadable for free as part of the summary! Add to that 21 step-by-step guides on memorizing everything from names, faces and numbers to speeches and your calendar and it’s a pretty thorough intro to the world of mnemonics.

Readable Math Textbooks   

 Dan Umbarger writes: “I spent 30 years teaching arithmetic, mathematics, and computer science to grades 5-12.  I found that many of the students in upper level (high school) math would not read their books because of the unappealing way they were written.   There was a disconnect between the maturity of the students and the formal style in which the books were written.

 Dan has written three books:

 

 

 

 

A spot check reveals that Dan teaches Bayes theorem in the same highly visual way that Barb does—which she takes as a very good sign. Check these books out if you have an interest!

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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