Month: October 2012

Cat Links Pedagogy, Technopedagogy

Popplet and its educational potential

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Explain effectively, with few words

Here is an interesting tool that allows students and teachers to work differently. Thanks to Popplet, students can organize their thinking in a different way by using images, drawings, videos to demonstrate concepts specific to a theme. The popular expression holds that a picture is worth a thousand words. Popplet understood this. For each image or bubble, there is the possibility of adding a few words that can justify the idea or specify the links between two bubbles.

What I see as potential, in the first place, is certainly the decrease in the need to write and use words to describe a concept, a situation. It is the art of linking the schematic and the concise and applying it to all possible and imaginable educational sauces. Because today, it is no longer true that students have to write work which, page after page, describes a reality.

Understand, Popplet allows you to give real importance to words without using them. Should this internet application replace the good old dissertations or more theoretical essays? NO ! It’s like any other educational tool or strategy. It should be used alternately and sparingly so that the interest and relevance of using it with students remains high.

Learn to work in a team

Beyond the question of the graphic organization of information, there is the whole question of sharing and the possibility of accomplishing real collaborative work among students (and teachers). By creating a Popplet, we can give access to colleagues who contribute to the work by inviting them. Each contribution is identified with the name of the user who added your two cents. It’s fantastic! More than I did all the work on my own or did nothing ! Easily, it is possible to transfer and edit the document so that it always remains current and relevant. Popplet makes it possible to become the technopedagogical   Read the rest

Cat Links Education

Better understand adolescent impulsiveness and egocentricity

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Secondary education professionals testify to this daily: adolescents push back the limits of egocentricity and extreme behavioral variations.

We all know that adolescence is marked by profound physical, hormonal and psychological changes associated with puberty. New medical technologies are enabling new mapping of the brain, and neurologist, professor and researcher in cognitive neuroscience, Sarah-Jayne de Blakemore of the University College of London (UCL) has a few explanations for us.

His research, conducted using a new magnetic resonance imaging technique, reveals several interesting findings that all teachers and parents working with teens should know:

  • Decrease in gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, which can be explained by a certain purification of synaptic activity where the lobe gets rid of certain synapses with a view to renewal with a view to carrying out new cerebral activities. The brain is, in fact, molting to prepare for abandoning childish tasks to accomplish more complex tasks intended for adult life;
  • The study of the so-called social brain reveals that the brain activity of the median prefrontal cortex is reduced compared to the same region in an adult, which explains that the brains of teens and those of adults employ different strategies during various social interactions. .
  • Social perspectives, due to brain development, are therefore essentially altered in adolescents. This explains why teens cannot react in the same way as adults when faced with situations of common life.
  • This results in a marked difficulty in taking into account a perspective from others, which aims to guide their own behavior in every sense of the word.
  • The adolescent’s social judgment is therefore impaired by a slowing down of certain areas of the brain.

The research results would therefore explain, at least in part, the behaviors that are usually denounced by adults about adolescents:

  • They are brainless and take unnecessary risks, regardless of
  Read the rest