A little bit of backstory as to the design intent of this site.
The Thinker / Le Penseur is a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin. The work depicts a nude male figure of heroic size sitting on a rock. He is seen leaning over, his right elbow placed on his left thigh, holding the weight of his chin on the back of his right hand. The pose is one of deep thought and contemplation, and the statue is often used as an image to represent philosophy. Source : Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker
TLDR (Too Long Didn't Read):
We must think about the validity of what we read online, and question its source or intent.
I have curated some resources and sites that I believe to be good sources of information.
These are my subjective opinion, or have been recommended by friends/colleagues, and are open to critique and debate.
About the Site
An inescapable modern reality is that a real chunk of our lives occurs online. Everyday we plug ourselves in to the digital world; more videos, photos, and articles are posted, new apps are launched for download, software gets updated, and advertisements glue much of it together. As we click and browse, our data creates a digital identity. Part of you lives within the internet, whether or not you want it to.
Teachers and students need to constructively integrate the digital space into their lives.
In my experience, a common struggle exists in education; we know how to use the digital space, but do not know how to navigate it effectively - getting lost in a fog of passwords, cookies, advertisements, media, websites, and software.
I decided to curate what I have found to be the most effective, efficient, and credible online resources into a Digital HQ of sorts. Credible news sources that focus on positive unbiased articles and stories, YouTube channels that focus on stimulating and thoughtful content, websites that serve educational purposes, software/apps that are helpful in day-to-day life, Google classroom content that helps students beyond the classroom, as well as my own content contributions are the main focuses within the folds of this website. I have not created everything embedded in this website, much of it simply links to sources outside the domain.
I hope it can be a light post to help guide you through the digital fog.
Are Teachers Going Extinct?
Will teachers be replaced by online learning? What is their purpose in the online world where everyone has access to everything?
Teachers are storytellers. Sitting down over a drink, great thinkers who have lived fascinating lives have been kind enough to share with me their stories. We've discussed everything from quantum mechanics to celebrity tabloids, from global issues to personal struggle. The world is eclectic, and storytelling is one of the best ways to indulge in its beauty. A teacher listens, thinks, and then shares.
The internet is the ultimate sharing platform, a digital coffee shop of discussion - one of humanities most sophisticated yet chaotic inventions.
The role of an educator is to accelerate learning. An integral part of that now occurs digitally. While anyone can learn just about anything online, "the teacher" helps direct "the student" along that learning path. This requires the ability to understand the student's needs and motivations. The teacher must be able to carefully listen to and perceive the student's world. The teacher must be able to think about the best way to help accelerate that student's learning. And then the teacher must be able to share strong resources and knowledge to spark inspiration.
Teachers will not go extinct, provided we acknowledge that part of the student's world is digital, and teachers who know how to integrate the digital world into their lessons will survive most effectively.
This website is my foray into that digital integration.
Design Motivation
At your fingertips right now is access to more information than you will ever have time to read, learn, and understand. Sinking in to that realization can be very unsettling. With so much information readily available, how do we decide what to view, and what to ignore?
What is information? I suppose you could define it as anything that communicates a meaning from one source to another. This could be in the form of text : a book, an article, a poem, a message. Or it could be in the form of sound : music, a podcast, a recording, a conversation. Or perhaps in the form of visuals : pictures, videos, paintings, images. We are immersed in a world of information, and every moment we are both consciously and subconsciously filtering that information. You are experiencing this right now ...
... as you read the words on this page, you are blocking out distractive images in your peripherals that are trying to tell your brain what is happening to the left and right of you - maybe you just paid attention to them. Perhaps as you read this you are ignoring the vibration that you just felt in your pocket. Perhaps you spaced out and began day-dreaming, and re-read this paragraph because you didn't actively register what you read the first time. Every second, of every day, you are bombarded with information, and you are filtering that information whether you are aware of it or not.
When you pay attention to something, and you process that information, you are learning. You learn what happens to the characters in a book as you read, you learn what your friends are doing as you check Snapchat, you learn new formulas as you attend Math class.
"Learning" isn't something you do in school that ceases the moment you graduate. Get comfortable with the fact that you are a forever-learner, we all are. You learned yesterday, you learn today, and you will learn tomorrow.
How Do You Learn - A History
Generally, what are the absolute truths of learning; and specifically, how do they apply to you as an individual learner?
Some people have an inclination to learn by experience, for example, being immersed in a setting when learning a language, or working with their hands. Others, prefer to learn by analysis, for example, by studying grammar when learning a language, or researching how to build a birdhouse. Others prefer to learn through teamwork, or creation, or repetition - learning has a varied and beautiful spread of style. At the basis of any of these styles of learning, is the acquisition of information.
Let's walk back through time together, and examine some learning revolutions. I like to think of these as periods when we changed the way we processed information, and expedited our learning. The graphic to the right depicts this evolution.
Think Critically About The Information You Consume
You are accessing this information through the internet, reading it, processing it, and filtering for useful and non-useful takeaways. These are simply my thoughts, and haven't been peer-reviewed by any means - so I caution you to question my words as well.
We are all now living in an informationally accelerated world, and we need to have effective methods of consuming that information. As such, I have curated what I believe to be effective information sources. Some are news based, others are academic/learning based, others are student/education based. These are subject to critique, interpretation, and argument, they are simply some information sources that I find to be effective given my worldview and understanding.
I hope you enjoy exploring them in the subpages found under Information Sources in the toolbar at the top of the page.
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