Empedia

What I discovered this week is this really cool tool featured on Technology Tidbits. It’s pretty much a social encyclopedia. So the information is not new, but what are new are the experiences behind it. Experiences can define people; describe you and our extremely helpful. The idea for this website erupted in 2007 with the creation of the online encyclopedia, it’s apparent that it was created then because while entering information on all these different topics it’s obvious how many are applicable to our lives. So here is an example- you click on the browse link and figure out what you want to enter. I just picked the artist Michael Jackson. It gave me a pretty long biography on him that you would read on any other encyclopedia but underneath it you found peoples comments. You can "thumbs up or thumbs down" the item and give feedback on who that person is, background information about him/her or the place or anything else for that matter that you may be aware of that the internet doesn't have. This could include personal experiences, if you have visited the location or met the person, this could include the impact it had on your life. It does not always have to be positive feedback; sometimes what you’re talking about was a negative experience for you and in that case writes about it. It is always good to see as many different points of views on something as possible. Now it is not really a credible website so wouldn't be the best tool to use for a research paper, but it’s got a lot of information that could come to great use for tons of different things. I really found it to be a cool encyclopedia resource that gives you a twist on information.

Doodling an essential skill to develop & support in our students?

The langwitches blog discusses a not very popular topic, because doodling has always been something that has been used to "kill time". Now that researchers are discovering it is in fact effective it could open several doors for teaching and for students to learn from. The first discussion talked about a movie a teacher played. She had students write notes on the movie and then she discovered the one student who doodled his drawings instead of hand wrote it took down much more information and detail. It depends on the type of learner you are of course, but it is obvious that this works well for visual learners. In a specific clip doodling was defined as to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think. How true, it really is extra detail on the side to help students think deeper into what they are learning. A couple questions that have been asked are, Does doodling calm a mind that is constantly bouncing off the wall? Yes. Is doodling beneficial for a visual learner? Yes. The problem is as I mentioned before it may be a learning device that is only successful for specific learners. But is has proven more positives than negatives and seems to be getting really high and positive ratings on the idea of getting this involved in classrooms more.