Gifted Update from ODE

I received an email with the following information. Please click on the link below to access this month’s Gifted Update: http://www.ode.state.oh.us/GD/Templates/Pages/ODE/ODEDetail.aspx?page=3&TopicRelationID=503&ContentID=14325&Content=124381 These are PDF documents. If you do not have Adobe Reader, click here (http://get.adobe.com/reader/) for a free download. You can also access this page by visiting the ODE website at http://education.ohio.gov and search the term “gifted update.” This month’s update should be live in the next few days.

Kahn Academy collaborating with VLA

The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. They are a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge. Their library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer. The virtual Learning Academy (VLA)is collaboratimg with the Kahn Academy so many videos are now embedded into the content of our program! There are over 3,000 videos a the present time in the Kahn Academy and VLA is working on embedding videos as needed! Click on the following link to check out the Kahn Academy: Kahn Academy

PhET Interactive Simulations is a wonderful way to explain various scientific techniques. Fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena from the PhET™ project at the University of Colorado. PhET provides fun, interactive, research-based simulations of physical phenomena for free! The website offers over 70 million simulations on areas such as Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, and Math. Some example simulations cover subjects such as bending light, balancing chemical equations, building a molecule, gravity and orbits, and many, many more! To help students visually comprehend concepts, PhET simulations animate what is invisible to the eye through the use of graphics and intuitive controls with click-and-drag manipulation, sliders and radio buttons. And to further encourage quantitative exploration, the simulations also offer measurement instruments including rulers, stop-watches, voltmeters and thermometers. As the user manipulates these interactive tools, responses are immediately animated thus effectively illustrating cause-and-effect relationships as well as multiple linked representations (motion of the objects, graphs, number readouts, etc.) The Virtual Learning Academy is a sponsor for PhET simulations and we have a partnership where PhET simulations are now being embedded into the VLA curriculum! Check out their website to see for yourself all that PhET Interactive Simulations has to offer! http://phet.colorado.edu/

Check out this website for a cool App!

Check out this cool website for an App called APPitic. A collection of 1,300 + apps for education. Look for whole sections of apps for Bloom's Taxonomy and Multiple Intelligences. Click on the blue link below the picture.

APPitic.com

Several Ways to Differentiate Instruction

This the first post in a two-part series on differentiation by Larry Ferlazzo. The website is Education Week TEACHER.

Click on the link below to follow the material:

EDUCATION WEEK TEACHER SPOTLIGHT

Common Myths in Gifted Education

Check out the website below for "Common Gifted Education Myths".

Common Myths

The myths include:

* Gifted students don't need help; they'll do fine on their own
* That student can't be gifted; he's receiving poor grades
* Teachers challenge all the students, so gifted kids will be fine in the regular classroom
* Gifted students are happy, popular, and well adjusted in school
* Gifted students make everyone else in the class smarter by providing a role model or a challenge
* This child can't be gifted; he has a disability
* All children are gifted
* Our district has a gifted and talented program; we have AP courses
* Acceleration placement options are socially harmful for gifted students * Gifted education requires an abundance of resources
* Gifted education programs are elitist

Perfectionism

An exchange in Pixar's The Incredibles sums up the absurdity that has ensued: "Everyone's special," says one character, only to have another rejoin, "Which is another way of saying no one is."

An article by Will Fitzhugh entitled, "Art Without Craft" (May 2008) has a quote that made me think...."The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work". You could use this with the gifted/talented students and then have a discussion on perfectionism. A teacher could refer to an art project - a piece of art - how long should you have to work on a single assignment? When does "enough" equal "done"?

Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) had a quote that may be helpful: "The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work."

We, as teachers, do want EXCELLENCE, which is attainable. We can ask our students to strive for things that are important to them and the world. Remind the students that nothing or no one is perfect.

We need to be mindful that we have to learn to choose our areas of perfectionism. Perfectionism is exactly what we want out of our brain surgeons, but not all areas of our lives need perfection. We need to choose perfectionism in appropriate circumstances, and it needs to be saved for those areas where it really matters.

Teachers need to encourange excellence without exacerbating negative aspects of perfectionism. Children, of course, need encouragement and support. But they also need to be pushed beyond the very human inclination toward self-centeredness and impatience, and be given a chance to experience both the discouragement and, finally, the joy in spending time and effort in making a thing well or in pursuing an interest doggedly, just because it's worth doing — not for the sake of praise.