Why we should keep practicing

This is a great and timely article about the benefits of practice.  Here's the key message:

“The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems as if the task has been learned,” said Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance.”

Practice works.  Just ask Ray Allen.

To read the article in full, click here.

To see concrete evidence of how practice has been so beneficial to Ray Allen, watch the You Tube clip below of Allen's under pressure, and effectively series winning, three point shot from the NBA finals earlier in the week:  

Four words that will vastly improve learnng!

Four words that will vastly improve learning:

'These people are special'.

To find out more, read this article from the author of The Talent Code, Dan Coyle.  The areticle starts:

'Talent identification is the holy grail of sports, business, parenting, and education. We dream of having the magical ability to quickly and accurately assess who is destined to succeed; to sort the contenders from the pretenders'.

IT classrooms of the future

It's all very well to have one-to-one classrooms with students using ICT devices.  The most important factor is how the resources are being used; are the tasks being done on ICT devices simply the same tasks that could be using traditional resources, or are students being introduced to a whole new learning dimension that are reliant on them having access to iPads, teblets, netbooks, etc?

Here's a take on IT classrooms of the future from today's New Zealand Herald.  The article starts:

'Students and parents give their blessings to new e-learning computer technology

Meet the classrooms of the information technology haves and have-nots.

Marshall Laing Primary School, a decile-six multi-cultural school in the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill, has two pilot classes based on the increasingly popular Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) electronic classroom'.

To read the article in full, click here.

How to teach Mandarin using Google Plus

I have recently started a Mandarin language teaching programme using Google Plus.  For an overview of the process click here to view a Google presentation.