by Presto Plans Do your students find joy in poetry? When teachers begin a poetry unit, they already face the challenge that students will already have their walls up before you even start. Typically, this reluctance comes from previous experiences where they've felt confused and unengaged by poetry. In some cases, this is a result of their experience with poetry simply being analysis without engagement. Teachers can help students find joy in poetry by making it a more interactive process. We can get them to move around the classroom, discuss poetry with peers, include an element of competition, and much more in our poetry instruction. These strategies sometimes come more easily with for other genres in our ELA curriculum, and we...
“Why do we have to read so much in here?” I have fielded this question from students several times over the years. By the time my students reached high school, many were disillusioned with reading. They found it tedious, challenging, or boring. I understand why so many students feel this way, given that reading is often a one-size-fits-all experience. Teachers select a text or pull from an established curriculum and require that all students read the same text at the same pace. Teachers often ask them to process the text and share their learning in the same way as well. Teachers may lead the entire class through a guided reading or ask students to read the text independently in silence...
OpenAI has unveiled a new AI tool that turns text into images — and the results are stunning. Named DALL-E 2, the system is the successor to a model unveiled last year. While its predecessor generated some outputs, the new version is a major upgrade. This picture in the style of Claude Monet illustrates the improvements. Credit: OpenAI DALL-E-2 adds enhanced textual comprehension, faster image generation, and four times greater resolution. “When approaching DALL-E 2 we focused on improving the image resolution quality and improving latency, rather than building a bigger system,” OpenAI researcher Aditya Ramesh told TNW. Animal helicopter…This story continues at The Next Web
By Child & Family Blog Editor Communication involves more than words. There is strong evidence that gestures used with speech enhance comprehension of the listener and help the speaker communicate. Children, especially, rely on gestures to express their ideas. Researchers have described gestures as “scaffolding” the child’s talk, freeing up cognitive resources to help them communicate. Speaking and gestures are so tightly coupled that they can be considered a single system of communication. This means that gestures or “hand work” have an important role in teaching and learning. A recent study asked: Is non-verbal communication used in similar ways in culturally different communities? The study examined the way children and their parents in two cultures – a Native American...
Lynn Grieveson/Getty ImagesMost people welcomed the opportunity to get vaccinated against COVID-19, yet a non-trivial minority did not. Vaccine-resistant people tend to hold strong views and assertively reject conventional medical or public health recommendations. This is puzzling to many, and the issue has become a flashpoint in several countries. It has resulted in strained relationships, even within families, and at a macro-level has threatened social cohesion, such as during the month-long protest on parliament grounds in Wellington, New Zealand. This raises the question: where do these strong, often visceral anti-vaccination sentiments spring from? As lifecourse researchers we know that many adult attitudes, traits and behaviours have their roots in childhood. This insight prompted us to enquire about vaccine resistance among...
