Knomadix is a new suite of apps that are designed to help teachers and school districts easily digitize their already existing curriculum.  Imagine a teacher being able to turn a traditional paper worksheet into an engaging digital activity, or a curriculum developer being able to convert all of an analog curriculum into a digital format. ​ Find out more about the app on our reviews page!

I love when Google adds features to any of its products, but especially Google Forms. If you read this post, you’ll understand my affection for Google Forms. I’m a bit of a Google Form geek This article from Tech Crunch prompted me to do some exploring. Here’s a quick breakdown[Read more] The post Great Additions to Google Forms appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

As I wrote earlier, once the student becomes better acquainted with the research area, it will probably become necessary to slightly revise the original research question. There could be several reasons for this, but largely this is because the review of the previous academic literature on the subject has helped to clarify what the academic community already knows about the topic and what still remains to be discovered. Hopefully this will result in minor adjustments, rather than huge changes of emphasis, but it is important to recognise that this is an ongoing process which will require a bit of settling down. For some people, in certain subject areas, this settling-down process will take longer than others, and a crucial resource to help the process along is - surprise, surprise - the research supervisor! It might seem obvious, but when the research student becomes enmeshed in the research problem, it seems that sometimes they forget to communicate effectively with their supervisor(s). While I always emphasise that the research project belongs to the student, the supervisor also has a very direct interest in the success of the study, and regular discussions between the student and the supervisor are essential. The definition of ‘regular’ can be a bit loose. Does this mean weekly, or monthly, or what? In practice, meetings are usually closer together at the start and towards the end of the PhD, and a bit further apart during the middle period when the student is really getting into the data-gathering and analysis. Perhaps meetings might be every 2-3 weeks at the start, to help orientate the student and discuss the broad plans, and about the same in the later stages to discuss feedback on the writing as each chapter gets produced. Normally I like to meet every 6-7 weeks in the middle phases of the study, just to keep on top of what the student is working on at that time. Similarly, the word ‘discussion’ can be a rather misused term. I don’t just mean quick chats in the corridor or tea-room, and I don’t mean that the student is brought in to hear a monologue from the supervisor. Discussion means both parties exchanging their views. There needs to be a level of trust developed - trust that the student’s half-formed thoughts and ideas can be shared and developed; trust, too, that the supervisor has the student’s best interests at heart and will give detailed feedback which is both supportive and useful. The student is learning the business of advanced research, so it is unrealistic to expect perfection from the outset, yet many students are reluctant to share their ideas and their writing with their supervisor, perhaps in apprehension of looking inadequate. This is completely the wrong attitude. As a supervisor, I cannot give advice unless the student tells me what they are thinking; I cannot give written comment or suggestions until a student submits some text for me to read. The more I learn of how the research project is developing, the more I can share my own thoughts and expertise. After each formal meeting I get the student to email me a half-page summary of what we have discussed and agreed. No-one else need see this summary, but it is a useful record to look back upon as the research project evolves. The effective research supervisor should be both approachable and knowledgeable, and ideally is the best "critical friend" that a research student could have. For a bit of light-hearted reinforcement of this almost symbiotic relationship, check the parable at http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~held/fun/thesis_advisor.txt Don’t say you have not been warned!

It has been a very busy and rewarding start to the month for Filtered. We first attended Learning Technologies (Olympia, London), where we showcased our personalized approach to learning and ran a seminar on today's learners with benchmarking agency Towards Maturity. We then attended the Learning Awards (The Dorchester, London), where - all suited and booted - we were announced double-award winners (read the press release).

We are delighted to announce that two of our clients, Western Union and Aon Plc are finalists in the Training Top 125 Awards. According to Training magazine, a leading business publication for Learning and Development professionals, finalists for the annual Training Top 125, which ranks companies’ excellence in employer-sponsored training and development programs both Western Union and Aon Plc have […] The post Two Nelson Cohen clients, Western Union and Aon Plc are finalists in the Training Top 125 Awards appeared first on Nelson Cohen Consulting.

Jason Kinsella is CEO of Cloud People, an Australian online education company. Cloud People’s Virtual Labs platform has been developed to help education institutions deliver cloud-based practice labs to their students in a user-friendly, cost effective way. Here, Jason explains how Virtual Labs can transform the delivery of IT courses and improve student engagement. Can […]

  What a week! A few days ago we released Uzity 2.0, our biggest update to Uzity—a learning management system for educational institutions and businesses—since the launch of Uzity itself. And here we are today announcing Fedena 3.5. It’s has been almost seven months since our last release. That’s because we’ve been working hard getting all the details right, and to bring you some big changes.   Fedena 3.5 is our biggest release yet and is jam packed with new and enhanced features to help you get the most out of Fedena. As always, we’ve listened to your feedback and made many of the improvements you asked for.   Automating and Simplifying Employee Leave & Payroll By far the biggest change in this release is the completely revamped Human Resources module. We’ve taken the foundation of the module and built out more exciting capabilities:   Employees can apply for additional leave even after exhausting their leave credits. For each Leave type, HR Administrators can define the leave carry forward settings and LOP calculation formula for additional leaves. Managers get notified of additional leaves. They can then mark additional leaves as ‘Loss of Pay’ and the necessary deduction can be made when generating payroll. Use Payroll Groups to organize employees based on their payroll. In addition to monthly payslips, payroll can also be processed Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly, or Semi-Monthly. Payroll Category amounts can contain not just plain numeric values but also be calculated based on formulas or conditional formulas. Ability to generate and manage payslips of all employees from a single view.   Printer Support Fedena now supports the use of Laser, Inkjet, Dot matrix, and Thermal printers, along with the ability to set the page size - A4, A5 Portrait, or A5 Landscape.   Fee payment through Fedena Mobile   Parents and Students can now conveniently check their fee details, pay fees, and download the fee receipts—all from their mobile phones.   More CCE compliant   To make life easier for institutions following the CCE grading system, we have made Fedena more CCE compliant, especially for classes IX and X. Support for 6th subject and Assessment of Speaking and Listening (ASL) subject. Simplified formulas and formative assessment (FA) calculation modes to suit your requirement. Ability to upscale student grades in scholastic areas. Ability to generate the student’s ‘Performance Profile’ report according to the CBSE norms. Other reports as required to be uploaded to the CBSE portal.   Timetable management made more efficient   The way timetables are created and managed has been updated to ease timetable management. We’ve added a new feature called ‘Timetable Summary’ that will give you the subject-allocation status of each batch assigned to a timetable as well as the work hour utilization of employees assigned to a timetable. We’ve also redesigned the ‘Employee Work Allotment’ feature to help you easily manage employee-subject associations.   Exam management made easy   With a small UI redesign, the process of creating and managing exams for batches is now much simpler.   Finance Reports—more usable, more functional   When generating Finance Reports, you’ll notice the beautiful new UI. But it’s much more than just a cosmetic change. You can drill down to student/employee-level and transaction-level details. The report data is now more user-friendly and well organized.   These are just some of the major changes we’ve made to Fedena.   We hope you enjoy this release, and as always, we’d love to hear from you. Write to us at info@fedena.com and let us know your thoughts, questions, and feedback.   The post Fedena 3.5 - Our biggest release yet appeared first on Fedena Blog.

I will be attending and speaking at the Training Magazine Conference in Orlando Florida February 15th - 17th. You can follow what’s happening on Twitter - @jessiner, #trgconf. I’ll periodically post interesting tidbits. It’s looking like it will be a great time with a lot of great information.

Nice visuals are great way of keeping user's interest in online courses and as not every e-learning developer has super awesome designing skills, all the free graphic and icons come in handy in that case. There is a lot of free stuff on the internet to use in your private or commercial projects (always double check the End-user licence agreement to avoid any problems). Have a closer look at the simple picture above - in terms of designing, these icons are quite easy to draw but you'd still have

  "A perpetual feedback process supports and enhances Inquiry Based Learning".   Feedback promotes inquiry; inquiry opens the doors for feedback. When we stifle inquiry processes, we stifle feedback. Likewise, when we stifle feedback, we stifle the inquiry process for our students. What if we changed our perception about what feedback is and how it […]

Learning is the new literacy. Personal computers are just one example. We buy new ones every few years. Operating systems change. Programs change, get replaced, or become obsolete. But we often continue with the same habits until something goes wrong. Few us do the equivalent of ‘looking under the hood’. We learn enough to get our work done, but often do not take time to understand the underlying systems and logic. By not being active learners we lose the agility to react quickly to changing situations. We have to take the time to keep learning. It’s an effort that too many of us avoid. When was the last time you learned a new computer program? How many books do you read? When did you try to master a new skill? These are things we need to make a priority. If not, we risk becoming obsolete before our time. Aiming for retirement is not a bad thing, but what happens when it is forced on us and we are not ready? "Statistics Canada estimates 158,400 people aged 55 to 64 were handed permanent layoffs in 2015. Is there any hope of a comfortable retirement for those folks?" - CBC News When our son was in junior high school he came home one afternoon and said, "There seem to be two types of people, Dad.". "What are they?" I asked. "Gamers, and non-gamers", he responded. As an active computer gamer, he was comfortable being given a problem with no evident solution. Most computer games do not come with instructions, as learning how to master the game is part of the game. He said that other students who were not gamers did not have any strategies on how to look at the problem they were given, as there was no set-step method provided by the teacher. How do gamers learn? They try things out and usually fail: lots of times. They learn from these mistakes and look for patterns. If they get stuck, they check out what others have shared, in online forums. They may ask a friend for help. Sometimes they will look for a ‘hack’, or a way around an impasse. Once they learn something, they might record it and share it, so others can learn. What they do not do is look for the rule book. There are similarities in learning how to participate on the Internet or the Web. Some people just want a formula or procedure so they can get on with their business. Facebook makes this very easy. Others want to have more control. Twitter provides a bit more. But there are others who really want to understand what they are doing. They might set up their own online community using open source software and their own servers. While we cannot all be computer geeks, we live in a computer-driven network age. We ignore automation, the Cloud, the Internet of Things, and surveillance technologies at our peril. Learning is the only literacy that will enable us to counter the negative effects of digital technologies. This literacy is also social. It is learning through communities of practice and knowledge networks, which we have to engage with to make collective sense. How many of those permanently laid-off workers over 55 have external professional networks that can help them find work or get support? Over the years I have met many people in their 40’s or 50’s who suddenly find themselves without work. Most of them do not have a professional network beyond their organization where they may have worked for a decade or more. Once outside the company, they are adrift. Being an active learner by connecting with others outside our everyday lives can expose us to a diversity of skills, knowledge, and perspectives. In a creative economy we are only as good as our networks. An effective network encourages us to keep learning. A good community of practice changes our practice. The more often we change, the better we get at it. For example, my PKM framework was developed from the necessity to develop skills to be competitive in the consulting market. PKM is one way to push ourselves to keep on learning. There are many other ways to keep up, but active learning in social networks is no longer a luxury.   Image: adapting to perpetual beta Further reading: principles of networked management

Throughout our years’ in the software purchasing arena we have been asked many different questions and not surprisingly also many of the same. The process of purchasing software is fairly standard across the board but we also appreciate that each organisation has specific areas of prioritisation. Using this experience we have answered a range of frequently asked questions to arm you during your search and selection of an automated solution.  

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Yesterday I got a call from Anika in Wisconsin who was asking about scripting and structuring her online course. Anika was concerned that she was going to write scripts that were probably going to be too long or too wordy. She wanted to be more efficient in how she was pulling together information and delivering it to her students as online course. To help her out, I created a short video where we go over a really simple way to structure your online course. This is the process we’ve used to create our own personal courses, as well as the courses you see on our training site. Since outlining and scripting is the first step in creating an online course, I wanted to share the video with you as part of our new Youtube show - Teach Online TV. Enjoy! Start With Why The first step to creating a script is to look at it from the perspective of writing an outline and start with the question of why. Why is your student taking your course? Really think about that question and dig deep. Think about how taking your course will change your students’ lives. Will they be better off financially? Will they learn a new skill and make money with it? Will they be able to complete some new art project or be more fit and eat better? Because that’s really what people are looking for and this is going to impact all of your marketing efforts. So, start from that question, how is their life going to be different when they finish your online course and then work backwards to create the steps that they’re going to take to get there. Note - We’ve also created a worksheet that you can download and use offline. Click here to get it! Break It Down Now that you have the answer to that question, you need to come up with five or ten steps that someone is going to take to arrive at that destination. So, for example, let’s say my life is going to be different because I will be eating much healthier after following the ten steps in your course. So those are your ten high level steps and that’s what you start with. Write those down, they should just be a couple of words each, and once you’ve got that then, within each of those steps, you’re going to break it down into another hierarchy. So to accomplish that first step, what are the sub-steps that you need to take to get there? Here’s an example of what your course break down could look like. Essentially you can keep breaking down the topics into steps until your lowest level step is small enough that you can teach it in 2-7 minutes. At that point you can start scripting those individual steps. How will my life be different after I take your course? ___________________ Big Steps or Milestones to achieve the result above: _______________________ (First milestone) Step 1 towards your first Milestone Micro-Step 1______________ (usually by this point you have broken things down far enough that each of these micro steps can be a 2-7 minute lesson) Micro-Step 2 Micro-Step 3 Step 2 - towards first Milestone Step 3 - etc. _______________________ (Second milestone) etc. And you can continue doing this for each of those high-level steps. Generally, I find only two or three levels is ideal. so you’ve got your first set of, say, ten steps and then each one of those steps is broken down into sub-steps and then, at most, each of those sub-steps is further broken down into a few more. Now, when you get to the bottom of that hierarchy, each one of those items is a two to seven minute lesson and you can deliver that message in video or a presentation with voice-over. Create Lessons After you’ve broken it down you can start to work, one by one, on what you’re going to teach people to achieve that goal. It simplifies the whole process, because when you’re writing your script you’re not necessarily thinking about the huge structure of the course and working all the way to that endgame. You’re writing your script from the perspective of this one little goal that you’re going to achieve that’s going to work up that hierarchy and eventually down all of those steps and flow into that end result that you want. I think that’s a great way to approach scriptwriting and a great way to approach coming up with that overall curriculum for your course. It’s going to break it up into bite-sized pieces and it will give you a much better end result. Give It A Shot Hopefully, that gives you a simple framework for structuring and scripting your online course. Give it a shot and let us know how it worked out for you in the comments below. We’ve also created a worksheet that you can download and use offline. Click here to get it! We’re also here to answer your questions, so if you have more questions about creating and marketing and launching online courses, let us now, we’d be happy to help. You can get your questions answered on Teach Online TV by asking us on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #TeachOnline. And if you haven’t checked out Thinkific yet, what are you waiting for? It’s free! The post Teach Online TV #01: Scripting Your Online Course appeared first on Thinkific.

Top Topics and Trends from Learning Technologies 2016! #LT16 A long foot soak was required after a very busy two days at Learning Technologies 2016. The PulseLearning team has been catching up on the main take-away topics and trends presented and discussed during this year’s conference. Conference Tagline: Mobile First! To date the industry has […] The post Learning Technologies 2016 | What we Learned! appeared first on PulseLearning.

They say everything's bigger in Texas. Well the #TCEA16 Annual Conference and Exposition Feb 1 - 5, 2016, did not disappoint. Not only were there a lot of people (over 9000 attendees), but the energy and enthusiasm were equally grand. This year, EdTechTeam went all out with sessions, workshops, exhibit presentations, panel participation and so much more. We kicked things off on Monday by participating in the Google Academy panel. 1100 educators participated by providing pressing questions around the use of Google Apps. One of the key topics that came up most was around identifying the best digital platforms for learning, best tools, resources, creative spaces, safety, and more.It helped solidify that educators in Texas are pushing the envelope beyond the tech and towards creating safe creative and engaging learning environments for students. The panel was led by Google Academy Steering Committee members Stuart Burt and Kasey Bell. Panelists included Carolyn Foote, Eanes ISD; Rafranz Davis, Lufkin ISD; Scott Floyd, White Oak ISD; Monica Martinez, EdTech Team; and Tom Woods, AmplifiedIT. The entire day's program can be found here: Google Academy.Google Education now has a dedicated Texas team to help support GAFE and Chromebook initiatives. Throughout the week they too had a big presence. During the Google Academy and in Room 2 they showcased the Google Expeditions program. With more than 100 current expeditions, the virtual reality platform built for the classroom, engages students in a whole new perspective. Since August 2015, over 500,000 students have gone on an Expedition.If you didn’t get a chance to experience Expeditions, check out the program here: https://www.google.com/edu/expeditions. Sign up to let them know you’d like the Expeditions Pioneer Program to stop at your school. They’ll be making their way to as many schools as possible, but spots are limited. So sign up today!Monday night we had the opportunity to lead and co-sponsor the Texas Google Educator Group Party honoring the Texas GEG Leaders, Texas Google Certified Innovators, Texas Google Certified Trainers, and Administrators. Along with our partners Google for Education and AmplifiedIT, we hosted a two-hour networking event with games, food, and door prizes. 175 Google enthusiasts came together for the night. Texas is well represented among the Google certified educator community. To date there are:>150 Google Certified Trainers>25 Google Certified Innovators>97 district + 6 ESCs in the Texas GAFE Technical CollaborativeAcross the world there are 50 million using Google Apps for Education (GAFE) and 10 million using Classroom. There are 30,000 Chromebooks being activated in schools every school day making it the #1 device in the US two years running.With the continued growth of GAFE deployments and Chromebook implementations across Texas, we’ll be working with passionate educators interested in becoming certified educators. To learn how to become certified and to host a certification training at your school or campus, contact Kate Petty (kate@edtechteam.com). Hosts will receive 3 comp tickets. Huge thanks to Google for Education for their continued support and Google Fiber for the space to host the event. Thanks to AmplifiedIT for providing the funding for our food and WeVideo for providing some of our door prizes.  Monday was only the beginning! We continued the week with back to back sessions and workshops with the Google Edu Team in Room 2, with ViewSonic in the exhibit hall, and throughout the event including a live radio spot on the official TCEA Radio channel. EdTechTeam featured Monica Martinez (EdTechTeam’s Regional Director), Stephanie Villegas, and new to Texas, Sergio Villegas. These Texas rock stars facilitated 21 sessions throughout the week. We tweeted all of our resources, but in case you missed them, here they are: edtech.team/AtTCEA16.On that note, huge thanks for the love on Twitter last week. If you're looking for resources on Google Apps or edtech, here are some great folks to follow and don’t forget to search twitter for #gafesummit. EdTechTeam @edtechteamMonica Martinez @mimg1225Sergio Villegas on Google+Stephanie Villegas @Ms_CerdaOut of everything we shared, our GAFE Tips poster tweet got the most love. People signed up to receive our 11x17 posters that showcase tips on different Google Apps services like Docs, Slides, Chrome, Cardboard, and more. During the TCEA conference, we designed two more: Chromebooks and GAFE Workflows. If you're interested in receiving these posters, sign up here: edtech.team/GAFEposters.All in all, it was a great event for us. We loved being able to connect with old friends like our partners TextHelp and WeVideo, and our 2015 Google Apps for Education Summit hosts. It was also great to make new connections. Among the discussions, we identified new hosts for Google events in 2016. Last year we had amazing hosts in South Texas (Weslaco ISD), East Texas (Sabine Pass ISD), and the Texas Panhandle (Canyon ISD). In addition to these areas, we’re super excited to announce our new 2016 hosts for Google Apps Summits:South Plains Summit (Lubbock ISD) June 1 - 2North Texas (Burleson ISD) June 8 - 9Dallas Area (Royse City ISD) Coastal Bend (Corpus Christi ISD) June 14 - 15and back for year two…Texas Panhandle Summit (Canyon ISD) June 22 - 23And that's not it! We have more in the works for west Texas (Big Bend area and El Paso), East Texas (Beaumont/Port Arthur area), central Texas (Temple, Waco, Hays County), and south Texas (Rio Grande Valley). We hope that you will join us at one or more of these events. More information can be found at tx.gafesummit.com.

Dublin, Ireland February 11th 2016 - Craig Weiss, the most influential person in the global eLearning sector, has named LearnUpon his #8 LMS for 2016. LearnUpon was also named the #2 LMS for SMBs and #2 LMS for associations in Weiss’s influential industry analysis. LearnUpon is the only LMS in the top 10 that allows users to "buy now, go live now" at all price points. The feature enables businesses to deliver eLearning from the moment they sign up to the platform. In positioning LearnUpon ahead of 682 other systems, Weiss recognized the company’s impressive expansion. LearnUpon has doubled its customer base over the past year to become the fastest-growing LMS in the world.   This is the third consecutive year that LearnUpon has risen in Weiss’s annual report ranking the top 50 of 690 learning management systems available globally. Weiss praised the cloud LMS for delivering "a lot for a low price point, even at 1,000 users." The industry’s most respected expert commended LearnUpon’s dedication to constantly improving the platform, with new features released monthly. Weiss singled out LearnUpon’s Gold, Platinum and Enterprise packages for recommendation to prospective LMS buyers.   Rankings are based on an independent assessment conducted by Weiss’s company, E-Learning 24/7. LearnUpon was awarded its three top positions based on criteria like pricing, features, ease of implementation and integration, and the security, reliability, and scalability of the LMS. In his blog post announcing the award, Weiss described LearnUpon as "a very easy to use LMS which continues to go up the rankings, every year."   The achievement confirms LearnUpon’s leading position in the LMS market. The cloud-based LMS now serves over 500 customers internationally, including PING, Mars, Citrix, Deliveroo and DocuSign. Commenting on the award LearnUpon’s CEO, Brendan Noud, said: "We’re delighted to have risen once again in Craig Weiss’s definitive report on the LMS market. As one of the most influential people in the eLearning industry for many years, it is great to be ranked in the Top 10 LMSes globally for the 2nd year in a row. Our solution is unique in the top 10 in offering instant implementation from the moment of sign up. Placing in the top 8 of almost 700 LMS vendors is something we’re very proud of. We’re getting ready to roll out some of our biggest ever developments to continue to deliver the best service in the market to our hundreds of happy customers."   Try LearnUpon free for 30 days .learnupon.com Agree to Terms of Service Start my free trial The post Craig Weiss names LearnUpon a top 10 LMS for 2016 appeared first on LearnUpon.

Exploring the CIF: The importance of Data Analytics Guest writer: Judy Bloxham Recent headline cases of poor and inadequate Ofsted inspection results should act as an alert to all, of the change of focus in the Common Inspection Framework (CIF) introduced last year. The results of the first five colleges inspected under the new CIF […]

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here Say hello to #NoFluff marketing It’s fast, honest and it’s free. This week, during a quick rush of blood to the head, we launched our #NoFluff marketing offer. It’s a free and exclusive deal for anyone mentioned in the #LTExitpoll we ran last week. Here’s the skinny Every year we get lots of people asking questions about the squeaky details behind the #LTexitpoll. Those who do well naturally want to know exactly how well they did. Those with honorable mentions want to know just how close they came to getting the cigar. So this year we thought we’d answer these calls by producing #NoFluff ads based on real feedback from actual #LT16UK visitors. Here’s the brave and the bold bit You don’t get to see the ad before we publish it. It’s #NoFluff. Its message is based squarely on honest feedback from the real L&D professionals we questioned at Learning Technologies last week. And when you think it right through, what possible added value could highly paid, well educated company brand managers add to that ;). Here’s one we did earlier Want one of your own? Just like us on facebook.       See the full story Say hello to #NoFluff marketing

Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." - John F. Kennedy - via @AdriaanG_LP @Tom_Peters: "Presidents rarely get good advice. Every "presenter" presents a totally biased solution-often suppressing competing evidence." @DonaldClark: Unified theory of ‘learning’ emerges - and it’s mind blowing "The idea is that learned behavior, and not just environment and genes, influences the direction and rate of the evolution of psychological and physical traits. The mind is a learning machine and it is the various aspects of this ability to ‘learn’ that may have had driven evolution and our success as a species. The Baldwin Effect places ‘learning’ on a larger theoretical canvas, lying at the heart of evolutionary theory. It is no longer just a cognitive ability, albeit a complex one, with many different systems of memory, but a feature that defines the very success of our species." Informal knowledge sharing alone will create employable workforces - via @C4LPT [I can’t really disagree with this] "For a company to thrive, it must create a culture where knowledge is actively shared between employees, partners and customers. This mostly comes from informal learning, which can include everything from social interactions both online and offline and curated insights from various sites and key influencers that are personalized to each individual’s interest-graph." Elon Musk on how to build knowledge - via @AndreaKuszewski How do you learn so much so fast? Lots of people read books and talk to other smart people, but you’ve taken it to a whole new level. Musk: I do kinda feel like my head is full! My context switching penalty is high and my process isolation is not what it used to be. Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to. Coopération : la technologie renforce le naturel "Jacques Lecomte insiste sur ce point : "nous sommes prédisposés pour l’entraide, mais non programmés pour cela". Les travaux de Robert Axelrod, notamment The evolution of cooperation, ont d’ailleurs bien montré l’influence du milieu sur l’apparition et la diffusion de comportements coopératifs." Image: Gapingvoid Art

I am excited to be bringing you our 11th episode on adapted physical education and activity (APE/APA). This episode specifically focused on non-profits within the field of adapted physical activity for people with disabilities. We were able to gather a terrific panel of directors from various non-profits from across the nation. In this podcast we discuss topics relating to why someone would start a non-profit all the way to how to get people with disabilities more involved in physical activity.Additionally, we are very excited to have added a new portion to the show. It is called What's New in History in Adapted Physical Activity. The portion looks at interesting events and facts in history with people with disabilities. Not all of the features will pertain to APE/APA events. Such as the one I chose to spotlight today, where does sign language (ASL) come from. Let me know what you think of the new portion.We interviewed three different non-profits from throughout the nation. Here is a quick description of the organizations that were on the podcast:RISE Adaptive Sports:RISE is based in North Texas. RISE offers a variety of different inclusive activities and sports for people with disabilities. A few of the sports they offer include WCMX (Extreme Wheelchair Skating), Wheelchair Rugby, and Water Skiing. RISE's mission is to empower and inspire people with disabilities through recreational and adaptive sports. Click here to learn more about RISE.TEAM GUTS: GUTS offers fitness opportunities to people with special needs. Team GUTS offers programs such as strength training, yoga, dance, ballet, Zumba, and Boxercise (boxing/exercise), as well as sports-specific programs like soccer, football, and baseball for people with disabilities. GUTS is located right outside of Detroit, Michigan.  Click here to learn more about GUTS. Adaptive Sports and Recreation Association (ASRA):ASRA works to build programs of adaptive sports for individuals with a physical disability by providing competitive league sports, recreational team sports, instructional camps, sports clinics, and offers other adaptive sports based on need and interest. ASRA is based out of San Diego, California. Click here to learn more about Adaptive Sports and Recreation Association.One last announcement for the podcast, is that we are currently looking for sponsors to help our podcast movement grow. Please let me know if you are interested in running a quick advertisement on the show. You can message us through the comments section on the right side of the blog. All the ads are required to be related to disabilities or disability services. 

Last week, the folks over at LEGO® Education were kind enough to send me their new WeDo 2.0 kit for review.  This kit is designed to help teach elementary students the basics of programming, robotics, and even STEM skills through hands-on, interactive methods.  It’s a pretty awesome tool, with a lot of educational potential, and you can find out more on our reviews page!

In the spirit of professional growth and a bright beginning to the New Year, please enjoy The Learning Café’s new Six Word Aspiration tool. You may be familiar with six word stories; they have been used for over a decade as a creative way to express important ideas in communities, business, churches, even the military. There is something about succinct, distilled phrases that draw out our deepest intents. Pretty cool, it works. And of course, you’re welcome to share with your colleagues, friends and family. Click here to view the PDF.