The brush of your steps.

I met the Invisible Children group back in 2005 when they came to my High school and promoted one of their first videos. I was sincerely touched by this group who had gone to Uganda, and encountered atrocious crimes and was trying to bring them to light. I never heard much of Invisible Children since then until two days ago, when everything went crazy. Hence, I was writing my original post out of rage more than reason, so sorry about that. I have read the articles you have posted, and did some more research. Upon relooking at some things, and doing some comparisons between Invisible Children, who spends ~80% of their revenue in program expenses, in comparison to Red Cross which spends about 90%, it made sense to me. Invisible Children spends about 16% in Administrative expenses, when the Red Cross stays about at 4%. This sounds shocking, but when you think about it, the Red Cross CEO gets a million dollar salary, and the Invisible Children founders get about 89,000 (both which I w...

                This chapter covers a lot of technologies that allow us to improve learning in the classroom. Some of the key components that a lot of the technologies seem to focus on are: ·          the understanding of what the student knows before the interactions, ·          what erroneous preconceived notions he has (conceptual barriers), ·          and implementing methods that experimentally have shown to tackle these conceptual barriers and achieve basic learning. These technologies have different uses and applications in learning, which is generally not attributed to the development of new learning theories, but rather to the core benefits of technology in general. Firstly, communication is one of those huge benefits new technology has brought along. One of the benefits of that in education is in the pos...

This chapter addressed the effectiveness of teaching in three common fields in elementary, middle, and high schools. These fields were History, Mathematics, and Science. It was very explicit and provided examples on how being an effective teacher does not mean that one can teach every field, and that the most successful teachers are actually incredibly resourceful and proficient in their field. Further, their skills are tailored to the specific field in which they teach. They retouched on some examples of History we had seen before, and how it can be a field to learn facts in, or a field where you study and interpret certain events in order to deduce what actually occurred in history. The example of Bob Bain struck home quite quickly in the sense that I was really disappointed in my experiences in History throughout school. I had never experienced a professor like him or Ms. Kelsey, whose strategies seem to actually engage these students in a historical adventure which I now seem to...

                This chapter was very interesting in tackling four concepts which I will explain in moderate detail to tackle the idea of learning and the effect the environment can have on that. The first type of environment (and it is often noted that none of these environments is exclusive of the others) is learner centered. In this environment it is important to recognize where the student is coming from. This is not strictly cultural, but also involves previous learned knowledge from past grades, and any other factors outside of the classroom which contribute to his/her experiences. This idea has been proven to be significant with experiments asking students to relate home experiences to their current work, and it thereby improving test performance on reading. While focusing on the environment may be essential, it is very difficult to determine what is stored as experiences. To narrow that down, knowledge – centered environments (the ...

                 Tread carefully when applying theories that you believe about the brain to learning. A lot of the myths that are quickly debunked in the chapter often have an effect on learning strategies for students that may not actually benefit them. It is important to look at the brain and focus on what we are most certain about, as this is what will benefit our learning. First and foremost, we have an understanding about the structure of our brain and how it is formed. Like a sculpture artist who starts with a block and ends with Abraham Lincoln, our brain too has over produced synapses, and essentially keeps the ones we use. This would be supported by why it is so much easier to learn languages when we are children. Further, the other way the brain’s connections are formed are from nothing. As we learn, it seems to be the case that experience creates new synapses where they were none previously, and this is incredibly fascinating be...