Cameron Brown's Blog – March 2009 Archive (5)

I found the Discover March 2009 article "Are we still evolving?" by Kathleen McAuliffe very interesting. The article discusses evidence for human evolution that has taken place over the past 50,000 years. As an educator I found it particularly interesting when the writer discussed the possible evolutionary basis for ADHD. The notion that ADHD and the patterns of behavior that are associated with the disorder, could have at some point, provided our… Continue

I just read this article from edweek that discusses President Obama's educational intitiatives. Certainly merit-based pay is something many of us dedicated, motivated educators get excited about, but I think the devil is in the details here...Of course I want to make more money and have my work recognized, but I have trouble seeing how this type of program would work. What criteria will be… Continue

I teach high school science at a small international school in Busan, South Korea where 90% of our students are ethnic Korean (check out BFS here). We have a substantial ESL population. The attention level of some of these students is very low, which I believe in some cases is linked to their comprehension level. I was inspired by stumbling apon this website that used vodcasting as… Continue

I just found this article discussing the use of Second Life in teaching science. I have no experience with Second Life but must admit my interest is piqued. Curious if other teachers have tried using SL in their teaching(?).

I have been doing lots of research on on-line teaching and learning recently. I have gotten into the habit of downloading loads of podcasts from various websites, putting them on my 2GB iriver media player and listening to them as I walk my cocker spaniel pup around the neighborhood (http://www.edtechtalk.com or http://www.palomar.edu/atrc/FeaturesIndexes/TipsIndex.htm). I'm a high school science teacher and I remember learning about the hey day of German scientific scholarship around the early… Continue