Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Shakespeare's words and expressions

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

storybird

http://storybird.com/books/the-adventures-of-cats-when-mom-isnt-home/

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

English is spoken by 1.2 billon people

English as an universal language

English as a Universal Language

by Carlos Carrion Torres - Vitoria ES - Brazil

English is without a doubt the actual universal language. It is the world's second largest native language, the official language in 70 countries, and English-speaking countries are responsible for about 40% of world's total GNP.

English can be at least understood almost everywhere among scholars and educated people, as it is the world media language, and the language of cinema, TV, pop music and the computer world. All over the planet people know many English words, their pronunciation and meaning.

The causes for this universality are very well known and understandable. English first began to spread during the 16th century with British Empire and was strongly reinforced in 20th by USA world domination in economic, political and military aspects and by the huge influence of American movies.

The concept of a Universal Language is more significant only now, in the era of world mass communication. Before this era Greek, Latin, French were to some extent universal languages, though mainly in Europe.

By a lucky coincidence due to factors above, English, the Universal language, is one of the simplest and easiest natural languages in the world. The only other simple and easy languages are constructed ones.

Of course the concept of easiness is relative, and it depends on which language you know already. However the concept of simplicity is undeniable: English in an easy language to learn, understand and speak. A complex language such as Hungarian would be a very unlikely candidate for a universal language.

First of all, English Language uses Latin alphabet, the most universal, simple and short one (only the Greek alphabet is shorter and simpler). In addition, in English, the Latin Alphabet presents its most "clean" form as a true alphabet with only 26 basic letters and no diacritics;

Verb conjugation is very simple and easy. Even for irregular verbs, there is almost no variation in person (except 3rd singular in present tense).

Regular verbs have only four forms: Infinitive + Present, Past Tense + Past Participle, 3rd person singular Present Indicative, Present Participle.

There are almost no Inflections. No number or gender inflection for adjectives, articles, adverbs. For adjectives there is only comparative and superlative, almost only number for nouns. In pronouns there are gender and number inflections and only three declension cases (Acc/Dat, Nom, Gen).

English is one of the most analytical languages, with no significant synthetic, fusional or agglutinative characteristics.

Could be there any other alternative for Universal Language, instead of English?

There are other languages that are quite simple and synthetic, with almost no verb conjugation, no declension, such as Asian languages like Thai and Chinese, but they are written with complicated scripts and are tonal languages. However if Chinese were to be written with the Latin alphabet, it could potentially become a univeral language.

There are other strong languages that, due to population and economic power, could be univeral languages, but they have a number of disadvantages when compared with English.

Some examples:

Japanese: has very regular verbs but also a very complicated script.
Chinese: no conjugations or declension, but a very complicated script and tones.
German has many more inflections than English.
The major Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, have fewer inflections than most of languages, but their verb conjugation is very complicated.
Russian has both complex verb conjugations and numerous noun declensions.

In conclusion, it is lucky for us that our universal language is the simplest and easiest, even though that simplicity and easiness weren't the reasons that lead English to that condition.

ENGLISH?

The importance of English language as an international language

English is part of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken as a native language by around 377 million and as a second language by around 375 million speakers in the world. Speakers of English as a second language will soon outnumber those who speak it as a first language.

Around 750 million people are believed to speak English as a foreign language. English has an official or a special status in 75 countries with a total population of over 2 billion.

The domination of the English language globally is undeniable. English is the language of diplomacy and international communications, business, tourism, education, science, computer technology, media and Internet. Because English was used to develop communication, technology, programming, software, etc, it dominates the web. 70% of all information stored electronically is in English.

British colonialism in the 19th century and American capitalism and technological progress in the 20th century were undoubtedly the main causes for the spread of English throughout the world.

The English language came to British Isles from northern Europe in the fifth century. From the fifteenth century, the British began to sail all over the world and became explorers, colonists and imperialists. They took the English language to North America, Canada and the Caribbean, to South Africa, to Australia and New Zealand, to South Asia (especially India), to the British colonies in Africa, to South East Asia and the South Pacific.

The USA has played a leading role in most parts of the world for the last hundred years. At the end of the 19th century and first quarter of the 20th, it welcomed millions of European immigrants who had fled their countries ravaged by war, poverty or famine. This labor force strengthened American economy. The Hollywood film industry also attracted many foreign artists in quest of fame and fortune and the number of American films produced every year soon flooded the market. Before the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which ended the First World War between Germany and the Allies, diplomacy was conducted in French. However, President Woodrow Wilson succeeded in having the treaty in English as well. Since then, English started being used in diplomacy and gradually in economic relations and the media.

The future of English as a global language will depend very largely on the political, economical, demographic and cultural trends in the world. The beginning of the 21st century is a time of global transition. According to some experts, faster economic globalization is going hand in hand with the growing use of English. More and more people are being encouraged to use English rather than their own language. On the other hand, the period of most rapid change can be expected to be an uncomfortable and at times traumatic experience for many people around the world. Hence, the opposite view, that the next 20 years or so will be a critical time for the English language and for those who depend upon it. The patterns of usage and public attitudes to English which develop during this period will have long-term effects for its future in the world.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Traditional teaching vs modern teaching

Our society these days are divided in to two different way of thinking on the education. Some believe that modern methods are better than the traditional method of teaching but yet these two methods are both a successful way. In my opinion, every method in teaching is the same for they deliver the same message to the students. Therefore there are pros and cons to it as well in these ways of teaching.
The pros for traditional methods are that teaches shouldered too much of responsibilities for teaching in the classroom to make sure everything they thought were understood by the student. Thus it was a good method, where there was efficient communication between teacher and students. There was also the typical way and a controllable class where the teacher would teach on the blackboard, explained, asks students to copy and made sure students paid attention and listen. Besides that, the traditional way in disciplining students in school and teaching them was an effective way in building a good characteristic student where students were afraid of their teacher and respect them.
Talking about the pros there are cons to traditional method way where students were to afraid to ask their teacher questions. Thus students get board of the same way of teaching method done by the teacher which is on the blackboard and listening to the teacher talk while they sit down in class and heat up their chairs. Besides that, disciplining the students with canning and scolding is not a sufficient way for students get traumatizes in school.
On the other hand, the pros of modern method in teaching help a lot where there is a centered classroom which is created by the teacher and accepted by the students. In modern method students are aware of their learning process through the computers. Thus with the help of computers teachers prepare their work in their thumb drive and present it to the class through slides show which is an easier way. And students can do their studying and their work all in the computer without depending 100% on their teacher in schools. Besides that, there is also classroom contract which consists on agreement between teachers and student regarding on how each will contribute to and behave in the classroom to start building a student’s expectation towards independence. Therefore students even have a bonding relationship with their teacher to be their friend so that they can share their problems to the teacher without being afraid.
As for the cons of the modern method of teaching students become too independent where they think they don’t need guidance from anybody because they think they can accomplish anything by themselves. Thus with the use of computers in school children gets distracted with online games and websites to browse on besides their studies which will cause them distraction. . Besides that saving all data’s in the thumb drive can be a problem when there is a virus which can also cause the students and teacher to get to comfortable and depend too much on technology and forget other better tools in teaching. Thus students also begin to be too comfortable with their teacher as their friend in schools and forget their responsibilities and respect over the teacher.
Lastly, I feel that the teaching methods should be balance because it both brings good intentions in educating a person for the better future of everyone. Thus it sends out the same message even in different way but yet it is useful.

digital vs analog -which is better?

CDs and vinyl LPs both have their respective strengths, and their respective weaknesses, which makes comparison somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison.To make matters worse, commercial recordings, both analog and digital, have not always been of the best quality possible for their respective formats. A good example is Aerosmith's first album. If you listen to the vinyl of this, you can hear the hiss of the original master tape.
You should not be able to hear this hiss. At the 28 inches per second transport speed of the high quality, professional recording equipment of the time, any hiss would only contain frequencies well above the range of human hearing. If your dog were an audiophile it might bother him, but human ears reach, at most, 20khz. Most ears top out at well under 18khz.
However, if you have an old tape that has been extensively reused, you can indeed get audible hiss at these speeds. Overuse of dubbing will also increase noise in an analog recording, because once the noise is there, there is no way to remove it without also removing signal.
A third posibility is that Aerosmith could have made a "demo" tape at 14 ips or even 7, which the record company could have "produced" the finished album from.
Their second album contained no such hiss. But someone who had only heard CDs before, listening to Aerosmith's first album through headpones or good speakers, might conclude that noise was a terrible problem in analog and digital is always better.
Noise is analog's biggest weakness. Its other great weakness is that when you make a copy, the copy degrades. With a digital recording, all you are copying is an incredibly large number from one computer to another. Each copy is identical to the copy it was copied from.
With analog, each copy of a recording is a completely new recording. It cannot have equal frequency response, nor can it have less noise, or a wider dynamic range.
The analog media most people are accustomed to are the vinyl LP, cassette, and there are actually a few eight tracks still around. Eight track should have been superior to cassette, as it has twice the transport speed of cassette.
But it wasn't. Play a cassette and an eight track side by side, and the cassette consistantly outperformed the eight track. Why? Because the record companies saw the eight track as for cars with their abysmal acoustics (much worse in the 70s than with modern cars), and the cassette for homes, with their superior acoustics and (at the time) superior speakers.
Home made eight tracks recorded from LPs often were superior to the factory produced cassettes. But with non-home made tapes, cassette ruled, despite what should have been its technical shortcomings.
Pink Floyd "fired" their first record label because the master to their third album sounded "muddy," presumably because the tape heads either had not been properly cleaned, were worn, or the studio's acoustics sucked. Certainly Dark Side of the Moon had none of these problems, and went on to be the best selling album of all time, still on the charts thirty years later!
Analog suffers greatly from lack of cash. With a digital recording, even the cheapest CD player sounds good if played through good speakers. Not so with analog. With analog, the more you pay for a piece of equipment, the better it will sound. A cheap Radio Shack turntable will have "rumble"- the rumbling of the platter's bearings. It won't sound clear, and likely will have the bass attenuated to minimize the rumble, and the treble attenuated because it will sound tinny without the bass. Likewise, a cheap cassette player may have a very severely limited frequency response and still have an annoyingly audible hiss.
In music, "dynamics" is the variation in sound volume. Probably the one piece of music with the most profound dynamics is the 1812 Overture, simply because it uses cannon as a musical instrument. Few stereos are powerful enough to reproduce the cannon accurately, and no recording medium yet devised has the dynamic range to do this piece justice. Not that it matters- if you fired a real cannon in your living room, you would not hear anything at all for quite some time. Certainly you would not hear another note of the performance, bacause of the ringing in your ears.
The fact is, even cassettes have a wide enough dynamic range that the entire range is seldom (if ever) used in a musical recording. CDs have a superior dynamic range than LPs, which have a better dynamic range than cassettes. Even so, many CDs that were remastered from analog media (like the aformentioned Beatles album) have even less dynamics than their original LP! A good example of this is Led Zepplin's Presence.
Why should this be? Presumably because you can always turn it up, or even buy a more powerful amplifier. Some studios use only half of the CDs dynamic range, or even less. I bought a CD of classical music that was so wimpy I decided to make a "corrected" copy, ripping to .wav and normalizing it.
It was so aliased I threw it away, and contented myself with the weak original. Until I could buy a better performance (and recording) of the piece (Swan Lake, IIRC).
Just beccause one technology is inherently superior to another in one way or another does not in fact ensure that an application of that technology is superior.
The CD's format has two distinct disadvantages to both cassette and LP, caused by the same shortcoming- its sample rate and to a lesser extent, using only two bytes of resolution per sample.
This was forced by the technology of the time when digital recording was first starting. In the late 1970s when digital recording was born, 44 k samples per second was the best the equipment of the time could do. It was deemed "good enough," since the labels "golden ears" (humans with hearing well above average) didn't hear any noise and the sound of aliasing was something they had never encountered. They knew what hiss sounded like. They knew what a "muddy" recording sounded like. They knew what harmonic distortion sounded like. They knew what clipping sounded like. But aliasing was new, and they didn't hear it- because they could not possibly listen for it, as they listened for the above mentioned distortions they knew.
At a CD's 44 ksps sample rate, the very highest frequency it can reproduce at all is 22 khz. This is well above human hearing- but here, the model fails. Because its 22 khz frequency response is not an undistorted response.
With a 28 ips analog reel to reel, you can record a dog whistle with no distortion, and transfer it to LP, also with no distortion. In fact, these two technologies had become so good, with a frequency response so high, that they introduced "quadrphonics," or four channel stereo, in the early 1970s. It was a complete flop, since a $300 stereo sounded much better than a $300 quadrophonics system. You needed four of everything for quadrophonics, as opposed to two with stereo.
So, with only two sides of a groove in a record, how did they get four channels?
In a stereo record, the up and down motions of the stylis (needle) translate into both channels of the stereo signal. This way an older, monophonic record player could still play a stereo record without losing half the signal.
The right channel comes from the side to side motions of the needle. To get the left channel, the right channel is mixed out of phase with the combined channels, cancelling itself out in that signal, which becomes the left channel.
With quadrophonics, the rear two channels were modulated with a 44khz tone and mixed with the other two signals, then demodulated at the turntable. This illustration is important to highlight the incredible frequency response of the 28 ips reel to reel and the vinyl record. These incredible frequency responses are completely undistorted. Were the supersonic carrier and the signal it carried distorted, when demodulated it would have sounded terrible. In fact, had you enough cash to afford a good quadrophonic setup, you would not have heard any difference in quality between the front channels and the rear channels.
By contrast, at high frequencies, CDs do very badly indeed. The best cassettes were capable of reaching 18khz without distortion, and even modest, affordable cassette players reached 16khz. If you had both the vinyl and the cassette (many people bought two copies of a piece, an LP for home and a cassette or 8-track for the car) you could hear the difference in the responses of cassette and vinyl. They were very striking, and it didn't take an audiophile to hear them.
By contrast, a CD doesn't even hit 15khz without horrible distortion. A little third grade math using graph paper explains why. A 15khz tone recorded on a CD has only three samples per cycle!
A sine wave curves up, then descends past the zero point, then curves back up to the zero point where it starts a new wave. A square wave goes straight up vertically, shoots horizontally, then straight down to its negative, where it repeats in reverse. A sawtooth wave goes up at a 45 degree angle, then back down at a 45 degree angle to the negative crest, then back up to the zero point.
A guitar player's "fuzz box" converts the complex sine waves coming out of his instrument into a sawtooth wave, or a square wave. Most fuzz boxes have a switch to select sawtooth or square.
At only three samples per crest, there is no difference whatever between a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, or a square wave. And a sine wave that sounds identical to a sawtoth wave is horribly distorted.
And here is where our action adventure nerd protagonist was right. A CD that was produced from an analog master will have theworst of both worlds, both analog media's more limited dynamic range and its noise, coupled by the CD's abysmal frequency response.
When CDs first came out, LPs had been mastered from digital tape for a few years. These CDs must be superior to their LP bretheren, since these LPs will have all the noise of analog, with none of LP's superior frequency response.
But remastered CDs made from an analog master is a completely different thing. Like the early digitally mastered LPs, they are the worst of both worlds.
But six hundred bucks difference??? Well, maybe if you are a chemist for the FBI, or your name is Larry Elison. Personally, the two dollar LPs I find in the used record shops are good enough for me.As to the aformentioned Presence CD, it lacks presence. The original LP was recorded at the cutting edge, pushing the limits of the recording technology of the time - and analog recording was at its zenith. When it was remastered for CD, the highest frequency harmonics had to be attenuated to remove the aliasing. This made the bass sound too dynamic, so it was attenuated as well. And, puzzlingly, even the dynamics were reduced; I haven't a clue why.

Analog.Digital.What's the difference?

Analog. Digital. What’s the Difference?

by Paul Wotel

Analog phone lines. Analog signals. Digital security. Digital PBX. Analog-to-digital adapters. What does it all mean? In the telecom world, understanding analog versus digital isn't as simple as comparing one technology to another. It depends on what product—and in some cases, which product feature—you happen to be talking about.

Analog at a glance
As a technology, analog is the process of taking an audio or video signal (in most cases, the human voice) and translating it into electronic pulses. Digital on the other hand is breaking the signal into a binary format where the audio or video data is represented by a series of "1"s and "0"s. Simple enough when it's the device—analog or digital phone, fax, modem, or likewise—that does all the converting for you.

Is one technology better than the other? Analog technology has been around for decades. It's not that complicated a concept and it's fairly inexpensive to use. That's why we can buy a $20 telephone or watch a few TV stations with the use of a well-placed antenna. The trouble is, analog signals have size limitations as to how much data they can carry. So with our $20 phones and inexpensive TVs, we only get so much.

Enter digital
The newer of the two, digital technology breaks your voice (or television) signal into binary code—a series of 1s and 0s—transfers it to the other end where another device (phone, modem or TV) takes all the numbers and reassembles them into the original signal. The beauty of digital is that it knows what it should be when it reaches the end of the transmission. That way, it can correct any errors that may have occurred in the data transfer. What does all that mean to you? Clarity. In most cases, you'll get distortion-free conversations and clearer TV pictures.

You'll get more, too. The nature of digital technology allows it to cram lots of those 1s and 0s together into the same space an analog signal uses. Like your button-rich phone at work or your 200-plus digital cable service, that means more features can be crammed into the digital signal.

Compare your simple home phone with the one you may have at the office. At home you have mute, redial, and maybe a few speed-dial buttons. Your phone at work is loaded with function keys, call transfer buttons, and even voice mail. Now, before audiophiles start yelling at me through their PC screens, yes, analog can deliver better sound quality than digital…for now. Digital offers better clarity, but analog gives you richer quality.

But like any new technology, digital has a few shortcomings. Since devices are constantly translating, coding, and reassembling your voice, you won't get the same rich sound quality as you do with analog. And for now, digital is still relatively expensive. But slowly, digital—like the VCR or the CD—is coming down in cost and coming out in everything from cell phones to satellite dishes.

When you're shopping in the telecom world, you often see products touted as "all digital." Or warnings such as "analog lines only." What does it mean? The basic analog and digital technologies vary a bit in definition depending on how they're implemented. Read on.

Phone lines
Analog lines, also referred to as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), support standard phones, fax machines, and modems. These are the lines typically found in your home or small office. Digital lines are found in large, corporate phone systems.

How do you tell if the phone line is analog or digital? Look at the back of the telephone connected to it. If you see "complies with part 68, FCC Rules" and a Ringer Equivalence Number (REN), then the phone and the line are analog. Also, look at the phone's dialpad. Are there multiple function keys? Do you need to dial "9" for an outside line? These are indicators that the phone and the line are digital.

A word of caution. Though digital lines carry lower voltages than analog lines, they still pose a threat to your analog equipment. If you're thinking of connecting your phone, modem, or fax machine to your office's digital phone system, DON'T! At the very least, your equipment may not function properly. In the worst case, you could zap your communications tools into oblivion.

How? Let's say you connect your home analog phone to your office's digital line. When you lift the receiver, the phone tries to draw an electrical current to operate. Typically this is regulated by the phone company's central office. Since the typical proprietary digital phone system has no facilities to regulate the current being drawn through it, your analog phone can draw too much current—so much that it either fries itself or in rare cases, damages the phone system's line card.

What to do? There are digital-to-analog adapters that not only let you use analog equipment in a digital environment, but also safeguard against frying the internal circuitry of your phone, fax, modem, or laptop. Some adapters manufactured by Konexx come designed to work with one specific piece of office equipment: phone, modem, laptop, or teleconferencer. Simply connect the adapter in between your digital line and your analog device. That's it. Or you can try a universal digital-to-analog adapter such as Hello Direct's LineStein®. It works with any analog communications device. Plus, it's battery powered so you're not running extra cords all over your office.

Cordless phones
The very nature of digital technology—breaking a signal into binary code and recreating it on the receiving end—gives you clear, distortion-free cordless calls. Cordless phones with digital technology are also able to encrypt all those 1s and 0s during transmission so your conversation is safe from eavesdroppers. Plus, more power can be applied to digital signals and thus, you'll enjoy longer range on your cordless phone conversations.

The advantage to analog cordless products? Well, they're a bit cheaper. And the sound quality is richer. So unless you need digital security, why not save a few bucks and go with an analog phone? After all, in home or small office environments where you may be the only cordless user, you won't have any interference issues.

Keep in mind, when talking about digital and analog cordless phones, you're talking about the signals being transferred between the handset and its base. The phones themselves are still analog devices that can only be used on analog lines. Also, the range of your cordless phone—analog or digital—will always depend on the environment.

Cellular phones
Perhaps the most effective use of the digital versus analog technology is in the booming cellular market. With new phone activations increasing exponentially, the limits of analog are quickly being realized. Digital cellular lets significantly more people use their phones within a single coverage area. More data can be sent and received simultaneously by each phone user. Plus, transmissions are more resistant to static and signal fading. And with the all-in-one phones out now—phone, pager, voice mail, internet access—digital phones offer more features than their analog predecessors.

Analog's sound quality is still superior—as some users with dual-transmission phones will manually switch to analog for better sound when they're not concerned with a crowded coverage area—but digital is quickly becoming the norm in the cellular market.

What to buy?
The first thing to consider when buying analog or digital equipment is where you'll be using it. If you're buying for a proprietary PBX phone system, you'll need to get the digital phone designed for that particular system. Need to connect a conferencer on your digital system? Opt for a digital-to-analog adapter. Shopping for home office equipment? Most everything you'll consider is analog. Want an all-in-one cellular phone—paging, voice mail, web? A digital cellular phone will deliver it all. In fact, the only head-scratcher may be your cordless phone purchase. Looking for security and distortion-free conversations in your small office? Go with a digital 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz cordless phone. Using a cordless at home? An analog phone will give you the richest sound quality and usually enough range.

Monday, May 7, 2012

English Conversation 3

Greetings 1 Vocab & Phrases - English Meeting ESL Lesson

100 most common words in English

English Phrases - Daily Expressions

Learning English Lesson 2 Animals

Learning English Lesson 1 Basic Greetings and Phrases

Teaching strategies

Part 2.2 Teaching Strategies

Student Learning

An enormous amount has been written in the last two decades about research on how people learn. While it is beyond the scope of this tutorial to summarize the literature, several points relevant to course design emerge in one of the best summaries of the field, the National Research Council's 1999 publication How People Learn :

Research shows clearly that a person must be engaged to learn. People learn by actively participating in observing, speaking, writing, listening, thinking, drawing, and doing.
Learning is enhanced when a person sees potential implications, applications, and benefits to others.
Learning builds on current understanding (including misconceptions!).

What messages can we take home for course design?

If student learning is the goal, effective teaching means creating effective learning environments, and environments where students are actively participating and engaged with the material are crucial to student learning.
Students are more likely to learn and retain if we ask them to do more than learn information. Including activities where students can explore applications and implications will improve learning.
A traditional lecture classroom focused on presentation of content by an instructor does not typically promote active participation and engagement.

Most students dutifully write down what the instructor writes on the board or shows on PowerPoint slides but are not actively processing the information. [For others, the statement "the light's on, but nobody's home" would be most appropriate]
A few students are engaged in thinking, comparison, analysis and projection during the lecture. They're the ones who raise a hand and say, "But what about X"? or "That must mean that"
Because many faculty members were this latter type of student, it is hard for us to recognize that traditional lecture is not an effective learning environment for many of our students because so many students do not participate actively during a traditional lecture.

Show an anecdote

Learning Styles

Before we get to teaching strategies that promote active student particiation and engagement, we'll take a brief look at learning styles, another important aspect of learning that is useful to factor in to assignment and activity design. If everyone learned the same way, it would be easy to choose teaching strategies to optimize learning. How people learn, however, varies widely, as does individual preference for receiving and processing information. How does this influence teaching?

Your learning styles will certainly not match those of everyone in your class, and your learning styles may, in fact, be quite different even from a majority of your students.
What works well for you may not work well for some (or even most!!) of your students. Because each of us knows what works for ourselves, we're prone to selecting teaching strategies that favor our own learning styles. If you choose only teaching strategies that would optimize learning for students with your learning styles, many of the students in your class may be at a disadvantage.
Knowing something about learning styles in general and your own learning styles in particular can help you to plan assignments and activities that reach students with as many different learning styles as possible.

Task 2.2a: Learning styles inventory

A commonly-used, web-based learning styles inventory was developed a number of years ago at North Carolina State University by Richard Felder and Linda Silverman. While other learning styles inventories exist, we have data from several years of Course Design Workshop participants with which you can compare your own results. Go to the learning styles inventory , and take the short survey. Print out the results as well as the interpretive text and additional information (more info) .

At right, you'll see the learning styles results from a group of 40 Course Design Workshop participants for questions in the active vs. reflective category.

Negative numbers reflect preference for processing information actively through engagement in physical activity or discussion; positive numbers reflect preference for processing information reflectively through introspection.
Bar heights reflect the number of individuals with a given score.
Individuals with scores in the mid range tend to process information actively sometimes and reflectively at other times (i.e., they do both with no strong preference). Individuals with scores at either end have a strong preference for either active or reflective processing.
Suppose this group of 40 were your class. If you had a score of 7 on your own learning styles survey, you prefer to process information through introspection. 20% of your class, however, has a strong preference (scores of ~5 though ~9) for processing information actively. Designing a variety of assignments, or providing opportunities for both introspection and discussion within an assignment, will meet the needs of more of your students.
You can find more information on the Index of Learning Styles, how it can be used, and how to avoid misusing the results in an article by Felder and Spurlin (2005).

Show visual/verbal results for comparison

Show sensing/intuitive results for comparison

Show sequential/global results for comparison

Teaching Strategies for Actively Engaging Students in the Classroom

As you enter a classroom ask yourself this question: "If there were no students in the room, could I do what I am planning to do?" If your answer to the question is yes, don't do it.
Gen. Ruben Cubero, Dean of The Faculty, United States Air Force Academy

It's now time to make choices about what you will have students do in your course in order to learn the course content and to practice the goals. What kinds of teaching strategies can be used in the classroom that accomplish both course content goals and active engagement on the part of students?
The old adage "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is equally true of teaching strategies. If the only classroom teaching strategy you know is traditional lecturing, that's the teaching tool that you're likely to use for all classroom situations. If, on the other hand, you have more tools in your toolbox, you will have the opportunity to choose the most appropriate tool for the task at hand. In this section of the tutorial, you will explore various teaching strategies in which most students are active rather than passive in the classroom and in which the focus is less on the teacher presenting and more on the student learning.

Task 2.2b: Exploring teaching strategies

Below, you will find brief descriptions of teaching strategies that promote active engagement and participation of students in the classroom, plus links to sample assignments and activities and more complete information for using each strategy successfully. Browse the various techniques to find strategies that you might be able to use to accomplish the goals in your own course and enhance student learning. Be sure to keep in mind the context and constraints of your course. Go to the course plan that you began to develop in Part 2.1, and add teaching strategies to specific topics, along with outlines of ideas for assignments or activities using those strategies (e.g., jigsaw with geologic maps from four adjacent areas to give students practice in analyzing regional geologic history).

The list of teaching strategies below does not by any means include all of the good ideas for structuring assignments and activities for students! But each is an effective way for actively engaging students and placing more responsibility on them for their own learning. And, while the specific examples might not be ones that you would use in your own courses, they are useful templates for designing your own assignments and activities.
Some of the links below will take you to the Starting Point site (a companion website to On the Cutting Edge) that is devoted to teaching introductory geoscience. Don't be put off if you are teaching an upper level course. The teaching strategies discussed are applicable to courses at all levels.

Making lectures more interactive

What happens when you try to engage students by floating a question during class? Silence? The same eager student anxious to answer? Most of the students not thinking about the question but just hoping that you won't call on them? What can we do to make students more actively engaged with the material during lecture in order to improve student learning? Clicking "more information" below will take you to a discussion, at the Starting Point site, of strategies for making lecture more interactive. more information and examples
Below, you will also find links to useful material for making classes more interactive:

Using Data in the Classroom: NSDL/DLESE/Cutting Edge resource site for engaging students in using data to address scientific questions, with over 500 links to on-line or downloadable datasets and tools for visualizing or manipulating data that can be used in the classroom. Both browsable and searchable.
Using Data to Teach Earth Processes: Cutting Edge resource site for engaging students with real world data.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations: short explanation of and rationale for using back-of-the-envelope calculations, plus examples.
Teaching Quantitative Skills in the Geosciences: DLESE resource site for helping students master quantitative skills with links to resources.

The jigsaw technique

Have you struggled with group work in class? The jigsaw technique can be a useful, well-structured template for carrying out effective in-class group work. The class is divided into several teams, with each team preparing separate but related assignments. When all team members are prepared, the class is re-divided into mixed groups, with one member from each team in each group. Each person in the group teaches the rest of the group what he/she knows, and the group then tackles an assignment together that pulls all of the pieces together to form the full picture (hence the name "jigsaw"). Jigsaw module from Pedagogy in Action

The gallery walk

The gallery walk is a cooperative learning strategy in which the instructor devises several questions/problems and posts each question/problem at a different table or at a different place on the walls (hence the name "gallery"). Students form as many groups as there are questions, and each group moves from question to question (hence the name "walk"). After writing the group's response to the first question, the group rotates to the next position, adding to what is already there. At the last question, it is the group's responsibility to summarize and report to the class. more information and examples

Effective discussion

Discussion is an excellent way to engage students in thinking and analyzing or in defending one side of an issue, rather than listening to lecture. Students must also respond to one another, rather than interacting intellectually only with the instructor. Good discussion can be difficult to generate, however. Clicking "more information" below will take you to some tips for having a good discussion in class and a sample template for class discussion. Download more information on effective discussions, with a template example (Microsoft Word 35kB Jun16 05)

Concept sketches

Concept sketches (different from concept maps) are sketches or diagrams that are concisely annotated with short statements that describe the processes, concepts, and interrelationships shown in the sketch. Having students generate their own concept sketches is a powerful way for students to process concepts and convey them to others. Concept sketches can be used as preparation for class, as an in-class activity, in the field or lab, or as an assessment tool. Download more information on concept sketches, with examples (Microsoft Word 475kB Jun15 05) :: Download an example of a final project involving concept sketches, with samples of student work (Microsoft Word 3.1MB Jun15 05)

Using case studies

Case studies have been used successfully for many years in business school and in medical school for actively engaging students in problem-solving relevant to the discipline. The primary hallmark of a case study is presentation of students with a problem to solve that revolves around a story (the "case"). In medical school case studies, the "story" typically involves a sick patient. In science case studies, "stories" can range from public policy issues to science research questions. Good case studies give the students considerable latitude in deciding how to solve the problem, rather than leading them through the problem by the nose, and provide excellent opportunities to engage students in the classroom. The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science has a collection of case studies in a number of different science disciplines. Also, clicking "more information" below will take you to a discussion, at the Starting Point site, of teaching with case studies.more information and examples at the Starting Point site

Debates

Debates can be a very useful strategy for engaging students in their own learning. Debates force students to deal with complexity and "gray areas", and they are rich in imbedded content. Debates can also help provide relevancy of course material to everyday issues, which can improve student learning. Debates also improve student's oral communication skills. Download more information on debates, including a rubric for grading debates (Microsoft Word 35kB Jun15 05).

Just-in-Time Teaching

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) was developed as a way of engaging students in course material before class and preparing them to come to class and participate actively during class. Clicking "more information" below will take you to a discussion, at the Starting Point site, of using Just-in-Time teaching. More information and examples

Role playing

Role-playing and simulations in class can be an excellent way to engage students. A well-constructed role-playing or simulation exercise can emphasize the real world and require students to become deeply involved in a topic. Clicking "more information" below will take you to a discussion, at the Starting Point site, of teaching with role playing.More information and examples

Once you have explored teaching strategies, Go to Part 2.3: Assessing Student Learning