Thursday, August 7, 2008

Another Cool NASA Site

There seems to be no end of great, educational sites from NASA. I found another one yesterday via a Department of Education RSS feed, Cool Cosmos and its Infrared Astronomy Tutorial.

Rewiring Dyslexic Brains?

A ScienceDaily posting this week caught my eye: Remedial Instruction Rewires Dyslexic Brains, Provides Lasting Results, Study Shows. A Carnegie Mellon University "brain imaging study of dyslexic students and other poor readers shows that the brain can permanently rewire itself and overcome reading deficits, if students are given 100 hours of intensive remedial instruction. The shows that the remedial instruction resulted in an increase in brain activity in several cortical regions associated with reading, and that neural gains became further solidified during the year following instruction." The report appears to be related to a June Carnegie Mellon release, Remedial Instruction Can Make Strong Readers Out Of Poor Readers, Brain Imaging Study Reveals.

A New Tech Oriented Elementary

Megan Gordon had an interesting article about technology and schools in the Arizona Republic yesterday, Arizona educators embrace trend of technology in their curriculum. Gordon tells of the new Scales Technology Academy in Tempe that is opening with 600 students and a 1-1 ratio of students to laptop computers.

A Busy Time

I guess every time of year could be called a busy time, but for teachers, the weeks just before school starts can be pretty intense. There's always lots of things to be done during the days before "losing ones freedom" and returning to the daily tasks of teaching. Teachers also spend a lot of time over the summer attending workshops, classes, and orientation sessions along with getting their classrooms ready for the new year.

Things here have been fairly busy as well, as I've had a number of meetings to attend getting ready for the new school year. Along with just keeping things up around the house and grounds, I've sorta let Educators' News slide a bit.

Of course, there's always time for things you place a priority on. One of those things for me this week was keeping our single cucumber plant picked! It's not just any cucumber plant, but an old canning (and fresh eating, too, I guess) variety called Japanese Long Pickling. I thought I had a good supply of viable seed of the variety, but only one seed germinated this year, so I'm really babying the plant to produce seed to save for future plantings. The variety had disappeared from all of the seed catalogs I get, but I did find one vendor this year who is carrying it. Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers are an open pollinated, vining variety that produce a long (16-20") thin fruit that is ideal for bread and butter and sliced dill pickles.

Have a great weekend!

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