iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Children’s brains develop in spurts called critical periods. The first occurs around age 2, with a second one occurring during adolescence. At the start of these periods, the number of connections (synapses) between brain cells (neurons) doubles. Two-year-olds have twice as many synapses as adults. Because these connections between brain cells are where learning occurs, twice as many synapses enable the brain to learn faster than at any other time of life. Therefore, children’s experiences in this phase have lasting effects on their development.

Visual note-taking allows information to be processed by the brain in three different ways.

“A boy at my table made fun of me during math today,” my second-grader told me one evening after bedtime. Worries tend to spill out after lights out.

“He said, ‘What?! You are still working on that packet? I finished that yesterday.’ ”

Swallowing my fierce first reaction, I said, “Oh, so how did you handle it?”

“I told him, ‘I like my learning pace. Your fast pace doesn’t work for me. I take my time.’ ”

I was stunned by her courage and her practical insight: speeding through the material is not the path to academic mastery.

In my work as an education journalist, I often take research about learning and the brain and translate it into usable chunks of information for parents and teachers. But this fall, I took on a personal challenge. Could I teach my 8-year-old about how the brain learns? And could this knowledge help her strengthen her academic confidence and agility?

Teachers change brains. While we often don’t think of ourselves as brain changers, when we teach we have an enormous impact on our students’ cognitive development. Recent advances in educational neuroscience are helping educators understand the critical role we play in building brain capacities important to students’ learning and self-control.

To understand how teachers change the brain, we need to begin with a reasonably new understanding of the biology of learning. The human brain is an experience-dependent organ. Throughout our lives, the cerebrum—the largest portion of our brain—fine-tunes itself to adapt to the world around us. The scientific term used to describe this is “neuroplasticity, ” which involves three processes.

Stress! It's just a part of everyday life, right? But what if that stress is chronic and beyond a child's control?

More than half of all students in U.S. public schools come from low-income families. Poverty is associated with chronic stress, which can have a toxic effect on the brain. While there is no silver bullet to solve the problem of poverty, we as educators do have the power to positively influence learning for children experiencing poverty by better understanding their brains.

If you just started working out you may be tempted to push your body to the limits. The problem isn't how hard your training. It's that you're still partaking in unhealthy habits, like poor diet and not getting enough sleep, as well as not giving yourself enough recovery time.

Like any other muscle in your body, the same can be said about our brains.

As an entrepreneur, I work my tails off for 10, 12, or more hours every day. Then I come home and do some additional work. I then respond to to email and social messages on my smartphone or tablet right before bed. I'm not over-worked right?

Next I watch the news or an episode of my favorite show. I get a couple of hours of sleep, rinse, and repeat.

This is what living is like in the information age. In fact, we now receive five times as much information every day as we did in 1986.

No wonder we suffer from anxiety and stress! It's even been estimated that 40 million adults in the U.S. alone are affected by an anxiety disorder.

Anxiety is also the most common mental illness in the country.

In 2017, more than any other item of everyday technology, the smartphone is the focus of our fears. This isn’t surprising—we use them to remember precious memories and factual information, to find other people and to talk to them. Our smartphones have become an externalized part of our brains.

The brain is an experience-dependent organ. From our very earliest days, the brain begins to map itself to our world as we experience it through our senses. The mapping is vague and fuzzy at first, like a blurred photograph or an un-tuned piano. However, the more we interact with the world, the more well-defined our brain maps become until they are fine-tuned and differentiated. But each person’s map will vary, with some sensory experiences more distinct than others depending on the unique experiences and the clarity and frequency of the sensations he or she has experienced.

Educators can positively influence students’ learning by understanding how the brain is shaped by their early experiences—and how it can be rewired and reorganized to work more quickly and efficiently.

"I want The Three Bears!"

These days parents, caregivers and teachers have lots of options when it comes to fulfilling that request. You can read a picture book, put on a cartoon, play an audiobook, or even ask Alexa.

A newly published study gives some insight into what may be happening inside young children's brains in each of those situations. And, says lead author Dr. John Hutton, there is an apparent "Goldilocks effect" — some kinds of storytelling may be "too cold" for children, while others are "too hot." And, of course, some are "just right."

Hutton is a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital with a special interest in "emergent literacy" — the process of learning to read.

When a teacher noticed her kids fighting at recess, she turned to neuroscience and mindfulness practice to help them take control of their emotions.

“[Adolescence is] a stage of life when we can really thrive, but we need to take advantage of the opportunity,” said Temple University neuroscientist Laurence Steinberg at a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Steinberg has spent his career studying how the adolescent brain develops and believes there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular characterizations of adolescents and what’s really going on in their brains.

Because the brain is still developing during adolescence, it has incredible plasticity. It’s akin to the first five years of life, when a child’s brain is growing and developing new pathways all the time in response to experiences. Adult brains are somewhat plastic as well -- otherwise they wouldn’t be able to learn new things -- but “brain plasticity in adulthood involves minor changes to existing circuits, not the wholesale development of new ones or elimination of others,” Steinberg said.

Adolescence is the last time in a person’s life that the brain can be so dramatically overhauled.

New technologies are shedding light on what really makes adolescents tick—and providing clues on how we might reach them better.

"Every day, hundreds of thousands of people go to the gym. They go to exercise their muscles and get stronger. But many of these same people neglect the one thing they really should be strengthening—their brain.

Brain training apps and tools are designed to help your brain be better. The idea is that by practicing daily, the brain, like your muscles, can grow stronger over time. If you’re going to take the time to work out your brain, however, you want to make sure you’re using the most effective tools possible. Let’s take a look at 7 of the best brain training apps and tools."

Even though the internet is largely populated by cat videos and memes, it also has some intelligent stuff. But you need to know where to find it, if you want the web to boost your brain and not blast it.

A while back, we compiled a mega-list of 35 brainy sites for you to read more intelligent content. This new list has only five more, but we find ourselves going back to them a lot. Don’t miss out on these.

Remember your seventh-grade Spanish class? Of course you do. But do you remember anything from it? You might’ve left off language-learning with decent proficiency at some point in your educational career, only to forget most of it with disuse in the years since. But picking up where you left off–or backtracking to the very beginning–isn’t a bad idea as an adult. In fact, trying to learn (or relearn) a language as an adult can help your brain in ways that spill over into the rest of your working life–even if you never actually become fluent. Here’s how.