teacher tools for this century

Scratch: a programming language for everyone. Create interactive stories, games, music and art - and share them online.

This is a very cool video on the active digital learner. 

"So let's demystify the origin of sentences. Think of it this way. You almost surely have a voice inside your head. At present, it's an untrained voice. It natters along quite happily, constructing delayed ripostes and hypothetical conversations. Why not give it something useful to do? Memorize some poetry or prose, nothing too arcane. A rhythmic kind of writing works best, something that sounds almost spoken. Then play those passages over and over again in your memory. You now have in your head something that is identifiably "language," not merely thoughts that somehow seem unlinguistic.

Now try turning a thought into a sentence. This is harder than it seems because first you have to find a thought. They may seem scarce because nothing in your education has suggested that your thoughts are worth paying attention to. Again and again I see in students, no matter how sophisticated they are, a fear of the dark, cavernous place called the mind. They turn to it as though it were a mailbox. They take a quick peek, find it empty and walk away.

......

"There's a good reason for doing this all in your head. You're learning to be comfortable in that dark, cavernous place. It's not so frightening. There's language there, and you're learning to play with it on your own without the need to snatch at words and phrases for an assignment. And here's another good reason. A sentence you don't write down is a sentence you feel free to change. Inscribe it, and you're chained to it for life. That, at least, is how many writers act. A written sentence possesses a crippling inertia."

NBCNews.comCuriosity has arsenal of tools to sample Red Planet's rocksNBCNews.comFor NASA's Curiosity rover, newly arrived on Mars, digging into the menu of minerals available on the Red Planet will take a robotic arm, a sleeve full of soil and a...