Kevin Brookhouser

Here is a webinar I hosted with another Google Apps for EDU Certified Trainer, Tim Lee.

If you use the internet (and I suspect you do) you owe it to yourself to read this  short web book  by Google.

In the summer of 1995 I was leading a mountain bike trip in the remote Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. I took a nasty spill and broke the axle on my front wheel. Digging through my bag I found everything I needed to replace the axle except an essential washer. My partner started digging through his bag, realizing that if we didn’t find a washer, I’d be walking the 12 miles back to the trail head ... and he'd be waiting for me with the rest of the group. He revealed a beer bottle cap, pulled out his multi-tool, drove a hole in the middle of the cap. “Here’s your washer.” Sometimes a bottle cap isn’t a bottle cap. Archimedes had his moment when he realized a bathtub can serve a purpose beyond bathing--it could also measure volume through displacement. Eureka! One of the keys to solving problems effectively is to overcome the cognitive bias known as functional fixedness. If you’ve read Daniel Pink’s book  Drive , as  I’ve urged , you would remember  The Cand...

I produced this one minute video as a part of my Google Teacher Academy application. The academy will be held in London this year and their application suggests that they're particularly interested in international teachers, so who knows. All applicants are to submit a one minute video on Motivation and Learning or Innovation in the Classroom. I chose the former.

Pop Quiz: If you want to encourage students to complete a project or assignment with creativity, innovation, and passion, what's the best tool to motivate them? a. offer a high grade b. threaten a low grade c. make it a competition d. offer a gift certificate to GameStop e. chocolate covered iPod f. none of the above According to Daniel Pink's latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us , the answer is f, as in fail. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that all of the above carrots and sticks actually reduce performance and undermine motivation. When it comes to tasks that require problem solving or other right brain activities, people perform best when they are given autonomy over their tasks, opportunity for mastery in their field, and a sense that the task has a clear and meaningful purpose. Those who have read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Carol Dweck's Mindset, and Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics will find much familiar, but ...

"The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will be Pretending I'm Not Excited," says an old friend of mine on Facebook. I tend to agree. What's up with this fascination so many of us hold for zombies? I'll leave that to the psych department of my school, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that our Id can indulge its hunger for inflicting violence without that pestering Super Ego telling us that such behavior is inappropriate. There's nothing inappropriate with unloading a twelve gauge in the face of the undead. The morality is delightfully simple. I would argue that this is the device behind the success of Tarrantino's Inglourious Basterds--Nazis being the closest thing we've seen to people we can kill with a free conscious. This device is why I picked up World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. However, it has nothing to do with why I liked the book so much. Sure, there's some good zombie killing satisfaction...

Earlier I wrote about the problem with hindsight bias and how it hinders meta cognition in students--big words that mean students don't know what they don't know and think they know what they don't know. When reviewing for an exam, many activities enable this mess by encouraging weaker students to passively observe the more accomplished students demonstrate their competence. The truth will come out in the exam, but wouldn't we all be happier if this truth revealed itself to all parties in the review process? This is why I love pollanywhere.com . Rather than review by asking questions, I can quickly set up a series of poll questions in pollanywhere.com and project them on the screen in the front of class. Here's an example of a Hamlet identification question. Rather than one student volunteering to answer the question, all students are required to submit their answers either by sms text message or through the web on their laptop, smartphone, or mobile interne...