Multitasking is a big part of the modern world. People are constantly doing two things at once; they send emails when they are spending time with their loved ones, they work out while texting a friend and they cook while they check Facebook.
However, all of this multi-tasking is bad for your brain. Recent studies have found that multitasking increases the production of cortisol, a stress hormone, and adrenaline, which can overstimulate the brain. This can cause a “mental fog” that makes it hard for you to concentrate or focus.
I think I’ve mentioned how bad multitasking is for you before. For myself, I’m becoming a fan of the Pomodoro technique, where you have a time and focus on work for a set number of minutes. It works well for me.
I know. We’re already many years into the 21st Century. And I know there’s a chance that the term “21st Century” might rub you the wrong way. But we’re here, and teaching and learning look very different. At least they have the potential to. When I started teaching in 2004, there was one computer in the…
University of Houston and Methodist Hospital researchers are reporting in Scientific Reports that the best way to train surgeons is to remove the stress of residency programs and make surgery a hobby. Under relaxed conditions outside a formal educational setting, 15 first-year medical students, who aspired one day to become surgeons, mastered microsurgical suturing and…
Two years ago, I was practically begging a student to read a novel in my high-school English class. This isn’t an unusual problem. The girl, who’s a relatively bright, college-bound athlete, told me that she “just gets too distracted after five minutes” of reading. When she promised that she would listen to the audiobook of…
So many people, especially young people and teenagers, spend a significant period of time each day staring at a screen of some kind, whether that be a computer, smartphone, tablet, or the regular old TV. Now, a new study is warning parents that all that screen time may be behind a stunning rise in children…
It has become a platitude by now to say that massive open online courses largely failed to achieve the promise many advocates saw to expand access to high-quality education democratically throughout the world. But now two researchers have provided the analysis and data to prove it. Source: Study offers data to show MOOCs didn’t achieve…
Good games—as opposed to candy-coated, multiple-choice quiz games—provide immersive experiences for students. Like novels, films, plays, and other media, games can be high-quality materials a teacher uses to enable students to access the curriculum. In my research, classrooms with high-functioning game-based learning are not ones in which the teacher hands a game to students to…
