eLearning4schools.net

“What are binaural beats recordings?”

Binaural beat recordings are specially generated sounds, designed to alter your brainwaves - bringing about different states of mind, such as happiness, creativity, or relaxation. They’re perfectly safe, non-addictive, and can be used as often as you like.

Many of us have heard of the Mozart Effect well this takes us one step on and could give our students the edge in focusing for class and revision tasks, for creating the right state of mind when they are problem solving or trying to be innovative or to give them a burst of energy!

“Tell me more about how binaural beats work…”

Let’s take a few minutes now to discuss the history behind binaural beats… and how they work in more detail.

For a long time, the scientific community has been aware that certain frequencies are associated with certain states of mind. For example, the alpha frequency of 8 to 12Hz is present when individuals are in the “zone”, in “superlearning”, positive-thinking modes. This frequency can be verified through an electroencephalograph (EEG) reading, and (more…)

At my school we are introducing Moodle as our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in March.

Now we had already played around with another alternative but it had not really been championed and it was quite hard and not very intuitive to use of and it cost a fair bit every year. Now we are approaching the third month and apart from Moodle being free it has really received some great feedback from teachers who once they push themselves to have a go they can’t believe how easy it is to use!

Now in order to sell this to our staff we had to think what are the benefits and the following list is what me came up with. So if you are in the process of implementing a VLE (Moodle or not) hopefully this list may help:

BENEFITS

No excuses for missed lessons – illness/visits/fixtures.

The VLE allows the teacher to place their lesson on-line. This means that any student who has enrolled on the course can get access to the course either at school or at home *.

What does placing your lesson online mean? Any digital material such as schemes of work and lesson plans can be set out so the student can see the details of what was delivered, worksheets and PowerPoint files onto the server there will no longer be any excuse for the student who misses a lesson, for whatever reason.

Central storage of digital resources.

Every department accumulates huge amount of resources ranging from photocopy sheets to videos to sound bytes to OHP slides. These occupy shelves in an around the classroom and keeping them ordered and accessible takes time and discipline.

As more and more classroom resources become available on the web then the need to collect all the digital resources into one place becomes ever important. It does not help if each teacher has their own notes and web links on their own hard drive. Also the chance to add resources such as a good web site to the data bank whilst at home is now possible with a VLE.

Add continuity within a department.

The head of a year group or department can now produce (more…)