Evernote - your external brain

This is less about the brain and more about a cool program that claims to be 'your external brain". The company tag line is "remember everything". Usable on a wide variety of devices. Full featured free version with a premium version available for a very affordable price. You really can remember everything with Evernote. I use it all the time. Very powerful search tools. Worth your time to check it out.

Digital Kids - Twitch speed

Here are some thoughts from an interesting article called Digital Kids by Ian Jukes and Anita Dosaj and the Infosavy group back in 2006...
"This generation operates at what Marc Prensky describes as twitch speed. Children accept as normal that they should have instantaneous access to information, goods and services at the click of a mouse. They expect to be able to communicate with anyone or anything at anytime, anywhere day or night.

Such everyday expectations have led to the death of patience and the emergence of a society increasingly expecting, wanting and demanding instant gratification. This is one of the reasons why it’s harder and harder to get children to read today. Reading is a delayed gratification medium while TV, video games and the Web are immediate gratification media.

For example, I recently heard my son Kyler bitterly complain that it had taken him 20 minutes to register for his Spring courses at college, which he was doing ONLINE from his bedroom!!!!"

Anyone remember the good olds days of waiting in line for hours? So what do you think? Do you agree? If it is true, what are the implications for how we teach Sunday School, VBS, Day School, etc?

I'll post more from this article and from others that explore how our brain wires itself based on experience.

An early pioneer

Dr. Robert Sylvester, a Lutheran from the Northwest, has been a leader in the field for a long time. He continues to give helpful advice in a regular column and has some helpful books published as well, one from the early years and one more recent.

Back in the early days

Some of the early pioneers in interpreting research about brain function as it relates to teaching include Dr Robert Sylvester and Eric Jensen.

Both continue to be active in the field. I have been interested for about 10 years and have seen a very noticeable shift in the last few years towards highly commercialized endeavors... you have to sift through more commercials to get to the good stuff. But good stuff is out there so keep digging.