Listeners will gain valuable strategies for employing Lightning Talks as a pedagogical tool, with emphasis on their simplicity, the encouragement of critical thinking, and the promotion of a more inclusive and engaging learning environment. The episode is rich with anecdotes and experiences, highlighting how these brief, impromptu presentations can ease the anxiety associated with public speaking, inspire creativity, and facilitate a deeper connection with subject matter. Furthermore, the conversation also touches on the adaptability of Lightning Talks across different educational contexts, offering listeners a comprehensive view on integrating this format into their teaching repertoire to ignite enthusiasm and foster a vibrant learning culture.

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Barbara Oakley is a professor of engineering, former Russian translater on Soviet fishing trawlers, Antarctic researcher (where she met her husband), author, MOOC creator, and so much more. Kelly and Sean talk to her about the ways that our brain learns and retains knowledge, and how we can use that mechanism to learn how to learn better.

Special Guest: Barbara Oakley.

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Links:

• Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects | Coursera — This course gives you easy access to the invaluable learning techniques used by experts in art, music, literature, math, science, sports, and many other disciplines. We’ll learn about the how the brain uses two very different learning modes and how it encapsulates (“chunks”) information. We’ll also cover illusions of learning, memory techniques, dealing with procrastination, and best practices shown by research to be most effective in helping you master tough subjects.
• Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential | Coursera — Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change effectively even in maturity, and we’ll build on what you already know to take your life’s learning in fantastic new directions. This course is designed to show you how to look at what you’re learning, and your place in what’s unfolding in the society around you, so you can be what you want to be, given the real world constraints that life puts on us all. You’ll see that by using certain mental tools and insights, you can learn and do more—far more—than you might have ever dreamed!
• A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) 1, Oakley, Barbara - Amazon.com — In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to learning effectively—secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they’d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions—you just need the creativity to see them.
• Amazon.com: Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens eBook: Oakley, Barbara, Sejnowski, Terrence, McConville, Alistair: Kindle Store — A Mind for Numbers and its wildly popular online companion course "Learning How to Learn" have empowered more than two million learners of all ages from around the world to master subjects that they once struggled with. Fans often wish they'd discovered these learning strategies earlier and ask how they can help their kids master these skills as well. Now in this new book for kids and teens, the authors reveal how to make the most of time spent studying.
• Amazon.com: Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential eBook: Oakley, Barbara: Kindle Store — At a time when we are constantly being asked to retrain and reinvent ourselves to adapt to new technologies and changing industries, this book shows us how we can uncover and develop talents we didn’t realize we had—no matter what our age or background. We’re often told to “follow our passions.” But in Mindshift, Dr. Barbara Oakley shows us how we can broaden our passions. Drawing on the latest neuroscientific insights, Dr. Oakley shepherds us past simplistic ideas of “aptitude” and “ability,” which provide only a snapshot of who we are now—with little consideration about how we can change.
• Amazon.com: A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence eBook: Hawkins, Jeff, Dawkins, Richard: Kindle Store — A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI. For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world-not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought. A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word.
• Amazon.com: Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn eBook: Oakley, Barbara, Rogowsky, Beth, Sejnowski, Terrence J.: Kindle Store — A groundbreaking guide to improve teaching based on the latest research in neuroscience, from the bestselling author of A Mind for Numbers. Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have made enormous strides in understanding the brain and how we learn, but little of that insight has filtered down to the way teachers teach. Uncommon Sense Teaching applies this research to the classroom for teachers, parents, and anyone interested in improving education.
• Amazon.com: Learn Like a Pro: Science-Based Tools to Become Better at Anything eBook: PhD, Barbara Oakley, Schewe, Olav: Kindle Store — Do you spend too much time learning with disappointing results? Do you find it difficult to remember what you read? Do you put off studying because it’s boring and you’re easily distracted? This book is for you. Dr. Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe have both struggled in the past with their learning. But they have found techniques to help them master any material. Building on insights from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, they give you a crash course to improve your ability to learn, no matter what the subject is. Through their decades of writing, teaching, and research on learning, the authors have developed deep connections with experts from a vast array of disciplines. And it’s all honed with feedback from thousands of students who have themselves gone through the trenches of learning. Successful learners gradually add tools and techniques to their mental toolbox, and they think critically about their learning to determine when and how to best use their mental tools. That allows these learners to make the best use of their brains, whether those brains seem “naturally” geared toward learning or not. This book will teach you how you can do the same.

According to ASCD

“The word rubric comes from the Latin word for red. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary lists the first meaning of rubric as "an authoritative rule" and the fourth meaning as "a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests." How did the name for a color come to mean a rule or guide? At least as far back as the Middle Ages, the rules for the conduct of liturgical services—as opposed to the actual spoken words of the liturgy—were often printed in red, so the rules were "the red things" on the page.

Benefits of a Rubric

“Rubrics are important because they clarify for students the qualities their work should have. This point is often expressed in terms of students understanding the learning target and criteria for success. For this reason, rubrics help teachers teach, they help coordinate instruction and assessment, and they help students learn.

“Rubrics are useful tool to help students and teachers:

• work towards a shared goal,
• Giving students a rubric before they begin working ensures that students and teachers are working towards a shared goal.
• facilitate constructive feedback,
• assess students’ learning on multiple elements of a project.
• Student can analyze their own work
• provide consistency in evaluating

To allow extension of learning and “WOW” factors:

Single Point rubrics-- meets expectations but allows (forces) extensions
“Single Point Rubric” in 2000 during a conference presentation by someone named Mary Dietz. Attending that conference was a researcher named Jarene Fluckiger, who published a study on its effectiveness in 2010. (The reference to Dietz is in Fluckiger’s paper, but no one named Dietz has published anything on the topic.)

From one of our favorite rubrics at Northeastern University.
Percentage for criteria with a built in a 2% “AMAZING” category. That’s reserved for solutions that absolutely blow us away. Doing exactly what’s asked of you does not earn a perfect grade; doing an incredible job with your solution earns a perfect grade. In each assignment, we’ll specify exactly what makes for an amazing solution

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Links:

• CS5001 Homework Rubric — This rubric will be used to evaluate your homework assignments in CS5001. It will be applied to each Python program you submit (most assignments have multiple Python programs). In addition to numeric scores in each rubric category, your grader will provide written feedback as well, if there is something helpful we can contribute to your learning.
• The Power of Yet Mug – Teaching Python — Three letter words are often the most powerful. Y-E-T is the gateway to changing your mindset. When you add yet, you add possibility and purpose. Remind your students that "yet changes everything" with every sip that you take. These ceramic mugs not only have a fun design on them, but also a colorful rim, handle, and inside, so the mug is bound to spice up your mug rack.
• iRubric: Python mini project rubric - QX73A82: RCampus — Grading Rubric for Python guessing game.
• Single Point Rubric: A Tool for Responsible Student Self-Assessment
• The Big Book of Small Python Projects: 81 Easy Practice Programs: Sweigart, Al: 9781718501249: Amazon.com: Books — Deploy Python creatively and effectively through this collection of short coding projects carefullly curated by best-selling author and Python expert Al Sweigart. This curated collection of simple Python projects lets you dive right in and make digital art, games, animations, number-crunching tools and more – right away! Forget standard step-by-step tutorials; instead, author Al Sweigart takes a learn-by-doing approach that provides you with over 80 programs to manually copy, run, and play with. Once you see how the code works, it’s time to experiment with your own changes and practice re-creating them yourself.

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How will teachers adapt their online writing in order to communicate and engage learners? What materials will teachers develop to ignite motivation with students? How will connections and community be built via online courses?

In this episode, Sean and Kelly talk with David Amos, a writer for Real Python about how he makes connections with his Real Python tutorials and we will share tips and techniques for developing quality online writing for learners.

David Amos Real Python
https://realpython.com/team/damos/
https://realpython.com/python-gui-tkinter/
https://realpython.com/python-rounding/

Special Guest: David Amos.

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Links:

• How to Use sorted() and sort() in Python – Real Python — All programmers will have to write code to sort items or data at some point. Sorting can be critical to the user experience in your application, whether it’s ordering a user’s most recent activity by timestamp, or putting a list of email recipients in alphabetical order by last name. Python sorting functionality offers robust features to do basic sorting or customize ordering at a granular level.
• Join the Real Python Tutorial Team – Real Python — Do you have a knack for writing and want to get your thoughts in front of thousands of Python developers?  The realpython.com tutorial team is known for making the highest-quality Python tutorials available online. Our mission is to “help Python developers around the world become more awesome.”
• Let’s talk: Effectively Communicating with your Online Students – Humanizing Online Teaching and Learning — Introduction While effectively communicating with the students in your online classes aids in the retention of your students, as educators, we should want to do more than just retain our students. We should provide them with a sense of community while enrolled in online classes to avoid the sense of isolation that some online students experience.
• Making Lessons Memorable Designing from Two Perspectives — What do we want students to learn? What do we want them to remember—tomorrow? Next month? Next year? Clearly, we cannot separate learning from memory. Ensuring that what we teach is memorable is a vital component of instruction. The question, of course, is how.
• 4 Ideas to Consider for Online Learning – George Couros — Not only have educators been inundated with information on COVID-19, but they have had to retool, refocus, and rethink completely how they are going to connect with and teach their students.  A lot is going on in our world right now, and my first instinct is that we need to slow down and focus on what is most important at this moment.
• 8 Strategies Robert Marzano & John Hattie Agree On — Robert Marzano and John Hattie have both reviewed the research on which teaching strategies work best. While they used different methods and terminology, they agreed on these 8 powerful strategies.

Special Guest: Meg Ray.

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Links:

• Codesters: Coding in your Classroom — Teach Coding in Your Classroom An online learning environment with everything you need to teach students to code
• Code This Game!: Make Your Game Using Python, Then Break Your Game to Create a New One!: Meg Ray, Keith Zoo: 9781250306692: Amazon.com: Gateway — Make it! Code it! Break it! Mod it! Meg Ray's Code This Game! is a nonfiction visual guide, illustrated by Keith Zoo, that teaches young readers, 10-14, how to program and create their very own video game. Each chapter introduces key coding concepts as kids build an action strategy game in Python, an open-source programming language. The book features an innovative stand-up format that allows kids to read, program, and play their game simultaneously.
• Code This Game! | Odd Dot — A nonfiction visual guide that teaches young readers, 10-14, how to program and create their very own video game.
• Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps course - [Talk Python Training - Python tutorials and courses for developers] — Course Summary Programming is fun and profitable. Learning to become a software developer should be equally fun! This course will teach you everything you need to know about the Python language all the while building interesting and engaging applications.

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Links:

• Visible Thinking
• Middle years | 11 to 16 | International Baccalaureate® - International Baccalaureate®
• Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything: Ulrich Boser, Tom Parks: 9781543602210: Amazon.com: Books — For centuries, experts have argued that learning was about memorizing information: You're supposed to study facts, dates, and details, burn them into your memory, and then apply that knowledge at opportune times. But this approach to learning isn’t nearly enough for the world that we live in today, and in Learn Better journalist and education researcher Ulrich Boser demonstrates that how we learn can matter just as much as what we learn.
• Welcome | Barbara Oakley
• Sean and Kelly’s Genetics Repo

In this episode, we will discuss how to develop persistence in programming for all learners. Whether your students already have an innate ability to stick with coding or if you are hoping to instill the “desire” in your students, Sean and Kelly will examine ways that they develop persistence in programming in their classrooms.

Note: In this episode, Kelly mixed up Sylvia Duckworth, the creator of Sketchnotes, with Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit. We've linked both of their books below for you, since they're both great reads.

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Links:

• Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard — Read more about the Cliff of Confusion that Kelly referenced in our episode.
• Teaching Kids to Debug Code Independently | EdSurge News — From EdSurge: approaches and best practices for teaching debugging and, by extension, persistence.
• Self-Reflection Tool Sheet — A worksheet of prompts for eliciting better self-reflection.
• Grit by Angela Duckworth — In her instant, multi-month New York Times bestseller, Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls “grit.” “Inspiration for non-geniuses everywhere” (People).
• Sketchnote for Educators — Sylvia Duckworth is a Canadian teacher whose sketchnotes have taken social media by storm. Her drawings provide clarity and provoke dialogue on many topics related to education. This book contains 100 of her most popular sketchnotes with links to the original downloads that can be used in class or shared with colleagues. Interspersed throughout the book are Sylvia's reflections on each drawing and what motivated her to create them, in addition to commentary from other educators who inspired the sketchnotes.
• How to Sketchnote — Educator and internationally known sketchnoter Sylvia Duckworth makes ideas memorable and shareable with her simple yet powerful drawings. In How to Sketchnote, she explains how you can use sketchnoting in the classroom and that you don’t have to be an artist to discover the benefits of doodling!