Instructify

Everyone would agree that learning is important. If we didn’t, none of us would be doing what we do. But are we practicing what we preach to our students? Are we, as educators, continuing our education in the same way we urge our students to do every day? In the past, unless you were willing to shell out thousands and thousands of dollars for additional schooling, continuing education was tough to come by. Not anymore.

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. In conjunction with top-level universities such as MIT and Princeton, Academic Earth brings the best content together in one place and creates an environment where that content is remarkably easy to use.

There are thousands of lectures currently available from the world’s top scholars. You may already be familiar with the MIT Open Courseware project or the Open Yale courses, which make thousands and thousands of lectures and courses available online for free. Academic Earth includes these resources but has added lectures from Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.

Currently, 17 subjects are represented ranging from Astronomy to Religion. All subjects include individual lectures, but many of them also offer entire courses. For example, if you’re interested in Computer Science, you can view all 32 lectures in Introduction to Computer Science I by David J. Malan at Harvard — for free. All of the videos at AE can be shared to a Facebook page, emailed, or embedded into a blog or wiki. Academic Earth also gives users the ability to create your own custom play list to make future visits a tad easier.

So the next time you’ve got the urge to learn a little about “The Fourier Transform and its applications” or “Convex Optimization,” Academic Earth is the place to go. - JERRY SWIATEK

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10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life - Do you know when someone is lying to you? If you answered “yes,” then good, you’ve recognized that a lot of people are probably liars. If you said “no,” then you are also right. In fact, you are the most right. Yep… no one lies. Not ever. Check out PsyBlog’s list of ways you can use the findings of psychological research in your daily life. You might even figure out how to use reverse psychology to outwit your students, but then again… you probably won’t. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo credit: misocrazy on Flickr.)

Online video is the cause of and solution to many teachers’ problems. You can find thousands educational videos in seconds, for free. But you’ve also got to sift through junk like video responses to TV shows and home movies, if your school even allows you to view it at all. If you’re a science teacher and want to find useful content without all the fluff, head to Science Hack, a search engine for scientific videos.

At ScienceHack, you can watch videos about physic, math, chemistry, robotics, psychology, and any other scienterrific categories you can name. The videos themselves are often from trustworthy sources like the Science Channel or National Geographic. In addition, Science Hack has actual scientists screen the videos to make sure they’re accurate. So that means you won’t have to dig through somebody’s poorly-shot video of their homemade baking soda volcano to find the good stuff. -BILL FERRIS

Science Hack

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All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

Which is scarier: spiders or soda? I don’t care how many mosquitoes they eat, spiders scare the bejeezus out of me. And I’m hopelessly devoted to Coca-Cola, despite the fact it’s loaded with sugar and caffeine, which together can rot my teeth and cause stress, anxiety and depression.

Maia Szalavitz at Psychology Today looks at how humans assess risk in “10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong.” And frankly, Szalavitz says, we stink at it. For example, look at how we react to one-in-a-million catastrophes:

“After 9/11, 1.4 million people changed their holiday travel plans to avoid flying. The vast majority chose to drive instead. But driving is far more dangerous than flying, and the decision to switch caused roughly 1,000 additional auto fatalities, according to two separate analyses comparing traffic patterns in late 2001 to those the year before.”

This is a great discussion topic for your psychology class. Do they (or you) make any of these fear-based decisions? If your students can understand people’s motivation, they can better understand human behavior. That’s helpful both in psychology and in day-to-day life. -BILL FERRIS

10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong via Psychology Today

Photo credit: mixatal on flickr