Thursday, February 27, 2014

Grown-ups 2: Multiple Intelligences




Read the text below about James Gardner's theory on multiple intelligences and learning styles. Then identify those you think best apply to you and share your ideas with a partner.

taken from: http://www.tecweb.org/styles/gardner.html


Howard Gardner of Harvard has identified seven distinct intelligences. According to this theory, "we are all able to know the world through language, logical-mathematical analysis, spatial representation, musical thinking, the use of the body to solve problems or to make things, an understanding of other individuals, and an understanding of ourselves. Where individuals differ is in the strength of these intelligences - the so-called profile of intelligences -and in the ways in which such intelligences are invoked and combined to carry out different tasks, solve diverse problems, and progress in various domains."

The learning styles are as follows:
 
Visual-Spatial - think in terms of physical space, as do architects and sailors. Very aware of their environments. They like to draw, do jigsaw puzzles, read maps, daydream. They can be taught through drawings, verbal and physical imagery. Tools include models, graphics, charts, photographs, drawings, 3-D modeling, video, videoconferencing, television, multimedia, texts with pictures/charts/graphs.

Bodily-kinesthetic - use the body effectively, like a dancer or a surgeon. Keen sense of body awareness. They like movement, making things, touching. They communicate well through body language and be taught through physical activity, hands-on learning, acting out, role playing. Tools include equipment and real objects.

Musical - show sensitivity to rhythm and sound. They love music, but they are also sensitive to sounds in their environments. They may study better with music in the background. They can be taught by turning lessons into lyrics, speaking rhythmically, tapping out time. Tools include musical instruments, music, radio, stereo, CD-ROM, multimedia.

Interpersonal - understanding, interacting with others. These students learn through interaction. They have many friends, empathy for others, street smarts. They can be taught through group activities, seminars, dialogues. Tools include the telephone, audio conferencing, time and attention from the instructor, video conferencing, writing, computer conferencing, E-mail.

Intrapersonal - understanding one's own interests, goals. These learners tend to shy away from others. They're in tune with their inner feelings; they have wisdom, intuition and motivation, as well as a strong will, confidence and opinions. They can be taught through independent study and introspection. Tools include books, creative materials, diaries, privacy and time. They are the most independent of the learners.

Linguistic - using words effectively. These learners have highly developed auditory skills and often think in words. They like reading, playing word games, making up poetry or stories. They can be taught by encouraging them to say and see words, read books together. Tools include computers, games, multimedia, books, tape recorders, and lecture.

Logical -Mathematical - reasoning, calculating. Think conceptually, abstractly and are able to see and explore patterns and relationships. They like to experiment, solve puzzles, ask cosmic questions. They can be taught through logic games, investigations, mysteries. They need to learn and form concepts before they can deal with details.

Watch the segment from the movie Grown-ups 2 and answer the questions:







1. What can you say about the little boy's intelligences? Is he intelligent? What are his strong and weak intelligences. Justify your answers.

2. Is it possible, in your opinion, for someone to have different intelligences, just like the boy in the scene? Why (not)?

3. What could a teacher do to teach the boy in such a way that he would have better results at school?



MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - GROWN UPS 2


Thursday, February 20, 2014

The Call: Emercency Calls 911



I really like thrillers, and this one is about an occupation I respect a lot. Professionals who work with other people's emergencies, no matter how they do it, are always worth-admiring individuals. This movie is a piercing thriller and I really enjoyed it.


I. Work in pairs:

1. Do you have an emergency phone number in your country/city you can call in case of an emergency? Have you ever had to use it? How effective do you think this service is?

2. In Brazil, this number is 190. In the USA, it is 911. What kind of requirements must a person who answers this call - a call-taker - have? Explain it.

3. How stressful do you think this job is? Would you be qualified for a call-taker position?

4. What can go wrong if the procedures are not followed properly by the call-taker?

5. Read the procedures a 911 call-taker must have in mind while taking a call and fill in the blanks with the following question words:



WHAT / WHERE / WHO / WHEN / WHY

Information collected from the important site:  http://www.franklinmo.org/EMA/911%20The%20Facts.htm


_______________ The call-taker is required to ask many questions in order to give responders an accurate picture of your situation. It is important to understand that responders may already be on the way while you are talking to the call-taker; we are updating the information as they go. It is also important not to exaggerate the emergency. Listen carefully to the call-taker’s questions; try to speak clearly in a calm voice. The call-taker needs to ask the basic 4 W's for every call-where, what, who, and when....

________________ This includes more than just the address. An apartment number, floor, suite number, or even the color of your house. Especially important is the nearest intersection, or cross-street, to the address. This makes it easier and quicker for responders to find you.

_________________ This is the basic "bottom-line" of the call-what is the exact problem? We don't require long descriptions of the events leading up to what is happening, just what the immediate problem is. Are you in physical danger? Right now? Are there weapons involved? Is there a fire? Or do you just need information or a referral? Also, try to remain as calm as possible; it only makes the process longer if the call-taker is spending time trying to understand an excited or hysterical caller.

_________________  This is to identify suspects in crimes, especially if they just left (so responding officers don't drive right past the bad guys!). This means clothing descriptions, names (if known) and last known location
or direction of travel.

_______________ It makes a difference if the incident is occurring right now or happened an hour ago, so a time frame is important.

Answer key:

WHY /  WHERE / WHAT / WHO / WHEN

II. Read the situations below and check the ones that are not considered emergencies that should be dealt with by call-takers. (This is true in the USA - 911 Calls)


(   ) Property crimes that are no longer in progress and the offender is not on the scene. These include crimes such as vandalism, thefts, graffiti, and stolen autos

(   ) Animal control problems 

(    ) A burglar inside the house

(    ) Illegally parked vehicles or vehicles blocking alleys or driveways, but that are not blocking traffic flow

(    ) A car accident with victims

(    ) Minor vehicle crashes where there are no injuries and traffic is not blocked 

(    ) Reporting crank calls.

(    ) Trash pickup problems

(    ) Stolen checks and credit cards 

(    ) An injured person on the street
(    ) Minors violating curfew

(    ) Loud parties

(    ) Road hazards that don't require immediate attention

(    ) Underage drinking

            (    ) Runaway juvenile or missing adult who does not   need special care

            (    )  Seeing someone robbing a car on the street.

             (    ) Seeing a violent fight in front of your house.

             (    ) Hearing gunshots near your house.

             (    ) Hearing children screaming loudly inside one of your neighbor's house.

Facts taken from the site:

http://www.911dispatch.com/info/fact_figures.html


Answer key:

Situations that are not considered emergencies.

¬Property crimes that are no longer in progress and the offender is not on the scene. These include crimes such as vandalism, thefts, graffiti, and stolen autos 
¬Animal control problems  
¬Illegally parked vehicles or vehicles blocking alleys or driveways, but that are not blocking traffic flow 
¬Minor vehicle crashes where there are no injuries and traffic is not blocked 
- Reporting crank calls
¬Phone numbers, addresses, hours of operation, etc 
¬Trash pickup problems 
¬Stolen checks and credit cards -- also call the financial institutions involved to have them stop payments of checks and verifications of charges 
¬Minors violating curfew 
¬Loud parties -- the person calling must be willing to sign a complaint 
¬Road hazards that don't require immediate attention 
¬Underage drinking
¬Runaway juvenile or missing adult who does not   need special care


III. Watch the movie segment and discuss the following questions:

 


 1. Describe call-takers workplaces.

2. How would describe call-takers emotional state while dealing with emergencies?

3. What kind of traing do future call-takers receive?

4. Why is their workplace called "the hive"?

5. What are some of their fears? What do they dislike about their jobs?

6. What is the last scene situation? What should the call-taker do to help the teenage girl?

7. How would you feel if you were the call-taker in that situation?


MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - THE CALL

Monday, February 10, 2014

Now You See Me & Jumper: Teleportation





TELEPORTATION:

Also called teletransportation, the process of moving from one place to another without traveling through the intervening space. 


I. Divide the class into two different groups. Group 1 reads silently the text below, edited from the awesome site http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162890-human-teleportation-would-take-so-long-itd-be-more-like-a-death-ray

 Group 2 reads the text edited from another equally awesome site http://www.buzzle.com/articles/is-teleportation-possible.html





Group 1:



Teleportation is always as sci-fi dream, but recently scientists have been able to teleport nano-sized objects across significant distances. We’re still nowhere near teleporting even the smallest, visible-to-the-naked-eye objects, but that didn’t stop a team of researchers from calculating how long it’d take to teleport an entire human being. It’s very, very long.


Since we can’t teleport humans — or even a paperclip — just yet, the researchers performed a fair bit of guesswork that checks out in theory. In order to teleport a human, every piece of data that human holds would need to be broken down and transferable — and the data that makes up humans are the DNA pairs that form genomes in every cell. The researchers were then able to calculate how long the transfer would take — just like you’d be able to estimate how long it would take to download, for example, an episode of Game of Thrones.


 

If the bandwidth used to perform the transfer were around 30GHz, it would take 4.85×1015years to complete. For comparison, the universe is theorized to be around 14 billion years old, which means teleporting a human from Earth to a spot in orbit directly above would take 350,000 times longer than the universe has existed.
You would’ve died long before you reached your destination, unless of course the teleportation process also somehow preserves you. If it could preserve your data, it likely wouldn’t preserve you. So the real you would be dead anyway, and a newly minted copy would be walking around, not acting entirely like you would. You’d be zapped by teleportation rays and you’d be dead. You could call that a death ray.


GROUP 2:

Teleportation is real. It exists theoretically and has also been done practically on a small scale in science labs. But the truth is, what we have gotten to till now is still too far from the fictional teleportation. All across the fiction world, you will have the concepts of teleportation like in Star Trek or the 2008 movie, Jumper. What reality dictates, however, is concerned with only atoms and molecules and their 'information'. Confused? All the more reasons to read on ahead on the matter.

Fictional and Real Teleportation
Your teleportation shown in movies and written in books, consists of transporting physical bodies, human or otherwise, through either some form of time warp or dimensional rifts.

Now, your current state of research and experiments on teleportation (or 'Classic Teleportation') is not that 'developed', if you may. Right now, teleportation only deals with the transfer of information from point A to point B, that are pretty close to each other (compared to two continents or planets). An experiment in 1998 showed the teleportation of a Photon across two terminals at a distance of 3.28 feet (or 1 meter). The latest experiment in April of 2011, teleported packets of light over 9.9 miles (or 16 kilometers) with previously unknown precision. This falls under another aspect of teleportation, known as 'Quantum Teleportation' and leads to the possibility of constructing quantum computers and quantum satellites.

Classic Teleportation
The main difference between the classic and quantum procedures of teleportation is the idea of transportation used. In the classic way, the object would simply be taken from point A to point B really, really fast, thus giving the idea of teleportation. Of course, the idea is old and no one thought it would actually work out that way. The truth is, the evolution of science and technology point to the fact that it indeed might be possible some day.

Now, teleportation takes a look at that old method, tries to do it the same way, but hits this one snag called the Uncertainty Principle (explained later). This prompts the new scientists to come up with a rudimentary concept of copying an object and sending it's information across to a receiving station. The whole idea revolves around the information the object carries. It works like a simple fax machine, like 2-D teleportation. Put paper with something on it on one end, send it to other end where the receiver gets your message. Note that the latter gets the 'message' and not the original paper. And that, is what Classic teleportation is; it suggests the duplication of an object by measuring it, sending over the information over to receiving end, where the object gets reconstructed according to the data and the material that the data 'wraps' itself around. Which means, if human teleportation were to exist this way, it would mean that a person stepping on the sending platform should have a somewhat similar organism on the receiving platform. He would then press the button, all the data carried by the person's structure is copied and transmitted over to the receiving station, where it is fed to the organic blob waiting for it and turn into the person on getting it. Now this obviously raises ethical questions like -

● What happens to the guy at the sending end?
● How similar are the two guys (in terms of physical reconstruction)?
● If the first one is 'destroyed', will that be killing and would it matter to the second guy created?


Whatever the future holds, we will not know accurately. It will keep changing as things advance, develop and deviate. Maybe there is another way we haven't looked at yet, maybe it's the wormholes. Whatever it is, I really hope we will be able to teleport cheesecakes with perfection.
 II. Pair one student from group 1 and one from group 2. Share the most important points of the readings and contrast the articles points of view. How different are their viewpoints? Who do you agree with the most?





 III. Watch the movie segment and answer the following questions.

 1. What are the Four Horsemen plans for the evening?

2. Do you think this is a fair use of teleportation? Why (not)?

3. What are some of the ethical problems teleportation would arouse if it were actually possible?

4. Are they criminals? Explain it.


IV. Now watch the second part of the segment and answer the questions.




Part 2



A. Watch the movie segment from the movie Jumper. Decide how different life would be if everyone had David’s power to teleport. Write at least 5 different things.







1.


2.


3.


4.


5.



B. Talk to a partner and make a list of what both of you would (not) do if only you had David’s power to teleport. Remember that you have to be ethical and think about the possible consequences of your acts.



What we would do : 


What we wouldn’t do:



C. Work with a partner and write down a condition for the sentences below.




1. We would donate 1 million dollars to charity if...


2. We would teleport ourselves to the Sahara desert if...


3. We wouldn't call the police if...


4. We would hide our super power from the other people if...



MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - NOW YOU SEE ME - PART 1

MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - NOW YOU SEE ME - PART 2


MOVIE SEGMENT DOWNLOAD - JUMPER