teaching Archives

Kangaroo Looking for a Few Good STEAM Teachers

September 21, 2016Stephen R Clark

The Kangaroo Pro is a full-featured desktop PC for under $200 that fits in your hand. They’re looking for teachers to see what it can do in the classroom.

The Perfect Bake Pro Helps Novice Bakers Feel Like Pros

March 30, 2016December 14, 2017Mordechai Luchins

Perfect Bake brings the Internet of Things to the Kitchen with a connected smart scale that wants to help your cookies come out perfectly, every time. Do they deliver?

A Totoro Shirt, My Students, and the Magic of Hayao Miyazaki

January 5, 2016Karen Walsh

So, I guess, what I really want to do is thank you, Mr. Miyazaki. Your movies remind us to dream and to believe in magic. Few people can say they attempted this. Even fewer people have accomplished this.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Miyazaki. I hope you have many more.

Staff Picks: 11 of Our Favorite Back to School Movies

August 12, 2015Preston Burt1

While the kids pack their backpacks, the Geek Dad writers load up our Netflix queue with some of our favorite back to school movies.

Try Family Meditation for Closer Relationships and Personal Growth

January 6, 2015Jenny Bristol1

In an effort to go through life with more mindfulness and as a way to teach my kids to be more introspective and thoughtful about themselves, we have begun a daily family meditation. Not the legs-crossed/eyes-closed/upturned-hands/”Om” type of meditation, but rather the kind where you read short but meaningful passages and discuss them. It only takes about ten minutes per day, but it builds a lot of personal skills in all of us.

3 Things to Remember When Teaching a Friend

January 27, 2014Ruth Suehle1

As geeks, we love to share our passions. But let’s be honest. A lot of us really, really suck at it when it’s time to teach a friend.

10 Tips for Teaching Younger Gamers More Complex Games

January 11, 2014December 14, 2017James Floyd Kelly6

Yesterday, Jonathan offered up 10 reasons to play board games with your kids… and today I’d like to offer up 10 tips for teaching your young children to play more complex board games. These tips are reprinted (with permission) from an article I wrote for the Winter 2014 issue of Casual Game Insider, a magazine dedicated to casual board gaming.

Case Study: Does Online Tuition Make a Difference?

December 17, 2013Andy Robertson3

Maths Doctor is a UK based service that offers one-to-one Math tuition tailored to your child’s needs.

Ben Bertoli’s ClassRealm Is Gamifying the Classroom

May 7, 2012Admin

My GeekDad colleague James Floyd Kelly and I teamed up to do our investigative report on Ben Bertoli, who teaches sixth grade math, science and language arts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Ben’s launching ClassRealm, his project to gamify education through a …

Flipping the Classroom Requires More Than Video

April 13, 2012Kevin Makice

In 2004, a former hedge fund analyst began recording and posting videos of himself explaining some math techniques, posting the videos to YouTube. By 2012, Salman Khan had more than 3,000 lessons online, 140 million views, and a reputation as …

Lectures Are Slow to Leave Education

January 5, 2012Kevin Makice

Eric Mazur is a professor of physics at Harvard. Like many successful academics, he was trained to teach in the same way he learned — standing in front of a room filled with students and lecturing them on the fundamentals …

Transforming Teaching in the Digital Age: A Blueprint (GeekDad Weekly Rewind)

November 6, 2011Admin

Literacy and numeracy are important. We all know our children need to be able to read and write and add up, but increasingly as the pace of change in our world increases what were once seen as fundamental aspects of …

Wordstock Interview: Ryan Alexander-Tanner

October 20, 2011December 14, 2017Jonathan H. Liu

I came across Ryan Alexander-Tanner at Wordstock, where he had copies of his book To Teach: The Journey, in Comics. It’s one that I haven’t read myself, but had heard of, so I stopped to chat with him. Alexander-Tanner works …

Education Week: To Teach or Not to Teach? That is the Question…

September 10, 2011Patricia Vollmer5

I want to be a math teacher when I grow up. (I also want to be a Hurricane Hunter, but that’s for another post.) Back before I became a mother, I used to set elaborate long-term goals…and then medium- and short-term goals to get me there. Among my plans was to become a school teacher […]

Teaching the Physics of Angry Birds

July 7, 2011Jim MacQuarrie

It turns out that Angry Birds is more than just an incredibly popular, highly addicting video game. It seems that, used in the right way, it has legitimate educational value. According to an article at eSchool News (registration required in …

What’s in Your “Activity Closet?”

May 30, 2011James Floyd Kelly

I must give my mom full credit for this post — growing up in Florida was great, but living in the Panhandle during the summer months meant hot, muggy days with an always predictable afternoon shower to make things even …

A Wrong Way to the Right Idea?

February 25, 2011GeekMom3

It is a generally accepted ideology that parents typically want better for their children than they had for themselves. We hope we can save them from making our mistakes. We hope we can teach them to learn when they make their own. We try to provide for our kids. Healthy eating habits, good study skills, […]

Geek Equals Math Plus Art

January 6, 2011GeekMom3

“Mathematics is the gate and key of the sciences. …Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world.” –Roger Bacon Math is one of those quintessentially geeky things that are often taught so badly that even some of […]

Static Season Has Returned

November 12, 2010GeekMom6

We’ve all done it. We’ve all earned the scathing look and the whine of discomfort because we just accidentally static shocked our child. You always feel just a little bad, unless of course you did it on purpose, in which case you are trying very hard not to smile. But in all things there is […]

Five Ways to Teach Science With Star Trek

November 11, 2010December 16, 2017Ruth Suehle18

When I was in tenth grade, my interest in astronomy collided with a boyfriend who was into Star Trek, just as The Next Generation was ending and Voyager was beginning. Two years later, I decided that I’d taken all the calculus any person needed, but I felt a little guilty not taking any math at […]

Geek School: Smarter by Design

November 1, 2010GeekMom

I’ve been a geek all my life, but I hated school. Until college, I learned more watching PBS and maxing out my youth library card every week than I ever did in a classroom. I’m worried that my son will have the same experience – he’s only four years old, but he already loves science […]

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