1.WATG Fall Conference Presentation Slides Now Online
Earlier this month I was fortunate to be able to attend the WATG (Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted) Fall Conference in the beautiful Wisconsin Dells. One of the highlights for me was meeting and attending two presentations by Dr. Nadia Webb, co-author of Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults. WATG has made available on their website several of the PowerPoint and pdf files from conference presentations, including two by Dr. Webb: Parenting the Heart of a Gifted Child and Heart, Mind and Hands. I highly recommend them. Here’s a sample from her talk “Heart, Mind and Hands”:
The Unidentified Gifted in the normal classroom: The “Average” Student
- The kids who are passed over. They are quiet; show average accomplishments in the classroom by using their intellect and hard work to conceal their deficits. “In essence, their gift masks the disability and the disability masks the gift.” They are frequently girls.
- The disability is frequently discovered in college or adulthood when the someone reads or hears about learning disabilities. Parents often learn about their own disability when their children are identified. Read More
2. Women in Engineering: A Crisis of Confidence?
As an instructor of engineering students, I was struck by a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a study suggesting that some women leave their engineering studies not because of a lack of ability or skill, but because of lack of “professional role confidence,” defined as “a person’s sense that he or she belongs in a certain field.”
“Traditionally, it has been thought that women’s family plans and low regard for their mathematical skills accounted for their low representation in the field.
Ms. Cech and her co-authors found differently. Women’s family plans had little bearing on their career planning, once they entered engineering training, the paper says, though the plans probably do play a role later, when they embark on their careers. Surprisingly, the researchers found much stronger evidence that men were more likely to leave engineering if they had plans to start a family.” Read More
3. Tamara Fisher’s Symbaloo
If you don’t yet subscribe to Tamara Fisher’s Education Week blog, Unwrapping the Gifted, do so without delay. Her most recent post is about an innovative way to collect, organize, and share theme-related web resources:
“Over the fifteen years I’ve taught this class, I have been collecting useful websites for the kids to use for their various projects. It started gradually when the internet was still young. At first it was just a helpful site or two that I knew from memory and would suggest to a student as a resource. Then the internet grew and I began scratching the addresses of a growing number of sites down on scraps of paper and thumb-tacking them to my bulletin board. And then the internet really took off and my students were helping me discover all sorts of great places they could use and my bulletin board looked a bit ridiculous.
Then this summer at Edufest when I attended a session by Brian Housand, I learned of Symbaloo. A symbaloo (also called “webmix”) is a place where you can collect a plethora of links on various topics and organize them however you want…” Read More
I cannot believe I had never heard of this tool before, and I can hardly wait to use it for next term’s creative thinking class, not only to share resources with the students, but as an option for them to integrate into their projects. Take a look at Tamara’s gifted education symbaloo for inspiration to create one of your own.
