Author Archives: Pei-Hsuan Lin

About Pei-Hsuan Lin

An enthusiastic k-12 educator, a life-long learner, and a team player who loves to walk students through their learning journey.

In-Person Learning Reminders from Google Education

  1. Have regular check-ins with students
  2. Encourage students to reflect in journals
  3. Combine of digital tools+ traditional methods = synergy
  4. Foster collaboration with tools like Jamboard
  5. Meet students where they’re at by expanding traditional methods
  6. Organize and distribute rich content through Google Classroom
  7. Establish strong connections with students IRL
  8. Build upon skills students learned outside of the classroom
  9. Focus on what students gained, not what the missed out on
  10. Build relationships with families and guardians
  11. Join a PLC, PLN or community of practice to network, grow, and learn

6 Crucial Questions We All Need to Be Asking Teachers Right Now

Teaching is a stressful job. Rewarding, fulfilling, meaningful, necessary (otherwise we wouldn’t do it) but STRESSFUL. Now add in a pandemic and the stress is next-level. We’ve pivoted to online. Pivoted back to in-person with masks and rows and distancing. Pivoted to a hybrid model of both. Teacher mental health should be everyone’s concern. Want to evaluate our job performance right now? These are the questions we should all be asking teachers right now.

#1 How’s your mental health?

#2 How’s your family?

# 3 Who checks on you?

#4 Are you separating school and home?

#5 Are you getting enough sleep?

#6 How can I support you?

Educators take care of their students’ learning, mental health, environment, and safety while they’re at school. Administration needs to do the exact same thing for teachers. It’s empowering to know that someone has your back, in a meaningful, consistent way, while you are in the thick of the battle.

These questions are great for the public to ask teachers, too. Check on your child’s teacher or your teacher friend, family member, or neighbor.

Reference: https://www.boredteachers.com/post/teacher-crucial-questions

What is metaverse?

Zuckerberg said, “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.”

What is metaverse?

The most common conceptions of the Metaverse stem from science fiction. Here, the Metaverse is typically portrayed as a sort of digital “jacked-in” internet – a manifestation of actual reality, but one based in a virtual (often theme park-like) world, such those portrayed in Ready Player One and The Matrix. And while these sorts of experience are likely to be an aspect of the Metaverse, this conception is limited in the same way movies like Tron portrayed the Internet as a literal digital “information superhighway” of bits.

Just as it was hard to envision in 1982 what the Internet of 2020 would be — and harder still to communicate it to those who had never even “logged” onto it at that time — we don’t really know how to describe the Metaverse. However, we can identify core attributes.

The Metaverse, we think, will…

  1. Persistent – which is to say, it never “resets” or “pauses” or “ends”, it just continues indefinitely

  2. Be synchronous and live – even though pre-scheduled and self-contained events will happen, just as they do in “real life”, the Metaverse will be a living experience that exists consistently for everyone and in real-time

  3. Be without any cap to concurrent users, while also providing each user with an individual sense of “presence” – everyone can be a part of the Metaverse and participate in a specific event/place/activity together, at the same time and with individual agency

  4. Be a fully functioning economy – individuals and businesses will be able to create, own, invest, sell, and be rewarded for an incredibly wide range of “work” that produces “value” that is recognized by others

  5. Be an experience that spans both the digital and physical worlds, private and public networks/experiences, and open and closed platforms

  6. Offer unprecedented interoperability of data, digital items/assets, content, and so on across each of these experiences – your “Counter-Strike” gun skin, for example, could also be used to decorate a gun in Fortnite, or be gifted to a friend on/through Facebook. Similarly, a car designed for Rocket League (or even for Porsche’s website) could be brought over to work in Roblox. Today, the digital world basically acts as though it were a mall where every store used its own currency, required proprietary ID cards, had proprietary units of measurement for things like shoes or calories, and different dress codes, etc.

  7. Be populated by “content” and “experiences” created and operated by an incredibly wide range of contributors, some of whom are independent individuals, while others might be informally organized groups or commercially-focused enterprises

Another idea relates to the fundamental communications architecture of the Metaverse. This is described in more detail later in the piece, but while today’s Internet is structured around individual servers “talking” to one another on an as-needed basis, some believe the Metaverse needs be “wired” and “operated” around persistent many-to-many connections. But even here, there’s no consensus around exactly how this would work, nor the degree of decentralization required.

References:

https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse

https://www.techbang.com/posts/89033-zuckerberg-metaverse-internet?fbclid=IwAR3-iWtMTJhZpKktF_Wbxeh3EnaaUEFkX9hKGOsn4hwAgp2yEe3QaE9r9T0

Here’s how early school begins – and why it is bad for students

  • This map shows when school starts across America — way too early according to specialists.
  • Due to early school starts, America’s students are “chronologically sleep-deprived.”
  • California is spearheading a change, which should result in improved academic results.

Why do American high schools generally start so early?

One large part of the answer: school buses. A lot of school districts re-use the same buses to pick up students from different schools: first the high schoolers, then the middle schoolers, and finally the elementary schoolers. In South Carolina, the order is generally reversed, which is why it is among the “latest” states on this map.

Early school starts are not the only cause of teenage drowsiness, but they are a crucial factor — especially because natural sleep cycles make it difficult for post-puberty teenagers to fall asleep before 11 pm.

A poll by the National Sleep Foundation found that 59 percent of 6th through 8th graders and 87 percent of high school students got less than the recommended amount of sleep (8.5 to 9.5 hours) on school nights. In the words of America’s leading soporific publication Sleep Review, the average American adolescent is “chronically sleep-deprived and pathologically sleepy”.

Chronic sleep loss in adolescents has been linked to a host of negative consequences:

  • Adolescents with sleep debt and/or disrupted sleep-wake cycles may suffer from poor judgment, lack of motivation, and overall reduced alertness, leading to poor academic performance.
  • There is a bidirectional relationship between sleep disturbances and mood disorders, especially depression.
  • Irregular and insufficient sleep in high school students has been found to predict certain types of risky behavior such as drunk driving, smoking, taking drugs, and delinquency.
  • Adolescents with insufficient sleep have an increased risk of suicidal ideation.
  • Several studies found links between sleep deprivation and obesity. One study estimates that for each hour of sleep lost (over a long period of time), the odds of being obese increased by 80 percent.
  • Sleep deprivation leads to metabolic perturbations that increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
  • Sleepiness increases the risk of traffic accidents. Young people are particularly affected. A 1995 study found that 55 percent of crashes due to drowsiness were caused by drivers 25 years or younger.
  • In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Bill 328, which requires middle schools to begin no earlier than 8:00 am and high schools no earlier than 8:30 am. It will go into effect in 2022.
  • If the measure proves successful, other states may consider similar moves. And there is some evidence that starting school later is beneficial. Around 400 school districts around the country have already moved their start time to 8:30 or later, often resulting in dramatically improved test scores, attendance rates, and graduation rates. (One Texas school district reported an 11 percent increase in its graduation rate.)

Reference: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/heres-how-early-school-begins-and-why-it-is-bad-for-students