T N.

The Dana Foundation is dedicated to the research of and dissemination of information about the brain. It's my go-to site for updated and reliable information on the latest advances in the science of the brain. The site is easy to navigate, the articles are pretty accessible and the resources are abundant. There are dedicated sections for kids, educators and seniors.

The Dana Foundation also sponsors the annual "Brain Awareness Week", in which our school is a partner. When you register with them (for Brain Awareness or even just as a user), you receive a small monthly newspaper that aggregates critical research from the month as well as a year-end book focused on a particular theme in brain science. Mind you, it's all for free. That's the way it should be!

I love the brain. If you stop to think about it, isn't it just the most amazing piece of engineering there is?

Every year our school participates in the Dana Foundation's Brain Awareness Week (generally around March). During this time we help our students understand a little more about the brain - with the idea that knowledge really is power - and when you gain some awareness of how your brain basically functions, you can take the first steps toward changing or modifying undesirable behaviors and increasing desirable behaviors.

Our students have brains that function a little differently - the social parts may not activate as readily or the neurons may not communicate as efficiently with each other to send the right messages in social situations. The prefrontal cortex, the newest part of our brain and that which is typically the slowest to develop in neurotypical people anyway, may be having more difficulty than what's typical, resulting in challenges related to inhibition, initiation, working memory, planning and organizing, self-monitoring, emotional regulation and shifting (skills we refer to as the executive functions). Without the development of this part of the brain, or the scaffolding of adults, our reptilian brains may be gaining more power over us than we'd like.

Now because I'm not particularly good at science, I've needed to devote much time and effort, the dummy's way, into understanding the way the neurons communicate or miscommunicate in the brains of my students that may be causing them to react in a way that is not typically how a child may react. Years ago I was introduced by my mentor to this website - Eric Chudler's Neuroscience for Kids. This website provides information in a way that's easy for me to understand and for me to translate to my students. Included are lesson plans, activity sheets, etc. The website has been up for many years now, and Dr. Chudler also sends out a frequent newsletter updating his readers of news related to the brain and events related to brain science.

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html

I used this website for the first few years of teaching - it was spectacular. Since then, interest in the brain sciences has boomed, leading to a host of websites and resources related to the brain. However, I still haven't found one as comprehensive as this for teaching about the brain to students.

Before I left for Guatemala, I remember looking at Zappos.com a couple times for shoes, but never took the plunge to making a purchase. Now 5 years later, to my surprise, I return to the U.S. and Zappos is about as big as Amazon. Well I guess it's about time someone emphasized the value of customer service as much as Amazon does. I ordered recently a Jack Spade bag from Zappos - got my confirmation and my bag as promised. Couldn't be happier.

Reading sure isn't easy, and because phonological awareness is a critical stage of literacy development, children who struggle to read may need more practice with those skills. Earobics is a program I've used in my school for years now - it's a research-based reading intervention targeting phonological awareness (though it purports to improve comprehension - presumably as a result of improved reading ability). The program itself is about $300 per disc (at least 5 years ago when we bought ours), and there are versions for pre-K to 3rd grade. It's perfect for the classroom that allows for differentiated, individualized instruction with time for students who need remediation. The activities are well-designed and appealing to the students; ours love Earobics time.

For those who can't afford the $300 disc or who want to supplement it with other computer-based activities, Earobics has a free game site called Game Goo which reinforces phonological awareness through various games:

www.earobics.com/gamegoo/gooey.html

I'm a late bloomer when it comes to some things: eating sushi, getting an iPhone, finding out that you don't have to suffer through motion sickness - that there's actually a pill for that kind of thing (which would have saved me a lot of suffering through my one week trip to Vietnam years ago). I stopped watching cartoons at the age of 6 or 7 and hardly read comics as a child (other than Beetle Bailey, for some very odd reason - why would a small Vietnamese girl feel drawn to Beetle Bailey?).

At the age of 25, through my desperate attempts at finding something that would engage one of my students, I found Calvin and Hobbes (or as another student referred to it, Calvin and Hobos). After reading a couple comics, I was hooked, and with this obsessive personality, I went out and bought every Calvin & Hobbes book I could find. It's probably the only thing that I consistently laugh out loud at - though I sometimes find myself concerned about Calvin's attitude and reckless behaviors' influencing my students' behaviors. After a second's thought though, I'm back at it.

When I left the first school at which I taught, I left my C&H collection behind for the boys to enjoy (which they did, immensely). I was reminded of those books as I recently found my extra copy of Yukon Ho! (not the best but still good) in a pile of books. Eventually I'll restore my collection, but the website will do for now - a C&H strip a day to accompany my cup of coffee - doesn't get much better than that.

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/

I'm sure that most ebook reader owners already know about this site - thousands and thousands of free ebooks that can be downloaded in Epub, Kindle, HTML and text formats for pretty much any ebook reader.

The site could be prettier, but hey, these guys work off of volunteers' sweat and a love of $#*!ens and Twain. We can trade aesthetics for scholar.

I just came across this and felt like I needed to write this review now, that's how excited I was about this website. This is like a wiki for all skills that are now obsolete. This includes: eating from a trencher, dueling with swords, riding a rope tow, playing marbles, FORTRAN programming (though the logic is still good, it says), etc.

Each entry includes: the field under which the skill falls, the time the skill went obsolete (some are in the future, for example, driving a car is predicted to become obsolete in about 50 years time), what replaced it, knowledge assumed and when it was useful.

Seriously, this could take up the next 6 hours of my life. I hope the internet doesn't become obsolete for at least another 60 years. I mean, this is kind of brilliant.

A few years back, in one of my classrooms, I had students ranging in ability from doing math at the 2nd grade level to math at the 10th grade level. I had an hour a day to do math with all 4 groups (and these are guys with neurobehavioral disabilities so the one-on-one, immediate feedback time is important) so I needed to be creative and differentiate instruction using what websites were available back then in addition to a high school teacher's videos that I'd obtained somehow.

I WISH I had a website like Khan Academy available to me when I was teaching. Khan has tons of engaging lessons that I'm sure my boys with Aspergers would LOVE - much more so than hearing me everyday. The man behind this is pretty darn smart, and I think I'll watch some of his videos now rather than finishing an awful little history of the world book I have on my Kindle.

Forget tutoring websites, it's all here for free.

Here Salman Khan is on TED:
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

I go through phases in which I try to immerse myself in whatever theme, food or activity is of interest. I once ate sushi everyday for a summer. I watched as many heist flicks as I could in one week. During one phase I was into geography - my boyfriend at the time and I were obsessed with the Odyssey globe game and with this game - Geosense. A simple game with a web 2.0 feel to it, Geosense tests your knowledge of where cities around the world are generally located. The game gives you a location and you click on where you think it approximately might be (within 10 seconds). Then it tells you how far from the target you ended up being. You can play solo or with a stranger. Everything about this game is easy... except for the game itself sometimes - especially when you're given a city in Russia (that isn't Moscow or St. Petersburg) because there's a lot of surface area to choose from...

Chartporn is a website devoted to people who love infographics, an ever-popular growing trend of the 2010s, it looks like. No organization or institute is respectable if it doesn't include an infographic in its repertoire once in a while. And no infographic is respectable if Chartporn doesn't sit up and take notice.

For the economically serious:
http://chartporn.org/category/source-ft/

For the jocular:
http://chartporn.org/category/humor/

I wrote a review for this and then accidentally deleted it. Here's the shorter version:

This is the third of a trio of food blogs I use to refer to for my Asian cooking needs. This particular one I came across when searching for a good spare rib soup (http://norecipes.com/blog/2010/10/28/bak-kut-teh-recipe-sparerib-soup/). No Recipes, a blog maintained by Marc Matsumoto is a tidy little food blog covering foods from around the world. The title No Recipes is less about irony (as the site is dedicated to recipes and ingredients) and more about encouraging experimentation, which is what I appreciate most about Matsumoto's blogging style / recipes. I don't feel like I need to follow the recipes to a tee (though I almost never do, unless it's baking). Unlike Wandering Chopsticks, No Recipes feels cleaner and simpler; the author certainly seems to be humbler and more accessible. Be fair warned that he does go for some of the more upscale stuff, but I skip over that stuff. I'm not making my own pate.

People who haven't been to Houston or who don't know much about it would assume that we don't have great art. But we do! We really do! The Menil Collection is one of my favorite places to go to when I come home to Houston. In a beautiful building designed by Renzo Piano and situated in the middle of a quiet little Houston neighborhood, the Menil Collection is a haven for art lovers in Houston. It includes some incredible pieces of Byzantine, African and modern / contemporary art. I've visited the Menil over a dozen times and can't seem to tire from the pieces by Warhol, Picasso, Basquiat, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Rauschenberg, Matisse, Pollock, Koonig, Jasper Johns - the list goes on and on. While it's not a huge collection, the way the museum is curated in a building that uses natural lighting in the most divine way really maximizes the value of each piece.

The Menil website is ehh, so-so, could be better, but just for the Collection itself, I have to give it the most love I can.

As a note: Within blocks of the Menil are the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel and the Cy Twombly building (but the Twombly is a whole other story that I'll write another day).

When I needed a recipe for good Vietnamese-style pork ribs, Chubby Hubby was there for me. With the tagline "Whining, Dining and Marriage", Chubby Hubby is an entertaining little food / life blog (because the foodies say "food IS life", right? *barf*). However, I'll admit that I don't read the life bits at all and only use Chubby Hubby for its recipes. The recipes are fantastic, and my pork ribs turned out better than ever.

I love convenience - I eat conveniently accessible foods, I read conveniently easy books, I date convenient men. All these things to maximize my screentime - my morning routine shouldn't keep me away from my laptop too long, so the right make-up is a necessity. I'm not the kind of girl who likes to put a lot of time and effort into my hair or face (and it probably shows), and it seems that Origins knows that. Well I know they know that because the last time I walked into the store, the salesman said, "You look like you like to keep it natural... I have something for you!" I wasn't sure what to make of that comment but I'm glad he noticed because I wouldn't have walked out with Vitazing then - Vitazing is an SPF15 moisturizer that doubles for me as a foundation. The mangosteen ingredient adapts to my skin color and provides a light coverage that I can't feel. It doesn't cover up all the spots, but who really cares about that. At my age, there's no hiding that stuff.

Origins.com is easy to use; the products come on time and with little free samples that are great to take on trips.

As a serious creature of habit, I've owned the same style of gray New Balance shoes for nearly a decade now. And when it gets worn, I get another pair. Thank GOD New Balance never discontinues that style, so I can keep on keepin' on. I only wish New Balance made better RUNNING shoes. Compared to Asics, NB shoes perform pretty poorly in gravel terrain.

AVG is one of the first things I install when I set up computers for the classroom or for myself. Without needing to pay for programs like Norton or McAfee, AVG takes care of my computer's anti-virus needs. Installation is easy, the interface is self-explanatory / easy to use, and the program can actually get rid of those pesky Trojan horses. AVG recently put out their 2011 free edition, which CNET gives 4.5 out of 5 stars. Not bad for a free anti-virus program that rivals their costly counterparts.

The Education Trust, an organization that advocates for students, developed this useful tool to compare different statistics across all the colleges and universities in the United States. You can find the graduation and retention rates, tuition rates, median SAT / ACT scores, demographics, etc. If you're looking at one school, you can find similar schools, and for those trying to decide between schools, a comparison tool is available. Similar tools like this are available through sites like U.S. News and World Report, but I don't find to be as exhaustive.

Everyone talks about Shazam, but I find it pretty overrated (other than the name, which is a good one - it can pose as a noun or a verb...). SoundHound, on the other hand, is pretty underrated. I got both for my iPhone and find that SoundHound can identify all of the songs that Shazam couldn't. So say I'm in a clothing store and a catchy tune comes on. Shazam has no idea what it is, can't find a match. SoundHound? Bam, it's got it.

Working with children with special needs requires that I think about the adjustments that need to be made for each student. For students who feel overwhelmed when I put a worksheet with too many problem sets or exercises on one page (unless I fold the page, which is one simple accommodation), there are sites like handwritingworksheets.com. Here you can create custom-made handwriting worksheets. You dictate the content, type and size of lettering, etc. without needing to log in or do anything besides create the worksheet.

John Elder Robison is the older brother of author Augusten Burroughs. Having been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (under the umbrella of autism) at the age of 39, Robison wrote a memoir about his life entitled Look Me In The Eye a few years back and is on the way to publishing another. I'll admit that I have a fondness for Robison because he has given time to an organization with which I'm affiliated. Robison has made great efforts to correspond and talk with students at The Monarch School in Houston, Texas in order to share more with them about his experiences with Asperger Syndrome. Any person willing to do that is pretty special. Robison's website provides great resources and information for parents and educators. He even teamed up with Monarch School faculty and students to develop a teaching guide for Look Me In The Eye.