Tidbits of Information

In January, I attended a session by Hall Davidson at FETC titled "Revenge of the Digital Immigrant ". After 3 months, I remember th examples of how Davidson demonstrated that the new generation learns with shorter and shorter clips/segments of information. In order to get their point across, commercials decades ago used to be several minutes. Nowadays they only need to be a few seconds long. As teachers we also know that students will retain information better and for longer periods of time, if it administered in small doses and frequently, rather than in one chunk and in one sitting.

Recently, I have discovered Worldview for my iPhone

WORLDview for iPhone lists facts about countries around the world. Categorized by continent, view all countries or pick a random country. Find data such as the capital, continent, coordinates, basic history, important phone numbers and more.

I make it a point of reading about a random country each day. Just a quick check where it is located in the world, what its capital is and a little background information. Did you know that Sierra Leone’s capital is Freetown and is a neighboring country of Liberia in Africa? Those quick tidbits seem to be sticking well for me. I still can locate the Glorioso islands off the coast of Madagascar and Guadaloupe is an island-country not "too" far from Florida, even days after!!

Maybe we need to take more advantage of quick tidbit moments for our students and in our own learning. Maybe that is part of the power of Twitter: Short bits of information. @lbilak on Twitter has started a Spanish Tweet of the Day, which I think is a SUPER idea.

I will make it a point to post some random quick tidbits about languages and global awareness on my blog every once in a while, maybe that information will stick with someone?

Here is my first one- agotada – exhausted or feeling drained