In Unleashing the Power of Perceptual Change, Renate and Geoffrey Caine recommend that teacher preparation programs include "understanding technology" as a primary focus. Here you will find sites that will help you "infuse technology into lives filled with meaning and purpose"—one of the objectives of brain-based learning and teaching.
Kids Love the Brain
http://www.exploratorium.org/memory/index.html. Explore Memory at the Exploratorium, a museum (both virtual and real) of "science, art, and human perception" in San Francisco. Here, play Memory Solitaire and Memory Party Games. Play with Droodles and Common Cents. Expand your brain.
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~chudler/neurok.html. Kids and adults will like this friendly site sponsored by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources. Neuroscience for Kids is a rich resource of graphics, information, and interactivity developed by Eric H. Chudler of the University of Washington. Find out where to order a brain—animal, gelatin, rubber, or plastic. This site is for serious biological students and for people just fascinated by how the brain works.
Let's Go Back to School
http://www.newhorizons.org/blab.html. New Horizons, a nonprofit organization in Washington State, hosts "The Brain Lab," a compendium of full-text articles and resources, including reviews of Robert Sylwester's ASCD book A Celebration of Neurons, articles by Renate and Geoffrey Caine and Marian Diamond, and links to the other leading educators. Check out the online journal for related articles. Note: This site also includes some of the links published here.
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/other/homepages.html. Lots of opportunities for adult learning are found at "Cognitive Neuroscience Resources on the Internet." From Harvard University (check the Whole Brain Atlas—http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html—which is really for adults and older students) to the Australian National University to the University of Turku in Finland—here are many centers, research groups, laboratories, and institutes studying how the brain learns.
The Brain Needs Content
http://www.c3.lanl.gov/mega-math/. Let's go the Los Alamos National Laboratory for "This Is Mega-Mathematics!" and tons of brain games, such as "A Usual Day at Unusual School" and "Welcome to Hotel Infinity." Here are links to other mathematical sites, such as SAMI, Science and Math Initiatives of the Annenberg/CPB Science and Math Project (http://www.learner.org/sami/), and TAP: Tapping Internet Resources for Women in Computer Science (http://www.cs.yale.edu/HTML/YALE/CS/HyPlans/tap/).
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/about.html. Can technology connect subject matter and art? "Image can acquire, display, edit, enhance, analyze and animate images. It reads and writes TIFF, PICT, PICS and MacPaint files, providing compatibility with many other applications, including programs for scanning, editing, publishing and analyzing images (Mac version; PC version available free from the Scion Corp.: http://www.scioncorp.com/)." This from the National Institutes of Health. Is this connectedness or what?
http://www.musica.uci.edu/index.html. MuSICA can answer questions like these: What effect does music have on learning? Should I play Mozart to my unborn baby? How does music affect emotion? An online journal publishes articles by Norman M. Weinberger, a professor at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California at Irvine (see p. 36 of this issue). The site houses a vast, searchable archive of abstracts and summaries of research related to music and learning—including an article titled "Bach Is Not Enough."
