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Top Ten Things Parents Can Do to Help Their Children Succeed in School (and in Life) - Lisa is a teacher. She is also a blogger. She seems to know what she is talking about. Check out this list on her page: Letters from Lisa. After you’re done perusing this list, check out some of her other entries. Lisa is one smart cookie.

9 Things to Stop Worrying About Right Now - Put down that glass of water, people! As it turns out, you don’t really NEED 8 glasses a day, so there is no sense in wasting precious space in the stomach for Mountain Dew. MSNBC’s Today Show puts some rumors and myths to bed so you too can sleep easy.

Picasso’s Top 7 Tips for Creating an Exciting Life - If you think “unabashed creativity” and “exciting” go hand in hand, then who better to take advice from than Pablo Picasso? The Positivity Blog brings us this interesting and fun list.

10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life - Do you know when someone is lying to you? If you answered “yes,” then good, you’ve recognized that a lot of people are probably liars. If you said “no,” then you are also right. In fact, you are the most right. Yep… no one lies. Not ever. Check out PsyBlog’s list of ways you can use the findings of psychological research in your daily life. You might even figure out how to use reverse psychology to outwit your students, but then again… you probably won’t. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

(photo credit: misocrazy on Flickr.)

Online video is the cause of and solution to many teachers’ problems. You can find thousands educational videos in seconds, for free. But you’ve also got to sift through junk like video responses to TV shows and home movies, if your school even allows you to view it at all. If you’re a science teacher and want to find useful content without all the fluff, head to Science Hack, a search engine for scientific videos.

At ScienceHack, you can watch videos about physic, math, chemistry, robotics, psychology, and any other scienterrific categories you can name. The videos themselves are often from trustworthy sources like the Science Channel or National Geographic. In addition, Science Hack has actual scientists screen the videos to make sure they’re accurate. So that means you won’t have to dig through somebody’s poorly-shot video of their homemade baking soda volcano to find the good stuff. -BILL FERRIS

Science Hack

Related Stuff:
All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

Which is scarier: spiders or soda? I don’t care how many mosquitoes they eat, spiders scare the bejeezus out of me. And I’m hopelessly devoted to Coca-Cola, despite the fact it’s loaded with sugar and caffeine, which together can rot my teeth and cause stress, anxiety and depression.

Maia Szalavitz at Psychology Today looks at how humans assess risk in “10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong.” And frankly, Szalavitz says, we stink at it. For example, look at how we react to one-in-a-million catastrophes:

“After 9/11, 1.4 million people changed their holiday travel plans to avoid flying. The vast majority chose to drive instead. But driving is far more dangerous than flying, and the decision to switch caused roughly 1,000 additional auto fatalities, according to two separate analyses comparing traffic patterns in late 2001 to those the year before.”

This is a great discussion topic for your psychology class. Do they (or you) make any of these fear-based decisions? If your students can understand people’s motivation, they can better understand human behavior. That’s helpful both in psychology and in day-to-day life. -BILL FERRIS

10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong via Psychology Today

Photo credit: mixatal on flickr