Nine Lessons About Recognizing Logical Fallacies

In today's social media and online news environments it is as important as ever to teach students how to recognize bias, propaganda, and logical fallacies. Here are two good resources that I like that can help students understand logical fallacies.

The Guide to Common Fallacies is a series of nine short videos from the PBS Idea Channel. Each video covers a different common fallacy. Included in the series are lessons about Strawman, Ad Hominem, Black and White, Authority fallacies. I have embedded the first video in the series below.



Your Logical Fallacy Is is a website that provides short explanations and examples of twenty-four common logical fallacies. Visitors to the site can click through the gallery to read the examples. Your Logical Fallacy Is also provides free PDF poster files that you can download and print.

Eight TED-Ed Lessons for Music Appreciation

One of my favorite extra-curricular activities in elementary school was learning to play the violin and the trumpet. Three+ decades later I can still read music. I'm looking forward to my daughters being old enough to learn to read and play music too. Thinking about that reminded me of a TED-Ed lesson that I found a few years ago. How to Read Music explains the fundamentals of reading music. Watching the video won't turn students into composers over night, but it provides a good start.

TED-Ed offers a lot of interesting and useful video lessons for students. Many of the videos are organized into playlists. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a playlist of all of the TED-Ed lessons about music. To remedy that problem, I made a playlist of my own featuring eight TED-Ed lessons about music.

Twisted Wave - Create and Edit Audio on Chromebooks

When it comes to recording and editing audio Mac users have Garage Band and Windows users have Audacity (it's available for Mac too). Chromebook users have Twisted Wave.

Through TwistedWave you can create and edit spoken audio recordings from scratch. Your completed tracks can be exported to Google Drive and SoundCloud. If you have existing audio tracks in your SoundCloud or Google Drive account you can also import it into TwistedWave to edit those audio tracks. TwistedWave's audio editing tools include options for fade-in, fade-out, looping, sound normalization, and pitch adjustments. The editor also includes the typical track clipping tools that you would expect to see in an audio editing tool.