Books about Connecting from Amazon.com

Teachers struggle every day to bring quality instruction to their students Beset by lists of content standards and accompanying "high-stakes" accountability tests, many educators sense that both teaching and learning have been redirected in ways that are potentially impoverishing for those who teach and those who learn. Educators need a model that acknowledges the centrality of standards but also ensures that students truly understand content and can apply it in meaningful ways. For many educators, Understanding by Design addresses that need.

Simultaneously, teachers find it increasingly difficult to ignore the diversity of the learners who populate their classrooms. Few teachers find their work effective or satisfying when they simply "serve up" a curriculum--even an elegant one--to students with no regard for their varied learning needs. For many educators, Differentiated Instruction offers a framework for addressing learner variance as a critical component of instructional planning.

In this book the two models converge, providing readers fresh perspectives on two of the greatest contemporary challenges for educators: crafting powerful curriculum in a standards-dominated era and ensuring academic success for the full spectrum of learners. Each model strengthens the other. Understanding by Design is predominantly a curriculum design model that focuses on what we teach. Differentiated Instruction focuses on whom we teach, where we teach, and how we teach. Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe show you how to use the principles of backward design and differentiation together to craft lesson plans that will teach essential knowledge and skills for the full spectrum of learners.

Connecting content and kids in meaningful ways is what teachers strive to do every day. In tandem, UbD and DI help educators meet that goal by providing structures, tools, and guidance for developing curriculum and instruction that bring to students the best of what we know about effective teaching and learning..
Price: $18.66 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For some, a job is just a way to pay the bills. For others -- those whose careers fit their passions and personalities -- it is a source of great satisfaction and success Career Match is designed to help people discover their ideal work. Using the author's revealing ten-minute self-assessment, the book helps readers determine their personality style, then walks them through the range of career choices best for them. This indispensable guide will enable anyone to:

* identify the type of work that will inspire and exhilarate them
* recognize the type of boss and work environment they need to thrive
* confirm the rightness of the path they are on -- or help them find a better one
* speed up their job search

The book includes in-depth chapters for each personality type, detailed explanations of career options, and inspiring real-life stories of people who have found fulfillment in work that suits their personality. This invaluable resource will help anyone in need of direction match who they are with what they should do -- for a lifetime of gratifying work and greater success..
Price: $9.34 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Bruce Goldstein's COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY connects the study of cognition to your everyday life. This accessible book introduces you to landmark studies as well as the cutting-edge research that defines this fascinating field. To help you further experiment with and understand the concepts in the text, you can use COGLAB 2.0: THE ONLINE COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY. Available at www.academic.cengage.com, COGLAB contains dozens of classic experiments designed to help you learn about cognitive concepts and how the mind works..
Price: $109.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when devices that you've built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting Through a series of simple projects, you'll learn how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need.

This book is perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest. Maybe you're a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor weather conditions at several locations at once, or a sculptor who wants to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. Making Things Talk demonstrates that once you figure out how objects communicate -- whether they're microcontroller-powered devices, email programs, or networked databases -- you can get them to interact.

Each chapter in contains instructions on how to build working projects that help you do just that. You will:

• Make your pet's bed send you email
• Make your own seesaw game controller that communicates over the Internet
• Learn how to use ZigBee and Bluetooth radios to transmit sensor data wirelessly
• Set up communication between microcontrollers, personal computers, and web servers using three easy-to-program, open source environments: Arduino/Wiring, Processing, and PHP.
• Write programs to send data across the Internet based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard
• And much more

With a little electronics know-how, basic (not necessarily in BASIC) programming skills, a couple of inexpensive microcontroller kits and some network modules to make them communicate using Ethernet, ZigBee, and Bluetooth, you can get started on these projects right away. With Making Things Talk, the possibilities are practically endless..
Price: $17.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Unlike most other books, Resonant Leadership undersells itself. With easy justification, the authors or their editors at Harvard Business School Press could have applied a more expansive moniker like "Secrets of Enduring Leaders", or "How to Deal with Burnout," or perhaps even "Being Happy at Work." The work's modest title, though, takes nothing away from its grand ambition: to explain what makes leaders effective amid unrelentingly stressful situations.

The authors, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee, will be familiar to many businesspeople and management theorists. They collaborated with Daniel Goleman on the bestselling Primal Leadership, which extended Goleman's seminal work on emotional intelligence, and explained how "EQ", not just IQ, underpins success in guiding and directing organizations. With this latest book, Boyatzis and McKee have continued developing their holistic view of management. It's an attractive one. Resonant Leadership begins with recognition of leaders' essential humanity and analyzes the physical, mental, and emotional triggers that make men and women strong or weak as leaders. As readers might expect from an HBS Press offering, Boyatzis and McKee's methodology is appropriately academic, with extensive footnotes and research citations, but it also uses a nice blend of anecdotes from their field work as consultants, and is expressed through decidedly touchy-feely language. What emerges is a highly engaging, readable work that takes business audiences into somewhat unusual psychological territory, far beyond the usual bar charts and spreadsheets.

The book's organization is simple. Boyatzis and McKee start by describing the highly stressful conditions in which leaders operate today, and explain sympathetically how many well-intentioned people fall into what they call "dissonance" due to burnout. Whereas the authors' earlier book focused on the initial ingredients for leadership effectiveness, their interest now is in ongoing, enduring resonance--leaders who can be effective today, but also maintain their edge into tomorrow, as well. Resonant Leadership thus moves from this initial exposition of problems--management ineffectiveness, and/or burnout--to solutions. The authors anchor their prescription around three core qualities which they believe resonant leaders must continually cultivate: mindfulness, hope, and compassion. These may sound like ephemeral concepts, but they form the touchstone of Resonant Leadership and are cited again and again. Readers of Boyatzis and McKee's latest--whether already-strong leaders looking to maintain their effectiveness, or burned-out ones aiming to get back in the proverbial saddle--will find this is a thought-provoking read. --Peter Han.
Price: $3.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Got a new MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro? Want the scoop on Mac laptop basics, using Mac OS X Leopard, networking a laptop, or connecting your laptop to wireless devices? There’s no better place to find what you need than MacBook For Dummies, 2^nd Edition!

With your Mac laptop, you can take your movies, music, documents, e-mail, and Internet wherever the action is. MacBook For Dummies, 2^nd Edition provides the lowdown on maintaining and upgrading your MacBook, customizing the Dock and desktop, traveling with a laptop, turning iPhoto into your portable darkroom, and much more. Learn to:

• Locate the battery compartment, iSight camera, ports, and “on” button
• Move your existing files from an older computer
• Use all the cool new features of Mac OS X Leopard
• Work with iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, and GarageBand, all packaged with your MacBook
• Identify the signs of a well-functioning laptop and check for trouble
• Set up your Mac for multiple users
• Explore the cool options available with a .Mac account and iDisk storage that lets you retrieve your files anywhere
• Manage your digital music, photos, and movies
• Use Bluetooth and get all your wireless devices communicating with each other

And if you’ve been considering switching from a PC to a Mac, MacBook For Dummies, 2^nd Edition guides you through the process and even shows you how to run Windows on your Mac laptop. If there’s a MacBook in your future — or present — this is the book for you!.
Price: $13.84 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $8.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In his most significant book to date, Dr. Larry Crabb expands on his lifelong work in the field of psychotherapy to adopt a groundbreaking, but biblical, approach to healing the deep wounds of the soul-an approach that centers around building intimate, healing mini-communities in our lives and churches.

Dr. Crabb envisions a day when communities of God's people-ordinary Christians whose lives connect as husband to wife, brother to sister, friend to friend-will accomplish most of the healing that we now depend on mental health professionals to provide.

God has deposited within us the power to heal soul-disease and that power is released to do its work as we relate to each other in revolutionary new ways. In challenging, practical language, Dr. Crabb shows us how.

This revised and updated edition now includes a full workbook for those who want to better learn how to connect with the hearts and souls of those around them.

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Price: $5.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

All churches like to think that theirs is the friendliest in town. But do visitors see it that way? Church consultant Gary McIntosh invites readers to take a look at their church through the eyes of visitors and potential visitors. His starting point, grounded in an understanding of God as a "welcomer," is that churches should see those who enter their doors as not merely visitors, but as guests, and themselves as gracious hosts. This practical book offers sound advice on assessing and improving the ways in which churches attract people, welcome them, do follow-up, and bring them into the church family. It also offers suggestions for making a welcoming attitude part of the very fabric of the local church..
Price: $8.04 [Notify me when price goes down.]