Keeping Up With Dr. Ruf
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Watch for these upcoming publications:
Dr. Ruf has been invited by Michael Piechowski to write a paper for The Advanced Development Journal, a peer-reviewed publication, based on her research from her 1998 PhD dissertation, Environmental, Familial, and Personal Factors That Affect the Self-Actualization of Highly Gifted Adults: Case Studies.
Dr. Ruf recently completed an interview with Michael Shaughnessy for Gifted Education International. Click here to read a previous interview with Shaughnessy about gifted children being left behind.
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Dr. Ruf will be presenting at the 58th Annual Convention of the National Assn. for Gifted Children (NAGC) in New Orleans November 3-6.
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| Greetings!
Greetings! We have a couple of points of business we want to mention:
1. In September we will be raising our testing fees slightly. So this summer may be your best opportunity to find out what your child's strengths and weaknesses are and what he or she will need in school.
2. Educational Options has done a little reorganizing. Our new assistant, Karen Saklad, who is quickly finding her niche here, will be the prime contact with those families looking for assessments and consultations. And I will be focusing on getting out the Educational Options and TalentIgniter newsletters, managing the Educational Options website, and exploring the many facets of social media!
Karen and I are still both working part time. So if you send us an email or call the office and get voicemail, please know that we will get back to you as soon as we can.
We appreciate all our clients, friends and website visitors, and we hope you all stay safe and well as we head into summer.
Sincerely, Kathy Hara, Editor |
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Smart Girls 
Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, in the article The Trouble With Bright Girls posted in the Huffington Post, discusses why smart girls can be their own worst enemies when it comes to finding success. In asking the question, "What makes smart girls more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident kids in the room," she goes back to see how fifth grade girls face challenges. You'll find some interesting answers that can help you guide your own bright daughters. |
Top 10 Gifted Education Blogs
OnlineDegrees.org has posted links to the top 10 blogs about gifted education. You will find many thoughtful discussions about education and the needs of gifted students. |
List of 10 Open Education Resources
About a decade ago, the faculty at MIT decided to post all the materials from 2,000 of its courses on the Web, thus making university-level content available online. Since that time, Open Course Ware and Open Education Resources have expanded and become more multidimensional. MindShift, a website which helps us keep abreast of how technology is revolutionizing how we learn, has posted 10 of these sites. |
Young Students and Online Classes
This might be the perfect point to mention Room for Debate's question on Can Young Students Learn From Online Classes. You will find good discussions about this topic in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times, where five debaters present their opinions and then readers post their responses. Very thought provoking. |
Why Do Animals Play?
Lynda Sharpe has posted a light-hearted yet serious guest blog in Scientific American titled So You Think You Know Why Animals Play. Sharpe is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, and for the last 14 years she has visited remote places in Africa in order to study the social behavior of mongooses. More specifically, she has been looking at the phenomenon of play in animals. And she admits that after four decades of research, scientists have no conclusive evidence as to why animals play. But still there are some interesting discoveries.
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U.S. Laws
 How well do you know federal laws? To help you and your students brush up a bit on the subject, toast.net has posted a test - just in time for Independence Day! If you do well on this test - or especially if you don't - try their other test about presidents. Good luck! |
About Gifted Kids
About.com contains a wealth of information concerning just about everything. And that includes gifted kids. More specifically, here's a page on their site focused on gifted teens. There are many articles with ideas on helping teens find the right career, plan for college, dealing with depression, and more.
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Project Gutenberg 
It seems that more and more people are buying books by the download, keeping their libraries on their Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc. Project Gutenberg is where you can get over 33,000 free ebooks to download onto your device. These are books for which the copyright has expired (in the United States), and they can be freely downloaded by ePub, Kindle, HTML, and simple text formats. |
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Home of the Ruf Estimates™ of Levels of Gifted Online Assessment. Don't leave your child's education to chance! Find out today what your child needs to succeed in school. For more information, go to www.TalentIgniter.com.
The TalentIgniter newsletter and archives are available by going to http://talentigniter.com/resources/talentigniter-newsletters.
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5 Levels of Gifted:  School Issues and Educational Options
Dr. Ruf's book, 5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options (2005) (formerly published as Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind), is available here.
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Deborah Ruf
Educational Options
www.EducationalOptions.com
[email protected]
763-521-4565
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