Moving Forward

New school year

simonlorimer — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 06:23:06 +0000

The school year has started back up again – in fact it has been going for a couple of weeks already.

New computers – the 1:1 has started and the kids are carrying computers to class. All seems to be going smoothly with people managing these things well. There seems to be a bit of a difference between 2 grade 7 classes as far as how they use them – one group seems a lot less discriminating than the other and a lot happier to get off task. Would be nice to have a look at.

I have blogs for classes. Since I set up docs whiteboard pages again, I am still looking at what these are for. The grade 7 unit planner comments was good. I am not sure about posting stuff that does not expect a comment.

A new toy is Socrative. This could function like clickers, though students are anonymous. You can verbally ask questions and get an instant displayed response. First use it took a while for people to get to the page and it was not super responsive but, once we got going most people were able to get it to work and we could check responses to quite a few questions. I could see over using this application, but for a once a week formative task with a few planned questions the instant feedback is pretty cool.

Public, publics and privacy

simonlorimer — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:59:52 +0000

Here danah boyd discusses public and private.

It’s not what we expect.

practical work in science

simonlorimer — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:58:00 +0000

This isn’t really a post about ICT in science, except that this has all been accessed on line, and it is interesting how we get our informtaion as teachers now.

Alom Shaha posted on a guardian blog about the role of practical work in science. There is much to read here.

Basically practical workisn’t good per se. This has something to say about inquiry and enquiry as well.

There are a bunch of great pdfs linked here

Diigo educator

simonlorimer — Tue, 24 May 2011 02:48:42 +0000

I am now the proud owner of a diigo educator account, with a console to create class groups.

I have no idea if this is a good thing or not. It seems like it is something that can help with managing stuff and might be something to put into the blog as that will be needed next year. Something to ask around about the effectiveness of.

Chromium

simonlorimer — Sat, 21 May 2011 02:02:00 +0000

Having booted u the computer to get some work done, only to find out it won’t be accessible for a while, I had a play with some parallels things. Parallels seems to work very well on this machine. Windows takes a while to boot up and sometimes seems to freeze for a bit, but this is all tolerable.

The parallels start came with a link to install Google chrome OS, so I have put that on. It all installed very quickly and started up easily. After logging on with the school account I get straight to mail and documents and these all display perfectly – though finding the f11 button to toggle full screen view made me scratch my head – expose was using it, so that needed to be changed.

I wonder if it is possible to last a day on chrome. I should give it a try at work. Some things I wonder about:

accessing itunes and podcasts
accessing the school server

sound didn’t work with some stuff – all things to look into.

An update: This has crashed a couple of times so far – as in all the browser windows shut and it offered to restore. It does restore very quickly (as in less than 5 seconds)

Backchannel

simonlorimer — Fri, 20 May 2011 02:46:24 +0000

I tried a couple of things for back channel use in class. Some groups are doing review and I thought it might be useful for students to be able to post queries and help each other work out answers to problems. I tried using todaysmeet first. This didn’t work as the thread would get very untidy very rapidly. If someone asked a question, the answer would not be associated with it. It also took too much policing as it wasn’t clearly useful.

I thought wallwisher might help with the issue of associating questions with answers. Turns out it functioned so slowly with the group we simply abandoned this one.

Basically, I think this is an idea that doesn’t fit my classroom very well – I would rather have people just talk to each other. The idea that the conversation could carry on beyond the room would only work if it involved something like facebook pages.

e-marking

simonlorimer — Thu, 19 May 2011 10:42:28 +0000

It’s emarking season again. I guess I am looking forward to getting it done – sometimes the interaction with colleagues is quite rewarding, though mostly it is just hours.

I have offered to do a short show and tell of the system for teachers, with two purposes in mind:

1-letting teachers know what happens to student work so that they can advise their students

2-letting teachers know what is involved with emarking incase they are interested

Here I will collate what I should describe

As teachers

Papers come without names or any other ID
Legibility is exellent as long as they use the right writing implement – zoom really helps
Tick means a mark – the mark scheme is everything
Automatically taken to a marking section and will not necessarily see anything not ‘in’ the box – though all the paper is visible in display mode
Are your intentions clear? when you cross something out we will still give you credit if it is relevant
For option questions – we are required to mark any submission and credit will be given for the best, regardless of what you write on the front – don’t recommend answering all
Papers have penalty marks – sd and u

As markers

Ergonomics matter – riser, lighting and mouse
Mac setup – do the tests early
Get your options right – follow the guide and do the practices
early contact with team
Direct mail people at the IBO – they really don’t mind
make sure you assoicate the right annotation with the right question part – this is much easier in this iteration
Have a calculator to hand

Data sharing

simonlorimer — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 04:56:50 +0000

I have been looking for a way to gather and share data about the use of electricity. The purpose is to provide a data set for classes studying electrical energy to use, either for interpreting and graphing activities or for comparing with calculated estimates..

I spent a while going through a few possibilities, including a google site, a blog and a wiki. In the end, the easiest and clearest presentation seems to be just to publish a google doc with the data in. This is simple and clean for me and gives direct and transparent access to the data.

Seems obvious really now that I think about it. Sometimes it seems I try and make things more complicated than they need to be.

Here is the html display for sharing.

I have also been putting some more questions on to Quia. This time I have been adding IBSL Physics questions. I have learned here that thinking through the choice of labels is important. I used some for IGCSE (e.g. mechanics) that overlap with the IB ones so that they can get mixed up in quizzes. I have now started using labels like ‘IBSL_Mechanics”. Overall this seems to be a useful addition to the resources and a good way of leveraging the past paper questions for the students. If I could think of a way of doing paper 2 questions, that would be great.

Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos | Action-Reaction

simonlorimer — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 06:55:38 +0000

It is a common view that “if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand.” Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven’t learned anything. [ed. note: textbook definition of pseudoteaching]

via Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos | Action-Reaction.

This links to a recent PhD thesis that suggests that the cognitive load needs to be high to facilitate long term learning. This means it is important to include misconceptions.

Does the same apply to student created content? Is it valuable to create? Does student created content need to discuss misconception? How about with shared content – like subject review wikis?

Do things like the heart voicethread project have a high enough cognitive load? Could this be extended?

Intelligence

simonlorimer — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 07:06:50 +0000

This paper starts off by identifying the term ‘intelligence’ as problematic, which would fit with my instinct, It goes on, however, to make a valid case for it being a useful term in contemporary education, but qualifies this by looking at a variety of definitions. I guess this is a core idea for education. Perhaps I should have a better idea of what intelligence is and hence consider how to enhance, or not stifle, it.

The notion of general cognitive ability (or ‘intelligence’) is explored and why the time might now be ripe for educators to re-consider the power offered by a general intellectual capacity which is itself amenable to educational inﬂuence. We review existing knowledge concerning general intelligence, including the cohabitation of general and special abilities, cognitive modules, development, and evidence for plasticity of the general processor. We examine why this knowledge is generally absent from educational practice and present a number of models that attempt to synthesise the main aspects of current psychological theories. We explore how the models might be used in educational applications and look at examples of effective cognitive stimulation considering both practicalities and theoretical notions of what in our cognitive models is affected by stimulation. We discuss ﬁnally the possible political, cultural and social barriers to the inclusion of general ability as central to educational aims.

http://www.edu.u-szeged.hu/%7Ecsapo/publ/AdeyCsapoDemetriouHautamakiShayer.pdf