I like to follow a lot of the TEDtalks. They are often thought-provoking and frequently challenging.
Yesterday, when I checked, I found that one of my favourite speakers, Sir Ken Robinson , has done another talk for them. He is again champions a radical rethink of our school systems. Although not talking specifically about the Australian system, it is easy to apply his logic here. Watch the video and then answer his challenge: How do we get out of the educational “death valley” we now face? How do we nurture our students, teaching them to value and cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligences.
Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.
EverSlide Turns Evernote Notes Into Slideshows | TechCrunch ”EverSlide is a basic, but potentially very useful tool built by TechCrunch. The service turns your Evernote notes into slideshow presentations, and it is simple to use. Basic at the moment but has a lot of potential if developed further.
The 6 Key Drivers of Student Engagement — THE Journal An interesting discussion piece: The best way to drive student achievement is to meaningfully connect with students and the best way to do that is through technology.”
4 Ways To Improve School Communication Using Social Media | Edudemic Discussion on Edudemic. Social media can no longer be ignored by schools. Computers and other forms of technology have filtered into the classroom in all sorts of ways and into the average person’s daily life as well. The ability to understand and use social media to improve school communication via computer has also become very important.
Expanding the Classroom with Mobile Learning | Cornell IT News ”When used effectively, mobile-enabled web sites and applications have the potential to engage learners, reinforce best practice, and change the context of the classroom.” The article discusses how teachers might work out what apps would best suit their classroom needs.
Apps for the writing process | (innovate) educate ”There are many writing apps recommended for the iPad, but most are only good for one or two aspects of the process but not all of them. @becdavies00. has listed a collection of apps that can work together to make the writing process painless for students.”
100 Mobile Tools for TeachersListed Listed in this post (with a basic description) are 100 mobile tools that teachers can use and share resources directly from their mobile phones.
46 Tools To Make Infographics In The Classroom Some of the tools that allow you to create infographics. There are many and varied types of Infographics. The offer an interesting way to use visuals ( symbols, shapes, and images) with added relevant character-based data (numbers, words, and brief sentences).They offer teachers a way to use a variety of media forms, charts, and other data for both information reading as well as general fluency in their classrooms.
If you are involved in education here in Victoria it is very easy to see the rise in mobile computing across all levels of schooling. The demand on the servers has been increasing enormously and recently many schools seem to have taken steps to move towards the cloud.
Until recently it has been quite tentative, with pilot projects and limited use, often by individual teachers or faculties for single projects and without a whole school commitment.
At our school some staff, especially those in the technology area who have carefully built our in-house network, the cloud technologies are not an option. They fear the move to the cloud and it will require a significant change in mindset before they come on board. Most of what we use/do is on the intranet. Staff book the internet for their classes if they want to use external sites. This limits the usefulness of many of our online work in wikis and blogs. There are so many other great online tools and collaborative opportunities for real-world learning. We also need to be teaching students how to exist safely and responsiblity in the online work. I know that there are issues and problems may occur but they seem to see only the problems. There are ways around those as there are with the problems the occur on our intranet. It just requires the will first of all and then planning. If we are not careful we will be left behind if this infographic is anywhere near the mark.
Infographic was put together with US data in August 2012 but anecdotally the trend is also applicable here in this state as well.
Those that research and write for Online Colleges see that a much greater commitment to the cloud is coming. They estimate that K–12 schools will allocate an average of 17 percent of their total IT budget (US costs) to cloud-related services and in five years that projection goes up to 27 percent.
Please include attribution to OnlineColleges.net with this graphic.
Wartime Snapshots ”Wartime snapshots are background information guides with teaching activities on topics of Australia’s wartime history. The wartime snapshots relate to posters developed by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and distributed for Anzac Day, Remembrance Day or to mark special commemorative anniversaries. These guides containing background information, resources, website links and teaching activities and are suitable for teachers to use to introduce or explore a theme, or encourage discussion around an image.”
Ken Robinson on Passion on Vimeo In this video from The School of Life, Robinson articulates the ethos at the heart of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything and echoes, with his signature blend of wit and wisdom, many of the insights in this indispensable collection of advice on how to find your purpose and do what you love.
Social Media in Education: Pros and Cons – EdTechReview Social media is being widely used to support learning. It offers new opportunities to share knowledge and experiences in fun and exciting ways. Good post and great infographic.
Why (Not How) We Should Use iPads In Education | Edudemic You can also insert the term “Tablet” for iPad: the questions and arguments for thinking about the task before the technologies are still very valid and worth considering.
Designing Libraries – Planning school libraries Collection of articles that discuss the important considerations for designing the learning environment for modern, 21st Century school libraries.
10 Techy Icebreakers for The 21st Century Teacher ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Several lists of digital tools you can use for these activities. Icebreakers are ” discussion questions or activities used to help participants relax and ease into a group meeting or learning situation” (Dover, 2004). Icebreakers are very important in the learning-teaching process that takes place within the classroom. They can help in creating and maintaining a healthy and successful learning environment for students and are also the best warm-ups to get students engaged in a learning task.”
The last week has been very busy working with English teachers to match the more reluctant boys in their classes with books they might enjoy. It can be hard work sometimes but so rewarding when you have some success. We also had parent/teacher interviews over two days/nights. The English teachers stressed that the boys should be reading in a number of interviews so I had a chance to talk to the boys and their parents about what might be of interest to them. It was also interesting to see that many parents after looking at the books on display (many were military fiction and biographies/autobiographies out for ANZAC Day) had their boys borrow a book for them to read.
I was very happy to talk about books and reading when I didn’t have an interview of my own. One of the books I enjoyed last year was Itch by Simon Mayo. I read a review in a blog from the UK and bought it via my Kindle to read. The book was later released as a paperback that we now have in the library.
The main character, who has the marvelous name of Itchinham Lofte, is fairly ordinary 14-year-old who loves science and has one obsession, his collection of elements. His obsession puts him and his friends in a lot of danger.
There is plenty of intrigue and action with a bad guy, in the form of a mad scientist and a ruthless corporation with dubious morals laying claim to the new element Itch has in his hands. Is the element dangerous and did it cause the death of the mysterious traveler “Cake”? Itch needs to know more but who can he trust with his secret?
An action adventure with a science theme made this book a little unusual. The pace was brisk and the ending a good one. So, after believing you have poisoned your whole class with arsenic gas then going on the run from a your mad science teacher and to top it off almost dying of radiation poisoning, what adventures could there be to write about? There were a few big questions unanswered at the end of the book so there are enough things open for a follow-up story.
The book trailer for the novel was also great. Watch it below.
Now the second in the series has been published. I have yet to read it. I will have to finish off some other books this weekend before I get a copy to read. I will probable get the kindle version before getting a hardcopy as well for the library. We have boys who like the digital format, boys that will read the story whatever the format and others who prefer the traditional book.
There is again a good book trailer to whet the appetite.
Creating Infographics with your Students A good guide for creating infographics with students. Slides by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano that provide you with some tips on how to use them with your students .
Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions | User Generated Education Learning to compose a good question is a skill students should possess. Those at the Right Question Institute proposed process for students to learn to formulate their own questions. This can be a good start to having students learn to compose questions. The post lists the QFT six key steps.
The Technology Source Archives – Seven Principles of Effective Teaching: A Practical Lens for Evaluating Online Courses ”The “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” originally published in the AAHE Bulletin (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), are a popular framework for evaluating teaching in traditional, face-to-face courses. The principles are based on 50 years of higher education research (Chickering & Reisser, 1993). A faculty inventory (Johnson Foundation, “Faculty,” 1989) and an institutional inventory (Johnson Foundation, “Institutional,” 1989) based on these principles have helped faculty members and higher-education institutions examine and improve their teaching practices. We, a team of five evaluators from Indiana University’s Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT), recently used these principles to evaluate four online courses in a professional school at a large Midwestern university.”
CILIP | Presentations Here are links to number of interesting presentations from the “E-books in Libraries: A Global Question of Survival?” seminar that took place in London on February 2013. The event was co-sponsored by IFLA MLAS (Management of Library Associations Committee) and CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and featured presentations by experts about the ebook situation in libraries around the world.
10 Ways To Use Technology To Teach Writing There are a many technology tools and methods that are available for teaching writing. The 10 are listed here can make the process easier and more enjoyable for both teachers and students. Read more »
I was fortunate to be able to listen to Alice Pung again today. She was the visiting author for our year 11 students and spoke on the theme of Identity and Conflict: Challenges of life and writing about being Asian in Australia.
Alice was an excellent speaker. She captured the attention of our boys immediately by telling them some stories about her experiences speaking to some other groups. It was from the perspective of the first Asian person to have talked to these groups. She spoke very understandingly of their behaviours. As she spoke her, wit and humour took command of her audience. Alice is softly spoken and kind to her audiences. She may challenge their ideas and thoughts about identity and what it is to be “Australian” but her manner is such that they listen and take on board her comments.
Alice has written two books so far and, in between writing them, she edited an anthology, containing the stories of other Australians with an Asian background, entitled Growing Up Asian in Australia. It is from this book that she took her first story.
All our year 11 English and English as an Additional Language (formerly ESL) students are studying Growing Up Asian in Australia in English this year. It is not common for these two groups to study the same book and I think that this one offers a lot of options for the two groups to share experiences.
Unfortunately I did not get to hear the last 20 minutes of Alice’s talk. I had a previous engagement with a class of year 7 students who were going to tell me about their reading so far this year but I am sure the boys gave Alice a hearty thanks for her insights.
This is the third time I have heard Alice talk about her writing and identity.
The first time was in 2006 at the Penguin Publishers launch of her first book, Unpolished Gem. This is a novel about growing up in a first generation Asian Australian (Chinese-Cambodian) family in Braybrook, a western suburb in Melbourne. It is a very affectionate look back at her childhood and her immigrant family life. It was not all light and she, and her family, had a fair share of difficulties. She is able to rise above these to produce a story that showed a keen sense of humour, a sharp wit and a good understanding of satire as she records her family’s integration into Australian life. This is a novel that some of our International students have studied at my school in the years since it was written. Many of our students are Chinese and they can identify with some of the things she writes about. There are teacher notes written by Pam Macintyre to assist with studying the book.
The second time I had the opportunity to hear Alice was in 2011 at a School Library Association of Victoria conference. She had just written her second book, Her Father’s Daughter. There are some more links here. This is again biographical, but it takes the reader beyond the comfortable life she has experienced in Australia with her parents to the life her father lead to survive the killing fields of Cambodia. There is a good video interview conducted in 2011 giving the background to writing this book on BlipTv .
