Engaging our students and teaching RE

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I have been to a few faculty meetings and have heard about students not focusing on the task, being engaged with the required work and that there is too much “copying and pasting” into the word documents they are to submit for correction. In one meeting the brilliant idea was to go back to kids using exercise books instead of their laptop computers, to force them to “do their own work”. As I am a visitor to the faculty I restrained myself from banging my head on the desk or jumping up and exclaiming that we should be asking why the kids are so disengaged not simply bleating/moaning about it. Here’s another question, why are we asking them to complete tasks that allow them to just cut and paste?

The Communist Library Threat

Here is a little bit of fun for Friday (via the Shifted librarian’s blog). The Colbert report is a satirical US television program. This is a warning about the local public library and what is really going on there!

Students teaching

I have been working with some boys on book trailers. Our Year 7 students this year have all learnt about using Audacity, Photo story and Video Studio. As yet there seems to have been limited use made of their skills as a whole. I am really interested in looking how best to use the student skills in a variety of subject areas. Pondering this, I was later looking at Sheryl Nussbaum Beach’s blog, 21st century learning, and reading her entry about students becoming teachers.

She begins by mentioning the product Screenflow (a webcasting and screencasting tool). She then researches it further and she found the following video.

How good is it to see a student answering a question someone had put up about how to do something within the program? This young boy is teaching it as well as I could.

Sheryl poses the following: Why do we need to understand the shift in education? And answers: Because they can learn and teach themselves anything they want to know without leaving home. When you move from a classroom structure to a community structure – the students become teachers AND learners and so do we. 21st Century teaching and learning is about shifting classrooms to learning ecologies.

I have often heard teachers talk about what they have taught rather than about what the students have learnt. Yes, the technology is only a tool but it allows students to teach and when they have to teach something , as part of the package, they will learn. One of the best things is that today you can teach, or help someone else to learn, from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world.

Read while Waiting Project

It’s happening tomorrow, 23rd August. What an Idea. I do it all the time because I hate wasting my time in queues. Imagine everyone in waiting in lines doing it!!! Starting in Malaysia – could we all do it?

Penguin Young Readers on YouTube

If you are interested in looking at the other videos, here is the link for Penguin YA books on YouTube. They are also including some author interviews, one being John Flanagan, author of the Ranger’s Apprentice series. This one for Monster Blood Tattoo was put on about 2 weeks ago.