Self-similar: adventures in iterative thinking

Seasons

2011-09-21T11:56:00.000+12:00

Learning about why the Earth has seasons has definitely thrown up some of my favourite student misconceptions. Last year, I had the student who earnestly tried to argue that seasons are caused because the sun goes round the Earth and it's closer in summer. This year, it was the student who said it was because the plants needed summer to grow and so seasons started because of the plants.

Personally, I have a special love for the equinoxes and solstices, and celebrate them each year. As a teacher, I have a few odd seasons in my head too. For example, late September to November is Red Pen Season, when I eat, sleep and breathe revision and marking. It's not my favourite season.

I know that some of my students have this sort of headcanon for thinking about the world in a way that is not strictly scientific or 'true' for some values of true. It's real or sensible to them in their own perspective, though, and I think that's a valuable thing to have. I think it leads to the sort of quirky creativity that helps people get their head around things, and it's not something we should try to stamp out.

So I guess I am thinking about where to draw the line between completely, utterly, bizarrely wrong beliefs and eccentric and personal interpretations of the world around you. I think, for me, it's the recognition that my personal interpretation is just that, and not mistaking it for a universal perspective.

It's for your own good!

2011-08-30T22:43:00.000+12:00

Over on twitter, there has been a bit of a discussion going on about e-learning. You know, just for a change. This post is not about that, or, at least, only tangentially. I will try to have a thoughtful and well-reasoned critique of the pressures of NCEA vs institutional stagnation vs teacher effort at some point. This is not that critique.

Instead, this is based on the extremely unscientific poll I took with my Y13 class today. I asked, "Would you like it if we spent less time doing book work and talking and more time using online resources and making exciting things online?"

I left it nice and vague, thinking that there would be a fair bit off discussion. I was not wrong. There was a lot of discussion, and it was quite interesting. Here are some responses:

"No. When the hell am I ever going to have to make a podcast or whatever those thingies were that you wanted to make?"

"I like it best when we talk in class and you explain things and we all write on the board together."

"Online is not interactive enough."

"Is this worth credits?"

"You like computers. We don't."

"Can we do some physics now?"

I was intrigued. Also, just in case you were worried by the last one, we had just spent a mentally exhausting 50 minutes exploring the Bohr model of the atom and relating it to atomic line spectra. There had already been plenty of physics.

I dug a little deeper. You see, this class is curious about things. They want to know what the speed of light is doing in the mass-energy equivalence equation. They want to know about why Nicola Tesla was eccentric, and why Lise Meitner is a classic example of women getting shafted in the sciences. Here is the rub, though. They want to get through the NCEA standards more than they want to know all this other interesting, exciting, fascinating stuff.

Personally, I can't say I blame them. I'd be concerned about my NCEA level 3 exams too, if I was in their shoes. So, I think the reason they said 'no' to my original question comes down to a couple of big things:

1. They have NCEA level 3 exams soon. We really don't have time to do anything time-consuming. If they have to master a new skill to do it (like learn to use Googlesites), then they're not interested
2. They have NCEA level 3 exams soon. If it's not contributing to their credits, they're not interested.
3. They don't use computers and online resources the way I do. These particular students use computers for some very specific things: writing word documents, and checking facebook so that they can keep up with the lives of other people that they know

It took me a long time to figure out what they meant by that last one. Then I realised that, for this class, social media is about strengthening connections with people they already know. That's what the response about online 'not being interactive enough' was about.

So, I am going to take a while to think about this. As I see it, I have a couple of future directions that I need to reflect on. First, how do I make enough wriggle room in what I do so that we have time to learn about interesting things like Tesla's thing for pigeons? Second, how do I learn more about what students are interested in doing with e-learning, and how do I find time to make that work?

The two questions are related. But tomorrow, when I see these guys, we're going to take a moment to learn a little more about Lise Meitner. It's important.

Alternative assessment (and the bribery of my students)

2011-07-12T14:49:00.000+12:00

This week, I am not giving my Level 2 Physics class a topic test, even though they have finished all their learning about waves. Instead, I have given them an extended collaborative project. They all blinked when I said that, so I have taken to calling it "your jewellery project".

I don't really like topic tests. The project I have given them requires the students to work together to answer a range of questions that cover everything you'd expect a topic test to cover, but they get more time, can use their books and online resources, and can talk. I assigned the groups by getting them to line up in order of the wavelength of their favourite colour. I'm seeing a range of group styles in their different approaches.

First, some groups assign questions to different people and they work more or less independently on their own tasks. They seemed to assign the questions randomly. On the plus side, they are working pretty consistently. On the minus side, it does make them more likely to ask me for help instead of asking someone else in their group or looking up the answer. I guess they like having a reassuring someone to tell them things.

Other groups went through the entire question sheet and separated out particular questions. One group has one person who is the 'diagram specialist'. This person is doing all the ray diagrams, while another person is doing all the mathematical problems. This is quite efficient, and shows that they have some pretty clear ideas about delegating and division of labour. It means I can't be completely confident that all of them understand all of the topics, but I think that is a small price to pay.

Still other groups are all working on the same question at the same time, just different aspects of each one. These groups tend to be noisy, with lots of checking that they are all on the same page and all on track. They don't ask a lot of questions, but when I check in on them, they are clear about what they are doing and where they are going.

I think these types of group styles can rise organically in classes, like this one, where the majority of students know each other fairly well and are all confident about communicating their ideas. In other classes, particularly bigger ones where the students are younger and less self-directed, most groups default to the first type. I think this is a bit limiting in some scenarios, and I think I might set up some activities deliberately to tease out some other styles of group management.

I am pretty pleased with how seriously the Level 2 students are taking this project. Of course, when I handed it out and explained the parameters, they negotiated hard for a prize for the best team. We had some discussion about how 'best' should be defined, eventually agreeing that it would be a combination of group work skills and value added to answers since their last formative assessment. Naturally, the prize consists of food. On Wednesday, we will have a judging session and the winning team will nominate their choice of home baking. I think it's worth a few hours of my time.

Key Competencies

2011-06-28T10:53:00.000+12:00

I like the New Zealand Curriculum. I get excited by things like the Vision and Values in it. I think its awesome that we are encouraged - expected, even - to explicitly teach about citizenship, to integrate creativity, and to develop curiousity.

Anyway, one of the big pushes in our school right now is to make the way that we teach the Key Competencies more explicit in our classrooms. I think this is a great idea, so long as it can be done relatively painlessly. Fortunately, this is possible. I used the activity below with my Y10 students yesterday:

Key Competencies Self Evaluation

I just wrote this on the board, and typed it up this morning so it could be shared. Some students found the matching difficult, and I worked with them to remind them/build with them a definition of what each KC actually is. Some students flew through it, and were coming to me with their statements and wanting to know what to do if they thought they did the KC twice. I haven't had a good look at what anyone wrote yet, but I will do that soon and give some feedback and feedforward. Overall, though, it was a simple activity that students got into far more than I expected. I guess all my excitement was infectious for some people.

I'm kind of embarrassed for them

2011-06-13T15:51:00.000+12:00

I don't think my students quite understood what I meant when I said, "I will scan the pages that you make into a pdf and upload it to a sharing site so that you - and others - can access it." Personally, I think that is clear and unambiguous. My students did not quite get it, which, I think, explains why their pages look like something escaped from their pens and died on the paper. Well, perhaps that's a little harsh. Most of them are legible.

Optics Visual Dictionary

This was my first attempt at making an online visual dictionary with my Level 2 Physics class. They chose a word from a list I generated; in a perfect world, they would generate their own list from a pre-reading activity. Allowing the students to choose their own words worked well. Some students tried to pick a word they thought would be easy, but they turned out to be deceptively difficult. You should have seen the student who picked 'upright' as his word; it was a vexing task for him.

The biggest problem with this, I think, was that the students just didn't realise that when I said that I would upload it, that meant that I would be sharing it with other people. I trust that next time will look a lot more organised.

Adjectives, or the most sumptuous and delectable post ever

2011-06-12T10:36:00.000+12:00

My daughter, aged six, has an inordinate love for adjectives. I approve. Her favourite adjectives right now are 'adorable' (applied to babies, mostly) and 'sumptuous'. The last one has me a little confused, as I generally use 'delectable' and 'toothsome' for food I like. I think she picked it up at school.

Some of my time at school is spent on adjectives. Just this week, I made the first part of a visual dictionary of optics with my Level 2 Physics class. It contains adjectives such as 'real', 'virtual', 'upright' and 'inverted'. You have no idea how much trouble a simple concept like 'upright' caused. The finished product does not contain the word 'erect', but only because I was particularly vigilant. I now just have to check the rest of the entries and scan them - I wanted to use the computers, but they were all booked. How irritating.

A lot of the explicit vocabulary work I have been doing lately with the Level 1 Science and Y10 Science classes, however, has been concerned with verbs. I have been using a lot of starters that focus on learning outcomes and learning verbs. At Level 1, some of this has been associated with the learning outcomes for the standards on which the students are working (even though we teach according to the curriculum, the students still need to understand the achivement standard specifications from the NZQA). At Y10, a lot of it has been to do with students understanding - and, hopefully, making their own - learning outcomes.

SLO Wordle Activity

Above is the Level 1 document. The number of students who weren't quite sure what verbs were was not quite a huge as I had anticipated. This was encouraging.

Plastics Learning Outcomes Starter Activity

This Y10 starter activity proved a little more difficult. Not many students spotted that the verb was always the first word in the learning outcome. Fortunately, those that did tended to shout it out at the top of their voices, so everyone soon knew.

I don't, in general, print starter activities like this off. I usually put them on the projector and get students to write down what they think they need. We informally assess it by students getting the whiteboard markers and coming to the board to write their answers up. It works for us.

He whero, he whero, he whero

2011-06-08T20:51:00.001+12:00

Matariki is one of my favourite times of the year - in theory, at least. In practice, I dislike getting up when it is still dark and cannot wait for the solstice to pass so I can get some sunlight.

Last year, we planted flax at the school. Sadly, we haven't done any planting this year, but we will be more organised next year. Instead, I have been finding out all sorts of intriguing scientific astronomical things.

I enjoyed this post on sciblogs about the stars that make up the Pleiades. One of the things I like about this post is that the author recognises that mythology is important, and, get this, that retelling myths is not a defeat for scientific fact. It is possible for myths and science to coexist. How revolutionary.

Anyway, I do enjoy the night sky in winter. I love looking up and seeing the Milky Way, though I am terrible at spotting stars in particular. I never have been very good at it, and my general dislike of being cold has always impeded any desire to learn more.

Aside from the sky, I have also been excited by the haka competition at school. I love this competition, and worked really hard on it. The students rocked on the day, especially since we wrote the introduction ourselves and it was a bit nervewracking to perform. The video below shows my house, Inverness. I think the students did a brilliant job:

And, immodestly, something I am particularly proud of were the korowai that the two leaders wore:

We already have a bunch of things that we're going to work on for next year, but, for the moment, I am happy with two korowai, seven sisters, and cold mornings. Happy Matariki, everyone.

Science is full of big words

2011-05-24T10:32:00.000+12:00

My students have an unfortunate hatred of 'big words'. For example, this morning, they expressed their loathing for such words as 'covalent' and 'polyatomic'. Of course, they also hate being explicitly taught vocabulary. Sometimes, dialogue in my class looks like this:

Students: You're using big words!
Me: Okay, let's learn some vocabulary
Students: Learning words is for babies!
Me: You said you didn't understand these words
Students: We should be learning Science!
Me: Okay, let's learn some Science
Students: We don't understand these big words!
Me: You said you wanted to learn Science

Of course, there is a lot more hand waving. Also stamping of feet and huffing. Possibly some shouting.

The thing is, I have tried teaching new vocabulary in a range of ways. I have tried making visual dictionaries that students add to each time we learn a new content word. I have literacy Do Now activities that involve definitions, example sentences, and cloze activities. I have tried keeping an online glossary on the class site (there was so much complaining about this one). I have tried posters. I have tried embedding vocabulary on purpose into learning. Students hate it, even though they know they need it.

Anyway, I am continuing with my literacy Do Nows, since five minutes of vocabulary seems a lot more palatable than a longer chunk. Here are some things I do, from very low level to quite high level:

Unscrambling letters to make words (visibility of words)
Matching related words and identifying what they have in common (topic-specific words)
Matching words to definitions
Matching halves of sentences that show vocabulary words in context
Cloze activities using vocabulary words
Differentiating between the Science meaning of a word and its common meaning
Creating a picture or diagram to illustrate a word

Anyway, now that I have reminded myself that I do actually do things that help literacy, I feel much better

Creativity and the artist/crafter/mistaker

2011-05-19T12:23:00.000+12:00

Ken Robinson asks, in the TED talk embedded at the end of this post, why don't we teach children dancing everyday, the same way we teach them mathematics? I am going to make posters from this, that's how much I love what I see embedded into this question.

You see, I agree with his basic argument, that creativity is a skill, or an orientation, or a collection of attributes, that we need to teach just as much as we need to teach literacy and numeracy. One of the things that makes it hard, though, is the fact that people think that creativity is a kind of a gift that some people have and others do not.

Wrong. You only have to watch young children playing in sandpits to realise that the capacity for imagination and creativity can be found in all of us. I mean, what is there to get excited about in sand? But when you have a truck and can create a city (or a farm or a spaceship) - then sand is fun.

I was thinking about the key things that keep me creative, and that I think helped me when I was growing up. I blame books, a lot, but also having plenty of quiet time away from other people. I might not have internalised all the lessons about cooperation, but I learned how to entertain myself. I got to try things out and make mistakes - and that's there in the title.

Now that I am a teacher, I've worked hard to find ways to encourage creativity. I model it, by bringing in projects that I have been working on or talking about something that I have tried recently. If I finish a sewing project that I am pleased with I will bring it in and show it off - and talk about what went wrong and how I fixed it. I talk about the whole body and start senior physics classes with a few minutes of yoga or stretching. I have a whole unit in junior science about playing round with diy and everyday materials. I encourage students to use interpretative dance to present ideas (ideal for waves).

But I find that I am fighting all the time to incorporate creativity and learning about creativity. I want to make it like metacognition, a thing I slip in all the time. Perhaps I should start thinking about it that way.

And, finally, the TED talk that sparked all this in the first place. Here's Ken Robinson, kicking it old school about creativity and schooling:

Fashion or refashion?

2011-05-16T11:31:00.001+12:00

I am usually all about the upcycling, refashioning, and general diy goodness. My current example is a project I am going to try in the spring - growing plants in a converted pallet, as in this post from Life on the Balcony. Doesn't it look awesome?

Just so that there is some educational link (aside from my daughter growing strawberries and cherry tomatoes), the Horticulture teacher is going to try with one class while the Horticulture block is being upgraded and therefore unavailable for her usual beds. This is a clear example of how my google reader provides useful and practical ideas that I actually use.

But the real topic of this post is to talk about fashion, and was prompted by a conversation with my Y13 class. I was introducing the idea that I had made a presentation (embedded below) and that I expected them to watch the presentation themselves and then bring their questions to class for clarification and extension, tutorial style. So far, so good, right?

But I said that there were fashions in education, in the sense that teachers follow trends in education, just like other trends. Someone has a genius idea and then people trial it and riff off it and it spreads. My students snorted, and when I asked them why, they said that all their experience of teaching was that it was pretty much all the same, and the differences came down to the style of the teacher, not the fashion or trend of the moment. These students have been at this school for over six years now, so I was pretty intrigued by this. Do they really have teachers who are still stuck in the educational equivalent of Paris Hilton as a fashion icon? (apparently, 2003 was also the year of cargo pants, monograms and Chinese embroidery)

I don't claim to be at the leading edge of educational trends and ideas, but I know my teaching tools and techniques change over time. One of the things I am playing with now is the idea of presenting lecture material online, to give students more time for talking and tutorials in class. I'm starting out with some presentations on present.me and then perhaps some video of me doing worked mathematical examples on the board. The Horticulture teacher is planning to do videos of practical skills, and the Chemistry and Biology teachers are investigating what's going to be best for their presentations.

It's interesting stuff. Is it fashionable? Probably, but it's interesting and educational. I'm enjoying the experimentation. Anyway, here is the presentation - NCEA level 3, all about Simple Harmonic Motion:

Or you can go and watch it, on present.me

Causing mayhem - cognitive conflict

2011-05-11T17:48:00.000+12:00

In senior Physics, at least, I rarely have trouble causing cognitive conflict. My students are in an almost perpetual state of cognitive conflict. They barely have a few moments of blissful security before I start asking questions that get them to look at how their existing understanding is too simple and full of misunderstandings.

In junior Science, however, getting students to that point of cognitive conflict can be difficult to achieve. There is nothing so disheartening as discovering that your students have absorbed all the new learning, but not jettisoned all their old beliefs. Students are capable of holding seven contradictory thoughts before breakfast, let alone their contradictory thoughts about the structure of plastics.

I have been working hard to get students to recognise that they are in cognitive conflict, not just be in cognitive conflict, do a bit of mental gymnastics, and assimilate the contradictions into a dual view of the world.

This isn't new, I know, but I have just come across it again recently. When I am working with students at a high level - getting students to predict, or make generalisations, or evaluate ideas - then students can't help but change ideas. It's something to do with the extended abstract thinking, at that top level of SOLO taxonomy, that makes contradictions untenable.

I use SOLO taxonomy in a relatively limited way in my junior classes. They are definitely embedded in the learning outcomes, and our whole department is working on increasing metacognition in our students. Now that I've thought about this link between cognitive conflict, high level thinking on the SOLO taxonomy and real change in thinking, I am going to have to think more about how to extend this.

Reflection! Fun times.

Google docs and collaboration

2011-03-11T12:28:00.000+13:00

Our school changed to GoogleApps for our email last year. Bundled with that are GoogleDocs and a bunch of other apps. We've been using the Calendar, and it's been awesome, but I have learned that many teachers haven't even opened their GoogleDocs, much less used them. I am aghast. Aghast, I say.

I love GoogleDocs. I have been using them for a long time for writing and sharing with friends, and so I think they have a lot of potential to be awesome in the classroom too.

One day, I will write a really thorough blog post about a way that my students used GoogleDocs to collaborate in a constructive and constructionist way. I sometimes need to remember that it's not a huge mission to set up simple collaboration - and if I need reminding, I am certain my colleagues need reminding too.

It gets different

2010-10-19T09:40:00.000+13:00

Here's the thing, I've never been bullied for being queer. I've been bullied for other things, but not for that. Oh, and there was the time someone wrote "Mrs Cooper is a dyke" in pencil on my classroom door (ridiculous, since all the students know I'm not married), but as a kid? Nope. I guess there were enough other things about which to bully and ridicule me without having to guess about that.

But I recognise that queerness is an important facet of bullying and victimisation in schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. Hearing 'gay' and 'fag' used as put-downs, the subtle heterosexism that prevails in books and classrooms, it all can add up to making queer - gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, genderqueer, asexual, questioning and so on - young people feel invisible. Feel worthless and marginalised. Feel unsafe.

The It Gets Better project is designed to combat this with the thought that things change. You grow up, other people grow up, and you can change your life. Which is great, and I am certainly a different, more confident person now.

I was reading Karen Healey's livejournal post on the matter this morning, and so much of what she said resonated with me.

Every day, I worry that a student in my classes or at my school is being bullied or victimised and I am not seeing it or doing anything about it. I'm missing the signs, or the student is too scared to tell anyone, or, worse, I am seeing it and not realising how serious it is. Every day, I worry that I won't be able to do something positive for a student who is being bullied. I worry that I am not enough of a positive role model, that being out and living my life is not enough. I worry that the systems I work in will fail students, and that will feel like I have failed them. I worry that I'm not hard enough on students who are casually homophobic, cruel or abusive. I worry, I worry, I worry.

So, I do some small things. I am out, to start with. I am openly bisexual. I have zero tolerance to 'gay', 'homo' and other homophobic language. I use examples with queer people in them - it's hard, given that I teach science, but not impossible. I try. I try to get the Guidance Counsellor to get me posters that highlight sexuality acceptance, and I put them up with my Quit Smoking posters. If I know there are students who are having a hard time, or who are high risk, I put more effort into having a positive and encouraging relationship with them. Sometimes, these students come to talk to me about whatever is worrying them, and I take the time to listen.

But I still worry.

Does it get better?

Well, yeah. For me, it did. For my students, I hope it will get better too.

Slime and fear factor

2010-10-13T15:33:00.000+13:00

Slime is one of my favourite things, and I am delighted that I have a unit which requires me to make it this year. Fear Factor is going to be an awesome unit, I can tell already. The cleaners are going to kill me, though, for the amount of paint and glue and gloop we managed to get on the floor yesterday.

Anyway, it turns out that the high grade PVA we get here in NZ is not the same thing as Elmer's glue. Who knew? I am disappointed, because it means that our slime is not quite the same thing as I expected, based on the instructional video I found.

One of the things I like best about teaching science is that, if first we don't succeed, we can just try again. The lab technician and I spent a happy hour making various concoctions - sometimes, I am sure I didn't grow out of making mud pies, I am just more purposeful about it now. Anyway, we came up with two possible recipes:

40mL PVA glue
10 - 15 mL acrylic paint
approx 5g borax

Sprinkle the borax onto the glue and paint mix and mix thoroughly. If it is too sticky, try moving it to another person who has clean hands, or add more borax if that doesn't work

This gives a beautiful, shiny putty that is charmingly elastic and doesn't stick to your hands too much.

We also made a slime that is quite lightweight and frothy.

1/2 cup PVA glue
few drops of food colouring
1/2 cup water
2 heaped Tbs borax

Mix all ingredients in a tip top container. The PVA will curdle and the borax will feel grainy, but just keep mixing until it starts to coalesce. This will make a firm, frothy slime that sticks to your hands rather more than classic slime.

We plan to mix grated polystyrene into the second slime and make sculptures. We expect that they will set nicely if left on a windowsill for a couple of days.

Anyway, the science that we are teaching along with this is all about states of matter and things like that. I hope the students are learning something in addition to the enjoyment of slime. Next week, cornflour slime. I love me some non-newtonian fluids too.

Cyclical thinking, the midnight sun, and connecting with others

2010-07-01T12:48:00.000+12:00

Blame my vaguely witchy version of being an athiest (which is a post for another day), but I have always loved cycles and repeating patterns. It's just gone winter solstice here and, like every year, I'm finding it hard to haul myself out of bed every morning - but at least, having celebrated the solstice, I know that better times are on the way (at least with regard to it being light when my alarm goes off).

The next unit in Year 10 Science is Amazing Adventure, where the students 'travel' around the world learning about scientific issues in different places. One of the places they visit is Oslo, in Norway. I wanted to visit Iceland, but no one would be able to reliably speak or say Reykjavik. Also, fiords are cool. It's a shame, though, because Oslo does not actually experience the midnight sun, you have to travel North for that. Right now, I am collecting first hand experiences from people who have seen the midnight sun, and also from people who live in northerly places where they experience the long winters and blinding summers. What is it like to live in a place where the cycles are so strong, compared to the fairly gentle ones we have here? I hope to set up a skype interview with a friend so that students (some, at least) can ask questions about that experience.

Anyhow, aside from the connected learning aspect, I am quite excited about this, because cycles make me happy. I love to look at the moon each night (or early morning) and track the phases. I like to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes (and I often celebrate the other Sabbats, just because). And I like to have quite a cyclical approach to my own creative process too. I think that the most interesting part, for me, will be to hear how the really strong sun cycles affect people in the northernmost portions of the world.

Clouds sighs

2010-06-21T09:23:00.000+12:00

I love visualisations, particularly wordy ones. I love how this nice little service produces charming word clouds. Here are the contents of my blog:

Cute, huh?

Today, a compliment

2010-06-17T13:51:00.000+12:00

Well, I took it to be one, anyway. A student asked me if they have Daylight Savings Time in the Cook Islands. I kind of blinked and asked why I would be expected to know that, and he replied that I am a fount of knowledge and so it was worth a try. That was nice.

So then, I asked why he didn't just google it to find out. His answer? He's not very good at searching. He doesn't know what keywords to use, and, even if he takes a guess at the keywords, he doesn't know how to combine them or how to sift through the results he gets in order to find something that will be useful to him.

In this particular instance, he was trying to find the time in the Cook Islands based on a time in Aotearoa New Zealand, given one time when NZ is not in DST and one when it is. First of all, I explained how time zones worked and we figured out in our heads how the times related. Then, we confirmed it with a handy time zone converter.

I found one online.

This student had no idea how I found it.

So I tried to explain boolean searching. At this point, he started to have that hunted look that people get when they really, really wish I'd just shut up and let them continue on having no idea how to fix things. I am pretty much immune to that look now.

I started with some venn diagrams, as in this picture below:

He kind of got the point of this. It's using simple English conjunctions to connect search terms in a way that makes them form a combination. That's all good. But that doesn't really make much difference with the first problem - that of the lack of sensible keywords in the first place.

In the Daylight Savings question, I put in daylight savings Cook Islands as my keywords. I didn't even bother with boolean connectors, because I was pretty sure I would find a useful link on the first page. I asked the student what he would have put in, and he shrugged. He didn't even really know where to start with it.

I think I will, next week even, start working on this with my younger students. I am inspired, because, even though being the fount of knowledge is good, I'd rather be the facilitator of how to do it yourself.

Sherbet, or the fizzing taste of success

2010-06-10T15:23:00.000+12:00

I like to think that cognitive dissonance is a little like sherbet. It fizzes on your tongue or in your mind and you find yourself having to adjust to the new ideas and tastes. I am also a bit of an opportunist. I would blame it on having a bit of crow in me, but we don't really have the crow archetype as such in Aotearoa.

Leaving aside my fondness for shiny things, I love to encourage moments of cognitive dissonance. The thing is, they take time to find and set up. Then the students take time to talk through what they've observed and come up with new explanations that are consistent with both their observations and the theory you and/or the text have provided. Today, I wished for a shortcut. I wish that sometimes, me saying "it just does" was enough of a reason for students to believe.

Reports, front ends and curricula

2010-05-12T10:27:00.000+12:00

So, I am just working on the schemes for the entire department. We teach five levels of General Science, four of Horticultural Science, and two levels of each of Chemistry, Physics and Biology. I have to check that all the schemes and units have been revised or devised with reference to the Revised New Zealand Curriculum.

This is something I enjoy doing. I have an inordinate passion for curriculum. I take the widest view of curriculum, defining it, in my head, as the total set of learning experiences within a school. It includes both the explicit curriculum, the null curriculum and the relationships and environment in classrooms and in the playground.

In my school right now, we're working on cultural capital. I think this is awesome. Unpacking teacher expectations and the ways we communicate those expectations is vitally important. However, it's not something easy to do, partly because beliefs and values about gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and disability are so pervasive and entrenched.

Here is an example that's really annoying me right now:

Okay, spot the only Maori in the ad.

He's driving the car. None of the clerical workers are Maori. The boss certainly isn't Maori. The only Maori shown is a (presumably) unskilled warehouse/driver/labourer.

This wouldn't be so bad if it was an isolated example. I opened up a textbook - one in which I like the explanations and questions - and turned to the first page with pictures of people. There were seven people on the page. One was clearly not Pakeha, and another was not clearly Pakeha or Maori, but the rest were clearly Pakeha or could pass as Pakeha. There was only one woman pictured. That woman was on a boat with two men - one of those men was getting ready to dive, the other was at the wheel. The implication was that the woman was a mere passenger.

I wish that was an isolated incident in that textbook. It's not.

Curriculum is the sum of all learning experiences. The textbooks we use, the examples we give, the analogies we draw: these are all learning experiences. That's how we encode our expectations, even beyond the verbal assurances we give to students that we value them.

That encoding is not okay. I want to do better. We should all do better, or we're condemning all our students to repeating the inequities we face now.

This differentiated, self-directed stuff is hard for us all

2010-05-06T10:36:00.000+12:00

Today's class saw a bunch of students going "but what do we doooooooo?" and flapping their hands over their freedom. I was so tempted to flap my hands back and reply, "I don't knoooow!"

Part of the problem is that they have never done anything like this. When I rewrite the Y 7 & 8 units, I will be sure to include the babysteps version of this unit. Part of it is that they don't really believe that they are allowed to be self-directed, and another part is that they are unsure of exactly what the parameters of their self-direction are. So, right now, we are compromising. All students have lists of the materials they need and should have them by Wednesday, ready to start experimenting and refining their methods.

I still need to finish off my exemplar. Finding time for this sort of thing is like pulling teeth in this place.

I like to think I am a happy person

2010-04-30T15:21:00.000+12:00

It is one of my more cherished delusions, for realz. But there are things that make me happy and I like to share with people. However, this week, I have been reminded that 'people' and 'students' can be a mutually exclusive group, for values of 'people' which mean 'people who will appreciate the happymaking of the things'.

Here are some examples.

My students said "why would anyone go to the trouble of making food look that good when all you're going to do is eat it?". My students are philistines.

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My students said "What? Why is this even funny? What is this song? Why are you laughing?" My students are young and do not recognise the juxtaposition.

The perils of trying new things, and why it's important to try

2010-04-19T12:19:00.000+12:00

I can totally see why teachers, heads of departments and school managers and governors stick to what they know. It's just so much easier than setting fire to the past and starting from scratch (or even just hacking the past back to rubble and then trashing the useless bits).

So, one of the things about the new units we're using in junior science is that they need fine-tuning as we teach, and that is hard work. It's worthwhile work, but it's not like any of this stuff has been tested before, or even like any of the teachers have worked in schools where science is taught this way. So each lesson is a learning experience.

Today, I learned that some students are idiots. Well, that's a pretty mean way to describe it, so let me say it in a more professional way. Some students are so accustomed to being given knowledge that they find the most simple of self-directed tasks daunting - even paralysing. So they cover it up with not caring. This, then, is the most nerve-wracking part, for me. I am trying something new, and expecting students to try something new, and expecting my staff to try something new.

Sometimes, I wish we could all have a group hug.

The scientific process and other monolithic entities

2010-04-06T09:14:00.001+12:00

So many students think of the scientific process (okay, if they think of it at all) as a set of data-in/conclusion-out, cookie-cutter, pre-made experiments. They get called investigations, but the outcome always seems pre-determined. The teacher always knows what the answer should be (even if your crappy following of directions has resulted in something quite, quite different).

One of the things I am loving on at the moment? The exemplar I am making involves me in my favourite part of the investigative process - the bit where I do some mini-tests and alter my method accordingly. I'm not recording data, just playing around within the limits of my investigation to make sure that my method is going to work. I love it.

I hope to have some success soon though - all those internet tutorials made it look easy! Here are two pics of the dismal failures so far. One was using a hot iron, one a cooler iron. I think maybe I need to let the baking paper cool before I peel it back *sadfaces*

One of the things I like about being a teacher...

2010-04-05T11:16:00.002+12:00

Is trying things first.

Next term, the Y10 class is doing a unit based around investigations and different inquiry processes. It features self-direction, individual learning outcomes and all sorts of happytiems so-hot-right-now educational features.

But the bit I am happiest about is that there is an exemplar for the first round - for very low ability students, they can use the exemplar as a template and basically plod along in the exemplar's footsteps.

Naturally, I get to make the exemplar.

Even that wouldn't ordinarily be enough to excite me, but I am making my exemplar about using plastic bags as t-shirt transfers. Yeah, I know, exciting right?

Look at this example of what someone made with plastic bag transfers:

I was inspired by three posts on Filth Wizardry - post one, post two, and post three.

And there is lots of science behind this - like why the particle structure of plastics makes them prone to melting, not catching alight. Why some plastics are softer and more melty than others. Like where plastics come from in the first place. Even though the tutorial gives basic instructions, there is still plenty of scope for investigation and coming up with a solid hypothesis. My exemplar deals with the effects of plastic type, holding the temperature and time of fuse constant. At the moment, though, I am freeform experimenting, to get the basic range of my constants settled. I will have pictures later.

So, I'm hoping that a few other students will choose other plastic recycling topics to use for their first investigation. I have some awesome tutorials on fusing plastic bags - here, with patterns if you want to make a rain hat or bag and here, with some more crafty ideas, and even a video tutorial:

But I need more! I'm going to exercise my google-fu later and come up with as many awesome plastic recycling ideas as I can. If any readers have ideas, I'd be delighted to hear them too!

But getting back to this unit of learning. Not many students are going to grasp quite what I'm on about quickly and be able to run with it. Some will, and I am really looking forward to seeing what they and their awesome imaginations come up with. But many will need a lot of support to get through it. That's where the exemplar and some supported options come in - at least for the first round of investigations. And if I get to play round with making t-shirt transfers out of the fifty million plastic bags littering my house, that's even better.

Some thoughts on assessment, IEPs and success

2010-03-31T10:12:00.002+13:00

So, the HoD meeting last night was fascinating. We talked - really talked about, like, actual ideas - and it was constructive and thoughtful. I left wondering if the entire school had exploded into pod people, but no. We had freaky mind melds and respectful disagreements and it was awesome.

One of the things we talked about was the need for students who have low ability to also experience success in some way. We talked about ways to measure and comment on where the students are improving, even if their improvement is not enough to achieve at the level needed in our assessments. I have been thinking about this, and the need to give good, constructive feedback and feedforward on what students are doing.

So, I have decided to make more use of the 'comment' option in our reporting programme. I think it will be helpful, not just for the students who receive the comment but for me too.

Self-reflection and students

2010-03-19T14:40:00.002+13:00

Well, I wanted to write a blog post, so I made the mistake of asking my students what it should be about. I don't think I've ever seen such faces - there was an underlying incomprehension about what the hell I was asking them for, true, but on top of that there were a myriad of shades of incomprehension about why I would want a blog in the first place.

Sometimes I wonder that too.

But today, I have some very specific things to reflect on. Like the report I have to write about how the Science Department is going in implementing the new NZ Curriculum into our schemes. Perhaps it would be more proper - and accurate, in our case - to say that we are re-writing our schemes in light of the directives of the new curriculum.

There are many parts I like about the curriculum. I like that it explicitly states that a positive sense of identity is a key learning outcome. I like that it expects students to learn how to be international citizens and informed decision makers. I love how it values diversity and social justice.

The challenge now is how to implement all of this into a comprehensive scheme of work that leads into the highly content-driven NCEA environment, where students must absorb and regurgitate knowledge. But it's a challenge I am excited by.

One thing that annoys me is to hear teachers say "but we already do this!".

Well, sorry, no. Mostly, you don't. You drive content. Sticking a new front end onto your existing schemes is not implementing the new curriculum. That's why we're thinking big and making big changes.

Good teaching, good learning?

2010-03-11T10:23:00.002+13:00

So, today I did a rather adventurous activity with my Year 10 science class involving mixed ability grouping, student-directed activities and a peer-assessment survey to follow up. One of the things I did in the peer-assessment survey was ask about how well I did. Specifically, I asked how well I explained my instructions, how well I explained the content, and how well I responded to questions.

After seeing these results, I am doing a little reflection on how I actually do respond to questions. Two of the three groups gave me an unfavourable ranking for my question-response skills.

My default, whenever I am asked a process question (like, "how do I fold this paper?"), or even a content question, is to refer them to someone who is successfully doing the process or task. My view is that students should turn to each other for advice, so long as the questions are appropriately difficult for them. If no one gets it, then I am definitely at fault and should explain. Otherwise, they can work collaboratively to find answers, and this includes asking someone else for help on what a word means or what a question is asking for.

But it occurred to me that students still think that teachers are the founts of all knowledge and that an answer from me is 'better' than an answer from a classmate, even if the content if exactly the same.

Since I don't want to have to answer the same questions fifty million times, I guess I have to take some action. Here are some thoughts:

1. Work on my instructions. In particular, make better use of bullet points and short, sequential sentences in a list rather than a short, paragraph-style set of instructions

2. For each class, assign two or three people (in a rotating roster) who will be experts on explaining tasks. Then the role can be filled by people who have a good track record on understanding the type of task we're doing that day

3. Do more examples and modelling and make more use of templates

I shall continue thinking on this and making improvements.

Learning at school

2010-02-24T11:24:00.003+13:00

Okay, so I've only been here since just before 9am this morning, but I'm still excited and think I thought be blogging just a little bit. Twitter is all awesome and stupendous but sometimes 140 characters just doesn't cut it.

I'm in a session on the SOLO taxonomy and we're rattling around a bit in this huge room. I think people are still digesting the keynote. Now, I'm pretty excited about this spotlight because I'm all about the learning outcomes. I try to have really clear signposts for learning in a lesson-by-lesson fashion and also on a longer scale. But many of my longer term goals are a little... well, punk, in the sense that I value a bit of a rough and ready, diy, homegrown kind of learning. Sometimes, I don't talk about them too much. It makes people nervous.

But I am enjoying the slow unfolding of the SOLO taxonomy. What I'm seeing so far is an interesting, deeper take on the rather dirty version of learning I use: "I know nothing", "I know something", "I know many things", "I can do things with the things I know" and "I can create and explain new things with the things I know".

You know, I'm thinking more about self-assessment matrices and how our department uses them. I think we need to work more on developing what those last two criteria look like for students. In particular - and I know this will go down like a lead balloon at my school - we need to focus on what application and creativity looks like for girls in subjects that are traditionally considered to be boys' subjects. I know I am influenced by being a physics teacher, but it is definitely a concern for me.

Right. More thinking. More listening. More link making and integrating.

(More dirty outcomes? You bet)

So excited that I might need more caffeine

2010-02-18T10:14:00.002+13:00

So, I have posted a lot about the integrated scheme we've got going with the junior science classes. I had a crisis of faith late in the holidays about whether we were making the right choice in abandoning a traditional model to go for something so unusual.

However, in the last week, I have collected some anecdata that has really reassured me that we've made the right choice. I'm confident that our test results and more formal surveying will bear out this confidence.

Most importantly, we've had success with at least two students who have, in the past, been notoriously hard to engage in learning. They enjoy the idea that for each bite of learning - about scale diagrams or the particle nature of matter or whatever - they do an activity that celebrates and consolidates that learning, and they get to display the artefact from the learning. What they do in class is what we base our assessment on, and these students are responding really positively to that.

On a less important, but enjoyable note, I managed to create a lesson (around mixtures, compounds and elements, with the beginning of an introduction to separation techniques) that uses mashups. In particular, it uses DJ Earworm's United State of Pop 2009. There is a video, which I've embedded below, but - even better - there is a colour-coded lyric sheet which shows the different artists who have been integrated into the mashup. So my students can watch the video and try to identify all the artists and songs, then use the colour coded sheet to see how they did. Then, we're going to show, on Audacity, how we can do things like that ourselves, making mixtures of audio clips. It's going to rock.

Of course, not nearly as much as this does:

Fail person is fail?

2010-02-15T22:08:00.004+13:00

Recently, I have been teh fail when it comes to blogging. I would like to blame any number of things, but I think it mostly comes down to the heat drying out my brain. Seriously. Northland is in the grip of the worst drought in years and it's miserable.

However, being back at school is not all doom and gloom. For one thing, I am excited about how the new junior schemes are going, even if it is only early in the term. Of course, the fact that I am getting to set up a crime scene on the front desk may have something to do with it - and the entirely spurious transcript of my 'interview' about it. I love this sort of creative work.

Hopefully, I will have resources soon. That is also exciting. I love the diy ethos we've got going in our department. We make things up and recreate them in different shapes and formats. We fix things and break things. It's refreshing, to work in a department that takes risks and works hard to make them worthwhile risks. I'm pretty happy, all things considered.

I'm all about the cross curricularity

2009-12-15T11:26:00.002+13:00

Actually, I'm not sure that's even a word. But I am running with it.

In my quest to be a Renaissance teacher, I like to maintain a passing acquaintance with other subject areas. Of course, this is fairly easy in Maths (since I use it all the time to teach, you know, my subject) and English. That's because I'm a writer *cues flappy hands of creative expression*. I like to know what's happening in Technology. But I love love love Social Science.

Here is my latest obsession of intellectual glee. Sociological Images. They use images to explore assumptions about gender, class and ethnicity, with a short, rigorous commentary. I love it. For example, just today I learned that marriage between cousins is prohibited in 25 states in the US. *blinks* My maternal grandparents were first cousins. Perhaps I shouldn't admit to that on the internet.

We're all about health. And science. Yeah

2009-12-12T08:08:00.002+13:00

The other day, I stumbled across a fascinating post featuring a periodic table of the elements represented by cupcakes.

Here, have a gratuitous picture of the sugary goodness:

Nice, huh?

One of the things I have found in teaching chemistry, and, in particular, atomic structure, ion formation and ionic bonding, is that students have real difficulty with the idea that removing electrons makes an ion more positive.

Yes, I am also a maths teacher, and this does make me worried.

So, I'm thinking cupcakes of the first twenty and the few extras we use. Some nice icing. Valence electrons represented by little sour jube lollies - if you remove valence sour jubes, the cupcake gets sweeter. I think this could be a really simple, if not particularly healthy, way to get the idea across.

Bring on the Chemistry!

Cookie-cutter science? Please, I hate chocolate chip

2009-12-01T08:10:00.002+13:00

So, one of my colleagues sent me this link, in response to my description of our new junior science scheme. Apparently, he thinks we’re going to be teaching cookie-cutter science. I am faced with the unpalatable thought that I failed to communicate effectively, or the equally unpleasant alternative that my colleagues think I have instituted an intellectually barren scheme of work.

Personally, I think that describing our scheme as cookie-cutter is, at best, unkind. We're getting rid of several student learning outcomes and changing our focus from content - facts in low context - to scientific literacy. I'm going to think more about exactly how we're ensuring high academic rigour.

The well-rounded student (a Renaissance ideal?)

2009-11-20T09:28:00.002+13:00

One of the things that irks me about school - and, for the record, I think my school is better about this than most - is how much attention we pay to sports and other athletic endeavours.

Oh, I fully admit that this annoyance comes mainly from the fact that I am not sporty and spent a large chunk of my schooling career as a socially inept loner who preferred reading, writing and drama to... well, pretty much any physical activity you could name. That just makes me more determined to offer students opportunities outside the sport/athletics mould.

So, my whanau (homeroom to any North Americans) is going to spend some time on art appreciation. This was partly prompted by my discovery, last night, of Feed Your Soul, a free art download site.

This is the one I chose for myself, to add to our art collage that will go up on my wall. Students will choose the ones they like and add an annotation about why they chose it. It could be really interesting, I think, and the students might learn something about themselves and each other - and an artist they might otherwise never come across.

I'll post more later about my Renaissance ideals. For now, I feel happy.

Starting thoughts about edupunk

2009-11-19T10:16:00.003+13:00

I don't blog much about my personal life. I probably should do more. Anyone who stumbles across this blog needs to know about my adventures in sewing, right? After all, draughting my own patterns is pretty exciting.

But what I have been thinking about lately is edupunk and my personal philosophy. I remember at teacher's college having to write soooo many essays (thoughtfully packaged by my lecturers as "reflective personal narratives or somesuch) on my personal philosophy of teaching, my thoughts on my subject specialities, and how I planned to integrate these into my teaching practice. Even though everyone loathed these, I found them really useful. What follows, obviously, is not something I shared with my lecturers.

I spent large chunks of my late teens and early to mid twenties in punk, grunge, fringe and freak subcultures, from the swamp-garage, industrial noise, punk-metal and punk bands I saw (and the one I played in) in Palmerston North and Hamilton while at university, to the niche, almost desperate, punk underbelly of Wuhan, China. A huge part of this was the idea that everyone can create, one way or another. We can reappropriate, recycle, subvert, satirise and reclaim ideas and knowledge. These things aren’t the exclusive domain of faceless systems. We can do it ourselves – make noise, make art, make community.

I also spent years involved in politics, from student politics and processes to the National Executive of the Green Party. I learned about democracy in all its guises, learned about structural inequality, privilege and cultural capital.

I thought long and hard before getting into teaching, worrying about how I would reconcile my roots-punk sensibilities with the rigid goalposts of Aotearoa-NZ’s examination structure. When I took the plunge, it was with the firm intent to take what I had learned and keep the ethos of doing it yourself, keeping it local (while thinking global) and integrating a rogue random-organic mindset into my teaching and continued learning. Oh, and lets not forget the activism.

If I look at the key points of punk, the things that stick out for me in an educational setting are subverting corporate models of education (including the nasty fringes of human capital), avoiding bite-sized ideas learned as the educational version of chicken nuggets (just as processed and devoid of nutrition) and embracing praxis, that loop of action and reflection.

Wow. Exams impede actual thought, for realz

2009-11-17T09:57:00.002+13:00

Let's be frank. I hate exams. I loathe revision. I hate teaching students canned facts because they have to regurgitate them onto a standard paper under standard conditions with standard answers and standard marking. I was going to tweet about this, but, really, my loathing won't fit into 140 characters.

The full post about why exams suck is for another day and time. The post I've been thinking about, about edupunk and DIY in teaching, is for another day too. The brainwave I had about forensics is for another day too. For now, the parts of my brain not eaten by revision are absorbed in my NaNoWriMo project.

BRB, working now.

Working on new curriculum and thinking thinky thoughts

2009-09-23T09:08:00.002+12:00

I read recently that only 2% of principals report that their school is ready for the NZ Curriculum rollout that takes place next year. I flicked over it on the front page of the local paper while in the supermarket (wine, cigarettes and chocolate - it's the end of the term) and rolled my eyes a little. Well. It's a new curriculum, not the next Great Flood. I think we can all be at different places without people freaking out. Also, that was the 2% that said they were OMG-completely-prepared-and-braced-for-the-impact. The vast majority of the rest said that they were on the way.

Related to this, I am slowly working on the new junior schemes for science. Most of the broad schemes are done, so I am just organising them now, checking the big ideas and the key competencies and thinking about how I am going to work on wider engagement.

It is no secret that my big thing about web2.0 and education is the idea of authentic audience and breaking down the distinctions between real life and the classroom. So my thinky thoughts at the moment are all around that - and making sure that our new schemes provide these opportunities.

GoAnimate.com: Bohr's Model

2009-09-08T13:10:00.001+12:00

GoAnimate.com: Bohr's Model by gwynethatschool

http://goanimate.com/go/movie/0aOSaXIV_-Rg?uid=03Ca54FewQCo&utm%5Fsource=gigyaembed

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Playing with literacy - using the fourth r

2009-09-08T09:16:00.003+12:00

One of the greatest strengths, I think, of using Web 2.0 technologies in teaching is that there are so many great ways to link words and images together to make meaning. Many students at my school really struggle with writing and reading, and these tools provide a stimulating way of students creating (and internalising) their own learning.

I played round today with two tools from pimpampum - bubblr and phrasr.

The first atomic models

Scientific models

I'm going to get my students to play with these two and make their own, to consolidate their learning.

Ooooh, practical thinkies

2009-08-27T10:02:00.002+12:00

One of the things science students always say, no matter who their teacher is, what year level they're at, whatever, is that they want more practical work.

This is awesome, but also a little problematic for teachers. The reason why I am conflicted over it is twofold. First, by the time I get my grubby little scientific mitts on them, students have usually defined what practical work is in their heads and it is a pretty narrow definition. It almost always includes bunsen burners and WORKSHEETS where you fill in things (like the aim and the method) and there is always a defined end point which you know about going in (because, usually, you've covered the topic in class already and so everyone knows that the candle gets lighter as you burn it). Second, they are often woefully useless at self-preservation and so teachers spend an awful lot of time making sure that the classroom is not set alight and that no one tries to drink the acid.

But we have to perservere with this. Experimentation and investigation are essential (the justification for that is a topic for another day). So, right now, I am devising a block of work around chemistry and skin care that will involve enough practical work to satisfy the most demanding adolescent audience. Even better? There is no set end goal. There are activities on the way, but the final golaposts require creativity, critical thought, and actual original experimentation.

Today, I am so happy.

Screencasting again... the not so quick and dirty edition

2009-08-24T16:27:00.000+12:00

Ooooh, I completely forgot that it was time for ray diagrams. It's one of my favourite things to teach - part physics, part technical drawing, part maths, it's the one topic I can be sure that (nearly) everyone can do.

Of course, it's also one of the topics that requires PRACTICE. Lots and lots and lots of it. Of course, that means that I have to repeat the same demonstrations again and again and again. So I am working on a screencast right now. I'll post it soon.

Every teacher is a literacy teacher

2009-08-19T11:59:00.004+12:00

Apparently, science teachers are the only teachers that take this seriously. Of course, that was the opinion of one person, but I think I can say that my department, at least, takes literacy seriously.

I think, in our case, it's self-defence. We have an awful lot of specialist vocabulary and are so dependent on analogies and models that we need to be really proactive in teaching students how to read and interpret texts, how to read and interpret images, and how to construct their own meanings from texts and images.

That's one of the reasons I love visualisations like wordles, love visual dictionaries, and adore talking books online. But today, we did a classic collage with scissors and glue, with my Y11 class making analogies for cell structures. Another time, I would probably do this using online tools. Today, though, it was nice to get our fingers a bit dirty. And my students came up with some lovely analogies - like centipede legs for pili and baleen (as in whales) for the cell membrane.

The quick and dirty screencast of junketing learnings

2009-08-12T09:40:00.003+12:00

So. Still can't use Jing and am exhausting both my patience and possible reasons. But I did find screencast-o-matic, which is the quick and dirty screencast maker of my dreams.

This is what I made to illustrate my learning from my visit to Andrew Douch last week. It is exceedingly quick and dirty, in the sense that it took maybe 30 minutes from start to finish (including taking the photos, making the powerpoint and learning to drive screencast-o-matic) and the sense that I kind of threw the information into it.

Things I learned from this? Well, screencasting is pretty easy if your standards are not professional. Big check yes here. Am I going to use this again? Yep. I liked making it, it was easy to make and talk through, and simple to upload and share. Am I going to do it again? Yep, though I am getting annoyed with Jing. But I shall triumph eventually.

meepage

2009-08-06T12:16:00.002+12:00

So, I went to Australia and it was all good. Now I have to give PD about it. Since the big idea I brought back from Australia was about screencasting, I am going to make a screencast explaining to teachers at my school about what they are.

First step, collect pictures of me doing boring and repetitive explanations, then show the Magnificent Wonder of Explanations Via Screencasting!!!!

I shall be back with one soon.

Emo vampire bats and sexual reproduction (you are so predictable)

2009-07-28T15:34:00.002+12:00

I want my students to make a comic, graphic novel or series of posters for sexual reproduction as part of genetics. I want them to hit four concepts: meiosis (cell division producing sex cells), fertilisation, DNA structure and replication, and genetic expression. So, since I have found that giving an instruction as wide open as that invariably leads to trouble, I made two posters as examples.

Here, the first two posters in my series: Emo Vampire Bats and Sexual Reproduction

I don't know about you, but I am pretty excited to see what my students come up with.

A thing for mash-ups

2009-07-21T11:34:00.002+12:00

Okay, yeah, I do have a thing for them. I love the first moment, where you boggle and wonder how the two things will ever, ever fit together. Then I love the actual product, which can be hilarious, powerful, or just entertaining. Then I love the way I can appreciate someone else's creativity and lateral thinking, because I never would have thought of juxtaposing those two things.

Today's case in point:

It's brilliant. I showed it to some of my colleagues (only the ones under 35) and we all loved it. It's like... Rick Astley is the Jonas Brothers of 1987! And Nirvana is the epitome of our teenage angst and hormone fog! And we squoosh them together to make something that is nostalgic and wince-worthy, and also bizarrely addictive.

I know that a lot of my colleagues have issues with mash-ups and other remixing endeavours. It's the same reason why they object to fanfiction and other pursuits of this nature. They get all het up about intellectual property and creativity and all sorts of guff that I really don't get.

Look, I would love to write the early 21st century's definitive novel, but I don't buy in to the myth of high genius being a rare and precious thing that is somehow only available to a select few. What I love about mash-ups, mixes, and other remix and remodel endeavours is the way that it makes creativity and artistry something that we all do. It's something that comes from all around us, from using the things that we find in creative and innovative ways. It's the embodiment of constructivism in everyday life, making sense of the world around us.

And I think that's something we should be encouraging in our kids.

I am going to come back to this later, with some ideas for mash-ups and remixes in the classroom, and ways that teachers can encourage creativity. Because I think it's important.

Playing around with Glogster

2009-07-14T12:21:00.002+12:00

I think my Y12s with enjoy using this *nods firmly*

In absentia, relief

2009-07-13T11:12:00.002+12:00

I'm not a big subscriber to the theory that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Instead, I find relief in being able to escape for a while. None of that explains what I am doing at school on a beautiful Monday in the holidays.

One of the things that I am doing is working on the units for next term: biology (genetics and then microbes) for the Y11s, Waves for the Y12s and Electricity for the Y13s. Now, sometime in week two, I will be going to Australia for a few days, but I don't know exactly when. So I'm factoring that into my relief - no practicals (you can't give practical work for a reliever to supervise) but still interesting and engaging learning. So far, I'm leaning towards either a video - pretty straightforward to do and I get to talk and draw on the board as I go - or some sort of powerpoint with audio followed by a class chat (time in Australia permitting).

Right. I will let that tick over in the back of my mind while I wait for the coffee to hit and take another look at the learning outcomes for these units.

Sometimes, I want to teach social sciences

2009-07-09T10:24:00.004+12:00

I'm really excited about should-a.com, a site where you can make referendum questions that mimic the one that we're currently facing in Aotearoa. I think there are awesome opportunities for learning in the gallery and in composing your own question - and looking at what makes a good question.

Also of interest is Sue Bradford's private member's bill to change the parameters around questions that can be asked in referenda. Fascinating!

I sometimes wish I taught one of the social sciences *makes sad face*

Of particular interest to me, though, beyond the shiny of the teaching implications, is the way it's an awesome example of web2.0. Something has happened in politics. People are interested. Someone makes this site where people can participate in the politics. The site is easy to use. The site has built-in options for sharing. The site is designed to be viral. When spreading the links/artefacts/whatever, people can add their own take on it.

Awesome. I love it.

Science fair

2009-06-29T10:34:00.001+12:00

I have been at school since just after 7am this morning - I think I am still residually under-caffeinated. I was here early to take delivery of science fair projects.

It is now just after 5pm and I am sitting in the drafty auditorium, presiding over 50 or 60 or so cardboard presentation boards, each one a monument to hours of work. I hate cardboard.

Next year, if we have to do a long-term project, I am so encouraging electronic submission. Aside from the fact that I won't have to hustle all the boards around the place and fret about losing things, I will also have the joy of allowing parents and community members to view online - so that I can go home.

Okay, okay, so there were some good points

2009-06-25T15:04:00.002+12:00

One of the good things that did come out of the Curriculum Development day up here was the chance to meet the occasional interesting - and interested - colleague. I met one.

We were talking about assessing key competencies. You know, it's all well and good for everyone to howl and say "but you're not supposed to assess key competencies", but I think it's really likely that you will, at the very least, have to assign a grade on a report card, even if it doesn't carry credits. So anyway, we were talking about how the key competencies are connected, so you can't have one without the other. And then we got to talking about how you could have a day for this, dressing it up as a challenge and using a science context - for example, projectile motion for Y12 physics - to assess them all together.

I mentioned this to one of my minions, and they thought it was pretty cool too. But I am wondering how to make it more authentic and how to make it integrate more collaboration and more web2.0 thinking. But the idea has promise, if not for the informal assessment of key competencies, then at least for providing an engaging science experience in the senior school.

Professional development, and an object lesson in inertia

2009-06-24T09:21:00.002+12:00

Generally, I love professional development. Nothing is more awesome than hanging out with other teachers and talking about what excites us and makes us eager to teach and learn.

Yesterday was not one of those days.

The Ministry of Education released the final Curriculum a few months ago. The document has a front end that is vast and sweeping in its scope, with real room for change and transformation in the teaching and learning process. It's coupled, somewhat awkwardly, with a back end of learning outcomes that aren't much different to the existing curriculum.

I should state, straight up, that I believe in the transformation of education implied by the front end of the NZ Curriculum. It was disheartening to go to the professional development yesterday and listen to teacher after teacher dismiss the changes, stating "but we already do that", or "we're not actually going to change the way we teach, we'll just add a few ticky boxes to satisfy the inspectors".

Today, I feel kind of despondent about being a teacher, when my colleagues are so visibly unenthused about anything that threatens the comfortable practice they have built up.

Exams are not my happy place

2009-06-22T10:17:00.003+12:00

Unlike youtube, exams do not make me happy by their mere existence. In general, I find them lacking in actual applicability to the real world, and would like to cordially consign them all to a deep dark pit.

This week is going to be horrible, I can tell already.

Playing round with content creation

2009-06-16T11:19:00.004+12:00

I have no voice today, so I am at home messing round with animoto and Stupeflix to see which one is going to work best for introducing students to the idea that they can create their own little learning videos.

I made one in each provider, both on the same topic - Air Pollution. We're studying that, briefly, as part of our unit on fuels in Y10 science.

Here is the animoto one:

I like this because:
They have music available to use as soundtracks
Their mixing is pretty funky and I love the visual aesthetic
They make embedding and sharing really, really easy

I don't like it because:
It's limited to 30 seconds only
Images have to be saved to your computer, you can't input urls
If you put in too much stuff, they cut it instead of giving you the option to cut it
Their flash uploader is incompatible with my school laptop settings and the simple uploader is hard to find

Here is the stupeflix one - youll have to follow the link, because, as I say below, embedding is not it's strong point:

Air pollution video

I like this because:
You can download a copy to your computer
You can make the videos as long as you like
The visual is pretty clean and there is plenty of room for text
You can control how long each image set appears for

I don't like it because:
You have to use music from your hard drive for sound tracks - royalty issues, anyone?
Their flash uploader is incompatible with my school laptop and there is NO simple uploader to be found (I'll be telling them about this one directly)
There is no easy option to embed and only a few sharing options are available (I will also be giving them feedback about this)

So, as you can see, it's not easy to choose. I'll have to provide the students with a step-by-step guide anyway, and I'm not sure which would be most painful to write. I think I shall discuss this with my minions and we'll decide which one is going to give us the fewest headaches while providing the coolest learning experience for the students.

Presentation success

2009-06-11T10:34:00.002+12:00

So, presentation all done and sorted and I think it went well. Personally, I like presentations where the presenter gets to the point quickly and doesn't drone on and on reading out their slides, so my whole presentation was done in about 25 minutes. Now I'm hoping that my colleagues will take the opportunity I offered and come and see me during my regular "talk geeky about computers" time and we can come up with some constructive solutions.

Content creators - Google Docs

2009-06-04T16:51:00.000+12:00

This is what I have so far. Notes and ideas and a rather spiffy (for values of spiffy that are plain and pared back) image that integrates the strands. Now I need the concrete parts, because teachers LOVE the concrete. I can just imagine my colleagues looking at this so far and wondering what the hell I am on about and how it could possibly apply to them.

Content creators - Google Docs

Key competencies - a visual introduction

2009-05-28T16:04:00.001+12:00

Now I'm all inspired to work on my presentation....

The New Zealand Curriculum Five Key Competencies

View more OpenOffice presentations from Daniel Hrstich.

Content creation and the NZ curriculum

2009-05-23T13:17:00.002+12:00

Most people who work with me know that I am all about content creation. For me, it's a big part of being a constructionist practitioner. As students make their own meanings, by relating to something they already know or by being entranced by something, or through taking or whatever, then I think they should be creating their own content too.

Recently, I was reading through the summary of the findings of the Digital Youth Project, which I think has some fascinating research with big implications for education. In particular, I was really taken with their definition of youth interactions online as taking one of three main forms - hanging out, messing around and geeking out.

Here's how the researchers introduce their topic:

Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out are three genres of participation that describe different forms of commitment to media engagement, and they correspond to different social and learning dynamics. In this section, we draw from the lengthier description in our book Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out to highlight the key features of these genres of participation, supported with illustrative examples. The examples highlighted here represent only a portion of the more substantial ethnographic support for the findings in our book, which are organized according to key domains of youth practice: friendship, intimacy, family, gaming, creative production, and work. Here we draw from this material in order to highlight the three genres of participation and focus specifically on the learning dynamics that we documented.

Now, apart from the way I made immediate grabby fingers about wanting to get the actual book, I also had a few moments of thinking about what the intersection between being a constructivist teacher and a web2.0 teacher might look like.

Now, I plan to dig into this further. There are a lot of papers to be read, resources to be gathered and so on. But to me, the key to being both a constructivist and a web2.0 pedagogue lies in the concept of content creation

By that I mean not just using web2.0 tools for instruction, no matter how awesome it is to show youtube clips to illustrate concepts. Yeah, that's great, but we need to go further and have students using these web2.0 tools to create their own content. Content that means a lot to them as well as to me. Importantly, it's also content they can share with others.

So. My plan for the next little while is to delve into this and make a case for it - using web2.0 technologies in a way that encourages content creation amongst students.

Four computers per classroom

2009-05-21T10:56:00.004+12:00

In my ideal world, I would have a class set of laptops. Failing that, having a pod of four computers at the back of the classroom is still pretty awesome.

Four computers is enough that students who finish early can use them to do extension work - like the students in my class today who are playing Fantastic Contraption because they finished their work and did not need to go back and revise earlier work. Four computers is enough - just - that groups can use it for a stations activity, with the other stations being paper-based.

But four computers is not enough when you want students to use online resources to create something new - a presentation or a poster or a video or whatever.

I'm really lucky. The class I tried this with first - Y9 science - is always on at the same time as only one other class. That means I can spread my 24 students around 12 computers across three classrooms. It works - but it's not ideal. When students have a question to ask me or hit a snag, they have to come and find me. It relies on students being able to work unsupervised in empty classrooms - or be trusted not to disrupt the learning in occupied classrooms. I am still not sure of the long-term value of having just four computers in my classroom, but I'm not giving up on making it work yet.

Oh, and since I'm here, here's a link to the wordle that one group made: They are so pleased with themselves.

Laptop for the win

2009-05-11T10:49:00.002+12:00

My laptop is made of awesome. Awesome, I tell you

Rube Goldberg machines for energy transformations and forces

2009-05-08T08:23:00.002+12:00

I'm teaching physics at four different levels right now. What a mission! I'm getting all tangled up in which ones are doing rotational motion and which ones are doing basic energy transformations.

But this is my favourite thing to teach, hands down. For the Y10s, we've decided to make Rube Goldberg machines a focus of how we explore energy and forces. We're going to start with how real people make them....

I found this amazing game for the students to use, just to embed the idea in their heads. And then, I am going to get them to play Fantastic Contraption. My Y13s got completely addicted to this game last year, it was so awesome.

Then I'm thinking that I might get them to make their own design for a Rube Goldberg machine. We don't have the time or space to really do it justice, so I'm thinking that we might ask the students to make the machine using small teams, using their own bodies and maybe two or three reusable props. Then we can take their designa nd analyse it for energy transformations and then for forces. I think it could be really awesome.

Next year, in the new scheme, I think I might expand on this, and actually have a two week block on making a Rube Goldberg machine. Wouldn't that be cool?

Oooh, shiny

2009-05-04T16:54:00.003+12:00

New laptop is new and shiny *loves*

Less awesome is actually setting the thing up - but I can persist! I shall persist, until my countless and ginormous files of doom are transferred.

Actual learning took place today, because I did not get the new laptop until classes had finished for the day. My Y12s finished their mobiles and are very proud of them. My Y10s were less recalcitrant about energy transformations than anticipated, and my Y13s had not done their homework.

I keep meaning to take some photos of my classroom. It is rife with students' work, hanging from the ceiling and stuck to the walls. It is great. I love having student work on display - much nicer than having generic posters, I think.

Investigative investigations and the relationship between the physical and living worlds

2009-05-01T16:08:00.002+12:00

There are five strands to Science in the New Zealand Curriculum, four content strands and a Nature of Science strand that integrates and permeates the others. It's not always easy to integrate the strands, though I am always looking for opportunities to do so. Today, I had an awesome opportunity to integrate the Physical World and Living World strands.

We're studying forces and motion in Y11 science at the moment. I wanted a paper helicopter investigation activity, because helicopters are pretty damn awesome. But I discovered something better (using the amazing power of google, too) - an activity that uses four different helicopter designs based on seed pods (the twirly ones).

I immediately abandoned the idea of straightforward helicopters and embraced the idea of using four different designs. The learning I wanted my students to get today was partly to do with forces. It was also to do with fair tests and how to design them. But, above all, I wanted them to get the idea that we use models in science to test things. It's hard to get to the forest to study dispersal patterns of seeds? Can we simulate it in the laboratory using other things, with similar behaviour, to get a better idea of what we should be looking for when we do actually get to the forest?

Of my five groups, three were engaged and did a good job. One was fantastic and finished the whole thing, even the extension activity about baby spiders. One wasn't engaged at all, even with my fervent encouragement. I'm not too worried.

I took some photos, and I'm going to make a collage on the wall showing their work. I'm going through a real phase of documenting student work in photo form and displaying it.

I love school displays unseemly enthusiasm

2009-04-27T12:40:00.002+12:00

This morning has kicked off brilliantly - although I could do with more coffee. My Y10s did an interesting reading exercise about fossils, my Y13s estimated the rotational inertia of each other and used it to explain why we put our arms out when we balance, and my Y12s demonstrated Newton's First Law with an egg. Have some video evidence:

I'll stick this video on the school site too, so the students can access it. They had a lot of fun making it, even though there was a lot of "no, YOU do the voiceover" going on. We didn't have time to add a proper audio track, sadly. Nevermind, it's pretty good for their first ever attempt at using Movie Maker and Audacity on the same day.

Even more ideas!

2009-04-24T13:20:00.002+12:00

I spent all day yesterday at the NZASE conference on science in primary education. It was awesome and I had a great time and learned heaps.

One of the best - and most important - things that came out of the day for me was the importance of providing an opportunity at the start of a lesson for kids to either frame their own questions ("I wonder what would happen if I made the diameter of the tube bigger?"), or to discover cognitive conflict ("X says that falling things can't have balanced forces, but that's not true"). This then gives them context for the rest of the lesson - awesome!

I do this sometimes, but not anywhere NEAR as often as I should. The conference really highlighted for me that I should be doing it more.

So... since my Amazing Adventure is on my brain, I have decided that the start segments (with the three teachers) should pose a problem or situation that is a springboard to students thinking and questioning. For example, if the section on Mexico City is on smog, then the teacher introduction will have one teacher coughing and sneezing, and the other two arguing over whether she can fix herself with medicine, or if it's a systemic problem that can't be fixed.

*goes off to plot*

More ways to use flickr

2009-04-21T14:20:00.003+12:00

I should have done this ages ago... too many things to do, and the sparkly image stuff kinda gets shoved to the bottom. Nevermind.

For parent-teacher conferences (or report day, as the principal likes to call it), I made name plates for the doors.
Last year we had budget sheets of A4 with our names written on them with a vivid, but I think these are much nicer, more personal, and look classy without taking much time to do.

I used flickr, again, to find the images. This time I got my Y13 physics class to help me (they were totally responsible for the one of Basil Brush doing an experiment while wearing 3D glasses, no matter what they may say to disclaim). I rather like the one we chose for me - apparently, I can be rather shark-like.

Then I used the 'motivator' tool over at Big Huge Lab's Flickr Toys site.

Easy. So, so easy, and the end result was something classy and a little bit nicer than a sheet of A4 with a name scrawled on it.

Another tool at Big Huge Labs makes a calendar for your desktop from a flickr image. Naturally, I made use of that, and I currently have Ian Crawford (from The Cab) gracing my desktop with a nifty little calendar in the bottom right corner. Of course, one of my colleagues saw it and asked if it was Chrissie Hynde.

Student collaboration and participation

2009-04-20T10:31:00.004+12:00

I think that the students should record an episode of an amazing adventure each week. I mean, sure, I'm not letting my ~~minions~~ colleagues out of their promise to make idiots of themselves on video with me and record our own series... but I think the students should do it. One group each week gets a free pass on the activities for that location, and instead they have to research that location, write a script, film themselves and edit a short clip to add to our show.

Awesome, huh? Then we could have a disc burned of them all at the end for students who wanted them. I'd suggest we show them in assembly, but I think that would not be motivational.

Writing new schemes is awesome

2009-04-17T10:18:00.005+12:00

Yesterday, my ~~minions~~ colleagues and I worked on the new scheme for junior science. There was nothing particularly wrong with the old scheme, it was just... boring. And very, very content-driven. It was all about the content.

So we wanted to do something different. We spent nearly all day working on an integrated scheme, and we've come up with the first stages of something that I think will not only be more interesting and engaging for students, but will also lend itself more readily to inquiry learning, will be rich in ICT opportunities, and will emphasise big concepts and information gathering and processing skills.

So... our eight (one for each term over the two years) big themes/concepts are:

1. Gross! A Y9 unit on just that, things that are gross or funny or icky. In this unit, we'll cover things like microbes and decomposition, the particle nature of matter (and how smell gets to your nose), goo and other sticky, ooky things, and anything else we can think of.

2. It's all about me. Another Y9 unit, this one using the students' own self as a focus. As well as all the adorable human biology and genetics we'll get to do, this is also going to have a social focus. We might consider things like tattoos and the inks used in them, or how to make lip balm.

3. In the home. This Y9 unit is all about what we find around us. I have left this with minion one to be finished, since it was her baby

4. Pretty. Obviously not the final name, this unit is about all the reasons why science makes us catch our breath, and all the ways that science and art collide. We'll look at natural landscape features, astronomy, adaptations in plants and animals, light and sound. It's going to be awesome. Can you tell that this one was my idea?

5. Amazing Race. This one came from my desire that students learn a little bit about the world outside. We have about 15 locations and students complete science activities in groups about each location in order to move along through their race. There will be a prize for the group that gets through the most locations. This will involve things like investigations into acid rain and the effect is has on old buildings (like Hagia Sophia in Turkey), or graphing smog count in Mexico City. Minions one and two and I are going to make a little series of videos to show each week, chronicling our (fictitious) progress through the race.

6. Time. This one looks at geological processes, archaeology, changing scientific models over time, and future predictions.

7. Engineering. We need a catchier title, but the key to this one is the ways that science shapes the world and the world shapes science. We'll look at lots of physics - forces, in particular - but also some genetics and some chemistry. There is lots of scope here!

8. Forensics. We're looking at shaping this one along the same lines as the Amazing Race, so students must take small steps towards solving a crime. We might take a lesson at the start of the unit to make badges or something, just for fun. Forensics is an awesome topic, full of integrated science already. We're going to have so much fun with it.

So. Life is looking good. I'll be uploading the first installment of our Amazing Race (Three Mismatched Teachers Edition) just as soon as we record the first episode.

2009-04-14T12:08:00.001+12:00

Dude. Gotta love the satire.

Today's amazing feat of awesome!

2009-04-14T11:04:00.003+12:00

Well, I haven't done it yet, but I shall.

Part of today is devoted to planning the Y11 Physics outline. We spend all of this term on Physics and I love it. Love it, I tell you! It's so much fun, at Y11, or should be fun. Y11 is where we learn the basic stuff, the stuff that rules our lives in the real world. Things like how forces act together to give a resultant force. How a body can have several forces acting on it but not be moving (that one blows the kids minds, even though it's something they have known since they were, oh, five, just from experience). How you can predict motion from the things that you know about a system. So. Much. Fun.

I have a whole pile of resources for this topic, and I am determined to use them to good effect. My students are going to inquire and think and learn if it kills them. One of the things that we are going to do is fair tests, and I will make the students do some of this online. I haven't quite decided how, yet, but I'm thinking that they might investigate experiments that other students have done and posted - like on that community on wikipedia that I can't remember the name of right now - and analyse them against a set of criteria for what NCEA defines as a fair test. Interesting? Well, I think it is.

Also on the table is the rewrite of the junior science curriculum. Fully integrated! With cross-curricula links! Nature of Science as a focus! Other stuff! It's going to be so much fun.

Keeping in touch from Whangarei, New Zealand to Norwalk, Conneticut

2009-04-14T10:52:00.001+12:00

My quasi-platonic life partner and I IM all the time. We keep up to date with each other's journals. Most importantly, we collaborate on projects that are important to both of us. She's always up for giving me advice on the tortured heartbreak of the angst I'm writing, and I'm always up for correcting her wavering POVs and continuity.

Teacher-only days

2009-04-06T08:50:00.002+12:00

I love the collegiality of hanging out with other teachers and talking about teaching and learning and pedagogy. Today I have had an opportunity to talk about my favourite, favourite things - metacognition, praxis and critical thinking. Huzzah!

We're working from the NZ Curriculum, and it is made of awesome.

I really think today is going to be incredibly productive, so far as improving whole-school approaches to the Key Competencies and Inquiry-based Learning goes. Next up, ICT tools for the above, and then we break into our departments to work up a unit of learning.

I'm looking forward to it so much.

The images we associate with science

2009-04-01T09:49:00.002+13:00

So, today, as my Y9s finished their collaborative, open-book assessment. One of the first ones to finish helped me make the image to the left - I asked her to help me choose images that captured the idea of science.

We used the Big Huge Lab's flickr site to build the mosaic using images we found on flickr.

Isn't it awesome?

I have to find a way to use this in class, because it is Just. That. Great.

Also, I did have the html that would take you to flickr so you could see who took those amazing photos... but then IE crashed and I lost it. Thanks, Microsoft. So, if you stumble over this, I am so, so, sorry that I cannot correctly attribute the creative genius of the photographers.

Music in class - treats and rewards

2009-04-01T08:57:00.002+13:00

I use music as a reward in some of my classes. If the class is working well, I'll hook iTunes into the stereo and off we go. We can mostly agree on reggae, but the kids get weirded out by the more avant garde end of my collection of dub and electronica, and their tolerance for emo music is low at the best of times.

So sometimes I let the kids hook their iPods into the stereo instead. Sometimes that can be really rewarding, but sometimes it makes my skin crawl. Who would have guessed that my Year 9s have a thing for Mama Mia? OMG, Belinda Carlisle just came on. I have to go vomit discreetly into a rubbish bin now.

Mimio and other things

2009-03-30T15:24:00.002+13:00

Today my school had a visit from the trainer for the NZ branch of the Mimio company. I spent an enjoyable hour with her, looking at the latest features of the Mimi interactive whiteboard. I particularly liked the codec that allowed you to embed movie files right into the active notepad page.

BlackBerry storm, please

2009-03-27T10:10:00.002+13:00

BlackBerry Storm by StrebKR

Gadgets! *drools inappropriately*

There are gadgets I wish I had in RL - like, yeah, that iPhone would be awesome. Or a BlackBerry Storm... doesn't the idea of a BlackBerry with a touch screen fill you with desire?

Then there are gadgets I wish I had for school. I wish I had a whole class set of laptops that I could hand out whenever I wanted to do stuff. I wish I had a wireless keyboard that I could pass round for students to write their answers into a document that I have up on the projector screen. I wish I had a huge digital photoframe that I could use to display my students' work on constant loop in my classroom.

But I'll settle for the BlackBerry.

Java problem solved, wordle made of awesome

2009-03-27T08:21:00.003+13:00

So, this is the wordle I made for a vocabulary exercise for a reading on convergent boundaries:

The idea is that they get the wordle and a list of vocabulary questions - not content, not yet - to answer. The questions are ordered from easy to hard, so that more able students can start with a harder question. After answering the questions, the students then go on to using the actual reading to answer content questions.

I'm pretty stoked with this, and think it will work well as a way of supporting vocabulary learning without being a boring list of definitions. I can circulate throughout the class and give support to students who are struggling without the rest of the class being bored.

In case anyone is interested, here are the questions (with the answers in brackets):

What are the four biggest words? (plate, earthquakes, mountains, collisions)
Put one word into the gap to complete the sentence using these words: Plate collisions _________ earthquakes and mountains (cause or make)
Find the word in the wordle that means:
the part of the plate that collides with another plate (edge or boundary)
the place where the land meets the sea (coast)
a really big number (millions)
Make three sentence using words from the wordle (plus a, an, and, the, are and other joining words) (eg. When an oceanic plate meets a continental plate to make a convergent boundary, you get a trench in the ocean and a mountain range)
Plates come in two types – continental and oceanic. What do these words mean? (about continents and about oceans)
Adjectives are describing words, like tiny. Find four adjectives in the wordle. Write a sentence using each one (eg Plate collisions take place over a really huge time)

Next time, I want the students to make their own wordles. I just have to find a way for this to happen *makes a considering face*

Java problems make me scowl

2009-03-26T12:41:00.000+13:00

So, I wanted to send you to wordle to see the awesome vocabulary activity I made for my Y10 students. But I'm having java problems *scowls* I will wait and see if it works at home, and then I will know that it is a school problem and can start to fix it.

Key words for e-learning

2009-03-25T09:42:00.003+13:00

I'm a huge fan of wordle. There is something so satisfying about seeing keywords visualised in this way. I particularly like this one - I love how the words learning, create and interact dominate the image.

meeps Generation Y, web 2.0 and EPIC FAIL

2009-03-24T10:25:00.004+13:00

At my school, the principal is really invested in teachers working to understand and cater for generation Y students. One of the ways we do this is through watching/reading/listening to research into generational change and some of the points of misunderstanding. One of the best I've seen was this presentation to the Australian Secondary Principals Association conference in 2008.

I love thinking about generational change and the huge cultural shifts that we see taking place as young people grow up and make sense of a world that is completely different - socially, economically and politically, to the world that their parents and (most of) their teachers were shaped by.

As a young teacher myself, I sometimes find myself acting as a translator to other teachers. Oddly, I also find myself acting as a translator to my students. Many of my students are not as computer savvy as a casual read of the literature would imply. A closer look at the literature reveals a more complex picture. I'll get into posting on that another time, when I can really engage with it.

But what triggered this today? It turns out that none of the students in this particular class had ever used or heard of *meeps* - or, for that matter, *hugs you* or any of the other common actions, encased in asterixes, that indicate an action in the middle of exposition. I use them all the time in blog posts and IM conversations and it really had not occurred to me that my students might not know what it means.

I would facepalm, but I don't think they'd get that either.

Nevermind.

*facepalms anyway*

The littlest things make people happy

2009-03-20T14:50:00.002+13:00

Well. They make me happy, anyway. I found this cup in the staffroom on Wednesday afternoon, and it made me really, really happy. An emo!lesbian cup - obviously, it was made for me.

You know what my reponses were? First of all, excitement, because, dude. Emo!lesbians. Second? "I have to take a photo and post it to my blog"

So the photo of me with my cup went to my other blog, but this one, of my twin loves (the cup and my laptop) is for you to enjoy.

I'm on a talk show. You want to know what I do for a living?

2009-03-20T12:44:00.002+13:00

I practice my patience - and my sarcasm and disbelieving stare. I shape young minds and nurture future leaders, and also explain why sexist jokes are never appropriate in a classroom or workplace. I eradicate 'gay' and 'homo' used as put-downs, all the while developing a disturbing fondness for other slang.

I'm a teacher. Sometimes we actually learn some science. Sometimes we learn to be better people. Both are good.

I get to have an unhealthy attachment to my laptop and drink a lot of coffee. My students make me laugh every single day. Sometimes they make me want to scream and break things.

You want to know what I make? Taylor Mali says it better than I could.

Task sharing and collaborative learning in an ICT environment

2009-03-19T15:48:00.003+13:00

As in the two previous posts, I have been caught up with my Y9 Science class and their final group project on communities. Today we finally got down to the activity. My time spent on Tuesday drilling them about their roles in the task were not wasted, and I saw some awesome work produced. It's a shame that they didn't actually follow the instructions - you know, the ones that asked them to put their results into a googledoc that I had set up for each group *facepalm*

Nevermind. I am not giving up on the utility of googledocs as a tool for collaborative writing of reports and authoring of presentations online. I am going to keep experimenting until I get it right, dammit.

Dude. Just when I think that ICT can't get more awesome.

2009-03-18T09:06:00.006+13:00

So, today I discovered that I can automatically publish googledocs to my blog. Huzzah. Excuse me while I flail.

Okay, I know that some of you are probably laughing at me right now, but my other blog doesn't support this feature so I have never noticed it before.

If you look below to the previous entry, you'll see a task sheet I made and shared with my Y9 Science students. Their task sheets are also googledocs, and they have access to them through their groups. They can work collaboratively to complete the tasks and record their results in other googledocs, that I can then assess online. No printing required *swoons* and the students get to assign roles and work collaboratively online.

Really. Can the interwebz get more awesome? Well, I suppose it could make me coffee.

Task sheet for example

2009-03-18T09:06:00.005+13:00

You must produce one or more resource sheets and a question sheet, similar to the example ones made by your teacher. The resource sheet must contain all the information needed to answer the questions that you ask about your specific ecosystem. You may include questions about topics that we have covered in class so far. Your resource sheet and your questions must cover the following information:

1. Definition of an ecosystem and a description of your ecosystem (your ecosystem is a desert)

2. Food web of common species found in your ecosystem (common species in your ecosystem include fungus, bluebottle flies, brittle bush, chainfruit cholla, crimson hedgehog cactus, ants, grasshoppers, desert wrens, kangaroo rats, desert bighorn sheep, banded gila monsters and coyotes) showing the role of each species (ie producer, consumer etc) and how energy moves around the web, plus a definition of what a food web does. You will need to make the image of this in another program or draw it by hand and get it scanned.

3. Explanation of what a mutualistic (co-operative) relationship is and a description of how two species have a mutualistic relationship (your mutualistic relationship is between chainfruit cholla and desert bighorn sheep)

4. Explanation of what a competitive relationship is and a description of how two species have a competitive relationship (your competitive relationship is between grasshoppers and ants)

Your questions must be a mixture of factual recall and description and explanation. There must be at least six questions.

You must present your resource sheets and question sheet as googledocs. You have two periods to complete this work.

Internet down, teachers depressed and emo

2009-03-16T21:26:00.002+13:00

The internet was down at school on Friday, thanks to a severed cable in town. Also down were teachers, filled with frustration, annoyance and a desperate lack of ways to occupy those snatched moments of leisure.

Okay, so I had to hastily re-write one lesson, but pretty much everyone I heard bitching about the outage was doing so because they couldn't get on to Facebook. Or whatever.

At least my students were sympathetic.

Presentations and hyperlinks

2009-03-11T11:36:00.003+13:00

Today - well, last week, actually, but today brought it into focus - I discovered a small but interesting gap in the knowledge of my students.

My Y9 science class was making biological keys on powerpoints. The idea here is that you ask a series of questions that allow you to identify an animal or plant correctly. They can be quite sophisticated, but we are dealing with really obvious physical characteristics (for the most part). So I made an exemplar using snakes. I ask a question ('is the snake venomous?') that can have two possible answers ('the snake is venomous' or 'the snake is not venomous'). You go on asking questions until only one of your possible snakes meets the description, then it must be the snake you're after. Each answer, in this case, is then a hyperlink, taking the student to either the next question, or to a successful identification.

The interesting gap was the hyperlinks. Not the mechanics of how to make them, which is just a fact in the operation of the programme, but the whole idea of hyperlinks, of using them to jump from one place in a document to another, or from that document to another one entirely. Sure, students know how to click on them and what they do, but the idea of making one and using one to create a non-linear document was something that they had no real understanding of.

I hope they left my class today with a deeper understanding of how you can use hyperlinks to create connections between information and create a web of paths that can take you to more interesting places than a linear progression might. I suspect that many of them left with the knowledge of how to make a hyperlink to another slide in a powerpoint presentation, and are satisfied with not thinking about the wider picture.

Nevermind. I now have to upload all their powerpoints onto the class page, so they can show their family what they made. But that's a story for another day.

A stocktake of ICT in class

2009-03-10T15:30:00.003+13:00

I know that lots of teachers at my school shake their heads and say that they can't use ICT, that there aren't enough applications for it, not enough ways to use it, it's not applicable and so on. So I took a snapshot of ICT usage a while ago and wrote myself a little table with the date, class and usage. I thought it might be interesting. It kind of is, partly as a little picture of what can be done, and partly (and worryingly) as a picture of how far I have to go until I am integrating ICT into my classroom practice to my own satisfaction. So, here is Feb 10th....

Y9 Science: used exploratree to record the results of a brainstorm into a diagram that can then be printed off. It would have been better with a wireless keyboard - or, even better, more computers so that it wasn't just kids calling out answers and me writing them in.

Y11 Science: used a youtube clip of a brainiac experiment of walking on custard in a states of matter experiment. You know, I'd love to give students more of a chance to give authentic responses to things like this, and to take part in real discussion. We have a youtube account, I must make more use of it

Y12 Physics: used a free Yenka resource and a youtube clip to demonstate electrostatic fields. This was done with the projector and me demonstrating, but I think it would have been far more effective for students to have viewed this in small groups at computer stations (or individually) and have shared their ideas and written their explanations collaboratively using the computer instead of me just talking to the animation/clip on the screen

So, three of four lessons that day had something simple in them. But there should be more. I should be thinking bigger, less demonstratively and more participatively. I'm going to come back to this idea, taking a snapshot - and hopefully, next time, not a month after the fact - and do it again to track how deep my ideas and techniques are getting.

The good, the bad and the paper

2009-03-10T09:19:00.003+13:00

Paper = the bane of my life

I sometimes feel like I'm awash in papers, old and new and bizarrely inexplicable. My desk is deep in them, worksheets and assessment papers and marking schedules and schemes and reports and reminders and - is that a shopping list?

Note to self: make more use of the iGoogle to-do list. Also, keep the recycling bin close at hand. Consider making a student follow me round with it for any time I get given useless paper. Consider changing all assessments so they can be one on the computer and I don't have to handle bits of paper. Okay, so the last one is a bit of a pipedream, but I can live in hope, right?

How will I find the time to do anything else?

2009-03-08T15:21:00.004+13:00

Today, while idly checking my Google Reader, I came across an interesting link via Mashable. A site that lets you check your username against the most popular social networking sites -
interesting for someone like me, who uses at least three different usernames, depending on context. Also, I realised that I didn't have an account at LastFM, and that would never do. I need new music to listen to at school - and my students can be exposed to a wider range too.

Go and check it out

YouTube is my happy place

2009-03-06T14:41:00.000+13:00

Nearly every day, I am grateful for youtube. Today, it was the turn of my Y10s to benefit from the fact that people worldwide have waaay too much time on their hands.

We're studying electricity, and my class is up to generating electricity. We did a little thing yesterday on turbines and the main types of generation. Today I wanted to ease them into a reading activity on wind power, so we watched a video on youtube. I backed it up with a little worksheet, of course.

The video was a parody of NIMBYs and their complaints about wind farms. I thought it was hilarious. The students just thought it was odd. The worksheet asked students to tick the reasons against windpower that actually appeared in the video, and cross those that did not appear or had nothing to do with the video. Then there were a couple of more probing questions for the more advanced students - I see this class right after lunch on Wednesdays, so I didn't want anything too complicated.

It worked really well, was quick, simple, and made the students laugh (although they claimed that he wasn't funny, just annoying). What's not to love? If you need to have a laugh, just watch it and giggle