I'm all about the cross curricularity

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

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

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?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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*

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)

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

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

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

In absentia, relief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rube Goldberg machines for energy transformations and forces

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

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

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*

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!

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

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

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

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.

Dude. Gotta love the satire.

Today's amazing feat of awesome!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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):

1. What are the four biggest words? (plate, earthquakes, mountains, collisions)
2. Put one word into the gap to complete the sentence using these words: Plate collisions _________ earthquakes and mountains (cause or make)
3. 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)
4. 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)
5. Plates come in two types – continental and oceanic. What do these words mean? (about continents and about oceans)
6. 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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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