Erica McWilliam article

As I said earlier last week I was really keen to locate some information regarding Erica McWilliam. Well, I’ve located the attached article which is absolutely AWESOME!

http://www.ericamcwilliam.com.au/personally-significant-learning/

Entitled Personally Significant Learning it masterfully pulls together so many education norms we must get our heads around as staff in front of students as well as leaders in schools trying to move our schools to being fantastic, vibrant and relevant to students of 2012 and beyond. Would be interested in people’s feedback if they too believe this is where education needs to be or if the thoughts are she (and therefore me) are way off the track!

 

Check it out – I think you will find it interesting at the very least.

 

Ed Charlton

A cool learning space?

Visit Northern Beaches Christian School (NSW). A 3 minute video showing and explaining the learning spaces accessed by primary students. Very interesting and not traditional like our school. Many positives to a space like this but maybe also some negatives. The idea of a flexible work space that can alter quickly appeals to me.

I wonder what we can do to make our learning spaces more flexible?

 

Socrative – Find out what your students know

This tool is excellent and I  will be using it in the next week or two with my stage 1 PE students. This Web tool/app allows for exactly the same type of feedback that the Activote devices provide with the IWB’s. Socrative allows you to preprepare quizzes or make up questions on the spot to find out instantly where your students are with a particular topic and use as another way of formatively assessing your students. Questions can be asked in the following formats – true/false, multiple choice and short answer questions.

To use this tool you need a wireless network, laptop or other device such as a smart phone, iPad, iPod that can connect to the wireless system you are using. For the year 11 and 12 students who always have access to laptops or certainly more so than other year levels this tool would be excellent. The teacher requires a device and so does each student participating (although I think multiple students can access one device if you don’t mind students taking it in turns). Another plus for this tool is that it does not require students to set up an account and therefore have to remember a username and password. Students connect with the teacher through a number that represents that teachers classroom (teacher provides the number to the students). Although Socrative requires students to have a device of some description it is a much easier process than the Activote devices provided by Promethean IWB’s.

Socrative also has apps for the iPhone and iPad (teacher app and student app both free). I could see this web tool working brilliantly in any class from year 1/2 up with iPads due to their ease of use.

I realise not everyone has access to laptops on a regular basis but you could use Socrative to run a quick test of your students knowledge in a computing suite or borrow 6-8 laptops and have them set up in your classroom permanently for a day so that you could get different students to do short assessment tasks for you during the day.

Check out the video below to see how Socrative works.

TEDEducation

Some of you may be familiar with TED Talks “Ideas Worth Spreading”. A great site that provides short talks on a huge range of topics. The quality of speakers and talks that can be found on TED Talk is excellent. So now TED have created TED Education. A site that brings together outstanding lessons by educators all over the world and employs professional animators to then animate those lessons to produce a quality videos (no longer than 10 minutes) for you to use free in your classroom. This in itself is good but there are a number of other functions the site offers. You can customise (flip) the videos provided on the site to suit your class and track your students success/use of the video(s). The videos are accompanied by lessons which are not designed to replace good teaching but are there to supplement a teachers lesson. These lessons contain quiz questions, open ended questions and resources to dig deeper into the topic. This site has only just got up and running, at the time I posted this the video below had only been on You Tube for 15 hours. This means there are currently not a huge number of videos available just yet (62 at the time of this post).  I wouldn’t be put off by this however as I would be guessing this will increase rapidly over the next 12 months.

From the brief look I have had of the site it certainly seems to be more suited to secondary students.

Below I have embeded a couple of videos from Ted Ed including the TED Ed Website Tour plus one from Adam Savage (Mythbusters) who walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods.

 

Click here to visit TED Ed Lessons Worth Sharing – put this site in your favourites!

Click here to visit TED Talks Ideas Worth Sharing – put this site in your favourites!

The Khan Academy/Flipped Classroom

The Khan Academy: The future of education? American 60 Minutes did a piece a couple of days ago about Sal Khan and The Khan Academy. The Khan Academy has inspired a whole new way of thinking called the ‘Flipped Classroom’ where students get the information at home through video and do their homework at school. The reasoning being that if students are accessing well thought out explanations about concepts and topics at home they are then prepared to do more activities and tasks in class with teacher help as opposed to ‘passively listening’ to the teacher explain concepts. I know Ed is using the Khan Academy videos with some of his students in Year 9 maths.

Here is the 60 Minutes segment. An amazing story of what one person has achieved (some of the software being trialled looks amazing).