Why ICT? March 25, 2008
Posted by mrsuds in pedagogy.add a comment
Love this clip. I will have to use it in my presentation to teachers. Why…? Bit of a no brainer really isn’t it.
Thanks to Andrew Churches for this one
My first rant – Copying notes from the board March 23, 2008
Posted by mrsuds in pedagogy, rant.3 comments
I came across this post by the 25 hour day blog (through Miguel’s of course).
I love it though! However……
One of my young ladies said this morning, “What have we got to do this for? None of the other classes have to?” This after I had spent some considerable time creating an activity that I thought was pretty good. Turns out she only wants me to provide notes.
“Do you know what notes are?” she says. “We read the textbook. you write notes on the board, and we copy them down. Like they do in the other classes.” Hmmm …….
I love the blog environment, and all the great ideas and discussions. Trouble is then I have to go back into the real world of my 19th century classroom.
This sort of thing REALLY irritates me. In my first year (2004) at my previous school, half way through a lesson (History of course) a student suddenly asked me to put notes on the board for them to copy down. I was stunned. I had NEVER been asked that before. Why would a student WANT to copy down notes – I would rather watch paint dry (well…may be a slight exaggeration, but you get my drift). I stopped what I was doing at the time, quietly collected myself and then asked the student why. At this stage a few other students started piping up about it. It seems that taking notes made them feel secure in the knowledge that they had the correct information for the exams. “Well how about I give you notes in a handout and we process it in a way that might be interesting?” I replied. For some that wasn’t good enough either. When it came down to it some of them just didn’t want to think. They wanted it easy. Just give us the information please, we don’t actually want to learn! They had been indoctrinated into this way of thinking by many teachers in the school. I did things quite differently and some of them werem’t used to thinking for themselves. Needless to say, once they got used to me they came around and surprise, surprise they actually did quite well in the exams. Despite not ever copying notes from the board.
Unfortunately many teachers out there still write up boards of notes for students to copy down. Some of these students will still eat that sort of thing. Others, usually those who think outside the box, will challenge it. I know why teachers do this and it is not because they think it is good learning. It is because they need to ‘get through’ the content and have exams hanging over the heads all year. I don’t think this is an excuse though. You can still get your students succeeding in the exams and provide enaging, thought provoking and worthwhile opportunties for learning (and yes sometimes these things are mutually exclusive). You just need to be willing to take risks.
Unfortunately a school system built on exams as a form of assessment will not encourage teachers to take risks.
But I think it is so important that we do.
Educating Marlborough March 23, 2008
Posted by mrsuds in PD.add a comment
Yay – a current post, i.e. not summarising 8 weeks
On Wednesday I travelled up to my old stomping ground in Blenheim. The Marlborough ICTPD cluster was running a jumbo day in which they had all sorts of workshops running. It was good to see so much Web 2.0 stuff on offer and great people running them as well. I would have offered a workshop on elearning / web2.0 / blogging, but thet were well served in that area.
So instead Giles (one of the facilitators) asked me to do hot potatoes. I started using Hot Potatoes around 2002 and really went to town on creating all sorts of quizzes for my website at the time. While they are not what I would call high end learning, the students do love them. I don’t see the problem in using them for revision and tacked onto the end of a lesson, but I have moved away from using them over the last year or two. I would prefer my students using their creative skills than just recalling knowledge. While refreshing myself over the week I did realise that they could be used in far more creative ways than jst recall type questions, especially with the integration of movies and music.
The interesting thing was that it was one of the more popular workshops which only reinforces to me that many teachers are still stuck on knowledge recall. Mind you who can blame them when many parents and senior managers judge teachers according to exam success!
Anyway back to the workshop. The keynote speaker was Greg Gebhart, an Australian educational expert in the field of internet safety. He spoke on web2.0 technology and was thoroughly enaging. Much of it I was familiar with, but there were a few tools I hadn’t come across yet. Have a look at this page to investigate for yourself. I think it is vitually impossible to keep up with new web 2.0 technology. I can’t anyway!
Thanks to Sandy and Giles for asking me along. It was great to catch up.
Meet and Greet March 2, 2008
Posted by mrsuds in School Visits.add a comment
One of the most important aspects of this job early on is building relationships, especially with the leadership of each school. Early on this term I spent two weeks travelling around the schools meeting principals and sometimes staff. In these meetings I outlined where we wanted to take Cantatech and built discussion around that.
All the Principals were very accommodating and showed a good deal of enthusiasm for the project. It was interesting to hear the variety of knowledge on this project. Some were very up with things while others had little beyond a basic idea.
By the end of this sojourn I was well and truly over my ten minute blurb to the staff, which had become rather repetitive for me. Guess I better get used to this when I get to the major presentation next term.
The various schools with links are listed below:
Cheviot Area School
