Another great video
Posted on August 20th, 2008 by Mark
Let it get a decent buffer before you play, to get the full glory of it…
Let it get a decent buffer before you play, to get the full glory of it…
12 weeks is definitely too long for a term. More than just the students where over it by the end, the teachers where as well. The last 2 weeks was a constant battle for the concentration spans. However, it has ended so can only move upward from there. Here’s hoping that the next lot of 10 is better, and that things work out better.
OMG! Ever since we got the cabinet unlocked and we have been able to use the interactive whiteboard, I have been looking at various websites for interactives to use. And I have got to say, TeacherLED is the best I have found. The Maths Train was enjoyed by my whole class, and I intend to use the Pentomino will get used shortly in my classes.
I am in the home straight with them at last and I am feeling a sense of relief in terms of that, but there is more to the story than that…
I am a little frustrated with things at the moment though, and I am not sure where to go to from here.
What not to do when giving a test.
Lesson No 1. Check that all of the options make sense and you have the correct answers for multiple choice questions. Don’t just hope and pray.
Lesson No 2. When you ask them to make a rule for number pattern, make sure that there is one that fits the data and their knowledge levels.
Lesson No 3. When printing a test double sided which have the answers at the bottom of the document, make sure that the you first make sure you don’t print the answers as well, and the make it impossible to remove the answers from the test.
Lesson No 4. Check. Recheck. Double check.
Lesson No 5. Some kids don’t listen no matter what, and even when you get them to change an answer so that it makes sense for the pattern, some kids still choose the wrong answer.
And yes, I did all that and more today. But at least it wasn’t as bad as the NAPLAN tests where the answer to the sample question was wrong when publish on a national basis…
I went to a talk by Marco Torres yesterday, and I went in slightly skeptical about the whole thing, since I had heard people rave about him, but even mindful that I had encountered people who others had raved about and found next to useless. Initially, I was going to to put him that same category as I found that he was of a similar vein in some ways. If I had left at the interval (2 hours + 20 mins + 1.5 hours), I would have left disappointed in a lot of ways, since in some ways I found it to be stuff I already knew, or didn’t appeal to me since it was a Mac based demo of how to do things. There where some things I enjoyed about this and I saw one piece of software used in way that I hadn’t seen it use before and it was something that I will use again, but for the most part, I didn’t get into it at all.
However, in the second part, it made more sense to me, and he built on the first part, which just spoke to me more, and is partly why I am back doing this. He talked about his personal learning network, and the people who help him learn what he needed to learn. It was this peer to peer learning between teachers where people are willing to open their classroom to other teachers which I found helped me out so much since I have started teaching, rather than this formal learning that seems to be the old standard. It is what we are encouraging in our kids, so why not in our schools and between schools, and the first part of his demonstration made perfect sense in this light, since he was using another teacher as part of his presentation and learning.
That other thing that I was impressed with was that rather than everyone having to know everything, but that the role of the teacher should be equivalent to a movie producer. You might not know how to do everything, but you can find someone who can do the work for you. It reminded me of a quote from Linus Torvalds in The Cathedral and The Bazaar,
“I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.”
Now this is necessary for everything, but why not let the person who knows what they are doing do all the work and let you do the things you are good at. It makes sense to me, but it doesn’t seem to to others, and it just makes another prominent author a little out of sync with his readers, but more on that at another time.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s03.html
I’m back, but on a slightly different site. Oh well, everything else won’t be restored at this stage…