Month: January 2008

I need a Blog Go-To guy (or gal)

I try to engage with new technology, but I know I’m no computer whizz-kid. For instance I would like assistance in some of the following. I may well figure these out myself over time, but it would be a lot more painless if there was a go-to person.

  1. Knock off the ‘Moderate Comments’ option. I wouldn’t comment on a blog if I thought that the comment wouldn’t appear for 24 hours.
  2. Put up a ‘Subscribe by email’ option, or with a feedburner.
  3. Improve overall presentation

Hopefully this will be raised at the CESI conference next month.

Ideas and Thoughts

Came across this blog indirectly through Ewan McIntoshes edu.blog.com (see blogroll).

Some interesting recent posts include Lesson #1 – Share;

I get really frustrated when someone tells me about an outstanding teacher and I can’t find hide nor hair of their work online. What a waste. If they are as good as others say they are, why not share that with others?  They’ll tell me their kids made a great video, learned something great from an experiment or gave a great presentation but it means very little to me unless I can be part of it too. But even those who have the means and understanding aren’t sharing like they ought to. Some even offline don’t share much. Part of it is culture.

Couldn’t agree more. Peter O’Boyle is the most inspirational teacher I know (of). I know he is inspirational because his students tell me. I have never seen him in action. We are pretty close – I was honored to have him as my Best Man at my wedding. We often meet up for a few pints, and conversation covers all the usual bases. But I reckon on any given evening 75% of the time is related to our classes. To say he is passionate would be putting it mildly.

PO is going to retire sometime over the next few years, and all that knowledge and experience is going to retire with him. Unless we can somehow figure out how to record his classes. And persuade him that we should be allowed do so.

Scifest 2008

The Young Scientist competition is a wonderful idea and makes you wonder why our students can be so enthusiastic about this and yet so uninterested in studying Science in school. Could it perhaps be anything to do with us as teachers, what we teach or maybe how we teach it.

I have had some mixed feelings about the competition itself however. The decision as to whether you get accepted or not is based on a form which is filled out well ahead of time. I don’t know how the organisers could improve upon this (or maybe they have since I was last involved) but it means that a pretty basic project could get spruced up in the report such that the final presentation bears little resemblance to the report which was sent in.
Aaron Dormer was a student of mine from a few years back and spent a year putting together a large scale model plane and built his own aerodynamic testing station. I helped him with the report and was as positive as I could be about the whole thing, only to find that the project was not even considered worthy of presentation at the fair itself.
In fact I don’t think I have ever had a student or group enter.

That’s why I love Scifest

Put together by Sheila Porter it’s all on a much smaller scale, so almost all projects should be accepted for presentation. It may not have all the hoopla of Young Scientist, but it should get me back into this way of teaching.

Our (my) mode of teaching is very traditional and as a result very poor. I know about formative assesment, constructivism and all the other isms, but it’s just so very, very, very hard; and I mean VERY HARD to change my bad habits. Hopefully this will give me a suitable kick up the arse, and allow me to recognise that an old dog can actually learn new tricks.

I already have one group looking on the net for material, and I got to thinking; wouldn’t it be great if each group had their own blog and were encouraged to submit comments on their peers’ blogs?

Maybe I’m getting carried away!

SCIFEST 2008

Why so few blogs from teachers?

I have been searching for Irish educational blogs lately and there seem to be very few about.

Matt Reville is a Primary School resource teacher and has an interesting blog here, while www.anseo.net is a wonderful diary of primary school teachers and their experiences.

http://www.pedablogy.com/ is a blog from Seoghan Moriarty about, as he says himself, “An eclectic collection of articles, links and remarks about the potential of ICT to enhance education.”

St Columba’s College in Dublin have a wonderful blog which exemplifies all that is good about this technology..

There are other forums where teachers talk to each other, like dictat, which again is for Primary schools with ICT queries, or the Physics teachers’ forum here.

And there are various forums like boards.ie, but all in all it’s a little sparse.

Pity

youtube again

It’s not just me

Some reasons to unblock Youtube:

  1. Free. Purchasing school videos is an expensive business. Channel 4learning is one of the better resources.
  2. Short. Lord knows students don’t have a great attention span, and Youtube’s policy of keeping videos to ten minutess or less works well.
  3. Being short means you are straight in to the relevant concept, no long-winded introductions.
  4. Videos can be critiqued and rated, although the language can be a little choice.
  5. Easy access. No fast-forwarding or rewinding  to find the start, and no last minute realisation that your colleague is using the same DVD just when you need it most.
  6. Sharing of resources. Favourites can be saved online using del.icio.us tagged for future referencing and sharing with colleagues.
  7. No valuable storage-space required, as would be the case with tapes or DVDs.
  8. The collection is extensive, and only getting bigger.
  9. Many are both highly entertaining and educational – not like the old ‘Open University’ titles which were a turn-off to all but the most dedicated.
  10. Safe. Youtube knows that its reputation is on the line and  as a result it is one of the most regulated video sites out there, although there are no absolute guarantees. 
  11. Rewards. While the educationalists mightn’t appreciate this one, a promise of 5 minutes on Youtube if the rest of the class goes well is a very nice incentive for students.

For some strange reason the numbers appear correctly (10, 11 etc) when writing this, but not when it gets published. Strange . . .

Seaghan Moriarty has written recently about the negative reaction towards ICT in Irish education and cites an anticle which “. . . is a much more balanced view of social networking, and a welcome counter to the defensive and reactive positions heard from Irish education and media.”
Seaghan Moriarty: Pedablogy.com

He has also spotted a newspaper report of a school which is using Youtube constructively in their classrooms.
Youtube course is a class act

My del.ic.ious links are here

Ken Robinson on Ted.com

This talk is beginning to develop cult status, and rightly so.

I can’t embed from ted.com, so this is from youtube (not sure how they managed to post up a 20 minute video).

Do schools kill creativity?
“A must-see for every parent and teacher. Education guru Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. Sir Ken Robinson is author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative,” and a leading expert on innovation in education and business. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.) More TEDTalks at http://www.TED.com ”

Henry Reed: Naming of Parts

One of my favourite poems is Naming of Parts, by Henry Reed. It encapsulates so much of what is wrong with our education.

It is about an army instruction lesson on the parts of an army rifle, where the poet is half listening to the instructor, and half looking outside the window at the beautiful japonica flowers. For me some of the best lines are here:

And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got.

So many Physics concepts are interconnected and we often find that we teachers introduce one concept in terms of others which students have still not covered and are therefore not familiar with.

Of course the more obvious message is the contrast between the dry-as-dust lesson and the wonderful world outside.

It’s also nice to read the comments below the poem; different people take completely different messages from it. And of course there is no one ‘right’ answer or interpretation, in spite of the answers which (some of) my English teachers wanted me to learn off so many years ago.

Henry Reed and Frank Duncan reading “Naming of Parts” here

Film adaptation of poem here

 

Youtube – is it just me?

I have had access to youtube in my classroom since last September and it is by a country-mile the geatest ICT resource I have in my arsenal.

You could take away the Interactive Whiteboard, the dataloggers and the DVD player, but I would cry if I lost youtube.

The irony is that I bought a VHS-to-DVD converter last year and it has taken me a full year to convert all my library. At the time I had probably 75 programmes, many on the same VHS cassette, and I was excited at copying each program on to a seperate DVD for easy access.

The big advantage of DVD was that I could scroll straight through to whatever part of the program I wanted – no more rewinding and fast-forwarding. I was also considering putting everything from there onto a large external hard-drive, for even easier access. All of this would take an inordinate amount of time, but would at least encourage me to use the resource more, where previously I would use it sparingly because of the hassle.

I think that for many students a video of anything more than ten minutes would lose their attention.
Hence my fascination with youtube.

This resource is available to everyone, there doesn’t seem to be anything too dodgy on it, or at least if there is it isn’t thrown at you; you would have to go looking for it.

All clips are under ten minutes. My favourites are Quantum Physics clips, because this stuff is not on any leaving cert syllabus (except maybe Religion) and the comments themselves are often revealing.

I wish I had this resource when I was growing up. If nothing else it allows me to see there are so many people out there who are as fascinated by science as I am, and unlike text-books and teacher conferences these people are all only too happy to express their wonder. It really is inspiring.

There are also wondeful demonstrations which can I can incorporate into my own lessons, and the videos usually include all those small but vital bits which text-books and demonstration-books often omit.
I feel like crying when I realise this resource is blocked in most schools.

I have spent quite a while loading up my favourite clips onto the online favourite program delicious.

CESI (Coputer Education Society of Ireland) are having their conference next month so my homework over the next week is to put together ten top reasons for unblocking this site.

Or is it just me?

del.icio.us site tagged with my youtube links are here
CESI homepage