I originally saw this video of Taylor Mali on Jenny Luca’s Lucacept blog last week. I think this video is great and makes you feel good to be a teacher. It’s just the thing to finish the term, especially after reports. Have a good break and if you’re like me, you’ll be trying to follow anything and everything that is happening over at NECC next week.
Travelling from the north-eastern to the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne each morning, I have a drive of anywhere between 40 minutes to an hour each way. Like many people out there, I use this time to listen to some of the many interesting podcasts on offer.
Below are some of the educational podcasts I listen to. They are listed in order of when I started listening to them.
Edpod is a fortnightly podcast from Radio National (ABC) and looks at a range of education issues. This podcast started off really well with interesting and relevant information on things such as school readiness, steiner streams in public schools and Schools for the 21st century. However, since the actual radio program behind the podcast was cut, I’ve found the stories have become less relevant.
While essentially not an education podcast, this one from the BBC has a lot of interesting information about what is going on in the world of technology. It is hosted by Gareth Mitchell and there is often three to four different stories in one episode. While hearing about the stories themselves is good, what is also great is the is the insights given by resident expert, Bill Thompson.
This is a fantastic podcast by Chris Betcher, looking at different aspects of technology in the classroom. There is normally one to two other people on the program with Chris and they change from episode to episode. The podcast contains a wealth of information and the guests are always interesting and engaging. There used to be a podcast about once a month up until the start of this year when they have been less regular. They are definitely worth a listen, and there are a couple which I’ve listened to a number of times (check out Episode 14- Questions are the answer).
This is a podcast that I stayed away from in the beginning, as we don’t use SMARTboards at our school, we have Promethean Activboards. Nevertheless, I downloaded a podcast after hearing Ben Hazzard speak on the Virtual Staffroom during one episode. What I quickly discovered was that this is not just a podcast for users of the SMARTboard. The podcasts are enjoyable to listen to, with engaging hosts Ben Hazzard & Joan Badger. Each episode contains a lesson on a different topic but it is not about what the SMARTboard can do, just examples of good teaching. Joan regularly gives good links to try out and what is refreshing is that they are not a mouthpiece for SMART. They often speak their mind about the board and its related products and are quite prepared to call it as they see it.
This is one I stumbled upon after reading a blog entry by Chris Betcher in which he mentioned he was a guest on one of their podcasts. This is also a good podcast looking at many different websites and web 2.0 tools on offer. The podcast is hosted by Tony Richards and The ICT Guy, Darrel Branson each week. They occasionally have guests on the program and have also conducted podcasts at conferences such as the ICTEV conference in May. I also listen to Darrel’s ICT Guy podcast which contains a link and blog post of the week.
This is a podcast I’ve been listening to fairly recently, created by Jeff Utecht. This is a podcast about shifting our schools, integrating technology into the classroom and the changing nature of learning. Jeff and his many of his guests are from the International School scene in various parts of Asia, and their conversations are always thought-provoking.
This is a podcast I’ve picked up only in the last couple of weeks. In this podcast, a group of people take it in turns to talk about different links or tools that they’ve discovered over the course of the week. The podcast contains a wealth of information, although it is difficult to take in every link that they mention while I’m driving. I’m finding I have to listen to these podcasts a couple of times to get maximum benefit.
These are many of the podcasts I listen to, if anyone knows of any other really good education podcasts, leave me a comment.
I’m sure anyone who has used the Activotes, or any other ’student response system’ can testify, the students absolutely love them. They are a great way to get kids excited about doing a quiz and revising for a test, whilst also giving teachers an idea about the areas they need to go over with certain students.
While we have a lot of IWBs at school, we have one class set of Activotes that reside in the Resource Centre (and are loaned out to teachers). Therefore, I am not someone who is going to get them out for a lesson just so I can do an ad hoc question about the students opinion on a certain topic. That’s what classroom discussion is for. So here’s how I generally use the Activotes:
At the conclusion of a unit in SOSE (History/Geography/Economics), I give the students a quiz using the activotes which I use as part of my formative assessment. I can then see the areas which I need to revisit with different members of the class. Ok, nothing new and I’m sure it’s how they get used most of the time. Incidentally, I don’t like to use them for summative assessment, as there is only so much information you can gain about a student’s understanding from a multiple choice test. What I create out of this quiz instead is a revision sheet that contains the questions from the revision test and whether or not the students got these answers correct.
At the end of the quiz, I export the results to an Excel file and set up a new sheet with IF statements that will put in “correct” or “incorrect” into each cell, depending on the student’s answer for that question.
I then mail-merge the Excel file with a Word document that has all the questions on it, along with the student name and their result in the revision test. The students are then given this as their revision sheet for the unit test. For those students who perform below par on the revision test, I also give them a more structured sheet to aid in their revision.
Today we had all six classes of year 8 English (two classes working together each time) complete an activity based on de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats. We are studying A Bridge To Wiseman’s Cove (an excellent book by James Moloney) and to break things up a bit, we opened up the dividing wall between the two classes, divided the two classes into 10 smaller groups, with each group looking at a particular character. The groups then had to look at their character through the lens of the red hat (emotions), green hat (ideas – predictions), white hat (facts), Black hat (criticisms), Yellow hat (positives) and blue hat (summary of other hats). At the end of the session, each group had to present their findings to the wider group.
The activity seemed to work really well, with students finding evidence to support each of their points, and it was really interesting to see them having to look for the positives in undesirable characters.
The IWB file made it really easy to keep track of the time allocated for each hat, and gave the students a visual cue as to what they needed to be focused on during that time period.
I did receive the comment at the end of the day by another teacher who wasn’t 100% sure about what they gained from the lesson, as much of the information presented by her students had already been covered when they constructed individual mind maps for each of the characters earlier in the novel study. I’m sure this is true to a certain extent, however, I think that they were also picking up new things and were forced to think deeper than they had previously done about their character. In addition to this, it will also have reinforced and built upon the work that was done earlier in the novel.
I do think highly of this teacher and think that we have to look critically at our lessons, making sure that we review what student learning took place.
Today I taught my other year 7 English class using a lesson I had prepared for the IWB. This is part of an Action Learning project we are undertaking on enhancing the teaching of the Reading to Learn scaffolding program using the IWB.
Reading to Learn is a program in which all students are scaffolded so they are able to successfully read and write age appropriate texts. The class looks at a key passage from the text and the teacher directs them to important words, phrases and language features in the text, which are then highlighted by the students.
The passage we were looking at came from the Roald Dahl book, Boy as it is a good text for teaching the students how to write reflectively. I had a copy of the passage on the IWB with buttons above certain words which, when clicked, took you to another page which gave more insight into that particular word, place or thing. On one page was a series of maps and photographs showing the location of the Bristol channel and Weston-super-Mare. On another was a sound file for the word ’swooshing’ and a bit of detail and other examples of onomatopoeia. I then had a picture of a paddle steamer which was linked to a video of a paddle steamer leaving a pier.
Allowing a student to control the whiteboard enabled me to move around the classroom freely, and the incentive of extra homeroom points meant that I had everyone in the class answering the different questions. It was something I should have offered my homeroom when I did it with them last Wednesday as I had far fewer contributors, although as it was the last lesson and they had just finished a test, I might have been asking too much.
What was also good about today was that the lesson was well received by the teachers in my class, as well as by the two DPs who visited the class of another teacher who was using the file. I just wish the file didn’t take so long to make!
One of the things for which I want to use this blog is as a record of the good things I have gained from different PDs. On the 20th May, I went along to the Secondary Literacy Network at the Treacy Centre in Parkville.
The first keynote speaker was Dianne Cullen from the school of Education at ACU, talking about how ESL fits in with the current teaching courses on offer. One of the best things I got out of her talk was finding out about the Language & Multicultural Education Resource Centre (LMERC) in Carlton. This facility contains a huge range of materials in the areas of LOTE & ESL, and is available to all Victorian teachers once you join (membership is free).
Another thing which I felt I needed to include was this excerpt by Chris Davison about ESL learners, which appeared in TESOL in Context vol.1 1990:
“In terms of classroom procedures, they need much more repetition and practice, more explicit instruction and concept-checking, more careful paraphrasing of difficult vocabulary, more demonstration and modelling, more highly structured and sensitive elicitation of existing knowledge, more opportunities for controlled teacher-student and student-student interaction and more time to absorb the rhythms and patterns of the target language development, not just opportunities for use.”
Although this was written back in 1990, the information contained within rings just as true today as it did back then. While this is not new (obviously, if it was written 18 years ago) it is still a good reminder of what we need to be doing to ensure that our ESL students, and indeed all our students with weak literacy, succeed in our classroom.
The other keynote speaker on the day was Associate Professor Pauline Gibbons from the University of Technology in Sydney, talking about setting ESL students up for success in an intellectually challenging classroom. At the centre of her presentation was the message that if you don’t understand the language, you can’t learn the subject. This is so true and is what I’ve been trying to get across to the different faculties here at school.
It was interesting to hear about the 7 intellectual practices, although what made it better than many of the presentations that I have seen, was that she also included real classroom examples on how each of these practices have been implemented.
One of the best things I came away with yesterday was a list of integrated literacy activities that could be done with students across all subject areas. These included some things we already do, but also others I had never heard of like dictogloss, split dictation, sentence matching and barrier crossword.
I came away from the day with a lot of new things that I can’t wait to introduce in my class, and hopefully the classes of others around the school.
