21st Century Educator

I am having fun with the whole class blog thing this term. The kids seem to be enjoying the activities and have posted some interesting thoughts. While some of the work on their blogs is actually quite poor it is giving my weak writers a chance to have a go at producing written work in a new fun way. I guess the question is, what happens when this “new way” is no fun anymore!?!?! Some interesting thoughts in a previous comment from a reader who is doing something similar has made me realise that there is a number of great examples to get ideas from.

I had to post this picture. It was taken during a thunder storm last night. The building getting hit is the recently open Q1 tower here on the Gold Coast. It is offically the world’s tallest residential tower.

I just had to be the first in OZ to blog about the new iTunes music store!!!!! WOOHOOO Rumour was it was being launched at a press conference which is about 2 hours away from now!!! But it works now…. I am now complete!!! And the first thing I have downloaded was a Sting iTunes Origanal!!

Episode 12 Another step into my classroom: Please send comments to edtech@brettmoller.com

Right click to download the podcast

Powerpoint presentation I used during the lesson recorded for podcast episode 12.

Just listening to Bob Sprankle’s latest podcast where he shares a very interesting workshop he attended…. Certainly worth checking out. During the recording of the workshop someone mentioned clusty.com as a great search engine for students. As the name suggests it groups everything together as a cluster. I would encourage everyone to check it out. My students tested it this afternoon with some great results!! What do we think?

My students are still blogging away this term as they learn more about rainforests. There is so much value in this and the benifits of getting students to blog have been metioned so many times before. However, something new for me was having the chance to really compare the student’s style of writing and how they are expressing their thoughts in this medium. Why don’t you have a look through the student blogs and give me some feedback.

I am a teacher who enjoys bringing humour into my classroom environment. Past students often comment on how they miss a relaxed and humorous classroom. I decided that I would show some cartoons to the students as a bit of a break between classes. When I did so I realised something about the way we as educators need to be teaching students to think. This “new information environment” they are entering into is not going to do all the thinking for them. I wonder if we as educators really understand how we need to be helping our students to use different types of thinking skills. Concepts like Bloom’s taxonomy seem to me to be even more valuable now than ever before.

I showed each of these cartoons to the class one at a time and gave them a moment to work out the joke behind it all. The interesting observation for me though was how long it took for many students to understand the joke. All of these cartoons required prior learning to have taken place in order for them to understand the joke. However, I believe it was the linking of prior learning to create some sort of relevance to take place was the problem that many students had. The final observation I made that interested me more than any other was the way peers explained the joke to each other….. They were always linking the joke back to prior learning and explaining the link. I see the lack of linking prior learning constantly in the use of technologies. Students have prior learning that would help in many obstacles that they come across (engaging in relevant information online etc) but fail to make the link from basic prior learning (which may have had nothing to do with computer technologies etc) to the current learning situation.

Am I reading into this too much or is there something in this?

Well this is an interesting read…. The $100 laptop is a research project by MIT. An interesting idea in order to get laptops in the hands of every student. I would have to ask if this is possible in the near future, but it certainly would open some interesting doors and a great level of debate amongst educators. While cost is often the reason schools give for not implementing laptop programs, I personally don’t think bringing the cost down will convince everyone. There are many educational issues to be addressed before thinking that the $100 laptop will improve learning. Teacher PD perhaps?!?!?!