It’s such a great reflective process to record your teaching. It allows you to reflect on things like your voice, clarity and pedagogy.
I found this gem from my university days.
It’s such a great reflective process to record your teaching. It allows you to reflect on things like your voice, clarity and pedagogy.
I found this gem from my university days.
I am SO lucky! I’m at a Distance Education school where, flipped learning is pretty much the norm. However, until recently students have been asked to read long amounts of text in science.
This is no more as far as I’m concerned.
Yesterday, the day that changed my educational future, I discovered an invaluable web tool called Video Scribe. And began making awesome looking videos instantly.
MY FIRST VIDEOSCRIBE VIDEO on SIMPLE MACHINES:
Taking advice from the greats of video lessons I made sure that it was:
Enjoy the first video I produced and I will be making all my video lessons available on my website under “For Teachers“.
OR: I’ve just scrapped everything I’m doing this year for something WAY MORE AWESOME
There is nothing worse than attending an incredible professional development as a teacher and then carrying on with your routine as though nothing has changed.
I have decided – NOT THIS TIME!
I was absolutely determined to make use of the incredible week I had at STEMX in Canberra as soon as possible.
Have a look at my year plan: mushing PBL and STEM together to make one beautifully awesome educational baby.
Rough Driving Questions in the order which students will be asked to do them:
1) Devise a Rube Goldberg machine that takes at least 1 minute to run that, when videoed will deliver the message of “welcome to Year 9 Science”. (Audience: each other, and current Year 8s) (Approx 2 weeks)
2) How could you use what you learned at the Observatory to create a device that improves your mobile phone reception for under $20? (Audience: Observatory staff) (Approx 8 weeks)
3) Using a programming software of your choice, model aspects of ecosystem interactions in the form of a game that will be presented to primary school students in years 5 and 6. (Audience: Local primary school) (Approx 5 weeks)
4) Prototype methods of mitigating tsunamis that are triggered by the warning signs of tsunamis and design a scientific experiment to test their effectiveness. (Audience: Geoscience Australia) (Approx 5 weeks)
5) Measure the happiness and wellbeing of your local community and create a plan to improve this by 2020. (Headspace) (Approx 5 weeks)
6) Create and refine a unique recipe that utilises at least two chemical reactions with evidence of experimenting with different ingredients, proportions and cooking methodologies to produce the desired product. (Audience: local TAFE Cookery students) (Approx 7 weeks)
7) Create a piece of artwork that is based on a scientific concept that you have studied this year which incorporates the use of electrical circuits. The design must allow you to give a three minute presentation explaining how you made it and the scientific concept you are illustrating. (Audience, parents and community members) (Approx 8 weeks)
What do you think?
If you care about the future of English, science, mathematics or history education in NSW, you’ll make your views heard. Here is where you can do that before August 31. http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabuses/curriculum-development/senior-years.html
Read more for selected comments I made on the Draft HSC Earth Syllabus for NSW. *Caution, emotive language used.
Rocky Biasi talked to us about “Accidental Counseling” because at one point or another, we need to respond to a person in need. We are in no way counsellors, and as teachers we know that there exist critical situations which need to go to counsellors. But your everyday situation when someone is a bit down, you as a teacher might be in a situation when you need to say the right things.
So what are they?
Finally! An Australian Book regarding Project based learning (PBL). At the school I’m at now, we have been embarking on a PBL quest to address the rising level of students who need greater awareness on the importance of their mental health. This has been a trend increasing all over Australia and a fantastic key note I attended recently by Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg told me I wasn’t alone.
Now, the Buck Institute of Education website and the online PBL course run by Dr. Thom Markham have been fantastic in shaping my understanding of PBL. I was beginning to be confident about it and keen to implement it.
But I still felt like this wasn’t enough. I wanted an Australian example. Was that too much of an ask?
“Are humans wild at heart” was recommended to me by my wonderful friend and collaborator – Kelly Pfeiffer.
These are some notes I took while reading the book. I hope you find them useful and inspiring.
Notes I took at the Riverina Science Leadership conference regarding HSC assessment tasks as presented by the BOSTES Assessment guru
These are Dr. Fogwill’s top tips. He’s been an advisor to writing HSC Physics papers as well as a senior marker for many years.
Plus an all round lovely guy, willing to share his expertise with people.
The reason STEM is such a big focus/ push/ buzz word right now, is not because other areas of education are less important. It has nothing to do with that.
It has everything to do with the fact that future generations have to deal with huge, global problems, that they need STEM skills to do.
As an aside, here they are* :
– Antibiotic resistance
– Climate change
– New energy sources
– Over pollution of the world
– Draughts and limited fresh water
– Over population
Instead, STEM has to do with the fact that students doing engineering courses at university are declining. These are our real world problem solvers and we are producing less of them. This may worry you. Rightly so.
STEM doesn’t mean arts and creativity is not important. On the contrary, any scientist or engineer knows that innovation requires creativity. It does mean however, that we are not talking about literary creativity here, or creativity in the arts. There are different kinds of creativity. In STEM we ask students to solve a problem. There is an absolute need for what they are to construct.
If we start using STEAM. Then why not add languages to it too? We know that speaking two languages changes the brain to be able to better adapt to problem solving and increases working memory. It also decreased problems in later life. Not to mention bilinguals have excellent cultural awareness. So we should then make it STLEAM.
Wait a second? Are we forgetting health? We cannot forget health because without proper sleep, food, exercise and mental wellbeing, we cannot call ourselves healthy human beings.
So it now has to become STLEAMP.
Can you see that it is getting a bit out of hand?
Let’s just agree that right now, there is a need for STEM students.
But we as teachers are educating the child as a whole. And we are not discounting the importance of other areas of education.
* Thank you for indulging my inbuilt scientific need to write lists
So it’s time for my second teaching rounds and I got to meet my first class. Let’s make a list, I love lists. These are the things I will be focusing on this time around.