Mrs A's Blog

My Rambling Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

If I See Another PowerPoint Presentation I’m going to screammmmmmmmmmmmmmm

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Yell

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This is a very dear subject to my heart.  As a business and economics teacher I really do hate seeing 28 presentations on a topic which all say the same thing and all look the same.  Recently I presented at the Qsite Conference and I was extremely surprised at the number of people who hadn’t really thought about this.  I get bored easily.  I want to see students put their own personalities into their work.  If I want to see the same 28 presentations I could just watch my own over and over and over again.

Why do teachers find it so hard to let students use their imaginations?  I have seen some amazing examples of letting students go nuts with their imagination and a multi-modal piece of assessment.  Radio interviews with Mother Nature to explain Global Warming, Students bringing in Row Boats to explain the concept of Imports and Exports, Websites, Trade Displays, Role Plays, Sock Puppets…

The best part is the learning which takes place without theme even realising it!

Here are my presentations from the conference on the Multi-Modal Assessment.  I have had to remove the student examples due to privacy.  Happy to discuss this further…

Multi-Modal Assessment Presentation

Multi-Modal Assessment Handout

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Proud as Punch (Both as a Mum and an Educator)

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Loud 'n' Proud

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The last term has been a busy one.  Not only as an educator but as a Mum as well.  You see the last term has been dedicated to our Year 6 Exhibition.  My beautiful children attend the school where I work and as my daughter is in Year 6 she has been part of the teaching and learning experiences which I have been offering the Year 6 students.  Over the course of the term I offered several workshops on Poster Making (digital and manual), time management skills, use of digital peripherals (cameras, video cameras, sound recorders etc) and OneNote.

The journey the students (including my daughter) is an impressive one.  Under the umbrella of a topic (Peace and Conflict Resolution) the student select a question or statement they wish to investigate.  They then go on to present it using five components (Creative, Interactive, Written, Oral and Action).  My daughter choose to investigate whether “Year 6 Students Behave Better than Politicians in Parliament”.  When she initially came up with this topic I was a little bit concerned at how it would all come together and how my daughter was going to find her research.  Well I really had nothing to worry about.  You see she contacted by email as many politicians as she could think of in our local area, state and country.  What amazed me was they responded and were willing to be interview by her either over the phone or in person.  The final product she produced was amazing she filmed every interview and put them together as a documentary (oral/creative), prepared a speech on her findings (oral), created an essential agreement for the politicians (written/action),  prepared a PowerPoint showing the information she had investigated on parliamentary privilege (written), provided a vote (interactive) along with a poster with sayings of both year 6 students and politicians showing good and bad behaviours (interactive/creative).

I was impressed by the many topics that our year 6 students chose.  Some were really personal (leaving to go to another school) right through to topics which interested students (conflict in computer games).

It is events like this which showcase student learning which make me proud to be an educator and in this case proud as punch to be a Mum to an extremely intelligent daughter.

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Peanut Butter and Lettuce – Who Said They Don’t Mix?

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I have just returned from Expanding Learning Horizons (ELH11) where I presented a paper on Problem Based Learning (PBL).  I love teaching using PBL as it means I can take a step back and allow the students to take control of their learning.

Here is the description of the session…

At a time when we need to let go of the need to be the sage on the stage and give students control of their learning come and find out how to set up and assess students through Problem Based Learning.  This presentation will focus on the who, what, when, where and how of PBLs – software, options, set up and how to find the resources you need.

And while your at it give Peanut Butter and Lettuce a go – it’s surprisingly good…

Presentation
Support Materials

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Change is inevitable…

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change-ahead-sign

Term 1 finished last Friday.  And boy what a huge term it was.  I have looked back at the last 10 weeks and I really cannot believe how much we squeezed into the term.

 

  • SharePoint 2010
  • Office 2010
  • Digital Profile Cards
  • New Departments
  • New Timetable Structure
  • Large Amount of New Staff

Not to mention all the new things that happen year in year out by being a teacher – new classes, new students, new timetables…

As part of our review of the term staff all commented that there was just too much change this term and this year and that had made the term more exhausting than “normal”.

Looking over it there was a lot of change however at the end of the term I think it was all necessary change. Change is hard at the best of times…  And a lot of change means that people are more resistant to the change…

My biggest project this term has been digitising all the Profile Cards.  We had some staff who used pen and paper to fill the cards out right through to staff who were using mail merge to link Excel and Word together to make results entry easy.  The whole point of digitising the profile cards was to allow for longitudinal tracking and a permanent record in the school data base of how students are going at any point in time.  My biggest challenge with the digital profile cards has been the staff who used pen and paper previously as pen and paper work for them.  One staff member proclaimed that I can see where the students are at any point in time.  I challenged back that what if another staff member needed to see the results.  The response “They can walk over to my filing cabinnet and take a look!”  It is this staff member who has had the biggest break through.  After all the kicking and screaming that they didn’t need digital profile cards on the last day of the term came to me to ask if there was a time next term we could meet so that he could recreate his profile card to better suit the new system of recording student results.

We all hate change but at the end of the day it is inevitable…  Lets face it life would be boring if it was always the same!
Change is a good thing

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Sharing is Caring….

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Sharing is Caring

Image by Jens Rydén via Flickr

I am a firm believer of sharing resources.  And as a result I have shared all of the resources which I have ever made or used in my teaching career.  Lets face it as teachers we are time poor.  And if there are thousands of teachers around the world who are creating fantastic lessons why should we all reinvent the wheel?  This week I have struggled…  I have struggled to understand why the Teacher Association I belong to is having to discuss the end of its resource sharing magazine.  And we are having to discuss this because we cannot get our members to share their resources.  It saddens me to see that teachers won’t share their resources.  Let’s face it by sharing resources, the resources can only get better as we use the collective teaching experience to make them better.  At the end of the day its our students who would benefit.  Most of us are in teaching to better the kids we teach?

The other reason we are struggling is the whole copyright issue.  Teachers, especially teachers of economics, use copyrighted materials all the time.  And even though for education this isn’t an issue because we are able to use the materials for educational purposes the Teacher Association is not an educational institution.  As a result we cannot publish the materials.

So I guess my question is how do we get more people to share the resources they have created?  I know there are lots of fantastic teachers out there creating fantastic resources.  If all the teachers just shared five resources imagine the lessons we could produce as a result.  And heaven forbid the learning which might occur!!

 

 

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