Posts Tagged "Teaching Resources"

Play-DOH Moments…

Posted by MrsAngell on Oct 29, 2011 in Class | 0 comments

I recently was trying to work out ways I could help my Year 12 students to remember their rather complex diagrams in the lead up to their IB final exams.  After thinking about it for awhile I realised that they had the basics of the diagram it was just a matter of remembering the particulars.  So I decided to make playdoh.  The beautiful Kindy Teachers at school helped with the recipe:

2 cups plain flour
4 tablespoons cream of tartar
1 cup of fine salt
1/4 tsp powder paint
2 tablespoons cooking oil
2 cups boiling water

Mix dry ingredients.
Mix oil and water.
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients.
Mix until dough.
Knead until soft.

What amazed me was the responses from the students.  Some of them had never played with Playdoh before in their lives.  The pure wonderment and awe meant that these students seemed to understand their diagrams so much better.

As with every lesson there is always someone who has to take it that one more step.  The result was an Angry Birds Circular Flow Diagram…  Check out the Birds take on the Pigs in an economy…

Sharing is Caring….

Posted by MrsAngell on Mar 27, 2011 in Collaboration, Rant | 0 comments

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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