Ian's blogomatic

August 30, 2008

Learning learning

Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding

I came across this video this morning (thank you delicious popular links RSS feed). It is mostly a call for constructivism , and contains a more cogent explanation of this than any I remember receiving during my Grad Dip. In fact the film feels very clear and digestible- what you would hope for from educators.

A couple of John Biggs frameworks I hadn’t heard of were mentioned. One (SOLO) is a thinking taxonomy not entirely dissimilar to Bloom’s. The other was his “three levels of thinking about teaching”

Level 1 – What the students are (good students/bad students)
Level 2 – What the teacher does (good teachers, bad teachers)
Level 3 – What students do (the outcomes of the teaching)

This is instantly familiar, although I haven’t seen it before. It ‘rings a bell’. A lot of the language in my school is not exactly “good kid, bad kid” but probably falls into this category: This student is easy to teach, this student needs help, why won’t this student do the work etc.

In a discussion with my line manager and another teacher yesterday about a student, who is doing better in maths than previous experience suggests he should, the conversation was more at level two. Why is this student working well for teacher A but not for teacher B, what are those teachers doing differently.

My position on this spectrum is near the cusp of level one and level two. I know the theory, and where I need to be, but I’m not living it yet.

Filed under // teaching

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August 29, 2008

Teaching the teachers

(image: Jessica Hagy @ indexed)

I’ve been out of the classroom for a couple of days on graduate modules. Unlike some teachers, I find the opportunity to step back and look at and think about our practice revitalising and useful in a practical sense. You might imagine a seminar room of beginning teachers could find talking about and experiencing good teaching intimidating. If so, I didn’t notice.

Filed under // teaching

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August 21, 2008

Bird and the Bee

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August 16, 2008

Image hosting

You may have noticed the M&M photo missing from my earlier post. I had gotten excited when I figured I could drag an image from web page and drop it into an email. I started a Google Sites web page because that seemed like an easy way to get an image on to a web page so I could drag it off into a Gmail email. Once I had grabbed the photo from the site's preview page I deleted it, sent in my blog post to Posterous and was happy.

The next day the image had disappeared. I think what happened is that when you drop an image into a Gmail email it is actually just the link (which is different to what I imagine Outlook does) and the link expired when Google expired the page I was creating but never saved.

So I need to host my photos somewhere public on the web if I want to email photo posts from Gmail. I already have a Flickr account which would be fine, except I am a bit snobbish about what I post there. I know a lot of people use it to store their happy snaps, but there are so many good photographers I feel I should only post good photos, or at least quirky and interesting shots. I realise how pathetic that sounds, but well, that's how I feel. There are a number of simple, easy photo hosting sites - Photobucket is the one I seem to see most on Digg. I chose Imageshack, simply because there was the controls to upload my photo right on the front page - no joining.

Slightly related to this is that I was frustrated that there was no "Image" control in the WYSIWYG editor for Posterous. Since you could just drag web image/links into Gmail I wondered if you could do the same with the Posterous editor - and you can. Yay!

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August 16, 2008

Lunar eclipse

I only got up a couple of times to look last night's lunar eclipse, I should have been more organised and camped out with the kids. Even here in WA it wasn't completely occluded. This was about 4:30

<edit>

A good explanation of luna eclipses is at Mr Eclipse.

I love the way science lends itself to being tested. You could tell your kids the Moon's orbital plane is tilted 5° relative to the Earth's but they wouldn't absorb it the way they did this morning standing outside watching the evidence.

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August 13, 2008

Mutant m&m

Amongst my peanut m&m's today was this specimen. It was flattened-ish ending up like a giant mutated Smartie. To really top things off, it didn't even have a peanut inside.

http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/4899/munted1308081634fn8.jpg

The whole incident reminded me of the 2004? Internet meme - M&M evolution.

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August 13, 2008

Inlining images using Gmail

One small issue I have been having is getting images into my posterous. I use Gmail and I thought it was only possible to attach images and not to have them in-line with the text. This sucked a bit, since any I sent to the posterous blog appeared at the bottom. I could go in and edit them straight away, but by then it had been sent off to the RSS feed.

Looking around I found a solution at Digital Inspiration - and it's not rocket science, just drag the images into the email as you are composing it.

Here is one image.

Here is another.

Easy when you know how!

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August 13, 2008

This way up

I couldn't help noticing in the beach volleyball against Australia that the Brazilian girls have written "BRA" on their tops.

Straight away makes you wonder what's written on the bottom half