Japan Tsunami Wreaks Havoc in Antarctica

Sometimes I am in awe of the power of nature - and the way in which technology allows us to understand some of what goes on under the hood of nature is equally compelling.

I follow the NASA Earth Observatory on  a semi regular basis - they way in which they capture changes to the planet over time I find pretty cool. But today I was blown away with just how cool some of their stuff - and their people - really are.

We all saw those horrific pictures from Japan back in March. In fact, our school is currently hosting a number of students from Japan who have been badly affected by that event and what followed.

But who would have thought that the tsunami generated would be capable of ripping huge chunks of ice off the Sulzberger ice shelf in Antarctica hours later.

Sometimes I wish was a geography teacher. This is one of them!

Did You Know? - version ..... another one

Most reading this blog and others like it will know of the original Karl Fisch "Shift Happens" or "Did You Know" video ... wildy popular on YouTube. With Scott McLeod an xPlane they remixed it, and now for Iowa schools in particular, Scott and xplane have remixed it once more.

Here it is ... worth the watch ....



And if you haven't seen the others - they are here ... worth a look if you are considering introducing the Mix and Mash competition for remixing material for your students this year.

Authentic Learning - Does this have a hope of working?

Over at Practical Theory the other day I read Chris's entry about "A School I'd love to see". You should read his full entry, but the gist of it is in this quote ... 
"Imagine this high school:

Every morning, the first thing everyone did was read the New York Times for an hour. Now, imagine that they are using some kind of Kindle-style software so that they can annotate with ideas, questions, etc... such that at the end of the hour, the school community could see who had similar questions from the day’s paper.

And now, imagine what it would look like if the kids spent the better part of the day researching those questions and seeing where that took them, with the end of every day being a "share out" where kids shared what they learned across a variety of media..."

OK - so, having thought about this and identified with Chris all of the reasons NOT to do something ... late that night I broke open my iPad NZ Herald App and had a 3 minute look on the articles granny Herald deemed worthy of their iPad version for the day wondering if there was story content that might appease the scientists, the mathematicians, the english/literacy teachers ...

Here are some of the stories that took not much time at all to find ... I'll start with one of the lead stories ...

This is a little ripper to start with ... as a primary producer, NZ has much to be thankful for on the world stage - we produce a lot of dairy and is our biggest export earner by far. And we have a monopoly company in charge. So, with this one story alone I can see history, geography, economics, accounting, mathematics, statistics ... from the standard curriculum ... and then what a dream to use some of the content coming out of the research being presented digitally via some form of infographic.

So - after no more than a few seconds I have one story that I can swing a whole series of "lessons" out of.

But lets not forget the Arts - they had better fit too ... well, off to the entertainment section ... didn't actually read any of the articles - but I see there is something covering the tragedy of Amy Winehouse, there are stories of dance groups and other musos, there is a tattoo story (why do so many people have tats these days?) - so I reckon I can find something here without too much trouble.

Next maybe there is a story around the JK Rowling headline? As someone who has never looked at a Harry Potter book (and don't intend to) ... I suspect that most of my students have and so they could probably lead this one for me ... I'll just act as the guide where I can.

I'm sure that I can find plenty on the sports pages to spark discussions and activities around health and physical education - probably on the health pages too.

Poor Christchurch's bad run continued over the holidays with snow adding to their earthquake woes. Again, scientists, mathematicians and geographers can delight in the data and the stories around this.

And to finish for today - what about an ethical discussion about the perceived rights and wrongs of copyright and privacy laws in the information age. Maybe we might even learn a little about politics and leadership too ...

And my current thoughts ... I have spent 3 minutes reading Chris's original post - and another 3 minutes browsing for possible content on the Herald iPad version for the day. I have spend probably another 10 - 15 minutes thinking about what it might mean and 15 minutes putting these thoughts down.

Sure - there needs to be some more thought given to making something like this work ... that is IF there any value in this as a notion ... or should I just shelve it and return to the safety of my classroom and close the door again?

I think is was Einstein who said we'll never fix the ills of the day with the thinking and tools that caused them - something like that anyway ... when are we really going to address authentic learning.

What do you think?

TED Talks: The mathematics of cities ... our future?

Have just watched Geoffrey West give a talk on the "simple" mathematics that governs the growth of rats, people, cities and companies. Well worth 17 minutes of anyone's time.

What happens when you let 13 year old students take control of their own learning?

Been thinking of how to write this post for a while ... and have decided to just let the student work speak for itself.
What follows are some examples of student work from a group of 13 year old girls who have were challenged to do something that they would be proud of ... something that they could show their parents and teachers that what they had done was of value to both them and to others as well.
First up is a website that a couple of girls put together for our Social Sciences faculty in an attempt to revamp their resources for teaching a unit to Year 8 students on biosecurity. These girls actually placed 3rd in the TVNZ Netguide Web Challenge last year.


Another student created a website on the holocaust, inspired by her religious studies teacher.

This student has a sporting outlook on life - so she set herself a goal of developing a website that looks at sports for the 2012 London olympics.

If you have a good look at all of these sites, you'll see the quality of the work these girls have put in. Add to this the fact that they had to research the various tools (eg Weebly, Google sites, Wix, Yola etc) to find the one that gave them the result that they were looking for. In most cases that meant that first choices of web building tool was not the one that made the cut ... often girls found that the site they had chosen didn't give them the outcome they wanted and they had to go back and rethink their choices. Add to this that they had to find the tools themselves ... little or no direction came from me ... the "guide" said "you know what the task is ... you find the tool to suit".

Another project these students were asked to do was to tell a digital story using Scratch software ... so there was some restriction here ... they had to use Scratch (it was a programming module after all), but the students had free range of the story they wanted to tell - the only requirement again was that they needed to be proud of their work. To be honest, many of the students produced outstanding work, but I chose this one to show here ... the sound is poor (haven't worked out why), but the student who created this had never used Scratch before and her story was a well known Maori legend ... enjoy it

 

 Ultimately, the girls all reported that they had learned a lot and enjoyed the freedom of choice of project. The quality of work speaks volumes for the spirit in which the girls approached these projects. I hope you enjoy them.

What price 14000 resources for teaching and learning ... try free!

The PBS (public broadcasting service) has a track record of providing some pretty useful resources for teachers. I've used several resources (like the "Growing up online" resources) many times. Now PBS have made over 14000 resources available free of charge for teachers here.

As you can see from the image above the search options are pretty standard, and once your search is done you can see the type of resource (see below)

According to the PBS site ...

"This next-generation digital media service empowers PreK–16 educators to re-imagine classroom learning, transform teaching, and creatively engage students. It brings together the best of public media, produced specifically for educators, from PBS, WGBH, and 55+ public media partners. This flexible service includes high-quality content tied to Common Core and national curriculum standards. The service is freely available to educators as a basic service that can be enhanced with premium solutions for schools and districts-designed for seamless media integration and customization. The basic service offers:

• Unique access to best-in-class resources from PBS producers and partners and technology resources tied to Common Core and national curriculum standards
• A robust content library of thousands of digital core curriculum resources, designed with today's student in mind
• Carefully created, purpose-built media: videos, interactives, audios, lesson plans, multimedia, professional development, and more
• Ability for educators to search, save, share, and review content
• Cross-platform flexibility to display on classroom presentation tools to mobile devices."

and more ...

"There are five types of media resources in the service: Audios, Documents, Images, Interactives, and Videos. Many resources include supplemental materials such as lesson plans, discussion questions, and background essays.
To view a media resource, first click on the media resource title or thumbnail image of a resource from your search results. This will open the resource page identifying additional information about the resource. Click on the large image to play an audio, video, or interactive, or, to enlarge a document or image resource. Videos can be enlarged to full screen by clicking on the four arrow icon to the right of the volume control below the media image.
The service includes individual resources and groups of resources designed to be used with one another. Group resources include a "Group Index" on the right side of the page. To view an individual resource within the group, click the resource within the index. It will appear on the left side of the page."

To me, this looks like it should be part of every school's repertoire of online resources.

The Entitlement to Change

Last week saw the NetHui conference in Auckland - a meeting of some of the best minds in NZ to discuss the future of the internet and what our parts were in  it. Now, apart from the obvious question "What was I doing there?" - there were a number of takeaways from the conference - but the biggest came from Larry Lessig. Many of you will know that Larry is a Harvard law professor, and is co-founder of the Creative Commons. He was the keynote speaker on Friday morning - and the 40 minute presentation he gave has left me in a somewhat mixed state ... a state of both unease and excitement.

Unease, because in a time of intense change, change by its very nature creates unease. Excitement because we are in those times where the network is allowing anyone to claim their "entitlement" and to recreate culture. He talks of "entitlement" and "entitlement yielding change" often in his early part to his talk. I'd encourage anyone to watch this - it is challenging. It's 42 minutes.

If you are interested in how the web, this network, is "yielding change", then these 42 minutes will fly past.


How will students exercising their "entitlement" affect what we do in our schools? This is the big question for me. Anyone got some thoughts?