The Saber-Tooth Curriculum

I was reading Tori’s blog about The Problems of Integration of technology into todays classrooms and the frequent simplification of the use of technology for the sake of inclusion without utilising its unique benefits. She provided a link to a skit about how phobia of technology can slow down progress dramatically which made me think of an excerpt I read last year in our philosophy subject called The Saber-Tooth Curriculum by J. Abner Peddiwell, that used an example of cavemen who taught their ’students’ necessary survival skills such as hunting wooly mammoths. However when these species became extinct some elders that wanted to adapt the ‘curriculum’, to include new necessary skills such as net throwing to catch fish, were challenged by more traditional elders who felt no change was necesary. I suppose the similarities between the two ideals is that change has and will always need to occur in education as it is forever evolving to correspond with societies needs… however shouldn’t technology extend beyond what society deems necessary?

Fun with Photostory

A required task in our eLearning subject was to create our own digital story. If you had told me I would be doing this at the start of the semester I would have been a little panicked as the concept is completly foreign to me, however I took on the task with enthusiasm and looked forward to experimenting with this new program. I feel this program would be fantastic to integrate in the classroom as a way for students to present all different forms of work, and even use as a way to share adn discuss their artworks created during the year. I found it simple to use and the end result is very impressive…if I do say so myself.

One more thing I would like to mention is the importance of encouraging students to progressively SAVE THEIR WORK. During this semester I have lost extensive amounts of work due to my forgetfulness. As these tasks are so engaging it is easy for hours to slip by without remebering to take a moment to save your work. When you do lose your work it is incredibly disheartening (and painstaking whle you are re-doing what you have done before), and has emphasised the need to ingrain good practice with your students in the classroom to avoid them developing negative feelings towards using technology in the future.

If the embedded image has not played by now you can also check it out on teacher tube here.

Constructionism in the classroom

Upon reading an article entitled Sand Castles Go Digital by Idit Harel I felt the ideals expressed closely supported the types of activities utilised by my partner and I when designing our LAMS task. We strived to include activities to actively engage students by providing hands-on activities where students design and construct a final product to be shared with an international audience. This resonates with the words of Papert who states “children learn best when they are in the active roles of designer and constructor….especially felicitously in a context in which the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe” or in our case an environmentaly sensitive collage construct. We had a year 6 students complete the task and she published her finished product on the Edublogs website we created for the task. This provided me with a concrete example supporting these values as the student was so excited to know her work would be on the web for her to show her family and friends and clearly motivated her throughout the task (to see her work click here).

The fact that I read this article after the creation of our LAMS task was quite encouraging as it reinforced the positive educational value of our task by designing activities we felt were important and delivering them in a manner that was engaging and interesting for the student, demonstrating that this subject has instilled in us good practices in relation to integrating information technology within the classroom.

Reflection on my practicum

Click here technology on prac to listen to a podcast of my reflections of the use of technlogy at the schools during my recent prac visits with a kidergarten class.

brrreeeport (is this as foreign to you as it was to me?)

As I was browsing books in a bookstore today my eyes fell upon a book entitled I Smirt, You Stooze, They Krump which, to my horror, not only enlightened me to the fact that 26 years old is no longer the youth of today, but there is also a need to publish books that define new words that are now in use. The reason this inspired me to write a blog was that I randomly opened the book and the first word my eyes fell upon was BRRREEEPORT which was a new experiment (in 2006) on keyword relevancy suggested by Microsoft’s employee blogger, Robbert Scoble. The theory that A-list bloggers only links to each other, thus preventing less-influencial bloggers to ever get a chance to rank high for highly competitive keywords. Robert “coined” this word, brrreeeport and invited less-known bloggers to post it on their blogs in order to track the results and at the same time to help them finally get good ranking (http://rogerbetagold.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html). When I got home I started searching for more information on brrreeeports and learnt about Technorati an Internet search engine for searching blogs. What does all this mean to me???? I suppose it reinforced that there is so much I dont know about the internet, and that once you start searching for one thing it leads you on a long path of exploration and enlightenment that I found very interesting and engaging. The process of exploring something unknown and reporting back to others is something interesting, engaging and enlighteneing that I feel could be easilly instigated in the primary school classroom.

E-volution of schools

While reading Zeinab’s recent post, I found the article she discovered very interesting, however agree with Z when she asked is the proposed school environment realistic? I suppose it probably is realistic in that it could be put into practice, but the resulting environment would most probably be inappropriate and I feel too extreme. I think we need to keep things balanced when it comes to educational perspectives.

GPS in the classroom

As promised in my last posting follow this link to a website with lots of interesting and fun way to utilise GPS in the classroom. There are ideas on integrating GPS with science and classification, maths and problem solving, geography and much more. I must say it wasn’t hard finding websites with a multitude of ways to integrate not only GPS but all kinds of hand-held technology including gameboys, mobile phones, iPods and more. If you are interested check out this site called Learning In Hand
Image retrieved from www.learninginhand.com

more ways to utilise technology in the classroom

I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing about GPS, aside from knowing it stands for Global Positioning System, however after watching a recent episode of Bondi Rescue the other day where the entire distance the lifeguards traveled in one day was recorded I was quite amused and immediately started thinking how this could be used in the classroom (this subject must be getting to me). Aside from the obvious cross curricular activities combining maths and information technology, i’m sure there would be other ways to use this form of technology to enrich learning in the classroom. I will endeavour to find (or think up) some examples and post them soon…i’m sure you can hardly contain yourself anticipating the fantastical ventures I will come up with!
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Imagre retrieved April 26th 2008 from www.bondirescue.com/seriesone/index.php?cat_id=5

Maths and technology.

Cooking with maths

I created this powerpoint presentation to introduce the relevance maths has in the lives of students. Although it is not interactive, I felt it was an effecive way to present a lot of information to students in an engaing manner. The timing of the slides can be modified to be used in the the classroom to allow students to qnswer any of the questions posed (and the boring information about links to the syllabus can be removed). You could then encourage students to creat their own powerpoint presentation using different themes, posing mathematical questions for their peers to answer.

Comic Strip

Just another example of fun, userfriendly software that could easilly and effectively be adapted for use in a primary school classroom.