Term 1 Week 4 2011 - thinking & creativity

Professional Reading/ Viewing
How can we ignite the creative spark in our students?
This talk (Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering) given at a TED conference by Gever Tulley uses engaging photos and footage to demonstrate the valuable lessons kids learn at his Tinkering School. When given tools, materials and guidance, these young imaginations run wild and creative problem-solving takes over to build unique boats, bridges and even a rollercoaster!

Gever Tulley founded the Tinkering School to offer an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 8 to 17 – learn how to build things. He says "by providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational. Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized."
If you want to know more about Tinkering School check out their website: http://www.tinkeringschool.com/

Thinking/ Creativity
This short video (Exploring Thinking Processes) shows how a secondary school teacher uses the wrong answers as a tool for teaching.
Summary: A secondary teacher shows how she reveals the thinking processes behind students' answers in a Year 7 maths class, using a technique which can be used across Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 as part of Assessing Pupils' Progress (APP).

General Resource
Term 1's Good Teacher Magazine has articles and readings on the following topics and is worth a look:
Creative emergence or planning studies - Bruce Hammonds
A Student’s Voice for the 21st Century - Anna-Rose Davies
UK approach to degrees supports productivity
Taking Strategic Steps Towards a Focus on Learning

School’s in for finances - Anneli Knight

Tools 4 Talent Development - Elaine Le Sueur
Talent Spotting & Creativity - Elaine Le Sueur
Big bang or slow burn - Laurie Loper
The History of St Valentine
Responding to a Child in Crisis - Gary Weber
Using Irrational Behaviour to Your Advantage - Michelle LaBrosse
Changing Lives - Bernie Hiha
Books and Things

Term 1 Week 3 2011 - literacy

This year the PD bites will be a little more structured. Each week will have a theme (literacy, thinking/ creativity, differentiation or e-learning) as well as a professional reading and a general resource.

Professional Reading
3 edtech realisations
This blog post by David Truss explores how educational technologies are transforming education. Here is the introduction to the post:
There is a lot of talk about ‘New Literacies’ and ’21st Century Learning’ and about transforming education these days. As I approach my 5th year ‘blogiversary’ I have come to some simple, but I think important, realizations about how educational technology (edtech) has and will continue to transform what it means to be an educator today. I believe that together, these three realizations are key to sharing and advocating for technology integration.

An article about the importance of Literacy Strategies and Activities
This article from the Adolescent Literacy website (adlit.org) emphasises the importance of all teachers explicitly teaching reading comprehension strategies to help students better understand what they read. There are strategies given to support students to overcome the main difficulties they have when reading, which are:

• difficulty monitoring their own understanding while reading,


• difficulty making sense of unfamiliar content,


• difficulty making sense of specialized terms and concepts,


• difficulty making sense of familiar words used in specialized or unusual ways.
  

Literacy Strategies: (from adlit.org)

Before Reading - Vocabulary

Concept sort - A concept sort is a strategy used to introduce students to the vocabulary of a new topic or book. Teachers provide students with a list of terms or concepts from reading material. Students place words into different categories based on each word's meaning. Categories can be defined by the teacher or by the students. When used before reading, concept sorts provide an opportunity for a teacher to see what his or her students already know about the given content. When used after reading, teachers can assess their students' understanding of the concepts presented.

Comprehension
Previewing Texts - Textbook previewing strategies focus not only on the structure of the text — such as the table of contents, index, chapter introductions, and so forth — but on a content overview, which focuses on the concepts and questions covered in the chapter and their interrelationships.

General resource:
This document by Peter Leech on behaviour (Responsible Behaviour: Teaching children to take responsibility for their own behaviour)- covers how to set the school and classroom environment for Responsible Behaviour- focusing on teaching children to take responsibility for their own behaviour. It offers a step-by-step pathway for teachers wanting to improve the learning climate in their classroom. It is quite long but it is in a slideshow format so it is easy to read.

Term 1 Week 2

The Font Debate
I belong to a couple of teacher litserves and over the last few weeks there has been much discussion about the use of fonts and in particular which fonts are best for our students. I have my favourites and find Times New Roman and Comic Sans especially revolting to read. However, according to The Times Educational Supplement Comic Sans may just help our students to remember what they read. Read all about it here.

This website (http://www.comicsanscriminal.com/) looks at the use of comic sans and typography (briefly) from a design point of view. There is also a link to a dyslexia website (http://www.dyslexic.com/fonts) which explains which fonts are better for students with dyslexia - which is useful for the many of us who teach dyslexic students.

Lesson ideas:

• Try out this puzzle generator at Discovery.com


• Do you teach your students about Fairtrade? The TES has some fairtrade resources which may be useful.

If you want to access any resources about setting up for learning at the beginning of the year, check out this post from the beginning of 2010.