So the other day I was doing a "CASE" lesson with one of my Y7/8 Science classes. It was about sinking and floating. The first activity was a true/false/partly true set of questions about sinking and floating. The questions were pretty ambiguous and the "right" answer was often "partly true". They collaborated and quarreled over the answers. The second activity asked them why the Titanic sank and gave them four reasons, all of which were nearly right. More argument! The third activity was a series of 7 or 9 sentences that could be assembled into an accurate statement about the principle of flotation.
It was a very good lesson and the part that enabled that was the questions were well constructed to get argument going. So what sort of thinking was it? I think it was 'critical thinking'. Here is a definition from "The Critical Thinking Community":
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
I guess it fits into our pin-up thinking styles because it is part analytical and part logical.
CASE is an acronym for Curriculum Acceleration through Science Education and claims to lift student achievement in all subjects by getting them to think in Science.
Sunday 20 October 2013
Wednesday 16 October 2013
I've Been Thinking
"I've Been Thinking" was the title of those a poorly titled book by a politician. I went to a meeting today organised by a couple of colleagues about thinking and more importantly the teaching of it to my Y9 class. I am pretty enthusiastic about this focus and I thought I would blog about it so as to clarify my thinking. (is reflective thinking a style?)
Lateral v creative
Lateral thinking needs the thinker to look outside the square. Sometimes called 'helicopter thinking' it needs a wee bit of suspension of rules so your brain can nonjudgmentally create options. But is it creative thinking?
Lateral thinking is a problem-solving thinking style. In fact I think three of the thinking styles our school "posterizes" are problem solving (analytical, logical and lateral), the fourth, meta-cognition, is not problem solving but seems a fundamental skill if you're going to be aware of what thinking style you're employing.
Have we got a problem solving bent to our thinking focus because of the way we set up the styles (a group of GnT students working with a Science teacher)? Or is thinking defined by the way it solves problems? If that's the case what is the creativity of the poet, the artists or the sculptor? Can artistic creativity be taught? If you wanted to take a arty photo you would need to know what parameters you had at your disposal to manipulate but perhaps that's analytical thinking? Lots of questions!
Types of thinking
So the "unknown" (the GnT students who first come up with Mackenzie's MALL (metacognition, analytical, logical, lateral)) came up with four styles. What did they sift out? I have become aware that I do teach thinking but implicitly not explicitly; are there other types of thinking I am implicitly teaching? I'll try and be aware of what the students are being asked to do to see as well as do some literature search.
Teaching thinking
How do you teach thinking? We got talking about graphic organisers and http://www.nctt.net looks like a site to explore.
More later as the focus develops. Comment is free and welcome!
Lateral v creative
Lateral thinking needs the thinker to look outside the square. Sometimes called 'helicopter thinking' it needs a wee bit of suspension of rules so your brain can nonjudgmentally create options. But is it creative thinking?
Lateral thinking is a problem-solving thinking style. In fact I think three of the thinking styles our school "posterizes" are problem solving (analytical, logical and lateral), the fourth, meta-cognition, is not problem solving but seems a fundamental skill if you're going to be aware of what thinking style you're employing.
Have we got a problem solving bent to our thinking focus because of the way we set up the styles (a group of GnT students working with a Science teacher)? Or is thinking defined by the way it solves problems? If that's the case what is the creativity of the poet, the artists or the sculptor? Can artistic creativity be taught? If you wanted to take a arty photo you would need to know what parameters you had at your disposal to manipulate but perhaps that's analytical thinking? Lots of questions!
Types of thinking
So the "unknown" (the GnT students who first come up with Mackenzie's MALL (metacognition, analytical, logical, lateral)) came up with four styles. What did they sift out? I have become aware that I do teach thinking but implicitly not explicitly; are there other types of thinking I am implicitly teaching? I'll try and be aware of what the students are being asked to do to see as well as do some literature search.
Teaching thinking
How do you teach thinking? We got talking about graphic organisers and http://www.nctt.net looks like a site to explore.
More later as the focus develops. Comment is free and welcome!
Friday 11 October 2013
Learning Reflection
This is an exercise prompted by my involvement in an Opel Content Licensing for Educators course.
I began this course more for the experience of learning online than its content per se. My institution (a small rural high school in New Zealand ) requires me to maintain an on-line presence with my classes (we close for snow etc from time time plus learning should be happening when the students want it to) and what better way to learn than be an "e-student" myself?
Well I did achieve that goal. I did learn a lot about structure and the type of activities that can make learning happen. But the content surprised me. I enjoyed it (that's not too surprising) but it made a big difference to me, and that's going to be hard to put into words- so I'll use a mind map!
I guess given that I wasn't very motivated by the 'what' in this course, my prior thoughts were not very helpful! I have been a principal and as such had a vague worry that one day we would get "done" for breaking copyright and it would be expensive and messy. I had heard of Creative Commons as the schools I have been involved with were members of virtual learning networks (VLNs), and for about a year I was chair of the council for the VLN Community here in NZ. But what I wasn't aware of, until I did this course, was that Creative Commons is connected to the moral purpose of education (I would define that as making a difference in others' lives); I had merely thought that Creative Commons was a form of copyright that would help protect our school from messy and expensive copyright infringements. How wrong I was!
Where I am now then is in a somewhat morally uplifted place! I can see that the moral purpose of education is better served by CC licenses; the freedom to reuse, remix etc is a fundamentally useful and liberating thing. As a relatively rich white guy (with a liberal streak) I can see that students and their educators around the world would be better off if these licenses were commonly used. Creative Commons is a better way in so many ways. I have made a decision to use a BY SA license in anything I do (like Chris Bletcher though I doubt that what I do will ever be useful!) and part way through the course I would have said and I'll have an NC in there too please. I didn't want any multi-national ripping my ideas off! That change really surprised me. And that brings me on to how I learnt.
How I learnt was my prior focus for this course. I was not disappointed here. One of the surprising things here may not be a surprise to educators in other countries. It's the multi-choice question (MCQ). In New Zealand we have moved to a system of assessment that does not value MCQs. To a large extent we rely more on extended writing as we try to judge a student's ability to evaluate, justify etc etc. The resources we read on MCQs has made me reconsider that and I'll be trialing that in my classes this term.
The video signposts were very well chosen. From Tutu to the more prosaic Bletcher, they were the equivalent of a high class conference. The readings were very good too; Moller's article was the turning point in dropping the NC tag for me. I was surprised by that (I need to rehearse his arguments though as I find I'm unable to explain concisely why the NC tag should be not preferred.). The definition of free and libre was a subtle point for me too and was partly responsible for some of the shifts I've made in my thinking.
I see great value now in micro and macro blogging and the use of reflective thinking and writing in learning. I'll need to find a "safe" way of doing that with adolescent students, our school blocks Twitter among other things, but the concept will work well with pen and paper too. As for me; I think I'll carrying on blogging.
Thanks OERU for this course. I would recommend it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I began this course more for the experience of learning online than its content per se. My institution (a small rural high school in New Zealand ) requires me to maintain an on-line presence with my classes (we close for snow etc from time time plus learning should be happening when the students want it to) and what better way to learn than be an "e-student" myself?
Well I did achieve that goal. I did learn a lot about structure and the type of activities that can make learning happen. But the content surprised me. I enjoyed it (that's not too surprising) but it made a big difference to me, and that's going to be hard to put into words- so I'll use a mind map!
I guess given that I wasn't very motivated by the 'what' in this course, my prior thoughts were not very helpful! I have been a principal and as such had a vague worry that one day we would get "done" for breaking copyright and it would be expensive and messy. I had heard of Creative Commons as the schools I have been involved with were members of virtual learning networks (VLNs), and for about a year I was chair of the council for the VLN Community here in NZ. But what I wasn't aware of, until I did this course, was that Creative Commons is connected to the moral purpose of education (I would define that as making a difference in others' lives); I had merely thought that Creative Commons was a form of copyright that would help protect our school from messy and expensive copyright infringements. How wrong I was!
Where I am now then is in a somewhat morally uplifted place! I can see that the moral purpose of education is better served by CC licenses; the freedom to reuse, remix etc is a fundamentally useful and liberating thing. As a relatively rich white guy (with a liberal streak) I can see that students and their educators around the world would be better off if these licenses were commonly used. Creative Commons is a better way in so many ways. I have made a decision to use a BY SA license in anything I do (like Chris Bletcher though I doubt that what I do will ever be useful!) and part way through the course I would have said and I'll have an NC in there too please. I didn't want any multi-national ripping my ideas off! That change really surprised me. And that brings me on to how I learnt.
How I learnt was my prior focus for this course. I was not disappointed here. One of the surprising things here may not be a surprise to educators in other countries. It's the multi-choice question (MCQ). In New Zealand we have moved to a system of assessment that does not value MCQs. To a large extent we rely more on extended writing as we try to judge a student's ability to evaluate, justify etc etc. The resources we read on MCQs has made me reconsider that and I'll be trialing that in my classes this term.
The video signposts were very well chosen. From Tutu to the more prosaic Bletcher, they were the equivalent of a high class conference. The readings were very good too; Moller's article was the turning point in dropping the NC tag for me. I was surprised by that (I need to rehearse his arguments though as I find I'm unable to explain concisely why the NC tag should be not preferred.). The definition of free and libre was a subtle point for me too and was partly responsible for some of the shifts I've made in my thinking.
I see great value now in micro and macro blogging and the use of reflective thinking and writing in learning. I'll need to find a "safe" way of doing that with adolescent students, our school blocks Twitter among other things, but the concept will work well with pen and paper too. As for me; I think I'll carrying on blogging.
Thanks OERU for this course. I would recommend it.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Thursday 10 October 2013
The last mission
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| The shuttle gets a piggy back home to retirement in California. Photo from Flickr. The photographer was Michael Dorausch |
After a journey of over 8 million kms it touched down almost 13 days later.
What was that journey like and why was there so few crew?.
"Only four astronauts were assigned to this mission, versus the normal six or seven, because there were no other shuttles available for a rescue following the retirement of Discovery and Endeavour. If the shuttle was seriously damaged in orbit, the crew would have moved into the International Space Station and returned in Russian Soyuz capsules, one at a time, over the course of a year. All STS-135 crew members were custom-fitted for a Russian Sokol space suit and molded Soyuz seat liner for this possibility." [Wikipedia]
"Only four astronauts were assigned to this mission, versus the normal six or seven, because there were no other shuttles available for a rescue following the retirement of Discovery and Endeavour. If the shuttle was seriously damaged in orbit, the crew would have moved into the International Space Station and returned in Russian Soyuz capsules, one at a time, over the course of a year. All STS-135 crew members were custom-fitted for a Russian Sokol space suit and molded Soyuz seat liner for this possibility." [Wikipedia]
In the upper video from the Ames Research Center (retrieved from the Internet Archive) a fusion of several visible light cameras and infra-red camera create a beautiful image of STS 135 taking off. The lower video is an amzing shot of the Earth receeding as STS 135 takes off. It's in the Public Domain as was also retrieved from the Internet Archive
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Attired in training versions of their shuttle launch and entry suits, these four astronauts take a break from training to pose for the STS-135 crew portrait. Pictured are NASA astronauts Chris Ferguson (center right), commander; Doug Hurley (center left), pilot; Rex Walheim and Sandy Magnus, both mission specialists. [Wikipedia]
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In this longer (34min) interview Sandy Magnus talks about her experiences growing up. It's a Youtube video on their standard license.
This post is in partial fulfillment of my participation in #OCL4Ed
It was easy enough to search for Creative Commons licensing. What was harder was finding stuff on Space.com where all rights had been reserved. There was a good quote there from Chris Ferguson the mission commander that would have been good to use as I didn't want to rely on Wikipedia. I can't help thinking that Space.com would have got that from somewhere else!
I also ran into problems with NASA as they have been affected by the US Govt close down!
Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.
We sincerely regret this inconvenience.
The Archive site is interesting with over a million videos. It's well known as a "way-back" machine but it's much more than that and worth a look.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
A scenario on copyright
This post is in fulfillment of a course I am doing (#OCL4Ed).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Scenario:
A teacher of Science in New Zealand, Michael Faraday wants an "accelerated" group within his mixed ability
Year 9 Science class to justify the continued spend of humankind on space exploration. The whole class is involved in the topic of Space Exploration.
He downloads and makes available the following on the school's intranet::
1. The Global Exploration Map a downloadable PDF from the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG)
2. A downloadable PDF "Benefits Stemming from Space Exploration" also by the ISECG but obtained from the NASA website.
Neither of these two items has any indication of asserted copyright.
Whilst in his classroom he makes available his personal copy, on DVD, of
3. "Apollo 13" a movie starring Tom Hanks. The students are not allowed to take it home but may watch on a laptop during class time.
The student's brief is to produce a seminar/presentation to the rest of the class about the dangers of space exploration and why they are worth it [or not].
Q1 With regard to the two downloadable resources Michael may assume:
- That freedom to store on the school's server is implied by the PDF's free availability on the internet.
- Distractor. Probably Michael will get away with this, especially since he wants it for science education, but...
- That copyright is not permitted
- Correct. Strictly speaking Michael should get approval from the publishers.
Q2. With regard to the video Michael may assume:
- That since tis is a "private viewing" of a DVD he has purchased that there in no copyright infringement.
- Correct
- That he is showing the video as part of his job and therefore it is subject to the provisions for a public broadcast.
- Distractor. The video showing is not generating income.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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