What are teachers excited about?

When a group of educators get together in 2014 what are they finding as exciting.

Teachers at our learning community's open meeting had this to say.

• using video to capture learning
• using WeVideo to for videomaking and stopmotion animation
• using iPad to entice reluctant learners 
• using whiteboards to engage entice and excite learners
• using a Google site to track my own learning

When I look at the list there is a focus on the motivational things that will hook students into learning and doing.

A way to think about learning in the now and for the future is to make learning motivational

the following are key ideas in Katrina Shwartz's mindshift article about this.

• INTEGRATED PROJECTS
• INTEREST-BASED AND RELEVANT
• MAKE IT HANDS-ON
• KNOWING TEACHERS CARE
• LEARNING FROM FAILURE
• EVALUATING WORK

Teacher's caring and daring is the starting point for what can become a cycle of upward achievement. 

Students in Year 6 are learning about well being and designing a lunch menu for boarders at our school. 

I can see that they are motivated by their autonomy in developing recipes etc. This is a hard process to get right especially when you adapt and change the things you are cooking to make them original. This is where the "knowing teachers care" really matters. Kids learning independently can't be just a convenience. This youtube shows the students talking to a chef and a you can see the learning and thinking written on their faces.

Healthy food for the boarders

Our Challenge is to create an ORIGINAL

healthy food LUNCH recipe that could be easily made in mass 

production in the Southwell School kitchen for the boarders. 

You will be assessed on your knowledge of healthy foods, your 

planning and cooking skills and your understanding of how your 

recipe will affect the students who are eating it.







What Do we need to do next?

Decide on a meal type. 

How will it be cooked?
What makes it healthy?
What makes it tasty?
Name three ingredients.

The Reuseversity

Teachers are innovators and combiners of things. A colleauge Elliot Tiffany has combined university with Reusing to create the reusiversity in which his students are getting great qualifications. First let's have a look at some of the outcomes for his students. Below that Elliot has kindly offered to share his ideas with others. We have included a sample of the challenge and a post-it note that may help teachers ans student make the most of the making.

A few projects 

Jared's Pallet bike rack

Here is a sample off the Certificate level Challenge

To make it a success we learnt a few things that might help.

Reuseversity by davein2it

The 100 Mile Food challenge

Students in 6LH at Southwell School are looking to meet a 100 mile food challenge. We are doing this as part of an inquiry into sustainability. The first step for us was to look at the idea of what the 100 mile challenge was and what was important about it. We watched the two videos below and recorded what we thought were the main ideas that they were discussing. 



Our Thinking is the main ideas in a 100 mile food challenge are:

• We need to Growing food and ingredients
• Encourage people to only use local
• Changing what people eat
• Eat Certain foods at certain times when the season is right
• Take your food seriously
• Try to reduce your carbon footprint
• We need to know where our food comes from !

So where is 100 miles from Hamilton?

We used this tool to make radius of 160 km out from Hamilton.

http://obeattie.github.io/gmaps-radius/

Next we started to put locations on the map where food is produced.