What we measure

http://twitter.com/madmacnz/status/359064338281160704/photo/1

Characteristics of Learning

Reflecting on the Term just been I have collected a few pictures that remind me of the learning that took place. To go with this are some ideas of mine and others that I see as important in getting to the learning.

“We need to shift from a focus on’Engagement’ to focusing on ‘Empowerment.’ David Jakes

“The person who does the work is the person who does the learning.”

Facilitating is making sure the things for the learning are there and then standing back as a prompter provoker.

When we work without a recipe we learn to cook. Sometimes when work with one we only learn how to follow instructions.

If creating is what leads to learning, then learners need tools that empower them to accomplish that creating.

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.

Reflection Scratch

Milan was able to explain reflection in 180 degrees pretty well after
programming a version of the pong game you can try it at this link start.

Below is Milan's reflection tutorial.


Learn more about this project

Cyber smart

Scratching the Surface

I have always liked the idea of using scratch with students

• to help them think
• make them doers 
• instant feedback.

I have been looking at an inquiry to find out

Is the use of scratch a way to increase student understanding of geometry?

Here was the First Project Challenge I gave students. 1. Create a Scratch script which tells a sprite to draw each of the following shapes in succession. triangle square pentagon hexagon octagon So how did things turn out Well with just a few basic introductions like pen down Movement and turning they got cracking The group almost all were able to complete the challenge though it was interesting to see  how they achieved it. Quite a few of them had really repetitive code to achieve it which  presented a great opportunity to look for patterns and optimise it. Here is a solution that  works and underneath it working.

Learn more about this project

The inquiry is showing some promise for scratch. In my next post I want to discuss with students some of their thinking around Maths.