David Truss – blog and podcasts

This blog is another excellent find via Twitter. I’ve spent a fair bit of time browsing and learning from this blog. David Truss blogs regularly delivery his thoughts and insights on various topics. My current favourite of this recent blogs is titled Learning about Learning in this blog he highlights the word of John Hattie and his focus on Visible Learning. This blog from David includes a couple of videos which are very useful.

The graphic below is what every teacher should be aiming for in the classroom… making that magic happen through ensuring how we are teaching is engaging our students in learning.

Truss

Taken from http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Learning-About-Learning-David-Truss-BY-NC-SA-1024×475.jpg

Educational Origami wiki

Educational Origami is a wiki I found on Scoop.it. The main focus of the wiki is all things Bloom’s and learning in the 21st Century. The philosophy behind the site is to share the best educational practice for the 21st century. It is full of very useful and well researched content. For me this site shares an amazing amount of knowledge and strategies for the 21st Century Teacher.

It’s important to remember that educational pedagogies in the 21st Century are continually changing and updating. The diagram below taken from Educational Origami highlights and summarises the pedogogical appraoch of 21st century teachers.

21st Century Pedagogies

 

The changing context and nature of education this century has forced teachers to become more creative and critical of the strategies they use in the classroom. ICT is an essential part of education today and as such has become a focus of professional development. Educational Origami is taking this idea and running with it. The thinking behind Traditional vs Digital Practice is an excellent summary of what has changed in the last 20 years. I certainly suggest spending some time in this section of the wiki to give you a huge repository of strategies and ICT tools for use in the classroom.

I’m still exploring this site as it is extensive! It will certainly give me something to think about during this summer break and also give me a huge amount of new information.

The huge world of 21st Century Pedagogy… Where are you at?
from: http://edorigami.edublogs.org/files/2008/08/21st-c-pedagogies.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is my new favourite web tool… yes I know I have a lot of those but I guess that’s why I love teaching and learning, there are always new ideas you come across that make what you do so much easier. Scoop.it is a tool which helps teachers troll the internet for information about particular topics. You can sign up for a free account and you are able to create up to 5 topics. These topics help you gather or curate web based articles, webpages or posts about these particular topics. Scoop.it also allows you to follow other peoples posts.

I have two topics which I am currently curating in relation to teaching.

1. Teaching Tools Today – where I gather and curate tools useful for teaching, these include web 2.0 tools, traditional ideas, graphic organisers and more.

2. What’s New In Education? – Here I gather and curate posts about current trends and pedagogical ideas in education.

How does Scoop.it help me? Well…. it keeps me up to date on what is happening in the world of education. I follow other educators and rescoop their posts that are relevant to me. I am able to find new teaching strategies to help me in the classroom and most importantly I’m connecting with others interested in the same thing… educating the future generations.

I’ve added the links to my blog roll so you can get to the directly.

Do you use scoop.it? Let me know your topics and I’ll have  a look!

Howard Gardner… Inspiring!

This morning I was lucky enough to be part of a conference session with Howard Gardner… yes the Multiple Intelligences guy. The Global Education Conference has been a wonderful experience for me. I’m looking forward to catching some of the recordings when I have some spare time. This morning’s session was present by Howard and his son Andrew. Andrew asked Howard a number of questions leading the participants through Howard’s work over the last 20 -30 years. I found it interesting that though most schools are still focused on Multiple Intelligences and using that as a way of developing thinking Gardner has moved on to much deeper thought. His work on ethics in recent years was certainly very interesting for me particularly in relation to ethics in the 21st Century. In an educational context, from which I am approaching his work, I found that there are some important issues which need to be addressed.

 

During the discussion Gardner raised the idea of copyright. Gardner mentioned that though people and students can identify that breeching copyright is wrong they often justify this by citing why it’s not so bad to copy other people’s work. I totally related to this. I have taught primary classes and identified discussed and thought I had made clear the ethical issues related to copyright only to find most students ignored our learning.

 

I’m now going to find Gardner’s two most recent books and read them. I’m hoping from these publications I can get a few more ideas about how I can get real learning and understanding happening on ethical issues related to ICT and 21st Century technologies. I think ethics in education are an important often forgotten aspect. Some useful links are listed below

 

Explorama

Project Zero

Visual Thinking Strategies

Gardner’s The Good Work

Gardner’s Good Play

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