Group items tagged

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

a fantastic post about class and student blogging. Some great links for blog support and ideas. A must read if you are unsure about the widgets and sidebar. This is compulsory reading for level 3 teachers who should be considering students having their own blog.

Awesome blog post on Movie making and literacy skills. Some great pedagogy happening with this group of students. I really like Kynan's philosophy of letting the students learn rather than intervening with teacher direction. Final cut express is a rather complicated piece of software but it looks like these kids have eaten it for breakfast

A great poster creator. Worth a look students can upload images and manipulate them to look like posters. Students can export out to blogs etc or print. Could be useful online tool for short presentations of student work. 

Have some students who just might be into blogging about maths? Then they might want to follow and/or add some of these to their blog roll. 

This is a great post on how to guide students to write powerful comments. Something that I think we should start concentrating on now that we have the blogging thing up and running. 

Title says it all. I am now going to go and update my class blog about page

Blog post with ideas about keeping students moving during Project Based tasks and encouraging students to collaborate and share 

Great rubric for blogging. Could be useful for upper levels or at least generate a discussion with students as to what is a good blog post. 

This is a great tool for encouraging students and parents to comment and discuss as a group. With Voice Thread you are able to upload images and have students record an audio track over a slideshow. Then, once it's posted, members can post audio comments. You are also provided with an embed code to put into your blogs. Browse some of the examples and see how it works.

The title says it all. Some useful tips.

Widgets

Another great list of online tools for creating music. These are worth exploring if not only to inform the students that they exist. Holiday challenge via a class blog perhaps?

Some cool useful widgets that might be useful for blogs. I know that Peter O has used poll daddy on his class blog

Blogging challenge is about to start! Are you going to be challenged?

40 awesome apps for science students

Great blog with heaps of interactive student online flash games for the class room

This is a fantastic web 2.0 tool. Upload images and annotate. You can other embed media inside the annotations. Annotations pop up as you click or hover over the objects you add. You can embed the annotated image into webpage or blog. This could be a useful tool for teachers and students. Lots of scope for creativity with layers etc. You can share to a group and set editing permissions for public or restricted people/groups for collaboration purposes. 

Great post on Assessment in UK schools. Ties in with stuff about their national testing that they have had in place for more than a decade. This could be our crystal ball are we looking at our curriculum becoming narrower because we are all jumping through hoops? Assessment for learning? I dont think so. I would rather spend time planning great engaging lessons rather than lessons that are going to meet the National Testing criteria.