Vientiane College Cyberspace Learning Community

Hmmm...thinking I won't share this to the student sites...what do you think???

Thinking about UIWT and how we get students to move beyond comprehension to grappling with ideas when the reality is they are grappling to understand the content in the text...

Geared toward middle school students but a great idea....

This might be interesting to add into our program somewhere....

Reference to this came up on LaoFab. This blog is interesting as it raises an alternative perspective on this as well... While this not generally an issue for our students it may be interesting to add as another use of a model as a way to organize ideas.

DRAMA Teacher alert...actually potentially useful for all of us for bringing more drama into our classes. Under 'strategies', I thought the 'conscience alley' activity could be quite interesting.

We looked at some of Stephen Brookfield's techniques ADS/NZAS meetings. We have three of his books. This PDF has a good summary highlighting some of the classroom routines he suggests. I also have an ebook of the book these are taken from "The Skillful Teacher" if anyone is interested.

What do you think of this website which is to help with speed reading? Is it relevant for second language learners? You can adjust the speed and the chunking but the chunking is random, not natural chunks that might occur. When I tried it I could really see how if I didn't use my 'inner voice' I could read so much faster. Of course our students tend to be vocalizing, not only using their inner voice and maybe this is necessary for word recognition?

I think your right about not using the inner voice helping with speed. What about the odd chunking though? It caused me one or two problems and one thing I like about speed reading is that it helps students to see more natural chunks like noun phrases, verbs and infinitives and things like that. It might be a good resource we can recommend for SDL.

An interesting take on the worldwide obsession with maths and more generally on what education is/should be about

Troy sent this article through wondering it if would be good for CLIL IPC.

Learning styles...

Another article about so-called 'learning styles'

For Leon, and his love of commas,,,,,,,,,,,,

Thanks Kris.From the Secretary Anti-comma League

Here's an interview of the book "Making Learning Whole" that was discussed at our last meeting.

This post adds to my thinking about how we can facilitate classroom discussions appropriately.

This prezi presentation explains more about the habits of mind and the journey that is often undertaken by teachers as they begin to focus on the HoM more explicitly and integrate them with content and thinking skills.

Some practical ideas about finding our 'blind spots' in the classroom. The comment section at the bottom is interesting too, especially the discussion of teacher/student responsibility...