Vientiane College Cyberspace Learning Community

IL search article

Well worth a read and visit to the blog that this one is responding to.

I feel like an idiot because I did not understand much of this. I understand that people misapprehend the Thinking Routines as algorithms that simulate thinking instead of visual representations of the internal process of thinking. Despite the author's insistence that he did support his argument, I merely read quotes from Making Thinking Visible without syllogism, dialectics, or exegesis. I just did not see how the case was made other than believe me because I read the book, and the authors said so.

Hi Troy- I think the point was the Webb didn't read the book and hasn't represented VT accurately.

I agree with the theme of this argument but not the points used to present it. I believe students have become less adept when it comes to forming and framing questions for research, and because of that, they either misunderstand their goals or readily lose sight of them, especially as a process. However, the argument that because a question is able to be google means it's a bad question is both a logical fallacy and a specious claim. Also, the interdependence position effaces the culture of criticism students use to derive context in even the most trivial situation because that's what Google is - trivia. I think the writer misses the phenomenon that Google, and social media, act as both a closed and open narrative, but either way, it's continuous and interdependent.

Free access for one month....

Another article about so-called 'learning styles'

Learning styles...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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

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

Thanks Kris.From the Secretary Anti-comma League