My Preproom

  Still deciding if Flipped Learning is for your students? Flipped learning is a strategy many teachers across Aotearoa are exploring or have launched into. TKI has a comprehensive collection of research, links, advice, and examples about  Flipped Learning .  What is Flipped Learning? -  see here Why Flip Learning? -  Benefits and Challenges  -  Research and Readings   Examples of Flipped Learning  in Aotearoa This blog aims not to replace it, but to supplement the content on TKI, particularly in the area of creating content for your students.  Disclaimer :  the apps and software listed in this blog are not an exhaustive list, nor am I endorsing these. They are just examples of apps and software that you may find useful plus some tips in between. This blog So, you've read about Flipped Learning and weighed all the pros and cons of the effect of a Flipped Learning model for your students that you have in your class, but you might sti...

The New Zealand Science Review journal has published a special issue featuring Mātauranga and Science in practice.  Here is a link to the issue . This is the first of two issues to be published and after reading most of the articles in the first issue, I am looking forward to the second installment. I was particularly captured by the article Mātauranga and Pūtaiao: the question of ‘Māori' science’ by Georgina Stewart. She discussed cases for and against there being such thing as Māori Science and comes to a suggested conclusion about it. She suggests that rather than western science being a separate system to Māori science as you might describe with a Venn diagram, that Māori science sits in a wider super-set circle with western science as a smaller subset circle inside it. This is because she sees Māori science as containing all the knowledge and attributes of western science plus other knowledge and attributes unique to Māori science. In conclusion, Georgina doesn’t defin...

As with all learning strategies in class; it's the right tool for the right job. I recently read Practical Work in Science: Misunderstood and Badly Used by Jonathan Osborne. It is a worthwhile read and I highly recommend it. Among some of the ideas that reading Osborne's article sparked in me was the idea of leveraging smartphones for data collection during practical work captured my attention. Being a digi-geek I decided to investigate how this might work and how accurate is the data created. Osborne talks about practical work being used in a science classroom for two reasons: 1) the practical's role in demonstrating a phenomena/ idea/ theory and 2) the opportunity for students to engage in the whole process of experimentation. If the teacher sets aside time for pre-, during-, and post- practical learning then it is a waste of time if a large chunk of that combined time is taken up collecting the data and calculating an answer because there won't be enough time for ...

All science teachers want their students to see the science and the elegance of how the experiment show the science in the experiments done in class.  Not all students see experiment time as an opportunity for learning.  A colleague just tweeted this and it made me think "What DO I do?" and "What should I do?" An internal conversation I do have is... Is this experiment to show a scientific theory? - If yes, then it better blimmin' work every time. I don't want any odd results and I don't want to have to say "Oh - you should have seen …". If this happens, I have lost them and all sorts of misconceptions get reinforced, or created or worse, they might think science is stupid! Will the students see what I need them to see if they do the experiment? Or would it be better to do a Demo or even use an Animation or Video Is this experiment to show the process of doing a scientific investigation? - If yes, then it is better to get some unus...

This conversation about the NCEA review if for parents, school students, grandparents, employers, tertiary students, employees, educators, politicians,...everyone. NCEA was phased in between 2002 and 2004.  It replaced an exam system of percentage of one assessment opportunity of School Certificate and Bursary, and it replaced number system of many assessment assignments in Sixth Form Certificate.  The early 2000's was the first time in decades that major changes had been made to our qualification.  Now, 16 years on, we are having our first big review of it.  This review is about how NCEA works as a qualification.  At the end of the review some aspects of it will not have been for discussion at all.  Not up for discussion are the content of the standards themselves, that is for another time.  Whether or not we should have standards based assessment...at the end of this review, we will still have standards based assessment and it will still be called...

Workshop By Jarrod Aberhart (Twitter: @JarrodAberhart) Jarrod lead us through a collection of change processes.   He uses bits from each of them as they suit the situation in his school. Design thinking -  https://medium.com/media-ethnography/ethnography-the-first-step-in-design-thinking-d3c533278978 Lean -  https://leanchange.org/resources/ Agile -  https://www.infoq.com/articles/modern-agile-intro He brought in the idea of ‘The Power of Constraint’ and suggested that we are more creative when we are constrained in our thinking in some way.   This was illustrated by a $50 bet between 2 men in 1960…”you can’t write a book using only 50 different words”.   Out of that bet came Green Eggs and Ham , one of the most iconic Dr Seuss books of all time. Jarrod uses ’30 Circles’ (explanation https://hbr.org/2013/11/three-creativity-challenges-from-ideos-leaders ) to help people warm up their creative brains.  ...