Educating the Dragon

Is this the Scottish version of AfL or AToL ? – at least they’ve decided on the a name! http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/assess/aiflschool/index.asp

I wonder what colour the sky is on that planet?

Dr Dixon here makes a very valid point. The skills that he describes are NOT on the whole skills that we are embracing, quite the opposite in fact. We do need to contextualize learning for students and we also need to be ensuring that the skills we are teaching ARE the skills that students are going to need for the future.

I would be interested to here what Dr Dixon’s exam question would be and more so the student’s answers.

His other comments from Dr Patrick Dixon can be found here

As the map shows I took a short trip across town to Ilminster Intermediate today, I’ll be there tomorrow too. But having spent the whole day in the library, I decided to take a bit of a walk down Gladstone Road this evening. Gisborne is lovely in the evening time. It looks very different in the light. But it did get me thinking about the difference in students between ‘in the light’ of the classroom compared to ‘in the dark’ after school.

What I mean to say is that our preception of a students ability in the formal ‘20th Century classroom’ could well look very different to their actual intellectual ability in the connected world in which they live. Now more than ever do we need to discover where their heads are at and begin to meet them at their point of educational need.

Today was the day for two training sessions.

Firstly, I ran ‘Digital Storytelling" workshop, sharing the online platforms of Voicethread, Teachertube, and Slideshare.

I always enjoy running these session because I find teachers bring just as much to a session as I do. We began a voicethread… My first really proper one and it is oh so basic but I am hoping that others whole attended the session will be adding there thoughts about it. The cough at the beginning of my talk is not me but an attendee who shall remain nameless.

Cliotech was good enough to allow me to share some of the input from her slideshare .

Second up was Stop motion animation. Some folk from this morning stayed into the afternoon. We played around with webcams for a while and discussed the usefulness of animation creation to support not only the literacy programme but also it solidfy learning in other areas, for example creating an animation to illustrate life-cycles in science. We even had one uploaded to www.teachertube.com by the end of the session. It’s entitled "Mr Mouse" Enjoy!

ps. It was also great to know about a couple of sound wikispaces today. One of the attendees has been struggling with establishing her class wiki on wikispaces. I would have loved to sit down with her and assist in creating her class wiki, but that would be another 3 hour session so I pointed her in the direction on Wonderfulworldof.wikispaces.com and encouraged her to look through the material there before she gave up. Often I find its better to have the pointers than to be able to ‘Fix it’ then and there. Thanks Chrissy

pps. Thanks Derek for sharing this . What a powerful illustration of Storytelling in the 21st Century