Blogs

DIY Catapults!

June 17, 2013

Fork catapult - side view

One of my jobs at my current school is work on mathematics enrichment projects with three 4th grade students. For the past couple of weeks, in between their camps, my camp, and other end of year events, we have been working on looking into a mathematics modelling task, specifically, a fork catapult. The 4th grade boys and I completed this project over a series of 3 lessons with me, and 2 more lessons working on it independently between our sessions.

Bias in assessment

June 11, 2013

Every form of assessment of learning has bias. This bias may be hidden, or it may be quite obvious. As Cathy O'Neil points out, assessment is a proxy for what we want to measure - learning. We cannot measure the building of connections between neurons that is happening in the brain directly (or even potentially understand what that growth even means) so we use a proxy in the form of an assessment of the externally visible signs of learning.

Access to computers

June 7, 2013

President Obama recently unveiled a plan to have broadband Internet access in every school across the United States by 2018. There's only one huge problem with that plan; according to the US government's own research, as of 2006, there was only one computer for every four students, and many of those computers are old.