teaching

Massively collaborative educational research

Posted by David Wees on Apr 2, 2010

The book Wikinomics has really got me thinking about how collaboration happens in our society. One of the area where I think massive collaboration would be really useful, but where it is underutilized is in the area of educational research. Imagine the power of collaboration that we could have if hundreds of educators collaborated to run a research study.

Research based teaching

Posted by David Wees on Jan 21, 2010

I'd like to be a research based teacher. This means, if research comes out which is compelling and reliable and which suggests that an alternate approach to what I do will work better, then I'll experiment and try that out. If research tells us that people learn in a certain way, then I'll need to look at my practices and adjust them correspondingly.

What would you tell a new teacher?

Posted by David Wees on Jan 20, 2010

I had the opportunity to have a new teacher hang out in one of my classes today. We had about a 20 minute discussion afterward where she asked some questions and I got to share a couple of resources. She is being trained to teach Math and Science so we have a lot of overlap in our specialties.

Introduction to Technology in the classroom course

Posted by David Wees on Jan 31, 2009

We are having a discussion in one of our classes, ETEC 533 (Technology in the Mathematics and Science classes) where we are all talking about how little support we've received over the years in our use of technology. We've all come from different education programs, but a common thread is that these programs usually have courses about how to use typical technologies, like Word or Powerpoint, etc...

What kinds of mathematics SHOULD we be teaching in schools anyway?

Posted by David Wees on Jan 21, 2009

I was surfing around when I found a really interesting post by Steve Yegge. He makes the point:

I'm guessing the list was designed to prepare students for science and engineering professions. The math courses they teach in and high school don't help ready you for a career in programming, and the simple fact is that the number of programming jobs is rapidly outpacing the demand for all other engineering roles. - Steve

My analysis of two different video case studies on the use of technology in a classroom

Posted by David Wees on Jan 19, 2009

These two case studies refer to videos I have watched as part of my Masters course, ETEC 533 and the copyright on the videos is unclear, so I am unable to show them here.

Learning Environment 6 with Teacher G (Post-secondary Applied Science)

Communication Online with Students Outside of Class

Posted by David Wees on Dec 2, 2008

Once you've started working with creating and managing online resources for your students, it becomes natural that the ways the students communicate with you is going to change a little bit. Here are some guidelines for ways you can communicate with your students, and some ways to protect yourself while doing so.

Ways to use Geogebra in a mathematics classroom

Posted by David Wees on Nov 24, 2008

There are a lot of good open source programs out there, but not many of them have direct application to a mathematics classroom the way Geogebra does. Geogebra is a software package for creating and manipulating geometric objects. It also allows for graphing of funcitons and manipulating the functions in all sorts of interesti

Resource sharing between teachers.

Posted by David Wees on Nov 22, 2008

As part of my Masters degree, I have created a venture pitch for a project I am working on called Pedagogle.com. Our assignment was to create a pitch as if we are the CEO of an organization which is looking for venture capital. We are essentially creating our own start up idea, and then learning how to create a pitch to market our idea.

Working with a 1 to 1 laptop program

Posted by David Wees on Nov 20, 2008

At our rather large high school in Thailand, we have a 1 to 1 laptop program. Every student in the high school has a laptop, which they are supposed to bring to class. After a year and half working with these laptops, I discovered the joys and pitfalls of such a system.

21st Century Educator