Professional blog

Imagine a school without walls and completely online.  Students could log onto any web ready computer, and sign up to join classes.  They could interact via a moderated back channel chat and vote questions to the teacher up or down during live sessions and participate in forum discussions during asynchronous sessions.  Assignments would be handed in electronically, mostly through online individual student blogs.

So I've had a thought about the direction of language learning.  I've been experimenting with 3D interactive worlds (specifically OpenSim), which are programs which let people interact with each other real-time in 3D.  Pretty cool stuff.  This is already being used to help people learn languages as many of the 3D servers offer the ability to communicate with each other via voice and text.

...continued from here...

Yes, I sold my soul to the administration of my school.  In exchange, I got to keep my job.

I read an article one time which questioned why we choose calculus to be the top of the math pyramid in school.  Basically, most of the mathematics students learn once they master the basics aims toward preparing the students to take calculus at the end of K-12 school.  The article I read suggested that statistics instead of calculus should be at the top because it is much more practical to real life than calculus is.

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.  It was very cool, I knew a lot of the information provided in it but some of the things had a fresh perspective and were collected in one place.

...continued from here...

As the Christmas break loomed in front of me, I began to finally feel more confident in my teaching.  I had more classes which seem to run smoother, not many more, but a few.  A lot of these things though, in reflection, I really don't think had to do with me.

I used clickers in the classroom for the first time today.  For those of you who don't know, a clicker is also known as a classroom response device, and is used to collect immediate student feedback.  Students have a small device, it looks like a remote and on your computer you have a hub of some sort for collecting responses wirelessly from the students, and some software on the computer to process this data as well as display the questions.

How does problem based learning work anyway?  According to Wikipedia, "Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered instructional strategy in which students collaboratively solve problems and reflect on their experiences."  To me this means, choose problems which will reflect your curriculum and which students want to solve.

...continued from here...

One of my students today pointed out that we have used hardly any paper all year.  In fact, the only paper I have handed in their class was the required course outline and two tests for a total of 10 sheets of double-sided paper.  I just mentioned to someone that I could be completely paperless in my teaching if I could find a way for the students to securely do tests online and include essay style responses.  Maybe a classroom set of tablets would be the answer to that but they are pretty expensive.