Entries from June 2009 ↓

Best thing about the best PDs? Meeting expert teachers with a driving, fiery, passion for children’s learning and engagement. Meet Charles Lovitt.

Charles Lovitt, a many years experienced teacher is obsessed with best practice in maths and what works. When Charles talks about what works he’s talking about happy, healthy, cheerful and productive. Charles is the mastermind and driving-force behind Maths300.

An unfortunately drab name for a rich resource. Maths300’s goal is to travel the country and find the best of the best of maths lessons, experiences and investigations; document them and share them. Many of them “old favourites” that have been taken to stratospherically awesome levels of problem solving and investigation. Little bit scared of that? If you want to really support your children’s maths learning, be prepared to get your maths feet wet.

So far my children and I have enjoyed Dice Footy, Multo and Chocolate Cake. As a signed-on Maths300 school we have access to all lesson plans, notes and investigation notes as well as some very effective software. These are two examples from Radioactivity, which is available to non-members to trial.

Go on the free sample tour here

What resonated? That every word, movement, task, comment, question and breath we use is meaningful as teachers. Charles’ asks: Are you effective? Are you raising student achievement and engagement? No? Why not? And what are you going to do about it?

I had an interesting session using bubble.us the other day. Being a huge Inspiration fan (but not having it available) I was very happy to find such a neat online tool. It’s essentially a brainstorming/mindmapping tool and the possibilities are endless.

I’m keen to use it to plan photography or documentary making. Each bubble can be used for a particular shot or scene. It gives the children a visual tool that they can also add detail too.

I used it to brainstorm the “image” my group wanted for our 5/6 Newsletter. Being a new user I wasn’t sure how to create a separate brainstorm on the same page so our design ideas had to go in the same bubble! The children especially liked it when a deleted bubble ‘exploded’! Very cool. Here is an example I put together quickly. (Thanks Anne for the random idea!) I used the ‘embed html code’ tool in the bubbl.us menu.

Bubbl.us is a free online tool that a user needs to register for. Currently, it cold only be used as a teacher modelling tool or by children with supervision. I wonder how other schools manage use of online tools that need usernames and passwords? I know of a school that has used Scraplog for the children to document their learning. The children all had their own username and password, no personal information was entered (of course) and the online scrapbooks were only available to the classroom community or invited users.

I believe a school must have a specific policy with regards to using these kinds of online tools, but again, the possibilities are endless. Children could collaborate on projects, invite people to share their mindmapping and blog their mindmaps.

bubbl.us found via a presentation at the Microsoft Innovative Schools Asia Pacific Forum by Kristine Kopelke.

I found a tutorial for bubbl.us on the TeachWeb2.0 wikispace which is also on Youtube (fromTechbites)

What do you think about enabling our children to create their own online learning communities using free online tools?  

Happy brainstorming!