9 year old came home from school last week very excited because her teacher was using ClassDojo. Excited to share what she’d seen, she set about creating a ‘FamilyDojo’ using the ClassDojo App. Everyone had a lot of fun seeing who got paired with which character and choosing what behaviours we could earn, or not earn, points for.
Great motivator for positive behaviour from parents as well as kids!… Read more...
Alongwith my first MOOC experience with Model Thinking (see post about that here) I signed up for a short course on Web Science with the University of Southampton thanks to a chance hearing of Dame Wendy Hall on Radio 4 who got me hooked with her enthusiasm and a tweet from @srjf. My first activity is to “create your own timeline of key factors leading to the development of the Web, such that you could explain it to general audience.” A quick google for ‘how to create a timeline online’ led me to timetoast.com and I managed to pretty quickly create the timeline that should be embedded below (if you can see Flash things. If you can’t see it below you could try here. I wish I’d realised it was Flash based before I started…). There’s a bit of a gap between 1910 and 1964 and after about 2008 but if I spend a bit more time on that we could fill them up.
…On Being Enthusiastic, Passionate and Exciting Curiosity!
Earlier this year, when this Exciting Curiosity project had just begun, one of the first things I saw people talking about via Twitter was the book ’Teach Like A Pirate’ by Dave Burgess (@burgessdave). There was a lot of excitement around the book, and with a title like that who wouldn’t be curious about the content! So with a copy ordered for a pirate-loving friend, and a copy for me, I embarked on the adventure.
There is a story in Part 1 that really stuck out for me. The author, his family and their dogs were out and about when they came across a man who was also walking his dogs and they said hello. The man then spotted a hawk on the top of a nearby tree and told Dave all about the hawk, ‘the type of hawk it was, its hunting behaviour, and how its feathers were specially designed for the type of flight manoeuvres it needed.” (Teach Like A Pirate, p11) The discussion around the hawk and ecosystem of the surrounding area went on for around 30 minutes.
But why would a story like that stick out? Well … Read more...
This was the question from the curious 6 year old as we drove along. Answer offered by adult: “Because their feet don’t conduct electricity. Electricity doesn’t pass through their feet because of what their feet are made of.” Question from other adult: ” What are their feet made of?” Well, no one in the car knew. Were we even right with our first answer? It turns out we were not!
Here is the simplest explanation I could find, from Rocky Mountain Power:
The bird is not grounded. It has not created a path of lesser resistance for electricity to follow. If the bird simultaneously touched two wires, the difference in resistance between the two wires would create a path through the bird and it would be electrocuted.
Well there you go! Apparently it works ok for small birds, but overhead electrical wires can be quite a danger for larger birds.… Read more...
Last night I read a wonderful article. I found the article because Cris Guenter shared it on Twitter via Roxana Marachi and I’d searched on Twitter for ‘curiosity + pedagogy’. Just that search alone popped up a bunch of educators I wanted to follow. Twitter is just amazing for professional development. Anyway, the article was called “The Pedagogy of Play and the Role of Technology in Learning” by Aran Levasseur and you can read it here.
I’ve been thinking about the article all day and feel compelled to share it’s findings and add a few thoughts of my own.
1) “One doesn’t read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to develop strategy before playing the game [Civilisation]. One starts by playing. This is true for all videogames.” Agree.
2) “You start by exploring the world with curiosity and begin to develop a hypothesis of what you’re supposed to do. Through trial, error, pattern recognition, logic and chance you continually reformulate your trajectory.” Agree. These two sentences, for me, encompass the development of a child. Technology-wise, as part of the generation brought up on the Atari (hardly any buttons, wood effect, joysticks, that’s all I remember), Sinclair ZX … Read more...