Tagged: nature

How could these two videos help us improve student-learning?

Today, I watched these two videos. The first one was sent to me by my wife, the second one by Chris Anderson from TED. Both are full of messages about the way we learn and, of course, the way we teach.

This video is a very simple reminder to us all about the importance of time. We are often in such a rush to “get stuff covered” that we don’t give our students the time they need to do things as well as they can. “It’s their fault… they have bad time-management skills” we say. We know that, as they get older, they’re going to have do more and more tasks in short periods of time and so we feel it is our job to help them learn to do things quickly. “Hey!” I found myself saying to my students the other day “you know, in secondary school, if you don’t finish your work in the lesson you’ll have to take it home to finish!”. Not my finest hour.

I should be constantly helping them to see the connection between time and focus, creativity, imagination, detail and personal satisfaction. In fairness, I usually do. I hope I was just having a bad day.

This video does all the talking for itself. How often do we share thoughts like these with our students? How often are they exposed to this kind of wisdom?

“Blanning” – the art of planning and blogging at the same time. Part One

I’m going to attempt use this blog to document all my planning, both before and as everything happens, as I work with my Year 6 students through the PYP exhibition process. I’m going to call this “Blanning”… because “Blagging” is just too honest!

Tomorrow, I’m going to use the Nature lens of the Compass. Through the Nature lens, students are asked to consider the implications of their issues from the natural perspective. So, for example, making links between local beggars and deforestion and loss of homes in Myanmar and Cambodia.

I was thinking of having quite an open-ended day, with students making choices of a number of ways to consider the links between issues and nature. But then I thought it might be good to have a series of finite activities that need to be done within a specific timeframe and then shared and reflected on before moving on to something very different. Perhaps:

  • Students could use expressive materials like pastels and charcoal to create an impulsive abstract piece of artwork based on their thoughts about their issues in the green context. I will limit them to using only shades of green and one other significant colour. I got the idea from a session my Dad did for the teachers at the Green School Bali: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=199675&id=114095042424&ref=mf
  • Creating quotes, locating quotes, sharing quotes: This would be the search for existing and student-created quotes that illustrate connections between their issue and nature. They will have a set amount of time to find and develop their quotes, and then the same amount of time again to think about how they will share it.
  • Green Data: Up-to-date facts and figures that will back up student ideas, arguments and conclusions. Again, they will have a set amount of time to find and collate their data, and then the same amount of time again to think about how they will share it. Emphasis will be placed on producing infographics here, probably leaning heavily on using the SmartArt features of Microsoft Word, or paint.net for the more technologically advanced.
  • I’d like to end the day with a lot of talking, walking and looking at what the kids have produced. I’ll try to provoke conversations and play devil’s advocate a bit. Then, I’ll get them to identify the “Key Connections” between their issue and the Nature lens of the Compass. They may blog those by comments on a posting. They may display them visually in the room, they may do both… we’ll see what happens tomorrow!

So, during all of this – hopefully – the Compass Guides will be dropping in whenever they have 5 or 10 minutes to spare and taking a look at what the kids are thinking, what directions they’re moving in and what ideas they have for them.

I've shamelessley created another wordle for this posting by copying pasting the words in the posting into wordle and hitting "randomize" several times. So simple, so good to look at. But... they can't be used all the time.