Sunday, October 30, 2011

SLATT- Assessment Part 1: Test Blueprint

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Lesson Planning - SLATT


For the PowerPoint slides on this topic, see Alwyn Lau's post below from the CIDTT session on Lesson Planning.

Links to files you can download:

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy
Cone of Learning
Lesson Planning template

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Monday, September 12, 2011

Friday, September 9, 2011

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Introducing Grammarly/EDU

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Friday, May 6, 2011

The Un-Learning Curve

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." (Alvin Toffler)

Here are some habits which may be worth un-learning...

  1. Vocalising the words as we read, and to quit reading from left to right.
  2. Typing with all your fingers (if you've been using only two your whole life). This is especially tough if you're a relatively fast two-finger typist.
  3. Looking for value and usefulness in ideas. We need to unlearn launching into criticism (i.e. analysing why it won't work) as a knee-jerk reaction to every new proposal we come across.
  4. Responding to menace with menace (instead of mercy). 'Nuff said.
  5. Having an answer to every objection to our most cherished beliefs - we could explore the value of silence or a waiting period so the question can be sharpened and the issue re-focused.
  6. Believing in the necessity of meetings - we must unlearn accepting their inevitability and experiment with other alternatives (e.g. Wiki-meetings?
  7. Reading the same authors over and over again - they sometimes anchor us down in unhelpful places.
  8. Requiring a teacher/lecturer for complex theoretical topics, without which we feel that 'real learning' hasn't occured
  9. Repeating a similar course of action when nothing substantial is changing, whilst continuing to believe that something different will eventually happen from the repetition...(I think Einstein called this 'insanity')
  10. More? What else do we need to un-learn?

Monday, May 2, 2011

Monday, April 25, 2011

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Using the i-Pad in Education

Please feel free to share your ideas. Some helpful links to start off include:

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Raised Hands and the Fear of Being Wrong

I gave some assignments on the screen, towards the end of which I went through the answer-options (A, B, C, D) requesting the students to raise the hands when the option they selected was mentioned. So when 'A' was read, a certain number of students raised their hands, when B was read another number and so on.

What's interesting is the reaction of students when they realise that the answer they've selected have also been selected by many others in class as compared to those whose hands are one of very few raised or, even worse, the only one in the air.

That feeling we get when our 'raised hand' is one among many - it's a good feeling, but also a dangerous one if we come to rely on it. It's great to know your perspective is shared by the crowd but if having a popular viewpoint is a pre-condition to doing anything cool or brave or fresh then it's no wonder that very few go out on a limb for something radical. If we wait till our POV is the majority one, we'll never take that first step towards shaping a new 'box', that new point of reference for our communities to both think within and out of.

Hence, I told the students to raise their hands REGARDLESS of how many in the class have the same answers. And raise it high. No need to be ashamed of being wrong; be ashamed of needing to be right all the time.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011