Now that's what I call blogging

I have often been asked the question "how does technology benefit the learners? Where is the evidence?" Well here it is. This year, four students from Reporoa College did a computing course, through video conferencing with a teacher at Mercury Bay Area School, Max Ross. The first part of the course was dedicated to creating a web page in PHP, with a link to a data base which was created and queried using mysql. The second part of the course was all about building a robot using Lego, and programming it to carry out a set of given tasks. This culminated in all the students congregating at Te Aroha College to engage in the "Robot Wars" to see whose Robot would be able to tip over the other robots and hence claim the "Title".

In order to track their work and to document the project development, the students were asked to set up a blog. Which they duly did. When I read a few of the blogs, what I saw is what we have been talking about as educators. Here I saw responsible and independent learning, collaboration, creativity and problem solving. Check out these two blogs (whose permission I have obtained from the owners to share).

12VC-nxt.blogspot.com
robot-abattoir.blogspot.com

These students would not normally have access to blogs because it comes under personal networking and is filtered by our network filtering system. So we had to unblock the filters for them. Makes you think - responsible use of blogs is so beneficial, but how many students would simply spend their time on bebo (Blog Everywhere Blog Often) and do nothing? Something we need to look at closely.

Educators talking about Learning

The videos embedded below come from a site called EDtalks.
Check it out. There are heaps of really outstanding educationalists sharing their views. The two I have chosen are centred around inquiry learning, as this is an area of interest for teachers in our cluster, and a personal interest of mine. If I were to say how I would like to teach it would be as follows:
Inquiry based with a focus on collaborative learning and assessment (COLA - thanks to Dr. Paul Lowe), using formative assessment to guide my practice all underpinned through the use of ICT technologies.

Sharon Freisen on Inquiry Learning

Inquiry Learning

I was at Tongariro School in Turangi today and was chatting with Denise New, the DP of the middle school. They have recently been following the work of Pat Nolan, but looking to find out how to apply the theory in the classroom. This search lead them to the work of Trevor Bond, whose work centres around an inquiry learning model called SAUCE. This model has been developed by Trevor using parts of all the other inquiry learning models, taking out and combining the parts he really thinks applies to inquiry learning. Have a look at the Quest website and also at the SAUCE model.