The Teacher Toolbox

I once enquired of the Head of Curriculum of a school why she thought the Yr 5 & 6 cohort had no real understanding of what Division actually was. Her reply told me a fair bit.

‘You know how it is Adrian, by the time you do Addition in Term One, Subtraction in Term Two and Multiplication in Term Three those last 10 weeks of school just get too busy to do Division properly.’

I believe the modern term all the cool kiddies are using is WTF

That said, I’m trying to pull a friend’s child back from the abyss that is Math Anxiety. We’ve been ‘exploring’ & ‘playing’ with maths concepts.  We’ve done heaps with metacognition/self talk, error analysis, heaps of demonstrations with concrete materials & practise moving from concrete to symbolic representations then we put together the comic strip above.

I’m fond of ‘enforced creativity’ as a way of producing unique ideas. We took the PC version of Comic Life (yes one does exist) and a pretty random set of machinima images from my Dawn of War collection and dropped them into the program. We then started brainstorming ideas for how we could create a comic about Division. NB the last speech bubble is a little tongue in cheek as my student knows that beyond simple division most of us use a calculator

cheers

Adrian

Oh, & I’ll deal with this comment another day ‘Adrian, that’s all just ‘bells and whistles’. ‘Real’ teachers ‘don’t have time’ to do stuff like that. We have a ‘test’ to ‘cram’ for’.

I attended the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival last weekend and one of the highlights for me was watching the children’s book illustrator Terry Denton work a marquee full of adoring fans. He spoke well on creative processes and all the while drawing to illustrate his point

After the session I joined the hordes of kids for a book signing and introduced Terry to the Ipad. I then asked if he would draw one of his characters for my son in Adobe Ideas. (Ok, I lied, it was for me too hehehe)

My machinima interpretation of Macbeth is finally complete. It has taken a lot longer than I had anticipated but in the end I’m very pleased with the way it has turned out. I am also really pleased with the amount of problems I’ve overcome and skills I’ve learnt along the way.

Do have a look at the interpretation and forward it on to anyone you think can use it.

Thanks

Adrian

PS What personal project are you currently doing?

I firmly believe the mark of a person is not what they do when they are knocked down once and get back up. It is what they do when they are knocked down a fifth, sixth & seventh time.

I tip my hat to all the educators who are fighting the good fight to make Education relevant to our children in the face of massive ignorance on the part of government & traditional media.

Happy Holiday Season to all.

After a long day I was just having a little play with my Oddfellows , my new Digital Camera &  Comic Life

The computer is the most powerful learning tool ever created. So why are the majority of my professional dialogues centred around strategies for getting teachers to turn them on?

Teachers should be the epitome of what it is to be a learner. They should model self directed learning. They should model life long learning, critical thinking and insight. Teachers should possess insight that extends far beyond the capabilities of the hardware into the realm of learning & creativity. It is not a matter of ‘making the time to learn this stuff’, it is what we do by definition!

Embrace these disruptive tools people and use them to transform and educate!

There are so many opportunities available for teachers to explore in order to ‘value add’ to the quality and scope of the education they provide students. So why is it we constantly hear people lament, ‘Oh I’m so far behind with all this computer stuff’?

People… you don’t get left behind in this field, you choose to stay where you are!!!

What are you doing to improve your skills?

Over the last few years I’ve become very interested in creative process. What is it that enables some people to have an amazing output of creative ideas? How can we teach ‘creativity’? Can we truly teach creativity? Am I creative or am I doing what creative people do?

One of my favourite creativity tools is the SCAMPER Process. I particularly like to play around with the ‘Substitute’ & ‘Combine’ part of the process to produce ‘creative’ pieces of work.

In my ‘Dora Meets Sigmund’ comic I’ve ‘Substituted’: Comic Life for paper, digital photographs for drawings as well as ‘Combining’ Dora from my daughter’s doll house & Freud from my workspace. The dialog comes from ‘Combining’ aspects of a joke my cousin and I had via email. Thanks cuz!!!

Try a little SCAMPER yourself, you’ll be amazed with what you come up with.

One of the things I love about ‘ripping across the ditch’ is the healthy banter between Aussies & Kiwis. As part of a demonstration of open source Vs proprietary software I knocked up this cartoon.

So now I’m looking for captions. Feel free to add your ideas to my comment section

2 weeks later – ‘One day lads, we will reclaim The West Island!’ – …and Kiwis might fly!