Educational Origami

When I logged into edublogs today there were two interesting incoming links.

The first is OPen Parachute’s June New Zealand Blog rankings. Edorigami features in this in the top 100 as does:

• Derek’s blog
  
• Educating the dragon
• Teaching Sagittarian
• Greg’s Blog
• CORE
• Life is not a race to be first finished

Its nice to see this many educational blogs in the top 100. Well done Allanah.

The second link is from PowerLibrarian who did a review of The Blog and the Wiki. Its a very nice one and I am pretty pleased to say the least. http://powerlibrarian.blogspot.com/2009/06/educational-origami.html

Thanks Jan

The more I use Voicethread the more I like it.

I like the simple GUI, the fact that I can produce media that contains, images, documents, video, voice and text. This is a rich tool for teaching and learning and one well worth using. I love that students can comment and reflect.

Starter Sheet - voicethread

The only issue I have with it is the limitations of the free version - you can only have three voicethreads. However, a quick look at the pricing plan provides a cheap and reasonably priced alternative. There is a free educator plan (by application) but for a one off fee of $10 you have access to their Educator Pro plan - 10GB of storage and unlimited voicethreads. This is worth the investment.

Worth reading is their classroom guide.

http://voicethread.com/media/misc/getting_started_in_the_classroom.pdf

Ian sent me an interesting article from the Edge - http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/tapscott09/tapscott09_index.html

The article is “The impending demise of University“. The article is written by Don Tapscott

Here is a quote from the article

“The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril. ”

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to visit the University of Queensland and meet Professor Philip Long (of horizon project, MIT and UQ fame). The visit was a pleasure, as Prof Long and his staff showed us many of the innovative learning spaces that the University of Queensland boasts.

Some universities have taken heed of the warning that Don Tapscott eludes to in this article. UQ is one of them. Many of the spaces we visited were exciting and innovative. The spaces facilitated communication and collaboration. However, I suspect many of the Universities are not adopting this mode of education.

In a world of High speed, ubiquitous internet access; in a world where there are now exabytes of information produced annually; where your phone can be your laptop, your television and a games machine, there are still lecturers (and sadly teachers in schools) who stand at front of the room and spout forth. Many of these students are adapted to digital media. We know that Nueroplasticity has shown that constant exposure to multimedia and technology causes our brains to adapt. Our students at schools and many of the students at the Universities are adapted to technology, to coin Marc Prensky’s phrase “digital natives”.

As Don Tapscott notes the pedagogy used in education must change to suit the students and their learning needs.

Here is another quotation from the article

“There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.”

For many of the lecturers (and also for many of the teachers) the students we were taught to teach no longer exist. Well done to the Universities (and schools) that are changing, to those resisting the change…

Your audience is changing, if you want to keep your audience you must change to suit them.

This is an update to a wiki page on Educational Origami on Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy and Assessment

Higher order thinking skills like analysis, evaluation and creativity incorperate lower order thinking skills like remembering, understanding and applying. We aim to teach and facilitate higher order thinking skills in our teaching, knowing that these higher order skills will scaffold better learning and ownership of concepts and processes. But what do we examine when we set our students tests or examination?

If we look at our tests and examinations are they focused toward Higher Order or Lower Order Thinking skills? Are the assessment tasks and questions open or closed?

We are required to assess our students to:

• measure their progress,
• to track their learning,
• to identify weakness
• to measure our own performance as educators.

Parents need a measure of their childrens progress, politicians and administrators need to measure how their money is being spent. Assessment, often in the form of tests and examinations, is used for all of this. This is not wrong but Assessment should primarily be for learning (Well done AFL)

This raises some fundemental questions about our assessment systems

• Do our assessment systems do our students justice?
• Do the assessment systems reflect our students learning?
• Do they reflect the higher order thinking skills that we should be teaching our students in the 21st Century?
• Is a 3 hour test a fair reflection on a years or semesters work?
• Does a test or examination adequately prepare our students for work? How many workplaces have examinations as a measure of performance?

Does a one, two or three hour examination, sat in isolation from information sources and reference give a student adequate time to develop analysis, evaluate and be creative? To reflect critically on a year or mores work? Is it realistic to expect a student to complete these in close book format, when in the “real world” they would have a plethera of resources at their finger tips?

We know that in the knowledge economy of the 21st Century, Higher order thinking skills are valued and are indeed essential. But, do our assessments reflect higher or lower order thinking?

Key verbs in Bloom’s and 3 story Intellect

If we look at Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy or perhaps its simplified cousin the Art Costa’s Three Story Intellect, many of the verbs we associate with examination and test questions reflect lower order thinking skills.

Common key verbs in examinations

What are the key verbs we use in our examinations. I examine several examinations recently and these were the key verbs.

• list (Remembering)
• state (Remembering)
• identify (Remembering)
• name (Remembering)
• describe (Remembering)
• comment (Understanding)
• discuss (Understanding)
• explain (Understanding)
• exemplify (Understanding)
• compare (Analyse)
• analyse (Analyse)
• evaluate (Evaluate)

These are predominently lower order thinking skills. Examinations can be a poor tool to measure higher order thinking.

Fortunately, examinations are not the only form of assessment we use with our students, but do the other types of assessment actually reflect Higher Order Thinking. Do the assessment tasks reflect the higher order goals and objectives or are they more of the same.

Do we put suitable emphasis on:

• developing a hypothesis (Evaluating)
• experimenting (Evaluating)
• planning (Creating)
• designing (Creating)
• judging and evaluating (Evaluating)
• producing and making (Creating)
• critiquing, reviewing and testing (Evaluating)
• refining (Creating)
• mixing and remixing (Creating)

These can not be easily tested adequately in an examination or test

The Wall street Journal has published an interesting article with a slide show and interactive resource on North Korea.

The article, dated 22 May 2009, has a broad perspective of recent events from North Korea and the interactive and slideshow elements look at the secretive nation from Google Earth Images.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124295017403345489.html#articleTabs=article

Source: Wall Street Journal

This is a great insight into how Google earth and Google Maps can be used in Humanities classrooms, current events and alike.

Other interesting resources:

http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_mapper.html

This resource is interesting but should be first viewed before providing to students - http://freekorea.us/camps

This is the starter video to go with the starter sheets on the excellent web 2.0 tool voice thread.

Download

(please download the video and use it. Its created under the creative commons share and share alike. This video will play here but you will only see a part of the video. Format: Quicktime Size 800×600)

This video like the starter sheets will walk you through getting started with voicethread. From:

• accessing resources,
• arranging order and sequence,
• adding titles and tags,
• adding comments in audio and text format
• and sharing using embed, email or URL

Its disappoint to see spam coming through to blogs - its a waste of time space and energy. This blog is moderated so spam gets deleted.

The Iranian Election debarcle continues as the world id shocked and appalled by the curruption of the electral system and the brutality of what is now essentially a dictatorship.

The new York Times has produced an excellent interactive timeline with media clips, photo shows and commentry of the elections. This is an excellent resource for Middle and Senior school students.

Iranian elections Timeline

This is a voicethread of the 2008 Trekking expidition to The Annapurna Region of Nepal. The Annapurna Is beautiful, awe inspiring and stunning.

In 2010, we are heading back to Nepal to the Khumbu Region. Like the 2008 Trek this is a community service trip and we will be working with schools and orphanages as well as doing trial cleaning as we trek toward Everest Base camp. It promises to be a stunning trip.

This voicethread is available at http://voicethread.com/share/549993/

The Images are from my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/67064663@N00/

The specter of nuclear conflict seemed to have lessened for a while when the enmity between East and West receded. Now we are not haunted by MAD - Mutual assured destruction that prevailed with the immense arsenals of the super powers, rather by the threat of terrorist action.

With Hiroshima and Nagasaki fading into the depths of history, it is important to note that these two cities were not just Military targets attacked to bring a nation to its knees and end a vicious conflict, but civilian targets with families and children.

The iconic Magazine Life has produced an excellent set of 18 images that show clearly, vividly, pionently the dangers and risks of Nuclear attack as it presents Fallout: After a nuclear attack.

Let us hope that no other city raises a monument at ground zero of a nuclear attack, that no other families suffer the pain and torment of radiation burns, cancers and lingering death.

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HiroshimaGroundZeroMarker6952.jpg

Education is not just science, maths, or english. Education is holistic, moral and ethical. Education is about respect, tolerance and understanding.