Today was the first day of my second practicum which I shall spend at Ulverstone High School. It was also a pupil free day, whether by coincidence or by design, I am unsure. During the course of the day, the teachers of the Central Coast cluster gathered at Penguin High School to participate in the Quality Assurance and Moderation Process. The day was broken up into three sessions -- two of moderating the assessment of work samples, and one of professional development.
During the first moderation session I was part of a group looking at work samples to be assessed for Being Numerate. We assessed a number of work samples from a class activity based on identifying patterns, finding rules and synthesising symbolic expressions of those rules. It was a relatively straightforward process and the group achieved consensus fairly easily in most of the cases.
During the second session, we looked as two work sampled assessed under Being Information Literate. As I experienced doing QMAP during PE1, everyone seems to have their own interpretation of the BIL standards and progression statements. The requirements about the safe, ethical, etc., use of information especially seems to cause much strife - why, some ask, should an other wise excellent piece of work be relegated to standard two just for a lack of referencing? In any case, it took us quite a while and a number of deviations from the QMAP protocol to come to a decision.
In the afternoon, I worked with a group of secondary teachers on "good questions" in numeracy. We used Bloom's Taxonomy along with the Being Numerate standards to explore questions we might ask of, and explore with, students about the concepts of money and finance. The suggestions and discussions we had were quite interesting.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Monday, September 18, 2006
Illiteracy
I read this comment on a story a few days ago and was appalled.
i am a 15 year old australian i think i am what americans would call a jok id prifer to run laps around a football or soccer field then reed eny thing i havent read eny thing in years but i started reeding this story at 11 at night and finished at 7in the morning i reeded 233 pages (i red some the night bifor) with out stoping and i reely injoyed it i reely want to know how it ends
I'm not sure which is worse, the abysmal spelling and grammar, or the idea that the writer hadn't "read eny thing in years." If I hadn't encountered students with such poor literacy before, I'd think that it was a joke.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Alas, the knitting, it would not felt
I finished my knitting off last night and today I tried to felt it to no avail. I shall have a go using the washing machine and tumble drier, but the thought has occurred to me that perhaps the wool was treated to prevent felting?In any case, I'll give it a go and if it doesn't work, I'll just use my knitting as knitting (instead of felt).
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Internet language resources for the win!
I've been thinking about trying to learn another language for a while now. I'd really like to learn Japanese or Welsh, but I think that I'm going to start with French. As in all things, I think that the best way to go about picking up a new skill is probably to start with something I'm familiar with and two years of French at primary school have made me much more familiar with it than Katherine Kerr's books have done for my knowledge of Welsh; my anime habit has done for Japanese; or a few years of lessons at high-school did for Indonesian.
After a little bit of searching, I found the 'French for Beginners' podcast from the French Ecole. I'll post a review after I've listened to a few episodes.
After a little bit of searching, I found the 'French for Beginners' podcast from the French Ecole. I'll post a review after I've listened to a few episodes.
Internet cookbooks for the win!
Rather than buy a few cookbooks, or a guide to leather-work or knitting, I usually hit the 'Net. For some reason, though, I often have difficulty finding recipes for really basic things. All too often, All Recipes won't have a simple no-frills recipe or, more often, will have dozens and dozens of variations.
This is where sites like the Wikibooks Cookbook and Cooking for Engineers can come in handy. Concise, clearly written instructions based on personal experience (although wikibooks, like all things wiki, can be a mess of contradictory information) with all the constraints so implied — they are simple, realistic and provide few, if any, endless variations on a particular theme.
This is where sites like the Wikibooks Cookbook and Cooking for Engineers can come in handy. Concise, clearly written instructions based on personal experience (although wikibooks, like all things wiki, can be a mess of contradictory information) with all the constraints so implied — they are simple, realistic and provide few, if any, endless variations on a particular theme.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Working with wool
This is the first of what will be a series of posts over the next few days. Each of them will cover a topic from my work at uni that I found interesting. This post, as the title may have hinted, will be about my work with wool in Curriculum and Method Studies: Technology Education 1B.
We started the semester with felting — take some wool fibre, apply warm soapy water, rub vigourously and hey presto! It's felt! All I've got so far is a beanie that I don't feel too bad about done and a number of bits and pieces of felt in a few colours that I don't have any plans for as yet. As our felt work is to be handed up at the end of next week, I've been thinking about what else I want to submit.
The goal of the assignment is to develop our skills through making a example pieces we can use as a teaching resource when we're out in schools teaching felting. As such, our submission is supposed to demonstrate a range of techniques. My beanie shows the use of a template (a piece of plastic slipped into the middle gives the beanie its basic shape and size) and felting several pieces together to get a pattern.
I'm planning on using another technique whereby the wool is bonded to a light fabric ("you need to be able to blow through it" according to the lecturer) during the felting process. This can result in interesting textures, colour effects, etc., especially if you use something like a lace or fishnet material. I can't see this being anything more than a sample, though one of the other students has made some rather interesting gloves using this technique.
If I can figure out how to roll them properly, I'll make a felt ball or two for fun — and because my few attempts today failed — and I imagine I'll wind up making some baby's booties out of the pieces I have on hand following the pattern we were given in class.
My last piece, if I can get it finished, will use knitted and embroidered wool in an attempt to add a design to a felt product in a more satisfactory way than by felting two pieces, then trimming them to shape and felting them together. I plan on knitting panels in my base colour and then embroidering them with other colours before felting the whole lot. If I can manage to knit enough, I'm also going to try to make a genuinely nice pair of baby's booties, rather than some made out of odds and ends, with little pom-poms and everything (I was just reminded of the technique for making pom-poms — the Patons web site is a great source of information on knitting and the like).
When everything is finished, I'll post a few pictures.
We started the semester with felting — take some wool fibre, apply warm soapy water, rub vigourously and hey presto! It's felt! All I've got so far is a beanie that I don't feel too bad about done and a number of bits and pieces of felt in a few colours that I don't have any plans for as yet. As our felt work is to be handed up at the end of next week, I've been thinking about what else I want to submit.
The goal of the assignment is to develop our skills through making a example pieces we can use as a teaching resource when we're out in schools teaching felting. As such, our submission is supposed to demonstrate a range of techniques. My beanie shows the use of a template (a piece of plastic slipped into the middle gives the beanie its basic shape and size) and felting several pieces together to get a pattern.
I'm planning on using another technique whereby the wool is bonded to a light fabric ("you need to be able to blow through it" according to the lecturer) during the felting process. This can result in interesting textures, colour effects, etc., especially if you use something like a lace or fishnet material. I can't see this being anything more than a sample, though one of the other students has made some rather interesting gloves using this technique.
If I can figure out how to roll them properly, I'll make a felt ball or two for fun — and because my few attempts today failed — and I imagine I'll wind up making some baby's booties out of the pieces I have on hand following the pattern we were given in class.
My last piece, if I can get it finished, will use knitted and embroidered wool in an attempt to add a design to a felt product in a more satisfactory way than by felting two pieces, then trimming them to shape and felting them together. I plan on knitting panels in my base colour and then embroidering them with other colours before felting the whole lot. If I can manage to knit enough, I'm also going to try to make a genuinely nice pair of baby's booties, rather than some made out of odds and ends, with little pom-poms and everything (I was just reminded of the technique for making pom-poms — the Patons web site is a great source of information on knitting and the like).
When everything is finished, I'll post a few pictures.
A paucity of posts
I've been neglecting this blog quite badly. I had intended to post semi-regularly about my studies toward a Bachelor of Teaching but I've dropped the ball fairly thoroughly. As an attempt at redressing the balance, I'll post several entries over the next few days.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Resources for Teaching Pythagoras' Theorem
I've decided to make the lesson plans, materials and such I write freely available under an Attribution, NonCommerical, ShareAlike license from Creative Commons.
The first lot of material I'm making available are the lesson plans for teaching Pythagoras' Theorem that I developed last semester (and wrote about using). If you're interested in teaching, mathematics, or teaching mathematics why not have a look at my free lesson plans.
The first lot of material I'm making available are the lesson plans for teaching Pythagoras' Theorem that I developed last semester (and wrote about using). If you're interested in teaching, mathematics, or teaching mathematics why not have a look at my free lesson plans.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Inclusive Education
I'm currently sitting in a lecture about inclusion and inclusive schooling. We're discussing a case-study about a primary school class and approaches that we might take to differentiating our curriculum and practice for students with disabilities. In particular we're considering a hypothetical student with Down Syndrome in a grade 5/6 class. We've had some interesting points raised including the inherent inclusivity of the Essential Learnings and the possible effects of differentiating the curriculum (will we be, in effect, "dumbing down" the curriculum?).
More later.
More later.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
LaTeX output for HsColour
On a somewhat related subject to my last post (the one about LaTeX), I've just started working on adding LaTeX support to hscolour. The structure of the program has made it easy to add support for LaTeX output: all I had to do is add two items to a pattern match (for option handling), and define a function to render the code to LaTeX (plus a few helpers to escape LaTeX special characters, etc. ).
Once I've managed to get it working adequately, I'll submit a darcs patch to the maintainer.
See also Malcolm's posts about hscolour: one and two.
Once I've managed to get it working adequately, I'll submit a darcs patch to the maintainer.
See also Malcolm's posts about hscolour: one and two.
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