RE: http://mr-stadel.blogspot.ca
After looking through Andrew Stadel's blog for a good 30 minutes I couldn't find a single topic that, content wise, was sufficient for me to write a blog on. It was difficult as the topics weren't really philosophical as I like them but rather seemingly superficial everyday stories from his classroom. I'm not saying they are useless, rather, I just can't write reflections or further thoughts or critiques on them. Surely, if I had a choice I'd chose another blogger to write on. Anyways, I had to think a while before I could come up with something to write on and to my surprise some profound cliche ideas came to mind. Two weeks ago in my "Designs for Science" class we had a guest lecturer who's primary focus was on visual teaching. That is, using visuals all the time, every lesson to help students be engaged in the lesson and to help them understand better. He argued, rightfully so, that as teachers we have to compete with the world of visual stimulation. Therefore, we must make our lessons more visually stimulating so that it engages the student. What I noticed on Andrew Stadel's blog is that many of his blog posts are about his classroom activities many of those have videos. That gave me the idea of presenting classroom activities and the exercises whether in science or in math in video format. That is, se it up like a movie trailer and ask the students to solve it. The cool thing is that the students if they wish, may respond in whatever format they wish whether that be on a piece of paper, in an email, in a series of pictures, or a video. Watching a video and responding to it is much more "21st Century" than opening the book to page 84 and completing exercises 3-9 don't you think?
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8/4/2013 06:35:25 am
Yes, I do agree. And there are many great video clips already set up for such inquiry-openers. For example, for math check out: http://www.101qs.com (set up by Dan Meyer - many of these are just images, which are also great inquiry-starters). For science, check out Veritasium (they have a YouTube channel). (2.5)
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