Skint to Mint board game

Skint to Mint is an investment game created by the reserve bank. Their agenda was to create a learning tool to teach about credit ratings. Their idea is that kids will learn it and take that information home. Early in the design process they decided that they had to teach all about risk and benefit to get the idea across. The outcome was a well produced and fun to play game.

The game mechanics covers probability, percentages, estimation and evaluation as well as a host of basic numeracy skills. The game is reasonably complex and will require some pre-teaching to get running in a classroom. It was recommended to get the students used to all the cards first as a class before starting play. Ideally the game should be played several times to give students a chance to develop their strategy.

I can see this being useful for juniors to develop and practice numeracy and percentage skills. It will fit in very well with PMF and will probably be a good game for any applied class. There is a lot that would be interesting for the more academic classes but it will probably be more important to cover things needed for the exams.

We will have five copies delivered hopefully mid December.

Nutrition Pamphlet

We finished up the Nutrition pamphlet last week. Overall I think it went well, there was some really good work from some students. I do think that it went on a bit too long. Next time I will set the deadline a bit closer.

For this task I created a pamphlet template that students needed to fill out with real information. The chose a nutrient, researched how much is required, how much is in various foods, designed a meal to have 1/3 of you daily needs for it, and turn it all into a pamphlet. It was a great self directed mini inquiry. Once I set them off with a few links they did most of the work themselves. There was good numeracy content in calculating percentages, measurements of portion size, conversions, tables and lots of other bits. And once they got started the students found out how to do what they needed to know independently. I say students grappling with conversion problems and finding their way through by themselves. It was great.

Filming the teacher

Today I had a few minutes of teacher talk to explain how to work out something for the pamphlet. This is the sort of thing that is always problematic. It usually invoves a lot of work to keep them quiet and attentive. The students haven't hit the problem yet so they don't have the motivation to listen or take notes. By the time they need it (in five minutes) half of them will have forgotten. I decided to try a trick from ulearn. I told them that thety all had netbooks with webcams and that if they thought they would want to hear what I said again they should video me. It went down well. All the netbooks (and one phone) were aimed at me. An interesting side effect was: because they were all filming they didn't want to make any noise to ruin the recording. I didn't Everone was listening attentively. It was great! I'll definately use this again.

I did talk about how I was happy for them to video me explaining things any time but that I did not want them to publish the videos without my consent. I also suggested that they could ask their other teachers to do this as well.

Google dashboard

I want it.

The product is basically an educational wrapper around the Google docs. They intend to wrap it around the other google things, gmail, blogger etc, as time goes on. It has been developed in partnership with Point England schools.

What the dashboard offers teachers are some excellent tools to make managing the class easier. It includes automatically sharing everything with the teacher, automatic creation of shared folders, the ability to log on _as_ any student, backups so a kid can't delete the work. The dashboard view made it really easy to see what the kids had been working on based on which folder they had put the work in (Maths work in the maths folder etc). I can really see it making things much easier to manage. It would probably make things easier for newbies.

The thing that I think would be the most useful is the automated setup functions. It will integrate with KAMAR and when a student joins it will generate an account for them and set it up with the right folders with the right sharing :-) This will take heaps of hassle away from the first few weeks. It also provides a parent portal, something we can't do at the moment.

The downside is that as it is all live it has to query google lots to generate the page. This may not work until we get our network issues sorted. If the proxy refuses a connection half way through it will really screw things up.

They reckon it takes order of 1 day to set up and they are happy to set it up for a tiny test group. The pricing is about $4 per student per year. We'll need to check about how transients will fit in.

I would love to trial it with my Year 9s this year to get a feel for it. They sound really happy to make this happen.


The services they offer are:
Account management
Authentication
Environment provision
Policy enforcement
Dashboard
Parent Portal
Portfolio management

Maths Blogs

We started blogs in maths last week. I think it has been going ok. Not everyone is thrilled to be writing in maths but everyone is doing it. The biggest difficulty has been getting the kids to write quietly. They spend so much time being able to talk and share ideas that the class is not used to silence. Today is the first day that it has been quiet enough for me to blog at the same time. I've found it good reading the blogs. It's been a nice way to get insight into how they are doing.

ULearn Computer gaming Breakout

Kids between 4 and 14 will spend roughly 10192 hrs gaming, 13300 hrs at school. That is long enough to become an expert. We should harness this.

The breakout hung off the wiki: http://gamesined.wikispaces.com/

There is a great list of games, loosely grouped into subjects. Definately a great place to start if you're looking for some games to use in class.

As far as the pedagogy goes the talk was pretty light, he recommended Immersion with guidance without elaborating much. He did say that he was hoping to get classroom experiences of these games put up on the wiki. That would be very useful to me.

ULearn 9 in 90 breakout

A review of 9 different software packages. The one that grabbed me that I'll play with later is Game Maker. There were other nice things, video editing, sound, comic creator, time-lapse photography. It's good to get an overview. I will have things to suggest to other people but I probably won't use many of these myself.

ULearn Lane Clark Breakout

This breakout was all about Human Cognitive Architecture and Cognitive Load Theory. It helped draw together bits and pieces that I've learned about these topics in the past. Her description of working memory in HCA was confused but the big idea that came out was that the aim of learning is to create schema. Kids can learn something and retain it well enough to sit a test months later but unless it is processed into a schema it will be gone by the next year. To help this happen get the kids to process rather than regurgitate or simply use their learning.

The CLT part was a good refresher but little new info. The big idea was to keep it simple when designing instructional material. People only have so much 'space' in their heads to process things. This gets divided between the intrinsic (what you want them to learn), extraneous (how it is presented and what you want them to produce) and Germane (interest and involvement). Make the presentation simple and familiar and the student has space to think about content with room left over to get enthusiastic about it.

ULearn Robots in Maths

Two teachers demonstrated how they use robots to teach maths in their classes. Both primary and lower high school. They were able to pull in an impressive amount of maths and problem solving out of some very simple robotic activities. From distance/time relationship to diameter and travel distance. Using gears to teach ratio and exponential in a practical way. Axel width + wheel diameter to do turns.

They reported that solving problems with the robots really increased student engagement. So much cool stuff. I want a class set (only $6000 :-)

ULearn Lane Clark Keynote

First impressions of Lane Clark's keynote address. She talked about inquiry (sorry, !nquiry). She did have some very good ideas about how to structure an inquiry and the reasons. It is definitely a better way to teach but what she was presenting was a very specific and trademarked(!) approach. It did not seem very flexable.

The big things I got out of it were the importance of immersion first. She stressed relevance to the learners, this is a recurring theme but difficult to achieve.

ULearn Day 1

What a bad start. I got up at 4:45 and we flew out of Wellington and circled Christchurch for 40 minutes before heading back. We got to Christchurch just in time for lunch.


The first breakout was good. Neil Stephenson from Calgary Science School talked about learning to teach in a technology rich school. He had good ideas about teachers collaborating to create inquiry topics that would be interesting and engaging. The key, in his opinion is to focus the inquiry on a specific, real, current issue. Ask what it's place is in the world.

He had good ideas about how to get teachers to improve and evaluate their practice. Some good rubric's on his blog: thinkinginmind

Test post

Testing the blog, Does it work. Of course it does...