OPLS blog

Some colleagues at our research unit at the University of Bath, UK, have recently published a review of research relating to the IB diploma programme.

Briefly, its contents include:

• College entrance
• Perceptions of the IB Diploma Programme by admissions staff of universities
• Perceptions of students and graduates of the IB Diploma Programme
• Perceptions of the IB Diploma Programme by teachers and heads of schools
• Preparation for the IB Diploma Programme
• Outcomes of the IB Diploma Programme
• Policy issues relating to programme implementation
• Comparisons with other programmes
• Critical studies relating to equity and access
• Personal, social and health education

Please have a look when you have time.  You can find more information on the publication here and download the full pdf file here: A review of research relating to the IB diploma programme.

Horatiu Pop a Physics teacher from The British School in Warsaw has produced a series of video podcasts to help his students and other High School students called IB Physics Help.

It is great to see IB teachers using new Web 2.0 tools as part of their teaching, as it enhances the learning of pupils who are used to viewing material online or as a download. Horatiu has posted his video podcasts to variety of sites( Blip.tv and YouTube)in order to encourage his pupils and others to download them to help in their studies.
We look forward to seeing more IB Physics Help video podcasts in the near future, and would like to hear of any other web 2.0 initiatives like this that are happening in IB schools around the world.

Last week we held a three-day training session for six “new” OCC online faculty members*. We hold these training sessions once or twice a year at IB Cardiff so that new online faculty members can get hands-on experience of managing their own parts of the OCC and be introduced to, and start to become familiar with, e-moderator skills. This year we also ran some sessions on the use of RSS feeds and aggregators, social book marking websites like del.icio.us, and we also played around on a wiki. The training session is a great opportunity for faculty members to connect with each other, and equally important, it helps to establish good working relationships with IB staff.

We currently have 89 online faculty members across all three IB programmes. Our newest members are:

Middle Years Programme
Suyi Wang: Chinese B
Marcela Bidegain: arts in Spanish

Diploma Programme
David McIntyre: English A2
Dave Mulkey: computer science
Cynthia Ballheim : DP coordinators

All three programmes
Lynda Slattery: academic honesty.

Welcome everyone, to our online community!

* OCC online faculty members are responsible for managing the OCC discussions forums and resources in their own subject area.

Not sure if this is a trend that has caught on in other countries, but there has been a spate of television programmes over the past few years in the UK devoted to lists. Top 100 films, Top 100 Britons, Top 100 children’s programmes, etc, ad infinitum.

I blame Nick Hornby, of course, and his first novel, High Fidelity (1995), in which the owner of a record shop, Robert, and his two employees, Dick and Barry, create all manner of lists to help them get through the day. Memorable examples include “Top 5 musical crimes committed by Stevie Wonder in the 70s and 80s”, or “Top 5 songs about death”.

Well, I don’t blame him really, since it was a novel idea at the time and, as Heppell says, one of the true measures of creativity and ingenuity is the extent to which it is copied by others.

I doubt, though, if the compilers of this latest list I’ve come across were thinking of Nick Hornby when they created the Top 100 tools for learning - a list generated from 158 learning professionals (from education and workplace learning) who shared their top 10 tools for both their own personal learning/productivity and for creating learning.

I think the list is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly it has a browser, Firefox, in the top 2. I’m assuming, here, it is more to do with the plethora of add-ons and extensions available and the fact that it is making significant advances in terms of discoverability.

Secondly, Microsoft Word has fallen from 10th position last year to joint 22nd in 2008. With the growth of Google Docs, Zoho and wikis etc, I wouldn’t mind betting Word falls out of the top 50 completely this time next year.

Thirdly, I was struck by the number of wikis in the top 50 (wikispaces, PBwiki and WetPaint) and certainly from my own experience, I would see these moving up the list next year, with Google Sites (formerly know as JotSpot) perhaps making an appearance too.

I encourage you to look at the list when you have time. There are some good pointers and it was good to see an IB teacher as one of the contributors, namely Richard Allaway, head of Geography at the International School of Toulouse in France.  Richard has been a leading light in terms of using Web 2.0 technologies to support teaching and learning, and collaborated with Natasha Lardner and Geography Jim on this wiki development in Wikispaces (something we blogged about here).  He’s worth following.

Oh, and for those who don’t have time to look but are curious as to what came out at No.1…

…it was del.icio.us.