Please find below a YouTube video B Nesbitt created to “inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.”
Paul Fairbrother and I used it at the most recent IBNA conference in San Francisco. It went down very well with school leadership who told us they will show it to their teaching faculty as soon as the new school year begins.
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.
Just a quick note to tell you - in case you haven’t spotted it yet - that we have added a universal navigation bar to most of the IB sites that are public.
I’m sure it will help with general navigation across the IB’s web presence. Let us know what you think.
I often turn to Stephen Heppell when considering next steps and looking for help in making sense of this new world we’re living in. Recently I came across this. I shan’t try and paraphrase this time, but let his own words speak to you.
“Computers are everyday tools for us all, seen or unseen, but their value in learning is as tools for creativity and learning rather than as machines to “deliver” the curriculum. These tools, in our children’s hands, are forever pushing the envelope of expertise that previous technologies excluded them from: they compose, quantise and perform music before acquiring any ability to play an instrument, they shoot, edit and stream digital video before any support from media courses, they produce architectural fly-throughs of incredible buildings without any drafting or 2D skills, they make stop frame animations with their plasticine models, they edit and finesse their poetry, they explore surfaces on their visual calculators, swap ideas with scientists on-line about volcanic activity, follow webcam images of Ospreys hatching, track weather by live satellite images, control the robots they have built and generally push rapidly at the boundaries of what might be possible, indeed what was formerly possible, at any age.
Little of this was easily achieved in the school classroom ten years ago although the many projects emanating from Ultralab over that decade offered clear enough indicators of what might be possible. The challenge here is to criterion referencing. So often the cry of the teacher “that work is better than my degree exhibition piece!” reflects a substantial step change in both the age at which a creative act can be enjoyed and the quality of the tools supporting that creativity.”
So, if you want some guidance on what we might do as educators to evaluate some of this, have a look at what he has to say here.
Berkeley University, in California, have recently launched a series of recorded lectures on their own YouTube channel. You can find the current catalogue here: Berkeley University on YouTube. It clearly mirrors MIT’s Opencourseware initiative, started in 2001.
It raises the question yet again of where the real value in school- and university-based education lies: in the teacher delivering the content or the collaborative working and investigation by students around it.
Clearly, Berkeley and MIT believe it is in the latter, otherwise they wouldn’t be distributing this content for free. It is the formal accreditation and recognition that surrounds it, which they then charge (huge sums) for.
The trend towards deconstructing territories of learning (a phrase I’ve borrowed from a colleague referring to the classroom rather than a geographical region) continues and I look forward to its development.
In the meantime, have a look at this lecture on atoms and heat:
We knew it would only be a matter of time before the IB learning community began to inhabit media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Here are two examples we’ve come across recently - both from YouTube.
The first is a PYP exhibition sample, contributed by students and teachers at the International School of Tianjin, China.
The second example is from a TOK student in the Diploma Programme. We don’t know who he is or where he’s from, as there are no end credits, but we think you’ll enjoy it nevertheless:
With either video, we make no claims as to their adherence to programme requirements. What we do want to do, though, is use them to highlight a number of important issues.
The first is that they’re two examples of students using new technologies to get a message across and show evidence of learning. This is something we will need to come to terms with as a curriculum and assessment authority, and particularly as an awarding body, in the future. Recognising student learning, when evidence of it is so dispersed on the web, will be a real challenge for us in the years ahead.
The second is that they’re both examples of resources which can help teachers in furthering their understanding of the programmes. Discussions around what’s good, and not so good, about them are invaluable for teachers as they attempt to come to terms with programme requirements and continuously improve their practice.
Thirdly, and as a corollary of the above two points, where these examples are located will increasingly be irrelevant. What is important is how we describe them (ie what metadata will we need to establish and use in order to tag these resources?) and how we link to them (ie how can we make use of the semantic web to go beyond a closed teacher resource exchange, such as that on the OCC?)
- that we have added a universal navigation bar to most of the IB sites that are public.
