Mr. Hamada’s Universe

Please excuse the brevity (and funny punctuation) of the next few blog posts. Being in Europe has its drawbacks: expensive internet cafes and funny keyboards.

At least, that”s what I hope it will look like! I”m only on the 5th day of the holiday, but thanks to Flickr, those are the things I”m hoping to see. You can travel anywhere in the world using other people”s photos, or you can harness the power of visual images using clear, sharp and near-professional photos.

Image Credits:

Nice-Cote-d’Azur-card by designer-wg.de

Contrails and the Pisa Tower by ccgd

relax in river to the Arno by pasma

Salzburg Cathedral by joiseyshowaa

Nuremberg: The City Clock by bill barber (very sporadic)

Relief…Bleriot-Plage, Calais by grange85

London Eye at Night by Philipp Klinger (in US & CDN 14/06 till 04/07)

Mermaid Quay by JohnGreenaway

Exposition Universelle by . SantiMB . (uninspired)

Please excuse the brevity (and funny punctuation) of the next few blog posts. Being in Europe has its drawbacks: expensive internet cafes and funny keyboards.

I thought I”d include a picture of where I”m currently internet-ing. My family and I are on our big European holiday and we”re currently camping about 800 meters from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Flickr could be used in all sorts of ways in the classroom. A quick example: on day 1 of a new school year, have the students search Flickr to find photos that represent their summer holiday. It could be literal, such as my photo above, or it could be more symbolic.

Photo: Contrails and the Pisa Tower by ccgd

Please excuse the brevity (and funny punctuation) of the next few blog posts. Being in Europe has its drawbacks: expensive internet cafes and funny keyboards.

Teachers have always gotten around traditional copyright law, whether they knew it or not, by the “Fair Use” standards in place for education. While this serves us well, it will not always serve our students. Nor does traditional copyright laws take into account the instantaneous nature of sharing and remixing information.

Enter Creative Commons.

CC licensing is necessary in today”s world. It can, I think, be thought of as a community. I”ll use your images, music, etc. and you can use mine. There is nobody policing anything. It”s up to the individual users to ensure that they are abiding by the terms of the license that has been placed on the work by the creator.

I kind of like that idea when it comes to students: empowering people to ensure that they are using other people”s work responsibly.

For a math teacher, wikis and blogs are hard. There is no intuitive method for students (or teachers) to input proper mathematical symbols and equations without a learning LaTex or importing a whole bunch of graphics.

The power of the wiki comes from its collaborative opportunities – the ability for students to create a shared knowledge. In this paradigm, the teacher takes on the role of caretaker or shepherd, keeping her students on task and headed in the general direction of their goal. Like any large herd, there will be ramblings, amblings and detours, but these can be seen as necessary ‘distractions’ in order to give the students ownership.

Welker’s Wikinomics is a good example of this. Jason Welker uses his wiki as a content delivery platform, allowing students total access to the course material. The collaboration, however, comes mostly through the discussion forums, where students are constantly asking questions (perhaps prompted in class?) and their peers are constantly replying. It is through this exchange that understanding is created.

Economics is an example of a course where the concepts remain constant but the examples are ever-changing and ubiquitous. Mathematics is a bit different. Yes, the concepts are constant, but unlike econ there are not always new examples of that concept showing up in the news. (Perhaps this is a comment on me, but I think I’ve been using the same few examples of parabolas the last 10 years!) It is difficult to have engaging discussions about topics that have been answered ad infinitum the past 10 years. The focus of the math wiki must be different. The Small Stones wiki uses a collaborative note-taking approach (called scribe posts) championed by Darren Kuropatwa. Students are responsible, on rotation, for updating the wiki with the class notes. Other students can then add details or correct mistakes that they find. In the end, it is a peer-reviewed textbook. Unlike the economics wiki, this won’t work in perpetuity. The next round of students needs to start from scratch and build their own understanding from the ground up.

My main concern with the Small Stones wiki is that it is static. It reminds me of reading a notebook, albeit in electronic form. I started a wiki with my grade 10 and 11 students this year. The initial idea was that the students would create screencast movies (using their TabletPCs, OneNote, and Cam Studio) of themselves solving problems in every unit. By the end of the course there would be a dynamic record of how to solve problems of various type. It would also give me a chance to ‘watch’ them solve problems and to identify misconceptions.

As you can tell from the tone of the previous paragraph, things didn’t quite turn out the way I imagined. I had a hard time getting the buy-in from students that this was a useful idea. I like to think that my school is pretty progressive, but the teaching methodologies tend to be quite mainstream at this point. I do hope that my new position will help change that, however.

image: Shepherd by ingirogiro
image: Come in uno specchio 1 by Hedrok

I love the TED videos.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

I subscribe to them in iTunes (opens in iTunes), update whenever I sync my iPod and usually watch them in the taxi to work or while taking my mind off the drudgery of the gym. There are so many times I have an “A-ha!” moment, thinking about how this amazing new thing relates to my curriculum. Then, more often than not, I forget about it until it’s too late.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who does this. There are quite a few TED resources out there. More importantly, there is Larry Ferlazzo, who has put together The Best Teacher Resources for TED.

Some of the most useful blog posts I’ve found are merely launching points to related posts. It highlights the collective consciousness of Web 2.0. My Personal Learning Network reads for me, vetting “The Best of the Web” that coincides with my interests. (Of course, there is always the hated “echo chamber” effect that one needs to be careful of.)

This post continues my reflection for my work on the K12 Learning 2.0 workshop. This post is a reflective post about an item of interest in my feed reader.

I know this course is about education – and the edublogosphere – but one of the greatest things about RSS is it allows me to get up-to-date news and current events. One of the best resources I’ve found, both for my own personal interest and for use in the classroom, is the The Big Picture.

Alan Taylor canvasses the wires to find pictures of interest. His most recent entry commemorates the 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

The whole blog screams “visual literacy” and I have seen entries related to math, science, history, geography and probably every other subject imaginable.

Check it out!