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A few shifts

Message on Audio and Pics From Today's Community Advent Service

Here are some pics and the audio from today's community advent service at Dahlonega Baptist. The message, "The Promise," is on Genesis 3:15. More audio teaching can be found here on the Creekstone website (the quality is not great-- to be improved soon with more adequate recording equipment).  The top photo is members of Creekstone's worship team (Elijah Merrett, Chris Gamble, Jesse Turk and Lauren Stephenson) leading music. Wow... they did a GREAT job!

(download)

Last Night's SNF Teaching Handout on Worship

(download)

I'm inadequate, apparently

Or at least, that's what the person observing me thought of my Year 1 music lesson last Wednesday. The headteacher gave me my feedback today. It was pretty poor feedback, much of which I disagreed with. Okay, I had no learning objectives. Big fail on my part. But apart from that, I don't think it went too badly. Year 1 are amongst my least favourite year groups to teach, along with Reception and Year 2. The whole of Key Stage 1 then. Not surprising, seeing as though I'm trained to teach secondary kids.

So who knows where from here. Learning objectives would be a good step forward, especially seeing as though the lovely OFSTED could come as soon as next week. Hopefully I'll have turned into at least a satisfactory teacher by then. Or, if they could observe me teaching older kids, I'd be happy with that too.

In other news, I have the day off tomorrow, and piles of ironing to get through. Suggested listening for me whilst I iron?

Class as Fun: Halloween Math Class

Should adolescents, and not just children, be reminded that hard work begets success?

Positive thinking with students.

A few weeks ago I read a very interesting post from Dominic McGladdery about giving effective feedback to students. When I mark homework or assignments, I usually follow the "traditional marking" method which is basically using a red pen with "lots of crossing out", the type of marking which "confuses students and can demotivate them, too. (The ones who bother to read it, that is)"!
Well, I used to do this and never questioned it (because when I was at school, my teachers use to inflict this on me too, so I thought it was "ok" to do it!) until I read Dominic's post and it opened my eyes to lots of other types of marking which make way more sense to keep students motivated.

They are lots of different ways of marking positively, but the one I chose to try is the "highlighting method" from Chris Hart (you can read his rainbow assessment blog post which explains the method in more details.). I highlight where students have achieved the set objectives or have written a well structured sentence with the appropriate vocabulary and grammar, which allows them to see clearly which are the good bits in their work, so they can use them again and again. So instead of highlighting the bad bits, the good bits are highlighted which is way more motivating!

On the same note, before I used to ask students to highlight the words they didn't understand in a text they had to read. Now,  I ask students to highlight all the parts they understand. This way, they can see that they can actually understand most of the sentences in a text and they can also see how much progress that have done in understanding a new language.

Students are more motivated and therefore more engaged :)

What about you? How do you give feedback to your students?

Token Indian

I got a new teaching gig for November 29th.  The only one outside of School of the Bible this year that I've done since the summer.  Let us hope things go better than they did last time.  This new opportunity doesn't involve a whole church service, but rather a 45 minute-ish discussion that goes by the name of Sunday school.  

We've been going to a new church here in Tyler and have plugged into a few areas.  One of which has been a Sunday school class called Merge, because it was a merge of the 20 something class and the 30 something class.  Last week I got a call from the normal teacher asking me if I would like to teach on the 29th.  At first I didn't want to because that's my first response to anything, let alone public speaking, but I know I need to take any teaching opportunity possible to grow in that area.  So I agreed to teach, which is only going to be leading discussion.

Faith is what I'll be talking about.  What is the difference between the blind faith that many attribute to Christians and the faith spoken of in the Bible?  I'm sure there is a major difference and we'll find out together.

Divine foreknowledge and conditional prophecy is my next teaching in School of the Bible.  That's a heavy topic and I should be studying it this week, but I've taken the 'vacation' approach instead.  

One praise report I have is that Thanksgiving is next week and I haven't been asked to be the token Indian in any play or school program, nor have I been approached to partake in a 'reconciliation' ceremony.  Amen.

Second Last Class - Seeing Early Results

I've been teaching a course called Oral Rhetoric, a course where I work with students on their public speaking, both in face-to-face situations and in creating online audio recordings. Yesterday was the second last class and we spent most of the class time listening to their second last assignment, a commercial/pitch to advertise their final assignment - a story of theirs that they create a recording of and post online. The recordings of their pitches we heard were wonderful, and why wouldn't they be. These students have spent all their lives listening to radio and tv commercials. They might not have Gladwell's 10,000 hours of commercial-listening to gain expertise, but they do have hours and hours of soaking in just how persuasion works.

Over the term, I asked them to read about and practice two kinds of rhetorical skills:

• traditional -
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_Speech
  

• current -
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_%28public_relations%29
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word especially In Business
• http://www.heapr.com/#l=web&q=[%22Sound+Bites%22+]&p=[[1,1]] An interesting new search engine showing many links
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator_pitch
  •  http://mashable.com/2009/03/31/pitchtv/   
  • http://www.dumblittleman.com/2007/08/how-to-craft-killer-elevator-pitch-that.html

Both the traditional and the current forms of rhetoric were in evidence in the pitches we listened to, but what really thrilled me were the spontaneous responses. We're using PBWorks for our course container and it allows comments on pages. At the bottom of the Pitch page, was a conversation, a series of comments praising many of the pitches. I was thrilled because I had been trying to develop a Community of Practice approach in the course. After almost every presentation or posting of student work, I asked students to describe their own experiences while doing their own presentation/recording and to give positive feedback to at least three of their classmates. This was an assignment and posted on a weekly Discussions page on the course wiki. I wanted them to learn from each other, and to get used to learning from colleagues as a way to continue learning in their futures. The responses in the Comments section of the Pitch page were an unrequired, spontaneous manifestation of giving each other feedback. What that says to me is that some of the students have developed the habit of responding, and could recognize the technical possibilities (the Comment space at the bottom of the page) for sharing those responses. They have both the communication and the digital know-how.

Makes me happy

 

Joan Vinall-Cox, PhD (905)
JNthWEB Consulting - http://jnthweb.ca/
Social Media & Learning

Intelligent Tutoring Systems

This post was triggered by an email I received for papers for a conference. One of the suggested topics was Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Here is what Wikipedia says about ITS:

It occurred to me that a simple system can be modeled (and tried) with AIML (artificial intelligence markup language) to provide introductory courses in several subjects. There is an AIML engine available written in Python called PyAIML. We already tried a simple student project (a help system for SugarCRM) using this engine.

The UI can be implemented using Processing or some other similar powerful visualization tool. The visual models can also be built using a Visualization Modeling Language (on top of SVG). A better method, would be to blend an instant messenger like chat interface, with a response window that supports simple graphics (to display diagrams). To do a project like this, we need the following:

1. A customizable chat (based on Jabber or some other similar client)
2. A surface that can display not only text but simple graphics
3. A KB built on something like AIML
4. Content customized towards teaching an introductory subject
5. A simple visualization interface like Processing

This is certainly an exciting area to explore for some student projects. A few good tools to create content in AIML format would be a great first step.