Jonesieblog

This may be the last post until mid-August.  On the other hand I may get bored and do loads of blogging over the Summer holidays.  Either way, we break up on Friday, and I’ve really enjoyed my first year of blogging - thanks for reading, commenting and being there

Stumble it!

Every once in a while, a lesson just comes together beautifully.  I had such a lesson today.  The learning intentions were that we master multiplying and dividing by powers of 10.

The S2 class has only been together for a week, and is quite mixed in ability.  We started the lesson with 10 quick questions, and this showed that about half the class could already do these problems pretty accurately.

At this point, I threw caution to the wind and said “In 10 minutes from now, we’ll do another set of 10 - work together however you want until then to see if we can all get at least 7 out of 10.  If anyone doesn’t manage, we share responsibility - especially those people who did well the first time!”  I didn’t give them any resources, or specify how they should work.  To my delight, they organized themselves into groups around folk who were confident and spent 10 minutes trying to explain to each other the methods.

The next 10 quick questions were answered much more accurately, but we still had a few folk that needed more help.  This presented a challenge for the “experts” as well as those who needed help.  Some “experts” came up to the whiteboard and tried some more explanation, and those needing help gave them some honest feedback about how helpful they had been!  The onus was on the “experts” to explain clearly - those needing help were in the driving seat.

In the end, we got everyone through the last sets of 10 questions with at least 7 out of 10, and one of those needing help got a spontaneous round of applause for a 9 out of 10.

It was a real feelgood lesson that built the sense of community in the class.  I think I’ll being using the idea of a shared responsibility for the success of everyone a lot more in future.

Stumble it!

Someone has been listening

 I’ve just been into the phase 3 version of the Glow portal, and they have included instructions to insert rss feeds into pages.  The way to do it is rather circuitous, but at least it is now doable.  I’ve tested it with a couple of feeds, and it seems to work fine.

The “glowing potential” bit has a page showing how to insert external web sites into pages, and they have use our scotedublogs.org.uk as one of the examples.  Very flattering

Stumble it!

A couple of things have led me to writing this post.  Firstly, I spent an evening with some soldiers on the Friday night before the kids arrived at Rothiemurchus Lodge, and secondly I watched “why we fight” last night.

My evening with the army guys reminded me that the men and women out in Afghanistan and Iraq getting shot at and blown up on a daily basis in our names are just regular folk.  They are not imperialist fiends.  They are regular folks, many of them from relatively deprived backgrounds, who saw the army as a way of making a decent living.  They are being killed and maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we don’t really seem to care.

I marched before the war began, and I wrote to my MP to complain, but once the bombs started falling on Baghdad I went pretty quiet.  And I have remained so.

I read Robert Fisk before the assault on Iraq started, and trusted his judgement that winning the war would be easy but that the real problems would then begin, and be protracted and bloody.  And when this came to pass, I felt a bit smug.  But I didn’t go back out on the streets to bring our troops home.  I didn’t call for direct action.  I just went back to my cosy life and shook my head at the news.

I am clearly not alone.  Millions of us marched in London, Glasgow and elsewhere prior to the invasion.  No subsequent marches have come anywhere near those numbers.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Stumble it!

This morning we were supposed to turn off our computers, as the school link to Haddington was getting switched to a broader pipe - “you’ll get to the bottleneck quicker” Alan C joked!  I ignored this request, but unplugged by machine from the network.  Call me arrogant if you will, but it made no sense to me that I had to have my desktop machine switched off even if it wasn’t connected to the network in any way, so I kept it on.

This meant that I found myself working on a computer without access to the Internet.  I rarely travel with a laptop, so Internet-free computing is something I have not experienced for years.  It was very strange!  The inner dialogue was something like: dum dee dum - OK, I’ll just - Oh, no, I can’t check that.  Right, I’ll do this instead - this is going fine. Ah - I wonder if - oh no, I can’t check that.  Hmm - OK, here’s something I can do without the Internet.  The work I did on some Geogebra files was productive in the end, but it felt very odd indeed to be without the Web at my fingertips.

Stumble it!