School 2.0 in SA

Paul de Wet from Michael House was sponsored by Casio to come and do a workshop with the maths/literacy teachers on how to create stunning assessment tasks using Word 2003, Autograph, Geometers Sketchpad, Mathtype and the stunning Casio emulator.

As quite a few of the mathematical literacy teachers where in Durban for the Maths lit IEB conference I did a tweet summary of his presentation and propably killed my entire twitter network with all my tweets which must have been very irritating for my non-maths twitter followers. Next time I promise not to be so cruel and have learnt from Frznguru that I could use Chatzy to create a backchannel chatroom to do this kind of thing. The good thing about using Twitter is that those “listening in” helped me to get other information and the maths teachers said that they did learn a few new tricks. So Paul, your passion was extended on a global scale (give or take the few people that I drove crazy).

The feed for the session can be found here using the hashtag #casiowshop. Tweets are stored in  reverse chronological order – so read them from old (at bottom) to new.

Here is what we got up to in the afternoon session:

Find more photos like this on Maths Literacy Teacher’s Network

As community moderator at our mathematical literacy teacher community (www.mathsliteracy.ning.com) I see my main role as facilitator of relationships and communications as well as technical support person within the community. Within this context I have actually learn so much, in unexpected areas. One of my community members posed a question starting off with ” This must be the dumbest question…” and that lead to me having a wondeful new learning experience!

She wanted to draw a system of axes (with grid) to use in her linear programming worksheet where the learners could sketch on the grid. So I immediately jumped to the occation by uploading a ‘How to’:

We tend to want to remedy situations by offering help too fast and she then gently reminded me that she is working in the new WORD 2007. So I went to investigate if I could do it in Word 2007. I have been avoiding getting to know it as it looks so different from Word 2003 and the times that I tried to figure it out, I got quite frustrated. So I forced myself…

What a pleasant surprise! It got oodles of nice features and once you get over your innitial abhorance, I found myself getting around quite effortlessly. My only worry is that I will now have to retrain my teachers to use the new Word from scratch…

So the moral of this story is that we must not be scared to learn new stuff even if the “old stuff” were so familiar and comfortable. If we don’t we, might be missing out on wonderful new features…. I do realise that TIME is a big problem. So I have made a little tutorial to demonstrate how to do a system of axes with gridlines in Word 2007.

To download, click here