School 2.0 in SA

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

We all know what it is like when our child comes to us the day before an
assignment is due and ask us to help them with it (do it for them???) So here is
how it actually SHOULD be done if we really care about giving our child a
learning experience, which I would think…is the actual objective of
assignments…..

A big part of LEARNING for the FUTURE will be not the information so much, but how to

• discern what info is relevant

• and the HOW of extracting and getting to the relevant information

• as well as the skill to summarise the chosen info into a CRITICAL reflection

• NO MORE CUT AND PASTE!!!!!!

So it will be cool if we can guide our kids HOW to do this (as the teachers are not necessarily going to do
it)…a tall order but IMPORTANT! This means that we sit with them and learn with them (as opposed to doing it for them…) Asking them all the time what they think look important and ….what does this mean to you…

I was asked by a parent to PLEASE just send them a few website addresses for their child’s assignment on “Discuss productivity and its effects on economic prosperity, growth and global competition”.  So it made me think (which is a good thing). How do we help our kids if we really feel strongly about giving them skills to cope in a future world (which for me is the definition of education)?

Here is my guideline. And I am hoping that I can get some help and suggestions here to fine-tune my thoughts… (note to self…will go and post this in my classroom 2.0 community and ask for help)

Help your child to…·        

• Understand the topic that was given to them. For this Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org)  works well as an entry understanding place.
  • Eg: Productivity…what does it mean…how is it defined
  • economic prosperity…..
  • growth
  • global competition·        
•  Google the topic
  • Again: By pasting keywords one for one
  • by pasting the whole thing into the search window
  • By taking sections of the task and adding the local perspective
    eg.   growth +’South Africa” (remember to combined words with “..”)       
• Go and search in  Del.icio.us (It is a site where real people bookmark stuff…so the articles you get there are always very relevant-my favourite tool!)
  • Eg: search for “economic growth” ·        
• For a bit of interactive fun…go to Youtube and do a search for a relevant video (remember our kids are digital natives- they love multimedia)·        

Once you have your search results:

• Glance over the search results and ask your child/yourself: ”What looks like it could be most relevant to the topic?
• Dive into the chosen articles and see if you can get an idea of how it relates to your topic·        
• Form your own opinion about the topic and critically discuss it in your assignment!! 

Hope this helps.  

I am here today with some wonderful Curriculum advisors from Limpopo and we are teaching one another how to draw figures in Word. In the “old days” we would just “cut and paste” (as with scizzors and glue) our maths figures into our papers, which resulted in us not really being able to use the resource effectively again. So today we will do it in our papers!

For a step by step guide on how to do this, click here