A culture of sharing

share your ideas by Britta Bohlinger on Flickr! We teach children from an early age to share. Learning to share the sandbox, our favorite toy, or a book is a formative experience that we all go through as we learn to relate to others.A lot of emphasis is placed on sharing when we are young, but it’s just…

5 Minutes to Safer Searching & Viewing

We always want to help our students find the most relevant information when searching or viewing content online. Here are two great suggestions which can lead to a safer online experience for our students. 1. View Purewww.viewpure.com is a site which allows you to ‘purify’ YouTube videos by stripping away the comments section and the…

Massively Misunderstood Minecraft

Overheard in the lab: “My Mum says she can’t believe UWC is offering a Minecraft activity. She says it’s a waste of time.”Me: <breathe> DM from @jplaman:   Me: <breathe> I guess it’s time! This blog post is proving hard to write. I have rewritten this paragraph about 14 times, mostly because I am trying…

Getting Connected – the Why and How

Why? Screenshot via sxoop.com/twitter/mosaic.pl The question of why connect is an important one for us to consider. Of course, being connected can lead you to lots of great resources and ideas for lessons, but what we are really talking about here is connecting with people. It is through these personal connections that you can build…

Dealing with distraction, 5 tools to help you get things done

We have chosen to give our students in grade six upwards their own Macbook. This has obvious benefits to their learning allowing them to create, collaborate and communicate with digital tools that they always have at their disposal.  However, as Spiderman said: There’s no question that digital tools can be tremendously distracting. Our students have…

doing more with diigo

Diigo is a great way to keep track of all of your bookmarks in the cloud so that they can be readily pulled up on any device connected to the Internet. Yes, and…  there’s a whole lot more that it can do. Diigo works best when it’s tools are integrated right in to your browser. …

Making Learning Visible – Mobile Video in PE

How do you know what you look like when performing a physical skill? This is a question I ask myself again and again on the golf course when the round ends up going south.  Was it my elbow, my grip, am I shifting my feet, not keeping my head down? For anybody who’s watched an…

Learning with Laptops and Lanschool

Laptops in the hands of our student present an enormous array of opportunities for learning. They also present several significant challenges that we must work to overcome, especially for those of us who are relatively new to a one-to-one learning environment. There are several things that a teacher can do to maximize the potential for…