Triple A Learning IB Blogs
August 30, 2011
The balance between food and water supply
Water systems at risk from growing demand for food – expert
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/water-systems-at-risk-from-growing-demand-for-food-expert/
A postcard from Greece
As I sat in the hotel restaurant and watched the teenager to my left consume his sixth large plate of desserts and fruit, my mind turned to the concept of statistics and how this affects the hotel and leisure industry and business practices in general. A strange dinner pre-occupation no doubt, but this is what twenty years as a teacher and examiner does to you!
When I first started to teach the IB in 1985, statistics played a more significant role in the Business and Management programme. Students were expected to understand and apply the concepts of distribution, standard deviation, probability and even (very strangely) Pascal’s triangle. So how does this relate to my Greek holiday? My consideration at dinner concerned a conversation I had with the hotel manager about food. More and more hotels are moving to half-board, or fully inclusive, packages. Here the price paid for the hotel/holiday includes a combination of breakfast, lunch and dinner and possibly snacks and drinks as well. The hotel where I was staying had changed to a half-board and buffet approach about 18 months previously. The advantages are clear; the hotel resident is offered meals in the hotel at an attractive price, so there is little incentive to leave the premises. The overall cost of the holiday plus meals allows the hotel to make a profit margin not only on the room, but on the meals as well. In addition, the hotel may be able to offer a range of ancillary services to an increasingly captive audience and, as a result, boost revenues even further. These can include alcohol and beverages to half-board residents and personal services, such as spa and entertainment options in addition to the fully inclusive package. As residents tend to be more static, there are further opportunities in terms of vehicle hire, sports activities and trips to tourist and historic sites, on which the hotel can earn significant commissions.
August 28, 2011
SlideShare
SlideShare is a useful resource offering a wide range of material. It claims to be the best way to share presentations, documents and professional videos. You can sign up for a free account or go pro. Using the search term “Psychology” produces over 6000 pages of hits though the presentations range in quality and revelance to the IB course. For example a featured SlideShare was uploaded by Carla Piper titled “The Brain: How does it work?” Teachers and students can upload their own presentation and gain a wider and authentic audience for their work.
Curriculum Review Report 2: TOK “too student-centred”?
Out of TOK Curriculum Review has come a very useful new document recently posted on the Online Curriculum Centre. If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to go straight there and download it. Personally, I applaud the work of the curriculum review committee, with appreciation of all the work behind this document. It flags some problems in the present course, based on work that has actually come out of ToK classrooms, and shows us directions in which TOK is presently moving in order to correct them.
The committee is evidently trying to find the ideal path between a prescriptive, content-based course and a responsive, learner-based course in order to gain the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither. It’s a challenge – a challenge for curriculum review to present a syllabus that gives improved guidance along this path (guidance that I suspect will be universally welcomed) and a challenge for teachers to distinguish ways in which the course has actually changed from ways in which essentially the same course has been clarified and developed.
August 26, 2011
China’s Trade
Understanding China’s new place in the global economy can help students understand a range of important concepts within Section 4, International Economics. Reasons for trade, Balance of Payments, Free Trade and Protectionism and Globalization are all relevant to China’s spectacular economic transformation.
The Financial Times provides a number of interactive graphics that students can study so that they have real world examples to cite in their writing.
Introducing anthropology through ethnography
As part of the never-ending search to find the perfect ethnographies to introduce anthropology, I have been keeping a list of popular titles among IB anthropology teachers (most of whom are using 4 throughout a course of study). I will leave articles aside for the moment and stick with the titles of full ethnographic studies. So far, here is what I have collected…
Abu-Lughod, L. (2000) Veiled Sentiments
August 25, 2011
yteach
yteach?…..because the holidays are good or because you are passionate about enthusing young people to develop an understanding of the ways of the universe.
Actually yteach is an online resource that my school has just subscribed to. There are thousands of activities. There are instructional video clips, student exercises, animated diagrams. As a teacher you can click and drop these resources into a playlist to make a presentation for your whiteboard or you can drop them into a class assignment which the students access through y-learn.
August 24, 2011
Japanese rice field art
I was so amazed to see images created in their rice fields by Japanese farmers that I even checked Snopes to find out whether this story was simply a myth in email circulation. Snopes confirms that it’s true (and I thus raise obliquely a few further questions about truth tests!). Then I found a story in The Guardian — from two years ago. Did everyone but me already know about this? An article in The Japan Times (from four years ago) gives further details: “by precisely planting four varieties of rice with differently colored leaves in fields their ancestors have farmed for centuries, the people of Inakadate Village have this year grown remarkable reproductions of famous woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).”
The elaborate images are designed to be viewed from above and created entirely through the placing of different plants. Japan Times staff writer Yoko Hani explains:
August 23, 2011
Barack, BIS, body shop = bisa
In a tone reminiscent of Barack Obama’s election mantra of “Yes, we can”, and inspired by CAS Coordinator Adrian Thirkell, a group of dedicated CAS students at the British International School (BIS) have launched the first school in the Asia Pacific region, if not the world, that is run entirely by CAS students.
It’s a clever name for a very significant project. The British International School’s acronym – BIS, forms the first 3 letters of the Bahasa Indonesia word “bisa”, which in English translates as “I/we can, can do”.
