What are the ingredients of a good service activity?
Is there a recipe for concocting a successful service project?
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
August 22, 2011
August 21, 2011
Creating art in response to the riots?
Tomorrow I will be back in the art room for the first teaching day of the 2011-2012 school year, so summer is over – and since I live and work near London, I’m thinking about those riots – and how to engage my students in some discussions and creativity in response to the riots.
There is nothing new in artists creating art in response to conflict, of course, but the nearness of the London riots both in terms of time and geography may give my students an additional impetus.
August 18, 2011
Tools for collaborative learning
Once again, it is growing closer to the date when May session learners will hit the classrooms. It seems timely to add to my post from this time last year that emphasized the importance of collaborative leaning.
balance
The beginning of a new school year, semester or term is driven by changes and challenges. It’s an intensely busy time, often associated with things “new” – faculty, administrators, students, curricula, professional development plans, buildings, classrooms, and open houses. This stress and strain of this time of the year will often lead to a desperate plea for help and the need to find more balance in your life.
An important counterbalance to academic pressures for yourself and also your DP students might be a realignment of your cognitive and physical and emotional activities.
August 17, 2011
Royal Dutch Shell puts their hands up (???)
Following on from the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil disaster I wrote in 2010 (June 17) of the hidden oil tradgey that has been present in Nigeria for the last 50 years (Production from Nigeria started in 1958).
fermat google doodle
Did you see the google doodle for today? When you hover over the image on the google page, this text pops up: “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this doodle is too small to contain.” Delightful, n’est-ce pas?
The story of Fermat’s last theorem is one of the truly catchy ones in mathematics. Combining the power of narration and the appeal of a mystery unsolved for three and a half centuries, a TOK teacher can use this story to convey much about the nature of mathematics and mathematical proof.
Misconceptions about the Reliability of Memory
This blog post from Scientific American, 4 Things Most People Get Wrong About Memory, gives a good summary of the misconceptions most people and students harbor about memory. This topic is one of the more interesting learning outcomes of the CLOA.
What perplexes the author is that these misconceptions about Human memory persist even though memory has been shown again and again to be far from perfect. We overlook big things, forget details, conflate events. The article mentions the famous experiment in which many people asked to watch a video of people playing basketball failed to notice a person wearing a gorilla suit walk right through the middle of the scene.
The GDP Fixation
This article, How did the world get so fixated on GDP? from the Guardian raises some interesting points about why most economic commentators and policy-makers remained locked into GDP as a measure of economic success.
The author points out that:
August 16, 2011
Workshops!
Following on from last week’s blog that focused on the visual arts workshop held at Les Tapies, if you are interested in attending an IBDP visual arts workshop in the coming school year 2011 – 2012 and want to find out where and when they are on offer, visit
August 15, 2011
Finally a book for the Design Technology Diploma Course
I know for many that running a Design Technology course without a specific textbook to back up the content and understanding for students has been problematic. Most of us have worked with the very comprehensive “Advanced Design and Technology” written for AS and A level courses, however it often comes across as a little too much and too heavy for IB Diploma students. So it will probably be good news to hear that IBID press from Australia are publishing a course specific book in September: -
