Welcome to the Triple A Learning blog for MYP Language A. The most recent blog posts are listed below and you can access the blog archive by following the appropriate link in the panel on the left.
For thosen regular readers of the Triple A Blog, you’ll know that 10 new laptops were recently donated to the One Laptop Per Child project. The use of the XO laptops, as they are known, has attracted the attention of a whole host of researchers from various universities around the world.
Children in Madagascar show off their new XO laptops
Here at Triple A Learning, we’ve always supported the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) cause. With a mission to “empower the world’s poorest children through education“, who could fail to be moved by its ideals.
As teachers, we talk a lot about assessment. Do we need it? Do we want it? What kind? Criterion-based? Multiple choice tests? Project? Visual? And what do we do with it once we have it? Report on it? Re-do it? Shelve it?
As MYP teachers, we know assessment is not just a by-product of learning. We assess for learning more than we assess of learning — well, at least we should be, but I know it’s not always easy. Some schools are still stuck in “old” ways and… well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. But regardless — we know we must assess.
Triple A Learning is an IB-approved provider of MYP online workshops. Our cost-effective workshops count towards a school’s IB authorization process and are also fully recognized as part of a school’s IB programme evaluation.
Registration for the following workshops in all 8 MYP subject groups is now open
Everyone at Triple A Learning wishes you a peaceful and merry Christmas period and a Happy New Year and we hope you will enjoy a relaxing vacation. We think you will enjoy this updated digital nativity story:
I wanted to quickly share with you a new app that you might be interested in, particularly if you are a teacher of Design Technology and your school or students have access to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.
If you find a blog post useful, you may want to use it with students as stimulus or perhaps encourage them to look further at the issues raised by the post. To use a post with students, you may find the Web2PDF tool useful. This is a great site that will convert a blog posting or blog page to a pdf file for you. Having the posting as a pdf file may make it easier to use with students or even perhaps to make the file available to them through your own intranet, departmental web site or perhaps Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Web2PDf is available from the following web address:
I thought for a while about whether this was an appropriate title for this post. Are teachers designers? Should they be? Am I suggesting that all teachers are designers, or just some? And what, exactly, are they designing?
I pondered and thought maybe I should title it Teachers As Designers, putting it more as suggestion, rather than a statement. But doing so seemed to take away the assertiveness with which I want to talk about the subject of teachers and designers; like the difference between casually mentioning to a friend a book as a recommended read, as opposed to just buying the book and plopping it into your friend’s lap.
I’ve recently read an excerpt from this book: In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization by Deborah Meier. The excerpt I read, Chapter Four, was for a course I’m taking as part of my graduate studies. Chapter Four is about teachers trusting teachers. I loved it, and I daresay I’m intrigued to read more of this book (I’ve added it to my ever-growing wish list!).
In this chapter, Meier talks about the different types of trust — trust in personal relationships, trust in professional relationships, friends versus colleagues, and how trust as colleagues ultimately makes us better teachers, and makes our schools better places of learning. If you don’t already know who Meier is, you’ll find her examples quite heavily American but that is because of her context — she is an experienced educator, administrator, and academic in American education. However, the details and specific aspects of her examples are easily transferable to any school because what she gets at is why community is so important to learning.
Years ago, when I was a fresh-faced teacher right out of teacher’s college, I interviewed for a job at a private high school and was asked the following question: “Do you think you can ever know too much about your students?” Sure that this was a trick question, I answered hesitantly, but honestly: “No.” When asked to explain myself, I justified my response (nervously) at length, explaining that I felt that the more I knew about my students, the better I could serve them as a teacher. I gave examples, waxed lyrical about how committed and caring I was, and generally made up the answer I thought they wanted to hear.
I mentioned that I was a brand-spanking new teacher, right? 
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