We spend so much of our time online. The lines between work and play are being redefined and we need to take a little break every now and again to laugh. Hope this helps you to relax while you wind down from grades and the flurry of activity that the end of term brings.
Triple A Learning IB Blogs
Technology
Welcome to the Triple A Learning blog for MYP Technology. 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.
December 16, 2011
November 24, 2011
Triple A donates new computers to One Laptop Per Child cause
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.
What OLPC believes
February 12, 2011
Design and Technology Manifesto 2011
“Design and technology is about making things that work well. Creating these things is hugely exciting: it is an inventive fun activity.”
Sir James Dyson
February 2, 2011
Bubble Ball and Twitter
Most of my project ideas and inspiration come from the news. Last week provided me with two fantastic ideas for students. I have not really flushed them out yet, in terms of what will this look like in the classroom, but I know I need to use them.
The first one is Bubble Ball. This is an iPhone app, that topped the download list from list in the Apple store much of last week. It was downloaded more often than Angry birds, which I have to admit is one of my guilty pleasures. Amazingly it was created by a 14 year old boy, Robert Nay. He used an open source software known as Corona. Robert claims he tried several other development tools, but found this the easiest to learn on his own. What an excellent example for students. With resources in schools also being in short supply more often than not, this also provides an inexpensive programming option for your students. What`s more, is that it provides students with a real world, engaging platform to share and test their work. Just think how interesting students reflections in the evaluation stage of the design cycle will be if they have opportunity to share their work with the world. For those of you that like quantitative stats, think of how telling the number of downloads of a student made app would be in terms of measuring success. I would love to hear others ideas about how they use this in the classroom, so please post a reply about how you use this!
January 20, 2011
Investigations
What does a good investigation look like? What are the key aspects of an investigation. Here you will find a quick “cheat sheet” for student investigations, as well as some ideas for building an excellent scope and sequence.
Every investigation must have four things:
January 10, 2011
IB-approved MYP online workshops
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
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December 23, 2010
A digital nativity story
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:
December 14, 2010
Finding inspiration for projects
If you are at all like me, you are probably using your upcoming Christmas holiday in part for technology course development. Time to re-work or develop projects to replace ones that you are not pleased with anymore. Sometimes, perhaps more often than not I sit down to develop a unit of work and am faced with writers block. The new unit planner is fantastic, because first and foremost I am not starting with a white page. It has a few other advantages as well though. Stage 1 is a great brainstorm sheet for me. I often write in the Area of Interaction I want to work with, and the basic concept I want to teach, and then figure out the unit question from there, like sorting out a jigsaw puzzle. A few years ago, I decided to let the students do this work instead.
I have three methods of getting the students to write my unit plan.
November 9, 2010
Technology Tasks
As you may know, the MYP Technology guide is under revision. The normal MYP curricula revision cycle is four years. Which means, after 2 years of using any guide a group is formed and the revision of the guide is started. This process is currently underway, and an interesting idea that came out of teacher suggestions is the creation of smaller tasks for MYP Technology. The idea behind this, is that it is very challenging to run through the design cycle many times in a year, particularly in years 4 and 5 of the MYP tech program. Several schools have volunteered to try out using smaller tasks, which would supplement the creation of a full project. These smaller formative tasks can be completed more frequently, for schools who feel that they do not have enough evidence to base final assessment grades on. So far, I have heard trials are going well, although not necessarily lightening the load on teachers and marking. It will be interesting to see what develops when the trail is evaluated in the spring!
July 7, 2010
Converting blog posts to pdf files
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:
