Follow the links below to see the range on offer. Our next session begins on May 28th. Do not miss out on these…book now to update your professional training. Our interactive workshops and resources will help take your career to the next level and support your classroom practice. Our courses cover subject-specific and whole-school topics and make the in-service training budget go further.

We also have an exciting new range of Triple A Learning workshops to supplement our IB-approved offering.

• Artists using Art: looking at transcription & appropriation to enhance art teaching and learning
• Assessing 20th century world history topics: the Cold War
• Business & Management: Tackling the pre-seen case study (Paper 1)
• Business & Management: Teaching Accounting and Finance
• Developing and extending CAS in your learning community
• Extended Essays – roles, responsibilities, research and resources
• Introduction to Higher Education counselling
• Language A: Meaningful Study and Assessment in Part 4 – Options
• Music Prescribed works: analysing, comparing and contrasting Prokoviev and Xian
• Supporting student inquiry in the DP
• Teaching International Economics workshop
• What makes an IB Library?

All our workshops are developed and mentored by highly experienced practitioners – many of whom have been senior examiners.

Workshops available…

Follow the links below (or select the IB Workshops tab at the top of the page) for details of all workshops running from 28th May 2012

IB-approved DP Workshops  (Scroll down and select Diploma Programme)

• These workshops count towards a school’s IB authorization process and, depending on the category chosen, are fully recognised as part of the IB authorization process
• All workshops require 4-6 hours commitment per week to satisfy the certification requirements. Workshops cost from (GBP) £150 to £395 depending on the length of workshop

Triple A Learning Workshops  (Scroll down and select Triple A Learning IB Workshops)

Our own Triple A Learning workshops are designed with you in mind. They are both subject specific and whole-school  related. They have been developed to to support excellent classroom teachers by providing both strategies for delivery and shared resources. These workshops are not recognised by the IB for school authorization and evaluation purposes.

We also offer an extensive number of IB-approved MYP workshops.

To register and find out more…

Already have an account with us? Go to our Workshop Booking System  Not registered before? Go to Registration Guidance  If you have any queries, please contact us at workshops@triplealearning.com.

The Poke provides a summary of the best hoaxes in 2012 and 2011:

April Fool Awards 2012 – The Poke

April Fool Awards 2011 – The Poke

… and stories that could have been pranks but were not:

2012

2011

2010

… and classic April fools

Flying Penguins

1957 Spaghetti Harvest

The fictional Island of San Serriffe

… and the Top 100 April Fools of all time according to the Museum of Hoaxes

As many MYP teachers will have realized if they haven’t been told, the MYP unit planner is very much based on good educational practice including UbD, Differentiated Instruction and Teaching for Understanding. It provides a framework for the teacher/designer to bring together the major elements of a unit and then work backwards from there; “starting with the end in mind”, as Covey would say. The key part of the MYP unit planner is putting the content to be taught into a real-world context provided by an area of interaction and then designing a culminating assessment in which students can demonstrate their performance. This is exactly what Wiggins is talking about  and what the MYP unit planner was meant to do. The focus is on student action and not on content. Content knowledge in the MYP is the ‘stuff’ teachers teach kids so that they understand better the underlying concepts. The other desirable effect of this approach is that schools are not required to teach a static body of content and this provides the programme’s flexibility in different school and curriculum systems. What Wiggins’ thought experiment does is push the areas of interaction (soon to be Global Contexts, so I hear) even more into the foreground as this is where the action component lies.

To explain his thinking a little further, here’s a quote that I was drawn toward.

“Video games are especially startling from the perspective of conventional views of curriculum and instruction. According to the standard view, I should never be able to learn and greatly improve at the games since there is no formal and explicit curriculum framed by knowledge, and – even more puzzling – no one teaches me anything! I shouldn’t learn but I do. In games (and in life), I begin with performance challenges, not technical knowledge. I receive no upfront teaching (or even manuals any more in games and other software!) but I learn based on the attempts to perform and feedback from trying – just as I did when learning to walk or hold a spoon. How is that possible? Conventional views of curriculum and instruction have no good explanation for it.”

I wrote a blog some weeks ago about my efforts to learn to play the Bass Guitar. My blog was all about the wonderful array of resources online that I could turn to for help. In these past couple of months, I’ve learned how to handle the instrument, how to play some scales, and how to play along to some fairly simple tracks – I’ve lowered my sights a little from The Police to the Foo Fighters as the bass tracks are easier to follow    Along the way, I’ve picked up some ‘knowledge’ of music; not intentionally and certainly not by cramming over a textbook! As Wiggins says, “What else might follow from thinking of performance, not knowledge, as the aim of education? We might finally realize the absurdity of marching through textbooks”. Like a video game, no one has taught me to play Bass and I’m not following a ‘curriculum’. By the way, I’m really enjoying it!

What has this got to do with Triple A Learning? Our workshops are designed to provide teachers the tools to do their jobs of supporting, encouraging and managing student learning. The workshops model Wiggins’ process – rather than ‘tell’ teachers ‘information’, they bring teachers together so that they can explore what they do and how they can do it better. In the video game analogy, I’ve watched endless numbers of teenagers at my house playing Guitar Hero or Rabbid Rabbits; their proficiency seems to grow out of working together and sharing tips and ideas with one another.

Back in the 1980s, the newpaper USA Today was a leader in the use of InfoGraphics, following increasing use in the UK newspaper The Times. Older readers may recall  that the USA Today editor was criticized for “oversimplifying” news and having tendencies for prefering “entertainment over respect for content and data” which led to the idea of  chartjunk. While some might question the qualities of the graphic itself, its use over the past few decades has established it in the publishers’ repetoire.

Anyone out there using them; anyone have students use them in presentations? We’d love to publish some, so please get in touch

I have experimented with a couple of topics – one of which will form the basis of my next post on Apple. This is my curated topic on the experience of online learning. As you can see, it is possible to capture the posts and embed them on a wordpress blog, although only 10 webpages that can be shown, even if your curated topic has more. The layout is in the form of slides, unlike the magazine style curated topic which can be accessed here.

Scoop-it has a useful blog which records user experience as well as reporting on improvements and updates and the knowledge base (FAQ) provides step-by-step instructions on curating your topic. Scoop-it is free in its basic form which will be perfectly adequate for most people, although there is a limit of 5 topics per month. However, if you want to customise your posts more fully, receive more detailed analytics and export to more social media locations, there are paid for plans.

The following is an inteview with Guillaume Decugis, the Scoop.it CEO who discusses social media content and trends.

Class activity

Ask your students to research a particular business topic and to produce their own Scoop-it topic and then share with others through their Facebook site. Alternatively they could embed the materials on a blog.

Follow the links below to see the range on offer. Our next session begins on FEBRUARY 20th. Do not miss out on these…book now to update your professional training. Our interactive workshops and resources will help take your career to the next level and support your classroom practice. Our courses cover subject-specific and whole-school topics and make the in-service training budget go further.

We also have an exciting new range of Triple A Learning workshops to supplement our IB-approved offering.

• Extended Essays – roles, responsibilities, research and resources
• Teaching International Economics workshop
• Assessing 20th century world history topics: the Cold War
• Language A: Meaningful Study and Assessment in Part 4 – Options
• Language A: Literature Part 1 – Literature in Translation
• Artists using Art: looking at transcription & appropriation to enhance art teaching and learning
• Business & Management: Teaching Accounting and Finance
• IB Music Prescribed works: analysing, comparing and contrasting Prokoviev and Xian
• What makes an IB Library?
• Introduction to Higher Education counselling

 All our workshops are developed and mentored by highly experienced practitioners – many of whom have been senior examiners.

Workshops available…

Follow the links below (or select the IB Workshops tab at the top of the page) for details of all workshops running from 20th February

IB-approved DP Workshops  (Scroll down and select Diploma Programme)

• These workshops count towards a school’s IB authorization process and, depending on the category chosen, are fully recognised as part of the IB authorization process
• All workshops require 4-6 hours commitment per week to satisfy the certification requirements. Workshops cost from (GBP) £150 to £365 depending on the length of workshop

Triple A Learning Workshops  (Scroll down and select Triple A Learning IB Workshops)

Our own Triple A Learning workshops are designed with you in mind. They are both subject specific and whole-school  related. They have been developed to to support excellent classroom teachers by providing both strategies for delivery and shared resources. These workshops are not recognised by the IB for school authorization and evaluation purposes.

We also offer an extensive number of IB-approved MYP workshops.

To register and find out more…

Already have an account with us? Go to our Workshop Booking System  Not registered before? Go to Registration Guidance  If you have any queries, please contact us at workshops@triplealearning.com.

And then reality took hold – how could I learn to play the Bass Guitar? I wasn’t sure I wanted a series of ‘lessons’ – not my idea of fun sitting with a teacher for an hour a week and going home £30 lighter. Being involved with online learning day to day, I wondered what would be on the web to help me learn to play. I was really quite amazed at the breadth and depth of the materials ‘out there’. This is what I have found in the few weeks since I opened my Christmas gift: all these are free, by the way!

• Blogs – on many aspects of playing the Bass, from very first principles such as Scales to more complex ideas such as improvising a bass line. Some blogs have tunes supplied in handy ‘tab’ notation for beginners
• You Tube videos – short, easily-digestible chunks of content on a similar range of aspects as the blogs, and with practical tips on handing the instrument as well as the musical aspects
• Sites offering graded ‘tab’ notation music sheets so even beginners can play along with well-known popular tunes. I’ve already played along to “Roxanne” by the Police!
• Subscription websites offering a level of free tuition, along with demonstration videos and vodcasts, discussion forums and blogs. Many materials are accessible without paying the subscription.

My kids also have friends who play the Bass, so I’ve been able to ask some questions to clarify my understanding. So far, this ‘new way’ of learning is working for me. Then again, I’m motivated, interested and understand ‘how to learn’. Does this ‘new way of learning’ work for all learners?

I’ll keep you posted!

Children in Madagascar show off their new XO laptops

The most recent blog from OLPC reveals that a Brazilian university team, under the supervision of Prof. Léa Fagundes, have studied how the XO impacted the reading and writing learning process of 6 year old children in a public elementary school at Porto Alegre. The full study was published in Portuguese.

Here’s an extract of a summary in English

They hypothesized that each child having their own laptop would change the practices of reading and writing by students, impacting how they create concepts about the written language. Student practices were observed and analyzed in two ways: practices proposed by the teacher and things that students did spontaneously.

After 7 months of observations, the research concluded that daily use of networked laptops allows children to use writing and reading in real life situations, differently from artificial activities in school. This kind of usage builds a symbolic environment helpful for understanding the function and meaning of written language (fluency) and leads to a conceptualization process driven by the need to understand others (literacy). In the class that was analyzed, the teacher’s proposals and some other conditions were necessary for that to happen. Project work, laptop ownership by students, connection to the Internet, and the use of a virtual learning environment were among them.

I was just wondering if those “laptop schools” out there have an anecdotal evidence of a shift in the ‘learning culture’ in their Language A classes?

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

OLPC believes for the world’s poorest children to be full citizens of the emerging world they must develop the passion for learning and the ability to learn how to learn. They also believe that the root cause of the rapid global change, digital technology, also provides a solution. The premise is that when every child has a connected laptop, they have in their hands the key to full development and participation. Using these laptops children can

• work with others in their communities and around the world
• access high-quality, modern materials
• engage their passions and develop their expertise.

By providing children with low-cost rechargeable laptops and setting up the wireless infrastructure needed to connect them to each other and to the web, OLPC is meeting its mission. Here at Triple A Learning, we know that the OLPC mission and methodology fits right in with our mission of Supporting Learning Communities through Technology.

Today, Triple A Learning added further to its support to this very worthy project by donating 10 new laptops.

Girls in class at Kabul school using the XO laptop

What OLPC has achieved

In the first years of OLPC, the world has seen two million previously marginalized children learn, achieve and begin to transform their communities. Triple A Learning is proud to be supporting the ongoing work to provide these opportunities to millions more children.

Over 1.7 million children and teachers in Latin America are currently part of an OLPC project with over 400,000 in Africa and the rest of the world. Largest partners include

• Uruguay (the first major country in the world to provide every elementary school child with a laptop),
• Peru (the largest deployment, involving over 8,300 schools),
• Argentina
• Mexico
• Rwanda.

Other significant projects have been started in Gaza, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Mongolia. Every school represent a learning hub, a node in a globally shared resource for learning.

About those Laptops

The laptop is so flexible in design and in operation. Known as the XO, the laptop is also designed for constant connectivity. A few children working together under a tree can connect to eachother without any other hardware, and a class full of students can share collaborative activities with one another and see what their classmates are doing.

For the more technologically minded, the XO runs on a Linux distro, has solid state memory (no rotating hard drive) has many opportunities for connections. You can find out more about it here.

(Source of much of the descriptive text One Laptop Per Child website)

Triple A Learning BACCpacks are ideal for use on an individual computer with a projector, on an interactive whiteboard or on an intranet, a Virtual Learning Environment or even on CD’s for use with students.

BACCpacks offer various materials, including (where relevant):

• IB topic notes, mind maps, quizzes, glossaries and assignments
• Images and embedded videos
• Web links to relevant good quality web-based materials
• Games and activities

BACCpacks are highly cost-effective. One pack will buy you school-wide use for as many students as you wish – permanently.

On the Triple A learning website there is a general demonstration of what a BACCpack is and also subject-specific demonstrations, such as that for Business & Management BACCpacks. BACCpacks are:

• Dynamic, interactive and engaging, with a range of student activities
• Suitable for group learning and independent study
• Consistent with all learning styles and ideal for use on Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs)
• Matched, where relevant, directly to IB subject guides
• Fun and different

The range of BACCpacks is growing all the time, so please keep an eye on our site.

In addition to our subject specific packs, we offer school-wide resources. Our present featured resource is our MUN BACCpack; an ideal support resource for anyone running, thinking of running or participating in a Model United Nations Conference. The pack is full of helpful advice, images, support, downloadable resources and links to relevant further information.