The Areas of Interaction contribute to shape, organize and enhance teaching within our disciplines. They should have a central part of our teaching. In other words, if teaching is truly generated by, or focused through, the areas of interaction, then students’ work will reflect their understanding of the areas.
I like to work in each year group or MYP level with ideas that could be interesting to the students.
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.
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.
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.
“Todos fabricamos los escenarios, episodios y personajes de nuestros sueños con deshechos del día…” (“We all create the landscapes, situations and characters of our dreams with shreds of the day…” ) Pablo De Santis
In the last post we used a YouTube video which depicted the damaging effects of plastic bags on the environment.
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