I’ve been incorporating “clicker” questions into my physics classes this year, and so far I would say it’s been a success. There are ups and downs while using them, but overall the process is working pretty good. However, yesterday’s class really got me thinking about how to optimize my process. First of all, here is a brief on how I use clicker questions in class. We don’t have clickers. Instead, I’ve been using Poll Everywhere.

After spending months and hours of reading articles and blogs about Standards Based Grading (SBG), I will be embarking down this path myself starting next week. I’ve been planning on doing this since I first got my job at Prince of Wales, but I think I’ve finally sorted out in my head how I want to approach it. There are a lot of unknowns because there are a lot of different ways to do SBG.

Yesterday I had a pretty good night of viewing with my 6" newtonian telescope. I managed to see many galaxies including M51 (the Whirlpool Galaxy), M101, M106, M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) and a cool look at the pair of M81 and M82. The Ring Nebula (M57) wasn’t very clear but the Dumbbell Nebula (M27) was decent. M13, the fantastic globular cluster in Hercules was easy to find in the NW, and I think the highlight of the night was the double cluster NGC869 and NGC884.

I recently read Martha Nussbaum’s book Not For Profit, Why Democracy Needs The Humanities. I really like the underlying principle of the book, and it is something that government policy makers and universities should consider, as well as public and private school stakeholders. The basic premise of the book is that schools are focusing too much on an education system that is believed to lead to stronger economic growth and GNP.

On this past Wednesday’s show of BC Almanac, Niels Veldhuis from the Fraser Institute was the guest and he was speaking about merit pay for teachers (if the CBC link is broken, leave a comment and I can probably post a new link). Once again I was infuriated by the Fraser Institute’s interest in this topic. There are so many flaws with the argument that it makes my head spin. I think Veldhuis’ main points were as follows:

As our education system moves towards an Education 3.0 paradigm, where student-generated content takes a large step forward, I see collective intelligence and current educational silo structures moving strongly in the direction of free access to subject content. To do this, political stake holders will have to give up their hold and control of exactly what it is that our children learn. From an educational design point of view, these changes have begun.

In the past year or two I had heard quite a bit about teachers and classrooms that were using wikis. For me, at the time I saw “using a wiki” as being analogous to creating wikipedia-like entries. I wasn’t sure as to this was applicable to to all the scenarios I was hearing about. Then a few months ago I took over some Physics classes where the previous teacher was using a wikispaces.

The following email was sent out to the BCAMT (BC Association of Mathematics Teachers) listserv. I think it is very indicative of what can go wrong with math education when we spend too much time dictating math curriculum and standardized testing. In no way is this a criticism of the math teacher, the teacher is obviously doing whatever they can to help their students have success in the final exam.

In my previous post I pretty much stated that I’m not currently in favour of school iPad programs, where a class would have 1:1 tablets per students. This is based on my current knowledge of tablets, computers and software that is available for them. However, I haven’t tried having my students use iPads in class (hence the conditional “current”!). I would be extremely interested in getting feedback from educators that have spent some time with 1:1 iPad/student programs.

With the instant popularity of the iPad last year, tablets were finally thrust into the computing spotlight. People have been purchasing the iPad for many different purposes but it remains to be seen as to what tablets are really good at. Originally it was said that the iPad would be about media consumption, but this was idea has been eclipsed by the proliferation of IOS apps. Many educators have touted the iPad as being a useful part of classroom and online learning technologies, while I don’t necessarily share this enthusiasm.