Just for kicks I check out some of the Fraser Institutes Secondary School Rankings yesterday. I was curious as to how of the slightly “alternative” schools rank. However, I noticed something else that really struck me as being important. A casual look at school rankings reveals that if a school has a Special Needs population of around 9% or higher, their school ranking is almost for sure going to be lower than 160 (out of total of 260).

Building a Moodle course site was just the type of activity and motivation I’ve been looking for, for many different reasons. First of all, I’ve been interested in Moodle since around February of 2010. I went as far as installing a Moodle site on my hosted domain and tried playing with it. Other than creating a couple of course titles and inserting a forum activity, I did not get very far.

I think one of the most important features in an LMS is to help enable communication. Learning is a social and cultural experience, and many people learn best through interaction with other people. I think it is relatively rare that a student optimally self-learns through books or other static media. This applies more to younger students than older or mature students. With this in mind, I was quite interested to learn about synchronous and asynchronous communication abilities for LMS.

Last week Kevin Falcon went on record with adding merit pay for teachers as part of his platform for his leadership bid. Seeing as it comes from Falcon, it’s no surprise that I have a few issues with his ideas. To begin with, I don’t know Falcon’s motives for merit pay. Is it to save money, to get better teaching, or something else? From the reports I’ve seen summarized, research has shown that merit pay does nothing to improve teaching or learning.

In the fall of 2008, after working as a mechanical engineer for 15 years, I decided to try out a new career in teaching. I put together my program applications and by spring of 2009 I was accepted into the PDP at Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Education. After a 12-month whirlwind program, I finally received my B.Ed in August of this year. In the spring of 2010 I anticipated that I would have temporary work in the coming winter.

As part of my development plan to engage and enhance student learning in the math and sciences, I would like to implement an online Learning Management System (LMS) to integrate with the subjects that I am teaching. The purpose of using an LMS is to achieve three primary goals. First, I would like to increase the frequency of on-topic course discussions, both student to student and student to teacher. Secondly, I plan on delivering lessons integrated with multimedia, and third, I will be incorporating some engaging Assessment for Learning techniques through the use of the LMS.

If you’re like me and interested in using math notation in Moodle, I believe you have 2 options. The first option is to use the TeX filter that is in Moodle. This is a LaTeX type editor. To enable, go to site administration -> plugins -> filters TeX in Moodle: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Using_TeX_Notation And more notation info: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Using_TeX_Notation_2 The big problem with TeX in my mind is that it is a bit awkward to use.

Shortly after I put up my previous post I came across a discussion about merit pay for teachers on CBC’s The Sunday Edition. The discussion was between Peter Cowley, who I have blogged about before, and Ben Levin, a former deputy Minister of Education in Manitoba and Ontario. Peter Cowley seemed much more reserved in this interview than in the previous one that I had heard. The fact is that both Cowley and Levin seemed to agree on all issues other than whether governments should move forward with merit pay (and their respective support for unions in general).

I think one of the best ways to incorporate mobile technology in the classroom right now is through Polleverywhere. This service offers online polling where the students can participate in several different ways, including: sms text messaging - via the web using their web widget mobile device by visiting poll4.com twitter a smartphone interface Polleverywhere is clearly growing, as the 3rd option that I mentioned above is a new development. I just tried it for the first time using an iPhone and it worked very well.

Reading through the different frameworks we’ve looked at so far, I find that the seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education speaks to me the strongest. There’s no doubt that the SECTIONS framework from Bates and Poole also resonates, but some of the elements are more focused on institutional and managerial aspects. These are exactly the kinds of issues I dealt with as a mechanical engineer and operations manager, and less so in my present circumstances as a secondary school classroom teacher.