Show us your Ocean!

Get your class involved in photo elecitation.

Beautiful shells at Eagle Bay

 I took this photo during a pilot study for Steve's photo elicitation module.  We were each given an underwater camera to go off and take photos with whilst snorkelling.  It was a great experinence, it really made me look at the sea and shore in a different way.  I really noticed the different fish, the effects of the light and water and movement of the plants.  It was even more interesting to look at everyone else's photos and see what they had deccided to capture, discover new creatures that i didn't even know existed(!) and to share our experiences with each other.  It definitely changed my relationship with the ocean here.

Steve's doctoral research is into the effectiveness photoelicitation as an education technique and your class can have the opportunity to take part in a similar exercise to the one I did and be a part of this Curtin University reseearch.  Steve has develped a series of 4 lessons to support the snorkelling field trip.  You can download them on our website here.
He's also got his own website with more details about the program  http://showusyourocean.wordpress.com/

Please get in touch with any of us here at Hotrock or with Steve (at steven.andrews@postgrad.curtin.edu.au) directly if you'd like more details about the program and/or would like to be involved.

I'll leave you with a couple of my other photos.  Lucy (resources@thehotrock.org.au)

Blogs

I have been finding myself using blogs more and more for inspiration, to find out what teachers are doing, to get an idea of feelings on different topics etc. I get ideas from them and they invariably lead me on to other places and sites where I get more ideas. You've got to stop somewhere but when you are a bit short of insporation I find them really great. Its really why I decided to start to write one aswell, to try to give you a bit of inspiration or the lead to set you off on the path to discovering new things for you.

Here's the train of thoughts/pages that I went along when reasearching for some lessons on climate change, MEDC vs LEDC attitudes and Kyoto. I think I started by search for Climate change Developing Countries Adaptations. This is what I found:

From Power to Poverty is a blog by the UK Oxfam research manager covering lots of aspects of aidwork. He had written a post about how african nations were acting to adapt to climate change. I then searched for other posts of his about cliamte change, from the comments I linbked to another website debating the effects of being sustainable in the North on the South from the IIED. This then led me on to a documentary on Copenhagen from the point of view of developing nations, really interesting.

So much better than all the dry stuff I was getting from official websites which was making me fall asleep and not really telling me what the issues really were (well probably they were but I was bored by then so imaging how bored your studetns might be if they had to read this). I was thinking it would be great to be able to direct students to blogs about the topics they are studying. They can see what views real people have, look at different sides of the arguement and could even engage in it themselves by leaving comments on a blog.

They could start their own class blog if they wanted, give their opinions about what they are studying, post some of their work, see what other people had to say about it. For a blog with loads of ideas about how to use social media in you teaching check out http://daviderogers.blogspot.com/ he's really innovating with it in his lessons, using twitter, facebook, shaerd files etc.

So I hope this gives you some inspiration to go off searching for yourself. It certainly got me reinspired.

Power to the Pupils

Ingrid reported on the meetings she'd been attending in our partner schools and I was struck by two examples of students being given ownership of projects.

At Mandurah Baptist college students volunteered to adopt vegetable beds. They were told what they would need to do to maintain them and grow their vegetables and now there is a waiting list of students who want to adopt a bed and gardening going on in breaks and after school. This is in contrast to before where 'everyone' was responsible and there were issues with harvesting. This seems like a great step and is testament to how well students perform when given responsibility, real ownership and the chance to prove themselves. Good on the teachers for making this happen, its not always easy to let go fo the reins.

At another school, John Curtin College of the Arts, one of the biology teachers has rewritten the curriculum to allow studetns to support each other via a wiki. A great way to get students to realise that they can all help each other to do well in their exams, that they are not competing against each other for the best result but can share knowledge and ideas, reduce their workload and support each other. Wiki's are shared spaces on the internet which different people (e.g. all members of a class) can edit and add information too. A great tool, if you don't use them elsewhere then start by using them for revision, with different groups preparing notes on diff topics would be great.
http://www.wikispaces.com/ Go here to set up your wiki. Free for K-12 education.

This great video explain how they work and what you might use them for really simply
Wikis in plain english

So Power to the Pupils - get them to help themselves and free up some time for you!

Lucy