SLF09: CANVAS

I’m in love. I’m so much in love. The virtual world created for CANVAS is just stunning. The kids will love it too. We’ll never be able to get them out.
Enough rambling. CANVAS (Children’s Art at the National Virtual Arena for Scotland) is a virtual art gallery created to house artworks from our schools. It’s [...]

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SLF09: S1 Thematic weeks @ Dumbarton Academy

Since I promote the Library Resource Centre as being at the heart of cross-curricular-dom, I thought it would be interesting to see how another secondary has tackled cross-curricular projects. This presentation from Dumbarton Academy discussed two specific projects: the Health and Well-being themed Fit 4 Life and the Citizenship-based 1 World (NB the school has [...]

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Becoming more thoughtful

I’ve just been interviewed for the fourth time and it is scary. The variety and planning in the variety of questions is impressive, leading from ‘Do I think children should be active outside of school’ (yes, of course) to ‘What exercise do you or your family currently take part in?’ (er, can I  think about that one?)
The [...]

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Questions, questions, questions

I’m fascinated by the change of tone in questions that are coming along to be added to the Debate Wall.
There is a clearly recognisable difference between those that the pupils came up with themselves, which were based in their own experience, particular to the school, and often somewhat biased, and the later additions. Following the Claim-Support-Question routine, the [...]

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Diversity

The class teachers are now diversifying their strategies. Two have held class discussions regarding social lies before viewing the Disinformation website. One of the classes viewed the website together and discussed each section as they went through it, while the other looked through it in pairs and discussed their thoughts afterwards.
The third class came along to try out [...]

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Compulsory PE debate

I’m a bit concerned about how the debate is developing. Not surprisingly, most of the questions appearing are firmly based in pupils’ own likes and dislikes, and their experiences following the change to two periods of PE a week last year. Much of the conversation at that time revolved around the comparative value of PE, Maths and English, and [...]

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Performing a balancing act

It’s proving very difficult to find suitable published evidence for the Visible Thinking debate on compulsory PE . I want to provide each class with the same selection of published evidence for pupils to use with the Claim-Support-Question routine. This should provide some “expert” opinions and information, as well as generating further questions.
I’ve hit three main problems:

useful numeric [...]

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Motion sickness

Over the Easter holidays I thought about the Visible Thinking assignment, in particular, which topic to investigate, and concluded that we should ask the pupils themselves what they would like to investigate. I put this idea to EM, who agreed (and then told me that I was now working with  three out of the five English classes). 
From the [...]

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Glow

Woke up at 5.30 this morning, unable to breathe because of the silly little cough I’ve got at the moment. Didn’t dare go back to sleep though because today is the day I’m presenting the introduction to Glow. Unfortunately I was also up til 1.30 am making my notes and ensuring I could access everything. Bit scary to [...]

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Can you be a constructivist librarian?

Brooks, G.R. and Brooks, M.G. (2000) “Becoming a constructivist teacher” in A.L. Costa (ed),  Developing Minds: a resource book for teaching thinking (pp. 150-157). Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
There’s plenty of fascinating stuff in this tome but I’m particularly taken by this article. The authors define constructivism as
a theory of learning that places the [...]

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