Passwords and Powers
xkcd’s Password Strength cartoon might be a fun prompt for a maths lesson. Children at primary school seem to like cracking codes, and hackers have a certain murky glamour to them. Better yet, password, security and spying is a rich topic. My Year 5’s have loved some basic frequency analysis. It ties in with the […]
#riotcleanup Clapham video
Makes you smile, really.
Aspiration, like alienation, is easy to spread
via @anu. This is great If you think you are an idealist, get off twitter, put down your placard, stop gazing at your navel to examine your privilege. Put your money and time where your mouth is. Go and volunteer in a primary school and sit with those who are struggling to read, go and […]
Mixed ability: academically & socially better
Academic Jo Boaler followed two groups of young adolescents in the mid-90s, one separated into rigid ability groups, the other taught in mixed-ability groupings. Not only did the mixed-ability students outperform those who had been put into separate groups in national examinations, but when Boaler tracked down a representative sample...
Brooks & Diet Internet
There’s a nice idea here – The Construction Zone [hat tip @surreallyno] that suggests getting students to discuss how the internet affects thinking. Certainly something to try out. One comment struck me, from Rodney Brooks: We, or at least I, need tools that will provide us with the diet Internet, the version that gives us...
Many nations, many views of psychology
In Britain, there was a noteworthy interest in individual differences, the distribution of these differences in the population and the significance of this data in social, educational and political questions. The result was a psychology intimately bound up with statistics. In France, a clinical method and an interest in the exceptional,...
Don’t Shoot The Puppy
This is curiously hard. Thanks to Waxy.org for this and more like it.
The Pedagogy of Oxford Tutorials
It’s funny how blind one can be. This article, by Robert Beck, outlines the Pedagogy of the Oxford Tutorial system, the jewel in the University’s crown. Essentially the process is research (reading, writing, lectures, chatting with friends) – essay – presentation of essay – discussion with tutor. A couple of...
To courageously follow
If nothing else, this is quite a fun way of stripping the ego from the idea of being a leader. [thanks Steven Anderson] Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore – […]
“Constructivism isn’t laissez-faire”
This, from ateacherswonderings, is rather impressive. how do you teach an abstract concept such as “system” to 2nd graders? Simple: I divided the class in three groups and gave each group something different: a toy car, a pen and a puzzle. The trick that the kids didn’t know…was that each was missing a piece! They […]