Learning in Playful Environments

Today I discovered the joy of the Ngram. When you search for a word on Google, a wealth of information is provided, including, in the drop down box, an "Ngram" graphing the percentage use of that word in all books scanned by google. For example, if you search for: "define curriculum"...you get: curriculum kʌˈrɪkjʊləm/ noun 1 . the subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college. "course components of the school curriculum" synonyms: syllabus , course of study/studies, programme of study/studies,educational programme, subjects, modules;  More Choose language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Cebuano Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Lao Latin Latvian Lit...

UWCSEA  is doing interesting curriculum work at the moment. In an attempt to clearly articulate our beliefs about learning and our understandings about how best to address the school's mission statement  we are rewriting our curriculum. At a purely pragmatic level, this might seem foolish. The thousands of hours spent exploring other curricula and negotiating our own understandings could be avoided were we simply to choose a well-established program from outside the school. ACARA's new Australian curriculum , for example, is based on years of academic discussion overlayed with extensive professional consultation and a rigorous validation and review process. What ACARA (or Common Core  in the USA or the UK National Curriculum  or any of a large number of other national or international curricula) provide to schools is a carefully considered package for teaching and learning. These curricula are valid and reliable and provide a level of credibility in the eyes of the c...

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman My rating: 4 of 5 stars A very simple prose with some hints of poetry and an artfully polished narrative that shines and shines until it is blinding. The moral dilemma of the novel is built in layers that remind us that good and bad are often neither simple nor self-evident. Stedman tells the story of Tom, a survivor of WWI and a good man who, as a civilian, must make choices as morally complex as those he made in the trenches. A compelling read. View all my reviews

License   Some rights reserved  by  cyanocorax Each of these pieces  Has its own story:  One of moves made At the hands of Father or son or  Grandfather who  Offered them as a  Gift one Christmas To his Grandson. Knowing he had not Long to live He took them from A dusty shelf and  Repainted those that Were black And revarnished Those that were white. Illness and age left paint Where it Should not be Adding ambiguity To our play - The predictable patterns of a timeless game Knocked slightly askew. 

I apologise for these Words which I wield With so little dexterity. They have on them   Some rights reserved  by  giltay The fingermarks of The women and men Who came before - Some more skilled, Others less, but Each blunting the Blade in their Frantic slashings At the world. How to find the Whetting stone To hone an edge Sharp enough to Cut to the bone?

Statue of Liberty being photographed from the Staten Island Ferry The flight from New York home to Singapore takes a bit less than 24 hours including a couple of hours to change planes in Tokyo - hours and hours sitting 10 kilometres above the earth’s surface with a few centimetres of aeronautical engineering between the bodies within and the minus 60 degree, very thin air outside. Somewhere above the arctic circle, I started watching Orson Welles’ 1940s Hollywood classic, Citizen Kane . It seemed the right film to be watching in that strange space between cultures and time zones. As I sat endlessly in a darkened airplane and reflected on my two weeks in New York, Welles spoke of something essential about the American psyche. A frame for understanding. Looking at the Empire State from on top of the Rockefeller Building Citizen Kane is set in early 20 th century America and tells the story of a billionaire newspaper magnate who builds a mansion which he fills with the greatest art...

I've just been reading a fascinating book recommended to me by our librarian: Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West (2012)   by Jin Li, Associate Professor of Education and Human Development at Brown University. The book really stirred me up (as a good book should); below is the email I sent to my librarian. I feel very pretentious making such broad statements in response to such a well-researched and argued book, but I also feel my response is an important one. In the school where I teach, the need to account appropriately for differing cultural perspectives on learning is incredibly important, not just because we want to teach our students well, but also because the ethos of the school is grounded in a belief that we must respect diverse cultures and explore what it means to make a better world for all cultures. Here are my thoughts: I found the ideas and arguments fascinating and - for me as a Western reader - very useful as I learn more about teaching students from an...

  Some rights reserved  by  artnoose Time Knots. Filtered through The pores of vision, Twisted through with the Obscurity of reason, The certainties Give way. Seen again, Filtered through The pores of time, Combed through with the Clarity of hindsight, The knots Give way. I've been reading Bonnie Campbell Hill and Carrie Ekey's book on Enhancing Writing Instruction and came across this lovely paragraph: My favorite part of the writing process is revision. I start with a section that feels as messy and tangled as my hair in the morning. By the time I've reread and rewritten a section over and over, all the knots have been untangled, the frizzies tamed, and my writing finally feels smooth. The key is rereading. I read sections over and over tweaking here and there until they feel right... (p29) The second stanza of the poem found its form fairly quickly. Originally the first stanza was to have been itself a muddled version of the second but it didn't really work for me...

  Some rights reserved  by  digitalkatie This space I provide For meaning Is bounded by a Few unimaginative Words and A donkey. Make of it what you Will.

The things that bind us are many and varied. Ties to family, to culture, to faith and to conviction keep us upright and braced against the vagaries of fate. Equally, however, our ties may hold us fast and prevent us from moving with the times even when change would be for the best. Many years ago (I find myself writing that line more and more), my friend Peter Lenten and I designed a social studies unit on religion. For years we had been taking students to visit a mosque and a church and a synagogue. It occurred to us that, whilst these were important places for our students to keep visiting, few of our students would feel any personal connection with these religions. In fact, in a largely secular school, few of our students had much of a tie to conventional religion at all. Peter had studied divinity many years before my many-years-ago and he explained that one etymology of the word "religion" is from the same Latin root as "ligature": historically "reli...