The first 100,000 words: Writings on Education by a Teacher

Instructional Video: the theory and purpose Instructional Video provides unique affordances, or possibilities, that can shift teaching and learning from the page onto the webpage and allows students to become more empowered and independent as a result. Note, it makes no suggestion that students will be willing to make these changes, yet, as modern teachers I feel we ought to prepare students for the wider world and model our own practice on that practised beyond the world of compulsory schooling. James Paul Gee (2003) provides distinctive suggestions about how Game-based learning involves a much higher expectation of its users than the majority of compulsory schooling which lends itself best to high-stakes testing rather than deep and authentic learning. Whilst the instructional video that we as teachers produce may not be more than online versions of Direct Instruction, by providing this content to, not only our student, but also the world’s students mirrors our expectatio...

Instructional Video: Positive personal outcomes for me Before jumping into the theory too heavily, I decided to take a moment to reflect on the positive outcomes that I have personally experienced by using instructional video for aspects of my teaching. If you take a moment to reflect on these positive outcomes, you may be more able to consider whether you are willing to create instructional videos and reap similar benefits in your own life. I will outline these positive outcomes in dot-point form, then you may read more into each element based on your level of interest. Here have been the positive outcomes I have experienced: Teaching Practice ·          I mproved direct instruction, more brevity and clarity ·          More precise, improvised and unscripted presentation ·          Greater awareness of speech patterns and faults ·   ...

#edureading – The Article Methodology Grumet (1990) posits that our “songs” ought to have three parts: situation , narrative and interpretation , this idea informs the structure that follows. The situation section contains an explanation of the professional learning community of educators that is the focus of this paper. The narrative contains reflection from the participants within the group. The interpretation contains a combination of the context and narrative findings to produce suggestions for further exploration.  SITUATION: Introduction to #edureading On the 18 th of September 2018 the following message was posted on twitter: “Alrighty, here’s my pitch: academic reading room type thing, but without the academics. We read 1 academic article per month (maybe not the Christmas months), maybe #flippedlearning related, maybe not. Then we have a Skype chat about the reading and record it. #AussieED #vicpln ” The resulting respondents, a group of ed...