Distributed Learning Family Blog

I came across an interesting blog post today about reporting. It raises a number of questions that I will be thinking about. The most important is what kind of reporting can benefit all three stakeholders in a distributed learning school: the teachers, the parents, and the student.

I believe that anything distributed learning schools do need to take into account all three. If something is great for parents and kids but doesn’t work for teachers then it is not viable. If it works for teachers and parents but not the students them it’s not viable either.

Report cards (mandated by the BC Ministry of Education) are assessments of learning. They outline what has been learned and how well. But they miss what I see as an important component of assessment - assessment FOR learning. This takes place in frequent, informal, and timely assessments. The challenge (as Andrew Church points out) is that teachers have a lack of time to do this on a regular basis. I have been time and again impressed by our EBUS teachers by the commitment many of them have to assessment for learning. I wonder if there are ways as parents we can help them with this.

I haven’t been writing as much lately, I guess we have been so busy learning! For anyone interested in the sport of trampoline there is a new blog about the sport written by a Canadian! Bryan Milonja was a member of Canada’s national trampoline team for a number of years (He is now retired), he is a trampoline coach, a trampoline judge and a freelance journalist. He has created a blog called Trampoline Canada, and describes it as, ” (a) blog for the many fans, athletes, former athletes, coaches, judges and parents out there who love the sport of trampoline as much as I do.”

Enjoy.

If you are interested in Online Course Development check out this article in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology.

This blog is getting too wide in scope so I have decided to split it into two blogs. For readers that follow this blog if you are interested in resources I have come across those posts will now be housed at http://cdoherty13.blogspot.com/

I will be maintaining this blog as the sport for items relating to my kids school portfolios and school events.

We’ve finished reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and so it made sense to make some candy to celebrate. First we made a supersaturated solution of sugar and water. Then we let the solution sit for a day with a string in it. Like magic candy is starting to appear.

Megan has been working on sight words. We found a neat online (free) program to help her. It is called Sight Words With Sampson. You can pick a list of sight words and then there are 4 different game levels for them to practice recognition, reading, spelling, and sentence construction.

Megan insisted I include a copy of her “certificate”.

My Magic Owl by Megan

Well, first I went I went to Ollivander’s wand shop and I got my 10 ¼ inch wand. Ollivander’s wand shop is in Diagon alley. In Diagon alley there is a quiddich shop and at the wand shop they have little tiny wands for baby wizards and witches.

Hagrid got me an owl for my birthday while I was at the wand shop. The owl had wings the size of my arm, like 2 feet for each wing. My owl was white and had orange eyes. It also had a black beak. This owl was magic because it could send letters.

My owl carries mail to and from Hogwarts. Hogwarts is an old grey castle surrounded by water. It is a school for wizards. The greatest Hogwart’s wizard is Dumbledoor.

Megan has done some refining on her story and added some art work. It is amazing how happy she is to add and revise when she gets comments on the blog. (click to see larger)

When you homeschool your kids there are lots of days when you wonder if you are accomplishing anything (or you wonder if you are crazy to do this). Then there are the days when everything falls into place and you witness your child learning at a deep level and you remind yourself, “this is why you do this.”

So today my youngest (grade 1) didn’t like what I planned for her to do today for math so she told me (note told, didn’t ask) if she could do her own “math”. I was interested to see what she would do so I said sure.  She asked me to get down the “math” box which is a box of all sorts of math manipulative. She took out the clear plastic geometric shapes, grabbed a pencil, a ruler, and a sheet of paper. She went off and worked for a while and then came back to show and explain the attached document.

“Mommy you won’t believe it but when you put two triangles together do you know you get a square? And if you put two circle halves together you get a circle? Can you send this to Raven (her online teacher) because I put arrows so she could learn this too.”

She was so excited about her discovery she had to share it. Learning by discovery is a powerful tool.

I stumbled across a search engine today for visual and kinesthetic learners. It is called Search Cube.

This is one of many resources I have stumbled upon thanks to a blog called Educational Origami. If you are looking for ways to integrate ITC into the classroom check them out. There is also a companion wiki with the blog also called Educational-Origami.