In this task we went through:

  • Google,
  • Online Testing
  • Mark books - Paper vs Electronic (Numbers, Excel).

Google is tailored. When I googled “Learning Objects” the fifth hit was a UQ database of learning objects. We looked at a few google features: Google Advanced Search, filetype, site, date.

Prof. John Hattie Metastudy showed that student feedback is important. We looked at:

And we looked at Gradebooks…

  • Electronic vs Paper
  • Excel, iPad, Online
  • Learning Boost. Jarrod shared some templates he used as examples.

My post on the discussion board follows:

Question 1: Learning as its own reward?

I had come across the fact that the 24-cell was regular as part of our curiosity-driven exploration of silver rhombic dodecahedra inspired by the Space-Fulling/ Mind-Filling artwork, because the 24-cell is the natural 4-dimensional generalisation of the silver rhombic dodecahedron. It always fascinated me that apparently, there where 6 regular polytopes in 4 dimensions, one corresponding to the generalisation of each of the 5 platonic solids, and an extra one — the 24-cell. Even more fascinating, in 5 dimensions, and in every number of dimensions equal too or greater than 5, there are only 3 regular polytopes, corresponding to the generalisation of three of the platonic solids. Meaning that the generalisations of the silver rhombic dodecahedra were regular in 4-dimensions, and only 4-dimensions, not in any other number of dimensions. WHY?!

A few months later me and a friend of mine went about trying to make a computer game. While brainstorming ideas we thought it would be really fun to make a game set in a non-euclidean world, and it immediately occurred to us that if we set the game on the surface of a nicely behaved 4-dimensional polytope, it would make figuring out how everything was connected to everything else much easier, and would introduce a systematic patterns into the game that the players could potentially learn and discover. My friends favorite shape was the silver rhombic dodecahedron, and so I immediately suggested we use the surface of a 24-cell, and explained about it’s facinating properties. Off to the races we went, I started researching the 24-cell and learnt ALOT of interesting stuff. One of the things I learnt, after having mapped the coordinates of the vertices of a 24-cell and calculating which combinations of vertices formed the vertices of surfaces of the 24-cell, I figured out that the surfaces of the 24-cell are actually REGULAR OCTAHEDRA. Which blew my mind. So that was fun.

Question 2: How will you record your marks?

I would definitely record marks electronically, in a place that could be accessed (but obviously not modified) by the students at any time. I think one of the key things I’d like to focus on as a teacher is transparency, which I think is really important. Exactly which technology I would use to implement this though, I’m not sure. It would depend on alot of things. As Jarrod mentioned, the school might have a system in place they would want me to use. But beyond that, it would also depend on the scheme I adopt for marking, feedback, etc. Given complete freedom, I would probably store the marks themselves (and other data) in some standard format (csv, or whatever), and then write some simple code to present it nicely (with percentages and whatever), potentially even having the marks and code for presenting it uploaded on a GitHub repository or something, and hosted as a website on GitHub pages using something like jekyll, much like how I’ve set up my eportfolio. Although I’d probably have a quick go at using some pre-established options (like a simple shared google spreadsheet or something) before I resorted to that, probably depending on how much I wanted to rely on it and how much time and effort I felt like I could invest in developing it.

Question 3: Give one piece of advice that you have learnt from this series?

Sometimes I’ve dismissed certain topics (like learning the countries of the world for example) as just being fundamentally boring and there not being any way to make them interesting — that you have to just slog it through. However seeing the countries of the world game and how fun (and simple) it was inspired me to re-evaluate that perspective as often as I can. Students finding a topic boring should never prompt that reaction from a teacher — instead, it should prompt self-reflection and asking myself “How could I teach this better? How could I make this more fun/ interesting?”.

Note: APST standards linked are those on the CANVAS site, presumably as specified by Jarrod Johnson.