Ben Kestner
Thoughts on Education
Tedxkids Brussels Tomorrow!
Follow the Tedxkids Brussels event live all day on http://www.tedxkids.be
Great line up. Also follow students blog: www.stjohnstedxkids.wordpress.com and twitter @stjohnstedxkids
Tan Lee will be here.
Check out this blog.
Here’s a blog created by some students in our middle school to generate excitement for the Tedx event to be held at our school on June 1st
Please comment!
TedxKids@brussels
Getting Ready for Tedxkids at St. John’s International School. If you are around on June the first book a ticket!
Letter to Students from a Torn Teacher
“…………..When given opportunities for curiosity, fascination, and discovery, your insights amaze me. When I offer you occasions to be brave in thought and expression, I am impressed by your abilities. You are smart, and you know that you could never tell the world who you are with a No. 2 pencil within the tight constraints of an itty-bitty bubble….”
Click on link below for full letter:
Tedxkids at St. John’s International School
Great Event held at St. John’s International School, Belgium. June 1st. Don’t miss it.
http://www.facebook.com/tedxkidsbrussels?sk=wall#!/tedxkidsbrussels
Three Steps to Helping Students get Excited about Learning
Reduce the Number of Students a Teacher Sees
The first step in this process is for administrators to work on reducing the number of students a teacher gets to see in any given week. If a teacher sees 240 plus students a week, I’m not sure if she or he can possibly know their kids. What’s the perfect number? I don’t know. I guess 1-1 teacher student ratio isn’t achievable or desirable within a school system, but anything over 80, I would say is too much.
Metacognition as an Essential part of the Curriculum
Once over this hurdle then we need to identify what kind of learners our students are. The student needs to be able to look at her or his own learning style and work out how they work best in a given circumstance. We can support this process by making room for metacognition in our curriculum. Not just make room, in my opinion, but make metacognition an integral part of the curriculum. Knowing about knowing. Teachers can use many tools and activities for helping students identify their learning style. The teachers and students can then work out when and how they use particular strategies for learning.
Getting to know the Student’s Individual Interests
As well as having a good idea of each of their students’ learning needs, the teacher also needs to get to know their students. What are their interests outside school, how many siblings do they have, what makes them happy, what makes them frustrated etc. Once this is known we can as educators, connect to those interests and use real life examples and experiences in their learning. Not just real world in terms of relating to the world around them, but real world in the way the learning connects with what the student finds interesting.
Each child is different. Each will have their own learning styles and interests. This makes designing learning experiences very difficult for a teacher. Of course, in a class of 25 students or more, a teacher will need to generalize. She or he cannot possibly plan their classes around each individual student in a situation like that. But what the teacher can do is help the student to learn about themselves and to take control and responsibility for some of their own learning. This is after all our goal. To help students become independent learners for the rest of their lives.
International Women’s Day 2011
This Year’s Theme:
“Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women”
How we can use On-Line Games to Change the World?
Gaming. How we can use On-Line Games to Change the World?
Online gaming. That world unfamiliar to many adults yet the norm for many of our kids.
Those not familiar with games such as World of Warcraft, which is an online role-playing game, will most likely not understand the huge potential which gaming can have to help kids learn. If you are over 30, ‘Video’ games as most adults call them, evoke the thought of a little hedgehog running around a screen trying to avoid things being thrown at it. Or if you are over 35, you might be thinking of a little circle with a mouth eating smaller circles whilst being chased by ghosts (PACMan).
Gaming has moved into a virtual, collaborative world over the last 10 years. Yes, there are still little characters jumping from level to level, so called platform games, but there is also a virtual on-line gaming world out there, where people (not just kids) are collaborating together to solve problems and achieve a goal together using collective thought.
As a parent, would you worry if your child sat for three hours every evening playing a game?
As a parent, would you worry if your child sat for three hours every evening reading a book?
Both of these activities can immerse the student in a fantasy world, a world of imagination and endless possibilities. The game has an added advantage. It can help them to interact, engage, think critically, apply skills, solve problems, work as a team and the list goes on. I think we should think carefully about which games in particular would help students to do all of these things.
In this TED talk, which I highly recommend you see, Jane McGonigal talks about the possibility of harnessing gamer power to do good for the world. (Thanks Margaret for sending me the link)
She mentions three games which can be used world changing games which we can harness in our classrooms.
TED TALK LINK
Try out the following games yourselves:
3rd World Farmer http://www.3rdworldfarmer.com/
World Without Oil http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/
Superstruct http://archive.superstructgame.net/
Ben Kestner 