Monday, May 25, 2009

firsts

These things have happened in the course of my classroom teaching for the first time recently
  • Two students brought their own laptops to school which ran a linux OS (Year 11)
  • I asked a technical question in class ("What does GIF stand for?"). Within seconds a student has retrieved the answer from wikipedia (Year 9)
  • I ask students to update their internet money so we can use the internet next lesson. Next lesson a student brings her iphone and mac laptop to class. She has setup her phone as a modem which blue tooth's to her laptop. She explains that she is not going to waste her money on the heavily filtered school internet (Year 11)
  • A student asks me if we can do a particular science experiment as part of the electricity / magnetism topic. I haven't heard of this experiment before and ask him where he has heard of it. He replied, "Youtube" (Year 9). Actually I think I have just found the video that he was talking about:

3 comments:

Chris Harvey said...

I really enjoyed reading this post, keep up the good work.

Bill Kerr said...

thank you Chris, your support is much appreciated

Unknown said...

Cool but not really suprising.

Is there any emerging technology of the last 100 years where students didn't have a better grasp than the majority of teachers?

Loved #4. Debunking youtube attempts at perpetual motion machines is good for critical thinking. Time to revise the 1st law?