Recently I was asked to give a talk to first year IBDP students about the role of knowledge in ITGS as part of their regular TOK class. I chose to invoke the legendary Claude Shannon in discussing the transformative effect digitisation had on knowledge, and tie it in to the often specious arguments people make about the “half-life” of knowledge.
Students often struggle with higher level thinking skills when introduced to them for the first time. In this post I talk about exceeding the expectations of exam boards by going beyond an A* through embedding deep, critical thinking throughout the curriculum.
For as long as I’ve been teaching content that requires more than a handful of notes, I have encouraged my students to use the Cornell method for note taking. Copying by rote doesn't work beyond remembering things. For comprehension & understanding we need a different approach - one I think is encouraged by this method.
Critical thinking was once the purview of classicists & philosophers, but with those subjects still being squeezed out of schools that view them as elitist or irrelevant in the modern world, where does critical thinking fit?
In September I moved to the beautiful island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. I recently started work on revamping the ICT curriculum, and am currently looking at a blank piece of paper surrounded by piles of reading material. What would you do?
When I was training to teach, one of my tutors had a section on his lesson plan proforma entitled "vocab". At the time, I wondered what possible reason there would be to have a vocab section for an ICT lesson plan - the kids know the vocab, right?