Tim Wilson Blog ePortfolio

Assignment 3: Personal Family of Models Unknowingly, I have been utilizing the personal family of models to my teaching greatly this school year.   Most of this has to do my view on teaching and learning being more focused on the concepts and skills that students will carry on into other and future areas of their lives rather than on content.   Coincidently I have had the opportunity in my Design class to developing students’ metacognition, self-reflection, and ownership of their learning through the creation of Learning Blog Portfolios.   I have also been modeling some of the strategies they can use to take on self-directed learning.   Next term, designing their own learning will be the objective of their project.   The whole purpose of creating the Personal Learning Blogs is to give the students a sense of ownership of their learning through giving them the individual choice of how they want to demonstrate what they have done and who they are.   In...

We are social beings.  As social beings we create our understanding of the world around us through the social interactions and experiences that we encounter.  To not utilize the inherent nature of human beings to be social in education would be negligent.  Although, teachers, up until now and some still teach in this manner, teach with the ‘Sage on the Stage’ method.  We, on the other hand, want to empower the community to be innovative through collaboration.  The group is wiser than the individual. Reasoning for using The Group Investigating Model in our school : As you know our school is an IB world school, meaning that we employ all three divisions of the IB, PYP, MYP, and DP.  The IB has a strong focus on learning through inquiry.  In the PYP we follow lines of inquiry in each unit to develop understanding.  However, what we have been finding is that when our students move from PYP to MYP they are having a difficult time adjusting to th...

Assignment 1: Scientific Inquiry Method My school is a PYP school which, by design, focuses on promoting students’ inquiry and developing strategies for them to follow their own inquiries.  In, what we call PYP 6 (third grade), the unit this term is “ Energy is fundamental to our daily lives”, which carries through to all of the students’ learning experiences including those in physical education class.  The head of PE asked me if I had any ideas on how they could explore the concept of energy within their PE classes (I used to teach PE so he often asks my input).  After talking through a few ideas I thought, wow this would be a perfect opportunity to develop this unit and the process of getting to the learning objectives using the scientific inquiry method.             There are two learning objectives that we are going to focus on.  By the end of the unit students will understand the concepts of: § ...

I've finally completed my research paper and case study of using Minecraft to develop reading comprehension.  I had a great time conducting the study and was quite pleased with the impact the activity had on the students.  Although the p value did not determine that the intervention was statistically significant, most likely due to the small sample size, the students in the class that used Minecraft  on average scored 10% higher on a 15 point comprehension test than the students from the class that used a traditional sequence of events graphic organizer to retell the story. The most important factor that I saw when observing the students using Minecraft  was their engagement level.  The entire class was immediately engrossed in the task from the word go.  They intuitively organized themselves divying up tasks, communicating progress, and researching actual building in Johannesburg.  No one asked them to do this.  They did it because they were in...