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I believe pedagogy is important and that too many people ignore it.  Especially teachers.  Knowing how to teach is just as important as knowing your subject.

I have been lucky, because I took mathematics when I got my teaching certification, and the emphasis was on pedagogy.  I have even been lucky enough to even take a computer science course that focused on pedagogy.

I also have a master’s degree in Computer Education and Cognitive Studies.  My hobby even involves learning how to teach and train, so that is where I am coming from.

That being said:

I am SO tired of being in workshops where we model bad teaching practices.  45 PowerPoint Slides, completely filled with information and talking for an hour is NOT the way to teach.  Talking as fast as you can because you are trying to get too much information in, is not the way to teach.

Plan better, make your talk interactive, and lead people to your information is the best way to teach.  Give people time to reflect and think.  Never talk more than 5 minutes at a time, allow people to interact, and allow people to reflect.  That’s the best way for people to learn.  If you have good stuff, people will go out and work with it when they get home.

If you are on your feet and talking over 20% of the time, you have failed.

If you are going to do an hour long talk, with PowerPoint slides, don’t number your slides.

At 23 of 45 I am going to be tempted to leave the room no matter how dynamic a speaker you are.

Especially of every slide is full.

Sent from my Windows Phone

The drug company is studying how hypoglycemia-alert dogs sense low blood sugar in humans

via www.ibj.com

See, even Lily is trying to figure it out — probabably to make money off of it too.

After spending a week doing Android Apps with the IBM Innovation Summer Camp, I broke down and bought an Android Tablet, the Nexus 7. 

Some nice things about it – it knew me when it arrived.  I opened the box and when I touched the screen, it displayed my internet nickname.  Had to put in my password, etc. and had to connect to the internet. 

Gave me some free magazines, came with $25 dollars and credit and was easy to set up.

I still think Google is fairly evil <smile> so I haven’t gone completely to the dark side, but it is a fun, cheap way to do Android apps, just like the iPod Touch lets  you do iphone Apps, without committing to the iPhone.

Or is this what this instructor calls good teaching?

He complains his students don’t read, but he has spent one day and almost one hour reading to us.  He gives us no time to think but fills the air with words.

Yes, I have lost patience, and I have 2 days, + 7 hours of this.

I have spent the last three days playing with VmWare’s Player and I really like it for development.  I have a Ubuntu machine setup for Android development now and working on a Windows 7 machine.  Earlier this morning I blogged about setting up a Windows XP machine so I could work with my insulin pump.

I see a lot of good in having a Virtual machine for development.  You can do whatever you want and don’t have to worry about screwing up your REAL machine.  That is especially cool is you are working on anything server related.

Here’s the cool part.  You can put the virtual machine on a drive and move it from machine to machine.  That is really powerful if you need to work on a school network.  I don’t like dragging my home computers back and forth, but don’t mind dragging a drive.  In fact, that’s how one of my laptops got broke.

Cool stuff.

Week well spent.

Thanks again IBM.

I’ve spent of this week at the IBM Summer Innovation Camp, and had a wonderful time learning about Android stuff.  So much so, that I’ve downloaded VMware, and am setting up a Ubuntu machine, and installing all the software from camp.

There is a facebook page at:  https://www.facebook.com/events/313435835415338/permalink/325916130833975/#!/IICDallas

and

https://www.facebook.com/events/313435835415338/

They took us through installing Ubuntu, Ellipse, and other tools, and had labs on setting up a HTML, CSS, JScript page to several different phone apps, all of which could be expanded on.  I have all the stuff here at home, so I’m going to keep working on it and see what I can bring into the classroom.

IBMer’s were great.  Kids were great.  UTD was great.  Overall good experience.

I’ve been recommending this for a while, but ran into something this weekend, that really impressed me, and that’s the fact that he’s put all of his quizzes in Moodle.

You can get most of what you need set up pretty quickly as a result.

Website is at http://www.apluscompsci.com and the pricing is reasonable.

He even does Moodle hosting if you need that.

Dallas school employees must receive gender equality training after a U.S. Department of Education investigation into the district’s boys-only field trip in February to see the war movie Red Tails.

Dallas ISD must provide gender equality training after boys-only field trip to see ‘Red Tails’ | Dallas-Fort Worth Education News – News for Dallas, Texas – The Dallas Morning News

Not a bad idea.  I’ve been through gender equity training a bunch of times, and it doesn’t hurt.

Last year, the district sent out a story that offended several women on my campus and our poor principal was quite confused, as a woman had given him the materials. 

I’m going to present a workshop on using RobotC to program Lego Robots to do autonomous stuff at TCEA

§ Details of Session

Session Number:  133149
Session Title:   Using RobotC to Program an Autonomous Robot
Track:  Technology Applications
Date:  2/7/2013
Time:    1:30:00 PM to 4:30:00 PM
Format: PC Workshop

Will be putting it on my staff development Moodle so if you sign up for it, email me at kathleen @ kweaver dot org and I’ll put you on the moodle.