The End, The Start. And some snakes and ladders…

The End

This post marks the end of jonesytheteacher.wordpress.com. I’ve been keen to grab my own domain space for some time, and now I’ve finally done it.

The Start

From 2013, I’ll be blogging from jonesytheteacher.com.au. It pretty much looks the same, but now I can control the backend of the blog so I can add more features. I hope you follow me from here to there.

Snakes and Ladders

To see an infographic I made with  infogr.am  about my year, click on the image below.

Happy New Year! See you online sometime!

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,900 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 10 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Testing is…testing

I was flicking through the Sydney Morning Herald whilst Mr12 played cricket this morning, and came upon this letter to the editor:

The article referred to by the letter writer is here

My first reaction was that pretty much all the concerns the author mentioned could be easily argued as pitfalls of any testing, not just fitness or body related.
Why don’t people consider testing like NAPLAN, or the HSC, or just your generic end of unit summative tests for reports in the same light? What makes testing the body and reporting the findings any more insensitive than testing literacy or numeracy and publishing the details for that? Conversely, surely the arguments used to justify NAPLAN testing and reporting for literacy and numeracy must hold for weight and physical fitness testing and reporting as well? Exposure of problem areas, targeted funding to address shortfalls, support for the kids that really need it?

Ahh. We’re worried people will notice and start to compare each other. “As we all know, children can’t refrain from wanting to see each other’s report cards” tend to suggest the author knows it’s already happening now. Just quietly, doesn’t My School do that now?

To me you can’t have one sort of testing that’s preferable to another sort. Testing is…testing. And lets face it, testing is usually deployed in education as a  blunt instrument to discriminate between candidates and often results in winners and losers, no matter how much chocolate you put on the broccoli.

PE teachers often resort to fitness testing as a well intentioned way to add a “personal best” aspect to the movement studies they program, but ultimately these tests usually end up in comparisons by students and staff.  In doing this we can often find ourselves creating a comparative culture that can be negatively reinforcing and detrimental to any lifelong physical activity aims we might have for the general student population. Additionally, the idea that competition (physical, intellectual or whatever) is “character building” and  important plays it’s part in testing being poorly used as an assessment tool. We face many examinations of our skills and character throughout life. Not one at the end of it. We should be showing kids this.

Testing in any realm needs to be carefully thought out. If we’re honest we’ll explain that it’s about comparison.  And that it’s one dimensional. And the results have a shelf life.

I’d prefer to find ways not to have that conversation at all in schools. Full stop.

DVR Glasses

I recently bought some DVR glasses from Kogan. I thought they might be an interesting experiment for a PE classroom.

This test was with my son sitting in the front seat of our car, on the way to his school. I noticed the .avi video quality was much better viewed straight form the memory card. Uploaded to YouTube, it seemed to lose some of it’s clarity. He was a bit quick with his movements too, and that would be a user technique to refine in the future.

Uses?

I reckon they could be good for video explanations of work done or skills learned from a performers point of view (POV).

I’ll take them to the cricket nets next. I’ll try riding my bike with them as well.

What do you think they could be used for?

CHANGE – Build your own brewery

Fermentation – http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fermentation

I do a lot of thinking when I ride my bike. It must be the extra blood and oxygen  pumping through my head or something, but I seem to think more broadly when I exercise. That’s probably a subject for another post…

Today I was riding and my thoughts turned to beer. I must have wanted one at the end of the ride…who knows…but then I started to think about what goes into making beer.

I’ve done that a bit – made my own beer- and I love the process, the smells and of course the end result.

And then another thought occurred to me – that making beer is a process not dissimilar to the process of change in any organisation, including a school.

Hang in there – it starts to make sense from here on in…

Let’s take a look at beer making. You start with a recipe (usually one that goes back over generations) and some basic ingredients – water, grain, hops and yeast.

Ingredients

You malt the grain, mix the malted grain with water and mash (or cook) it, cook it a bit more while adding some hops (flavour and preservative), cool it down and then add the yeast. Bubble, bubble, let fermentation do its thing in optimal environmental conditions and then filter, bottle and enjoy. This is a great change process – grain, water, hops, yeast transformed into an entirely different end result where you can still taste the original ingredients, but they are now represented in a different form. There’s even some substrate (left over) sometimes that can lead to an unpalatable but useful byproduct – like Vegemite.

How to make beer at home – Tyler Hoehne (OC Weekly)

As organisations (and I’ll talk school here, specifically) approach change projects I reckon the process is similar. We bring together various ingredients (people, tools and ideas), mix them using a recipe (usually one that goes back generations) , ferment the plan in optimal environmental conditions (not too hot, not too cold),  bottle and distribute the final product and consume. The substrate in this process can be useful, or unpalatable, as well.

But to me it’s one ingredient that makes all the difference to both examples.

Yeast.

Yeast is the catalyst for change in beer making, and the yeast in your school change project is just as important.

If you’ve ever used faulty yeast in bread or beer making, you’ll know what I mean. Bad yeast fails to change or lift and ends up leaving the final product flat.

So, just as it’s important to have fresh, active yeast for  beer making, so it is just as important to have a thinker or do-er as a yeast-like catalyst as part of your change team. Someone with the ability to help things along.  If you don’t think it’s you, then you need to look around and find them. They’ll usually stand out – they’re the ones that produce fizz when they have a go at something. Can’t see them yet? Examine your personal learning network (PLN), because they don’t necessarily have to be at your school. The beauty of an extended PLN is that  if you don’t have yeast in your own kitchen, then they could just be a tweet or hangout away.

 

So, get brewing! Cheers

The Pour – cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by Beertographer: http://flickr.com/photos/seanbuchandpt/5732633634/

 

 

My Twitter Follow/Unfollow/Block Philosphy

I’ve recently reflected on why I follow Twitter users, and what criteria I use to finish following people. I’d also recently read that it’s periodically important to publicise what your social media user tipping points are, and to let your network know. So here goes:

 

 

 

What is Physical Education pedagogy?

I came home tonight to find the latest edition of Active Education (AE) magazine waiting for me. Active Education has stories on Physical Education, Outdoor Education, Coaching and nutrition for those involved in health and physical activity. It is locally produced and promotes mainly Australian venues and products but the articles have an international application.

Active Education Magazine Sept/Oct 2012

I like the Active Education mag because it usually has a good balance of research based articles and pieces written by people in the classroom talking about what works for them.

So, I was flicking through and came across an article written by Richard Tinning on pedagogy in Physical Education. I won’t recount it here, but I liked it for a couple of reasons. Linguistically, I got the feeling he chose to “write to the audience of the magazine” (by and large practitioners in educational settings) in way that wasn’t patronisingly simple or, conversely, wordy and complex in abstractions. And he provoked me to think about what “pedagogy” in PE could mean.

What is Physical education pedagogy? by Richard Tinning

I’ve included a Scribd version of the article. Have a read, if you can’t access the magazine yourself*

View this document on Scribd

Anything I say from here on in will be my interpretation of his article. I’m more interested in what you make of it. Feel free to make comments here, or even better – write your own blog post. I’d love to read about it.

*I approached Active Education magazine for permission to reproduce the article on Scribd for people that don’t have a subscription (or know to subscribe) to their magazine. I promised to advocate for people to subscribe to the fine mag. But I never heard back (the email request bounced because their inbox was full. Someone needs to monitor their “enquiries@active education.com.au email address more closely).
So, Active Education, I’ve gone ahead and probably infringed your copyright by reproducing the article without your express permission. I decided it was too important to be hidden behind a subscription. I’ll take down the Scribd reproduction if you want me to.

Maggie map

I was out riding today, and got swooped twice by magpies. I love magpies, but they unfailingly scare the hell out of me when they do that.

Meet the mad Mingara magpie. Source: The Daily Telegraph

I know the swooping only happens at the beginning of Spring, and I’m ready for it. But I know some aren’t. So I started a map to locate swoop zones for unsuspecting cyclists. Forewarned is forearmed, they say.

View Larger Map

I’d like to crowdsource this into a bigger resource. If you know of a magpie swoop zone, leave details in the comments and I’ll add them to the map.

Happy cycling.

Love this Infographic

Degrees of separation

Here’s a presentation I did on the value of a Personal Learning Network (PLN) as part of  a TeachMeet@PLANE online session on the 25th of July, 2012.

The presenter notes DEFINITELY help you make sense of it all. You will need to visit the actual Slideshare site to see them. Just click on this link to go there.