Rita

Thursday, April 26 An interesting day with an awful lot to take in! I'm excited by Anne's use of a wiki space as a teaching tool and hope to explore this further with my own course over the next few weeks. Having done the Essentials course and delivered it many times to MTs, I can the benefit of having this course as a foundation for TWT. It is great to see the same messages being reinforced. I liked playing with the tools and exploring the possibilities. Overall, a good day - thank you Anne and Trudi!

Friday April 27 A very full on day. Really liked the focus on the tools- am getting my head around these. Good to revisit the Curriculum Framing Questions and getting started on the Unit Plan Template.

Monday April 30 Work on use of the Visual Ranking Tool progressing well. I wish I had gone for a less complicated model for my unit plan and will be sure to point this out to my MTs when I do my training. I like the use of videos from YouTube and TeacherTube to set the scene - video is such a powerful way to promote the potential use of technology! Great to see some much collaboration and sharing of ideas amongst the group going on

Tuesday May 1 Another good day. Really like the Seeing Reason Tool. It wasn't until the end of the day that I realised the importance of having a research base for students to draw upon before they use this tool. Having to do the research to draw cause and effect relationships would really focus students on the information and then move them beyond the facts to thinking through the causal relationships - therefore they are being guided to think at a higher level rather than just dealing with facts. I think this is a tool that has a lot of potential for use by teacher-librarians also.

If you have done the Essentials course, What are the similarities and differences between the Teach Thinking with Technology and the Essentials course. The focus of this course is very much on the tools. We do spend some time focusing on and developing Curriculum Framing Questions, but I didn't get a feel that the way in which we used the tools had to relate back to the questions. In fact, there is very little reference back to the questions in the rest of the course. Becuase I am so passionate about the Essentials Course, I think the link between the tools and how they support the Essential and Unit questions needs to be reinforced throughout the TWT course...but I have a slightly biased view!

Also, I think we need to think about how we can manage both streams of participants - those who have done Essentials and those who haven't - in the course. I think that in Module 3, I may get those that have done the course to read through 3.01 - 3.12 and start developing their own CFQs, while I take those that haven't done Essentials through the CFQ presentation. Then I would bring the group to gether and work through 3.13 onwards. I know Lynne Kendall mentioned that non-Essentials trained candidates were taken through the CFQs and would like to discuss this further with her.

What are the things you are wondering or still have questions about. Having worked on the Designing Projects localisation, I found there were some discrepancies in the content in the manual on Blooms's Taxonomy and Marzano's Dimensions of Learning to that found on the DEP site and as a result was a little confused. I have mentioned this to Anne - perhaps a telecon may be need to discuss over the next few weeks if possible? The other thing is that we don't really come back to out taxonomy and how this influences or guides the development of the unit plan. I know this is difficult given the amount of time that is needed on the tools, but I think this would be most worthwhile to really challenge teachers to think about the learning environment they createt support student learning.

Hope this helps Beccy. Happy to discuss further.