Ocelotte’s Journey

 I’ve added to slideshare, a presentation about grade 7 students using Tinkerplots to look at scatter plots that show changes over time.  Visit http://www.slideshare.net/ocelotte/tinkerplots 

Just thought I’d share with interested people that we’re looking into implementing a whole school numeracy programme. Since the beginning of this year, we have implemented Carol Christensen’s literacy programme across the whole school. We are currently exploring QuickSmart. For more information see:

http://www.une.edu.au/simerr/quicksmart/pages/index.php

Byers, Terry, (2009) “The Basics Intervention Mathematics Program for at-risk students”, The Australian Mathematics Teacher, Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 6-11.
Pegg, John, Graham, Lorraine, and Bellert, Anne (2005), “The effect of improved automaticity of basic number skills on persistently low-achieving pupils”, on-line accessed 14th May, 2009, http://www.emis.de/proceedings/PME29/PME29RRPapers/PME29Vol4PeggEtAl.pdf

QuickSmart is for the bottom 30%, so we are looking for other programmes for the rest of the school. My thinking so far is;

Farkota, Rhonda (2000) Elementary Math Mastery, McGraw Hill, Australia. (The EMM programme is currently being used by MacKillop College in Hobart who say the programme is being successfully used by non-Maths specialist teachers.)
Farkota, Rhonda (2003) The Effects of a 15 Minute Direct Instruction Intervention in the Regular Maths Class on Students’ Mathematical Self-efficacy and Achievement, Unpublished PhD thesis, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia, on-line accessed 14th May, 2009, http://www.acer.edu.au/documents/FarkotaThesis.pdf

For the top half of the school, it would be good to design a numeracy programme similarly to how Carol Christensen does – for literacy they do activities based around critical literacy. Maybe “statistical/financial etc literacy” related activities. eg Mathematics applied to social issues across the curriculum, Maths in the newspapers etc.

Maybe we will only end up with programmes focusing on the tail end, but due to the success of all staff being involved in the literacy programme, for 35 minutes every day, we are certainly considering whole school progamme possibilities.

The following are some of my sites – I don’t visit them very often, but if I name them all here, I will be able to find them myself!

http://www.slideshare.net/ocelotte
http://delicious.com/Ocelotte  (I do use this alot.)

http://twitter.com/ocelotte  I have made 2 postings in the last 6 months – no wonder no one follows me lol!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ocelotte

Does anyone know anything about Samuel John Duncan? He was a signaller in WW1 with the 19th Battalion. 

TitleTINKERPLOTS REVIEWTinkerplots Review

Hi, I’ve recently become part of the Apple family with the acquistion of a MacBook and iPod. As they’ve named some of their products by the cat family eg Tiger and Leopard, I’ve called my iPod the Ocelot.An ocelot is a member of the cat family. It is nimble, agile and of course is a smaller version of the felines. It could even be a metaphor for my learning journey – I’m a small member of the larger community of educators. Many larger tigers have gone before me, but this agile ocelot is ready to pounce and have a go. In particular I’m interested about seamlessly integrating technology into the classroom so that it becomes a part of my teaching pedagogy.Visit my del.icious.us site. http://del.icio.us/ocelotte