Coursera for PD

\PD (professional development) is hard to do sometimes, as a teacher. The best courses are in the holidays, are affordable, and are applicable straight away. Flexibility is a bonus, because as with every occupation - and life in general! - things crop up and the weeks get busy. Providers like Open Universities are great, as their courses are recognised as formal qualifications here in Australia. So are standalone or non-award units from bricks and mortar universities, and short courses through TAFE or CAE.

Me, I've chosen a slightly different route. Mum put me onto Coursera about two years ago, and I kicked off by doing a short art appreciation course before starting on education-based courses. You can do courses on just about anything! Art was great but you can study IT, business, marketing, engineering, health sciences - you name it, someone has probably put together a course on it. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are easy for universities to run once they've set them up, because they're asynchronous and assessments are automated or peer marked, so many very reputable higher education providers are putting them together. They're a bit of a cash cow when they're set up through Coursera, too, I would imagine - you can get a verified certificate for a small fee, though you can still do the course for nothing if the certificate doesn't bother you.

After my art course, I hooked up with the Virtual Teacher Program, a specialisation (series of related courses) run by the University of California Irvine Campus. I've currently completed the first four modules and am waiting for January when they will run the final unit (the Capstone Project) over four weeks. I'll be completing it while on the road on our summer trip, so I'm proving the flexibility of the courses first-hand! I've been able to complete the rest while working full time (and studying another course or two part time!).

MOOCs were intially designed for adults, but there is a movement towards them diversifying to be accessible and appropriate for children, such as the Stakers and Brain Chase. I feel like it's the next step in online learning for children - recently someone said 'If there's an internet connection in your classroom, you're no longer the smartest person in the room!' and it's true - it's really true. The MOOC movement makes learning available to all - in the education industry, that includes children seeking different knowledge presented in different ways than what's available in their learning environment, and includes teachers seeking flexible, affordable PD solutions.

Check out Coursera, and also this article which talks about child completion rates of age-appropriate MOOCs. Fascinating stuff.

MAV - Lectures and Support

When they redeveloped Docklands here in Melbourne, they built a beautiful library on a dock. They weren't brilliantly imaginative when they named it, but it doesn't seem to have mattered too much - The Library At The Dock is proving to be a great hub for all sorts of learning communities that can converge on the city.

One of those communities is the Mathematical Association of Victoria. Each year, they host a series of free lectures for anyone interested in Mathematics. Last year, knowing our school was looking into branching into 3D printing as a Design and Technology and Mathematics endeavour, I was looking for professional development to help me work out what direction this might take in my classroom.

MAV came up on a Google search, and I registered for a free lecture on 3D printing and Mathematics as presented by Dr. Burkard Polster and Dr. Marty Ross. It was a great afternoon, with lots of interesting information about the evolution of 3D printing and how 3D printing gets used now. While they were presenting, I was making some connections to curriculum links, and I came out of it with some really interesting ideas and new concepts to chew over.

MAV offers really interesting topics for their lectures. Last year they also offered 'Was Pythagoras Chinese?' and 'The Mathematics of Futurama'. This year, so far they've done 'The Mathematics of the Simpsons' and 'Footy Maths', and they still have 'Calculus In One Easy Lesson' and 'Yin and Yang Maths' coming up.

If you're interested in changing up how you think about maths in the classroom, as well as updating your own mathematical knowledge and understanding, you can register for the remaining lectures here. MAV also offers support to teachers with lesson plans and resources for differentiated instruction under the 'Teach Maths for Understanding' or 'TM4U' package as part of their membership.

New School Year... sort of?

It's an interesting time of year for educators. Here in Australia, we're racing towards the end of Term 3, which means beginning our work on reports, assessment, online and offline student folios, PDPs, and job applications for next year. On the other side of the world, though, our North American counterparts are heading back to school - and that's great news for us. Not only are there an abundance of sales on online resources and subscriptions, just in time for a new year of planning, there are also about a million parodies out there about back to school scenarios.

Most of what I post here is professional and digitally minded, but today's post is lighthearted and fun. My two favourites from this year's parodies.

One Day More by the Des Moines School District

I Like Big Buses