AOLE - 2.8 Blog - #ghostbloggers

Using Google Documents in Teaching             Debating as a teaching method is a strategy that involves a process of, firstly, allowing pupils time to research and construct an argument regarding a certain topic. They will then be required to present this argument to the opposing team, by listening carefully to the defensive opinions and finding the relevant information from their research to ‘argue back’. (Darby, 2007)         As mentioned in the previous blog post, as a class we have recently spent a seminar debating with another group online using Google Documents. We spent the first part of the lesson researching and forming our argument as a group, before logging onto Google Documents to ‘argue’ with the other class. I found this session very engaging and I am now going to explore the idea of using this in teaching.             O...

Incorporating Music into Education I have recently explored the idea of the Mozart Effect and the use of music to enhance children’s learning. As a group, we shared ideas about this topic in the form of an online debate with another group, a learning style which I will discuss more in a separate blog post. I have summarised the arguments of the debate below. The Mozart Effect refers to the study that found that spatiotemporal reasoning was improved for ten to fifteen minutes after listening to complex classical music such as the Mozart piano sonata (Rauscher & Shaw, 1998). However, a study by the Knight Foundation (2002) reported that only 30% of 850 17-21 year olds enjoy listening to classical music, implying that it is unlikely that the 70% who do not are unlikely to benefit from listening to this genre (John & James, 2002). Another criticism of the Mozart Effect is the lack of scientific evidence to support the claim. For example, one researcher’s work found no evidenc...

Creativity in the Classroom Donaldson highlights the importance of creativity in education by dedicating one of his six areas of learning to ‘expressive arts’. The idea of this learning topic is to give children the chance to explore their own creativity and imagination, through the practice of their artistic skills. (Donaldson, 2015)      However, creativity should be clearly recognizable within all aspects of the curriculum, not just in art lessons. This means that teachers should be ensuring that the lessons that they plan are exciting and original. Lessons that are not original and creative will soon become repetitive, and will therefore disengage the children from wanting to learn. (Freire, 1985, p.79)             In order to engage students heads, we first need to engage their hearts (Curran cited in Gilbert, 2006). To do this, we need to create a ‘fun learning environment’ to allow disengaged stu...