Jacob Walker Professional Blog

Blogging can be an effective way to share your professional knowledge and persona with your community and is great for recording professional growth and development however blogging platforms like blogger and wordpress are not the most accessible content creators for most of the community, as I have found through personal experience.  In terms of sharing your brand as a teacher to be effective you need to be accessing the forums that your community access. To this day that would be Instagram and Facebook. Then you would need to make sure your content is appropriate for your audience and ensure it encapsulates the brand of teacher you want to show. I have set myself up with an Instagram page that solely focuses on my STEM development and I use this to share my creations and things that I think my students would engage with. This is part of my brand as a teacher and I make sure that I interact in a way that ensures I maintain critical thinking and a learner focused relationship. ...

Sitting in a floating ball in the Tech Futures building in Newmarket, Auckland, I find myself thinking about the future of education (mainly because I'm doing the Mindlab post graduate course) and how as teachers we can develop our individual understanding of how to make use of the new digital curriculum and change the way we approach our classroom task design and learning environment. The collaboration flow chart from Microsofts 21C Learning design framework and rubric is a great starting point for most schools and teachers to use to help them redefine collaboration within their classrooms and practise. How many tasks do you provide for your students that would meet level 5? I know I would probably be lucky to get to a level 3 or 4 and I'm the head of Digital at my school! Gives you a strong point to start reflecting on.

2019 has been interesting. This is the year of STEM and the year of heavy learning on my behalf. If you are new to digital teaching, then STEM subjects through a digital medium can seem pretty hardout. You may want to yell NERD!!! at the top of your lungs at anyone who seems vaguely adept at this area. However it is much easier than I had anticipated and basically all I really had to do was spend some of my own time mucking around with the learning tools in order to fully understand what they do. So to help you break down some of those STEM walls I have a few tools I would like to recommend for the inexperienced. Scratch.mit.edu Scratch is a great tool to get kids into coding. However at first it can seem pretty daunting. Luckily for you and me there are some pretty good youtube tutorials to help you get through the basics. Alternatively this online tool also offers mini lessons that can help break down basic commands, like moving a sprite and creating fun games. Scratch is a gre...