Jacob Walker Professional Blog

Reflective entry on effective communication and collaboration between Teachers to students, to parents.

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...

So I have had my students have a small play with the website to see if they can access the content and help find any bugs or areas they think should be reworked. This was an interesting process and although I have designed the site to be a 3 click max experience, I still found students might need the site to be less scroll orientated. This presents some issues for me around the amount of content I have and how to get it into a more functional format, but it has made me look at how I can use HTML to add the features I want. Which in itself is a fun learning experience, recently I figured out how to use a carousel and have started looked at other more advanced (to me) functions. After this experience I know I need to look at forming a team to help get the build up to scratch. My next area for work is also around the content and creation. I have tried to make as much content as I can but because of this I feel it is potentially limiting the experience that could be given. I would hate t...

The website is live. I figured I am at a stage where I need to start having people critique and find bugs in my site. So I have opened it up to all who wish to critique. Below you will find a link to the site. If you find any areas you wish for me to have a look at please comment below and I will endeavour to answer your queries and fix any bugs you may find. Just to note however, as this task is monumental in the amount of content I need to create at the moment many of the sites pages do not go beyond the initial landing pages for each subject area. Inferencing is the only one nearly completed and some more may be ready by the time you read this. Please be steadfast in your accusations of lazyness as I am getting there with the content. What I need from you however is to check these few things - Can you access the work (all open to make a copy) - Can you see the videos (nothings wrong there hopefully) - Does the content you think meet the need by level - Are most areas 3 click ma...