Saturday, August 18, 2007

Making Learning Fun

Clay Burell describes his teaching style as "relaxed, non-authoritarian, relevant, high-energy, philosophical, wonder-aimed, and encourages principled non-comformity and laughter."

In the spirit of this excellent philosophy, I have been paying around in ToonDoo, trying to create some lesson-enhancing cartoons.

All of our teachers are being required to post an Essential Question while we teach. Since the students might not be familiar with this term, I came up with the following two cartoons:

Essential Questions

Eq for two poets

If we can access the site at school, I'd love to have my students create their own EQ cartoons.

6 comments:

CB said...

What a great idea for a great tool! One more toy to learn and learn with!

CB said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
CB said...

Oops. Take 2:

FYI, that "What is the perfect teacher and classroom?" student survey you suggested has now been thrown to all my last year's student to answer, anonymously, in comments on my blog here.

It would be interesting to turn this into a "student" meme....

Unknown said...

Diane,

Clay just forwarded to me today your post about ToonDo. Great idea of using it to have kids post essential questions.

diane said...

Clay and Anthony,

I'm starting to (I can't believe I'm writing this!) wish for the first day of classes so that I can start interacting with students and trying all of these new technologies with them.

My two key points to remember: 1. the content must drive the curriculum not the tools (which are, after all, just tools) 2. try to make this course as collaborative as possible: rather than giving "answers" work with the students to construct knowledge.

rajendran said...

Hi,

Glad you liked ToonDoo.
Do tell us what specific enhancements you would like in it, from the teacher's point of view. We would love to build them in for you when we release our next update.

Meanwhile, your ToonDoo's look shrunk because blogger doesn't allow pictures as wide as a ToonDoo. To bypass this problem, we have provided two embedding-code mechanisms for each ToonDoo. You can grab the code for each ToonDoo, from the globe-icon in the right-hand-strip and paste them in the html-mode of your blog editor. You will be able to see the picture in real-size without any loss of quality.

Doo try that!

Rajendran.
ToonDude from www.jambav.com