What is a Community of Practice?

What is a Community of practice?

Well the matter of fact is,

Not every community is one that is of a practice

Your neighbourhood community may be full of mystics

but that won’t fit this terms 3 characteristics,

Domain is the first, and no not the auckland park

but your subject field, your interest, your spark.

The people with which you collaborate

engage with, and help each other elaborate

this is your community, real-time, face to face,

or perhaps a little later up in cyberspace

Problem solve, share, are the ideas of the domain

to implement, enhance, and help you to stay sane

allow you in your practice, to gather a real stance

you must be practitioners trying to advance

Now you know the characteristics of this term

I hope this rap may have helped you to learn

- Matt & Stef

Today our challenge was to create a rap to explain a learning theory. 

+Matt Goodwin and I wrote this rap within our own Community of Practice.

Puzzles for learning

I am an absolute puzzle fiend. There is nothing I love more than stealing away with the daily newspaper and completing the sudoku puzzle sipping on a coffee.
I love word puzzles, number puzzles, 1000pc puzzles, wasjigs, logic puzzles, rubix cubes, anything that can be solved, I want to solve it.


Today I got to share some of that love with my learners by doing Tangram puzzles as part of our Geometry learning in Maths. Students got to explore the different shapes, using rotation & translation, we used the 7 tangram pieces to make other shapes. Learners worked in teams of three to problem solve and collaborate. 

I remember part of my love of problem solving and puzzles came from my year 5/6 teacher Mrs Robertson. She would talk us all through how to complete Logic Puzzles [Figure 3]. We would do these for 10 minutes at a time gradually working through the puzzles together. After a while I became more confident and more independent in these puzzles, and my love for puzzles grew. 

Today was a great experience for me to share one of my passions with my learners. I look forward to exposing them to more puzzles as the year goes on. If you've shared puzzles with your learners I would love to hear any insight on how best to introduce and scaffold them, or any good online sources for them. 

[Figure 3]

P.S. The answer to the problem at the top is 9.

A Pokemon battle. Working with stop-motion animation.

A couple of weeks ago we learned about making stop-motion animation.
This is my video, as a result I also learned a lot about Pokemon, a big thanks to Matt Goodwin for that!
The photos were taken using a tripod, and digital camera, loaded into iMovie, then sound and voiceover added. Great fun, a lot of learning going on and best of all collaboration though our Learn Create Share paradigm.