Computer Hindered Learning

Some thoughts on computers in the classroom, based on my first three weeks as teaching assistant:

I have long hated flashing screensavers.  They are totally unnecessary.  All they do is provide a distraction for every eye in the room.  Teaching in front of a row of monitors all merrily flashing and rotating a logo is like trying talk in front of a row of waving idiots.  Teachers would not tolerate this behaviour from students, they should not tolerate it from computers.

Screensavers which activate in the middle of demonstrations cause the teacher to have to jump across the room to restore the display, and maybe even log in again. This is a completely unnecessary interruption to the flow of the lesson and a waste of time.  For this to be happening 3 or 4 times in a lesson is totally unacceptable.

If a screensaver has to be used for security reasons then it should have a static display and the time before activation should be at least the length of a lesson.

When the students are working at the computers, it is difficult to get their attention away from the screen so you can address them as a group.  There are nearly always some students who will keep surreptitiously clicking away, with one eye on the teacher and one on the screen.  I did see one teacher demand that all his students switch off their monitors before he addressed them.  This I think is a very good idea, and I will make a point of using it when I become a teacher.

Update on Thu 2009-01-29 by Tristram Brelstaff

The default screensaver on most computers in schools is, in effect, an unpaid advertisement for Microsoft.  It would seem, therefore, doubly dubious that it is present in classrooms.

Walter Dack Brelstaff

From the family archives: a photo of my paternal grandfather, Walter Dack Brelstaff (1903 - 2000).  This was probably taken at his wedding to Emily Elizabeth Mercer in 1929. For more on Walter see here and here.

Pochards

Yesterday morning I walked with round the Reading University lakes with Zoe.  On the large lake there were still a few shoveller ducks under the bushes on the north side.  We also saw three brown headed grey ducks which I hadn't seen before.  Their backs were light grey and their side an even lighter grey.  On getting back home I was able to tentatively identify them as common pochards (Aythya ferina).

Update on Sun 2009-02-01 by Tristram Brelstaff

We saw one of them yesterday, in with a group of shoveller ducks.

Cold

I knew it was too good to last.  Having not had a single day off work due to illness in 15 months, I do two weeks as a teaching assistant and come down with a cold.  I noticed two children sniffling and sneezing in the class I was helping on Wednesday, and on Thursday evening I was sniffling and sneezing myself.  On Friday morning I prepared Zoe's breakfast and saw her off to school.  With her guitar on her back she looked like a himalayan sherpa (she is taking guitar lessons with Berkshire Maestros).  Then I went back to sleep until after 10am. 

Infections are the bane of new teachers.  Back when I was a lab technician, I remember a new female teacher being being laid low for most of her first term by a particularly nasty series of colds and 'flu.  Hopefully, I won't be as bad as that.  I have mentioned before that I regard children as vectors of disease.  And schools might have been specifically designed to maximize the efficiency of those vectors.

Silk Button Spangle Galls

Oak trees seem to be host to an unusual number of parasites.  Just by casual inspection I have been able to identify six different types of insect galls on the oak trees in the grounds of Reading University.  The above photo shows one of these, the silk button spangle gall.  Like the smooth spangle gall that, I blogged about here, this is found on the underside of leaves and contains one stage in the development of a type of small wasp (in this case the species Neuroterus numismalis).

Photo taken in Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2008-09-02.