Tuesday, October 04, 2005

ISD TOK Blog

Theory of Knowledge Weblog
TOK as Theory of knowledge, is a part of the International Baccalaureate curriculum delivered at International School Dhaka. The aim of the TOK course is to give the students the ability to think about their different knowledge they’ve learned through their curriculum: natural sciences, human sciences, arts, ethics, maths, etc. How can I know? What can I know? Is it true? What kind of truth can I expect from a historical statement? From an arts statement and from a scientific one? These are questions that our TOK students try to answer.

The TOK weblog was established for the 2005/2006 TOK students at ISD. The initial use of the weblog has been for students to maintain their own TOK journals. As a minimum requirement for the ISD-based assessment of TOK, students must complete two journal entries per week.
These journal entries must be relevant to areas discussed in recent TOK classes and must have some original input from the student. It may be a summary of discussions, questions raised from discussions or ideas for focus papers, practice essays and presentations. The journals will also be used for resources which students collect.
Each student’s journal is contained in one of the ‘recent discussion’ sections with the student’s name and TOK class as the heading. Other students and TOK teachers have access to student’s work and can post their own comments. The weblog is being developed on an ongoing basis.
Future developments include:


  • international collaboration with TOK students
  • pages for resources: including annotated bibliographies and examples of essays and presentations
  • weekly summaries supplied by TOK teachers
  • requirements for ISD-based and IBO assessment

An advantage of the weblog for ongoing assessment is that each entry has a time and date so that deadlines for entries can be easily checked.
Check out the TOK weblog and individual student postings at: http://www.isdweblogs.org/tok/discuss/
Written by TOK teachers at ISD: John Lindsay and Francoise de Ryckel

Our featured columnist has a word about environmental awareness in the technology age.

'Brendan Says' "This article is not a rebel article"
It is great that we all have computers but have we forgotten about the poor ol' environment? I went looking on the net to find information on the impact of computers on the environment. Just this single piece of information (on a 30 second Google search) has changed my life. I found the following at the United Nations University web site
http://update.unu.edu/archive/issue31_5.htm.

"The average 24 kg desktop computer with monitor
requires at least 10 times its weight in fossil fuels and chemicals to
manufacture, much more materials intensive than an automobile or refrigerator, which only require 1-2 times their weight in fossil fuels. Researchers found that manufacturing one desktop computer and 17-inch CRT monitor uses at least 240 kg of fossil fuels, 22 kg of chemicals and 1,500 kg of water – a total of 1.8 tonnes of materials." ..."By the end of 2002, one billion PCs had been sold worldwide"....

You do the math!! Every time I have purchased a computer I was only really concerned with style, size, fast speed I never thought I would be killing cute chipmunks,dolphins, polar bears and polluting the environment so. I'm not being flippant it just "How could I have let this slip under the radar!!" Inever once asked the sales person about their company's "Green" policy. Could it be that we have unwittingly walked into the culture of having the newest technology at any cost and as we marvel at our greatness...our wings begin to melt. So stop it!! Make good choices!! Brendan Says!!

Brendan McGibbon

Links for the week:

  • Both of these come from the Learning and Teaching Scotland website.
    - ICT in education portal
    - Blog for Modern Foreign Languages
  • L&L article (Leading and Learning with Technology is the monthly magzine of the International Association for Technology in Education): (Point/Counterpoint)
    Should School's Strive to be on the Leading Edge? Which side are you on??
  • Skype in the Classroom by Wesley A Fryer (Skype is a relatively new VoIP synchronous communication tool: see the website to find out what this means). Wesley states: "Educators interested in helping motivate students to develop both traditional as well as twenty-first century literacy skills in the classroom can and should use audio conferencing technologies like Skype to literally plug their students into collaborative exchanges with global partners on a variety of projects".

What are you doing with eLearning in education? Contributions to this eLearning blog are welcome. Please send to Julie Lindsay

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