Gracián goes on to stress the importance of having a number of wise and/or witty sayings up your sleeve. It’s all about telling stories. 🙂
You can purchase an inexpensive copy of The Art of Worldly Wisdom book from Amazon or read it online for free via Google Books. The whole set of Wednesday Wisdom images can be found in my Creative Commons-licensed Flickr set.
Full disclosure: after mentioning Learning Score in a previous post (and raving about its potential) I was kindly given a free copy of the latest version, courtesy of John Davitt and Tribal. This was done on a no-strings-attached basis and does not influence the positive or negative points I make below.
Lesson planning is a difficult thing to learn to do well; it’s even more difficult to teach others to do effectively. The idea of coming up with learning objectives and success criteria before dealing with specific activities is a difficult one to get used to. And then there’s all of the other things to get right:
The list goes on…
So that’s why I was overjoyed (yes, overjoyed) when I saw Learning Score. It’s described as a multi-media lesson planning and delivery tool and I believe it to be invaluable for:
As you can see from the video at the top of this post, it’s extraordinarily intuitive and easy-to-use. The metaphor used is a musical score, a perfectly befitting one as a well-planned and executed lesson is like beautiful music played by a symphony. 🙂
In an improvement from the previous version, you can add up to 6 tracks, meaning that you can rectify the strange situation where ‘props’ are available to be added at the bottom of the screen but, by default, there’s nowhere to put them!
You create your lesson in ‘Edit’ mode and then, when ready for delivery (and after saving, of course) you click ‘Play’ to enter delivery mode. This has a timer function to keep you on track, but to be honest I find that learning goes off at so many tangents sometimes that the lesson plan is merely a statement of intent. The timer’s not that useful to me, but may be to trainee teachers for reassurance.
Double-clicking on the resources in ‘Play’ mode allows you to view/listen/access them within Learning Score. For obvious reasons, the filetypes available are limited. With videos, for example, only SWF and FLV files can be used. If you’re fond of using downloaded YouTube clips, this presents no problem at all. If you’ve got a bank of high-quality MP4 files, on the other hand, you’re going to either have to get transcoding or play them outside of Learning Score.
I love the whole concept of Learning Score: the way that it liberates you from having to use just text, which often can constrain ideas – and therefore creativity. I really like the way that, if you choose, you can package up all of your resources inside Learning Score, ready for delivery. And then, again if you choose, export them, share them with colleagues, or add via SCORM-compliance to your schools’ Learning Platform.
I admire the powerful simplicity of Learning Score, the way in which you can very quickly build up a lesson by focusing on learning rather than just keeping students busy. I find the interface intuitive, fairly lightweight and flexible. I like the ability to add annotations. In short, if a site is created to be able to share the resulting .lsz files (I’ve been told it’s in the works) then I can see Learning Score taking off. Big style. 😀
But Learning Score isn’t perfect. There are still some things I’d like to see improve. For example, although I can customise activities and props after dragging them onto the score, I haven’t figured out a way of adding to them so that they appear by default. And having only 30 characters for the main learning objective is nowhere near enough!
My second problem is the proprietary nature of the file format it produces. To a great extent this is the nature of the beast: it’s a new, fairly revolutionary tool. But the ability to read and write the file formats using (potentially) other applications would be a boon. It would reassure me as an educator that I’ll always be able to access my own lesson planning in future.
And finally, although the whole point of Learning Score is lesson planning and delivery in a very visual and multimedia kind of way, sometimes it’s necessary to print things out. Unfortunately this is what a wonderfully-crafted and visual Learning Score looks like when exported to text format ready for printing. Not pretty.
I highly recommend Learning Score. It’s an application that, had I not very kindly been given a free copy, would definitely have purchased for myself. It not only serves as an awesome way to plan your own lessons (and meetings, projects…) but to demonstrate in a very hands-on, visual way how colleagues and trainee teachers can do likewise!
CC BY-NC Jon McGovern
Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response. (Mildred Barthel)
I used to have this quotation up in my classroom – accompanied by the smiliest smiley you’ve ever seen! It, along with other quotations* would often prompt questions and discussion. A lot of students didn’t really understand what it meant until I explained it to them. Some adults too.
What it means is this: everyone has setbacks in their life. But it’s your reactions not your carefully-considered actions that show your character. I’m reminded of the story of the member of the congregation who followed the vicar around whilst nailing up banners in the church. “Why are you following me around?” enquired the vicar. “I want to hear what you say when you hit your thumb with the hammer,” replied the parishioner! :-p
So to be positive is a choice in life. Things are going to come your way that you could conceive of as being:
Which is why you need to lean into life. Expect setbacks, have strategies for dealing with them.
The second way to be overwhelmingly positive (even when you don’t feel like it) is to focus on the needs of others. Selflessness actually has a massive effect on your own wellbeing and happiness. Think about it: our needs are actually very few; we often confuse what we desire with what we need. There are those around us with very real needs.
There are people who are lonely with whom you could spend some time.
People in mourning whom you could comfort.
Those struggling to make ends meet who you could help in cash or kind.
The list goes on. Once you take that step outside yourself, you’ll find it much easier to be positive. After all, you have to be positive in order to have a positive effect on others!**
* Such as my absolute favourite: “He who stops being better stops being good” (Oliver Cromwell)
** Just as with all advice on this blog, this is something I don’t claim to be perfect at. But I know that I’m in a state of perpetual beta. I’m actively *trying* to get better at stuff like this… 😀
