Yes I was totally surprised and I want to thank Jo McLeay for doing such a wizard job of getting to the VITTA conference dinner thinking I would see all my NECC pals and then having her get up and make a speech about me. What a fantastic and memorable way to finish off what has been a very up and down year. I have only a few days to go in my old job in the state system and after 29 years in the same school, I am definitely leaving with a whole lot of mixed emotions and I will miss my dear friends and hard working government teachers who struggle so hard against huge odds to do a wonderful job for kids.
But as this blog is a large testament to, my view on schooling has changed so much that I cannot sit and wait for things and people to catch up with the changes anymore and I am taking my plans and dreams and heading off into the sunset - or as many have said going across to the dark side. I am so excited about next year and I hope that my expectations are not unrealistic and that I can meet the school's expectations too.
So, thankyou so much Jo and VITTA for the award, and Upwey for allowing me to grow and explore all this new and challenging frontier in education. What a way to finish one chapter in my life !
It seems my life has been all about Comic Life recently This is a video that has been made to help teachers who are training to use netbooks and are wondering how to use Comic life Thanks to a very easy session with Russ Blackwell who filmed the session with my class working beautifully behind me
I also gave a presentation at the second EMUG meeting on the 29th October at Mooroolbark SC about Comic Life and the work my class was doing while the film was being shot was shown as examples. Great fun and I hope it has some impact for kids in classes as it is a wonderful tool. If you are interested in learning more about Comic life, Deb hicks has created this stunning wiki and Russ Blackwell is developing a great repository of ideas and training films on this wiki I will try and put some of the kids work on here too.
My friend Julie also was filmed on the day talking about Comic Life and how she has been using it in LOTE classrooms and here is her movie.
Just discovered this great site created by Mark Warner who I met in America last year. It is called Ideas to Inspire and it is full of great ideas and resource suggestions . This slideshow is fabulous - well worth taking a look. Well done Mark!!!
Photojojo's PhotoTimeCapsule Setup the Time Capsule with your email & Flickr account. (60 seconds, tops) Twice a month, enjoy an email with your photos from a year ago.
Life moves on sometimes slowly, sometimes imperceptibly and then you stop and consider and things have happened which should be noted. Emug has begun - we had our first meeting last Thursday at Ringwood North Primary School and Mark Richardson and Deb Hicks from the western Macschoolsnet group came along to give their blessing and their advice for our fledgling and help us get started. For a group that sent out ning invites by twitter and a fairly small number of channels we now have 107 members for the ning and we had thirty people turn up for our first meeting. It was lovely to have such a good start and Adam Brice has done a superb job in getting the ning on the go and organising the meeting.
The recent storms took their toll as a tree fell on our cubby- a place that was a favourite play area for our girls when they were growing up. In a moment it was gone as the earth heaved and a beautiful old tree fell and crushed it completely - the cleanup will take a while .
I have finally been able to upgrade to an iphone and I am having such fun learning how to use it and make the most of this amazing little device. It is incredible- video, camera and voice recording plus apps plus a phone - I am loving the apps and how many more productivity tools I can make use of...
As the term draws to an end the number of conference flyers coming to me has increased, but the one I am most interested in is Ulearn in Christchurch in New Zealand in October. I have applied for a study scholarship from the school council and am hoping to have the opportunity to visit all my tweetbuddies over there and see some of the great ideas they are working on.
The excitement of being involved in the PLP project was enormous for me at the start of the year. I had been blogging and connecting with other educators for 18 months and had established the OZ/NZ Educators network. The online meetings and the Bloggers Feasts were all part of developing a community of like minded educators who could talk freely about their exploration of Web 2.0. The opportunity to give a formal title to what I was doing and to allow some fellow staff who were starting to share the interest the chance to learn and develop a PLN was fantastic and so we started off with a team of five. The first session was like oxygen for me but for others it was confusing and perhaps overwhelming. Within a week one overcommitted staff member had basically backed out and another was in danger of losing her contract position and so had to withdraw from the group and concentrate on her core teaching. So five had become three and our third member was only able to be involved at a minimal level due to a number of family issues. The remaining two came from one faculty area was good because we had a similar focus , but it was also a problem as we didn't have the spread we had in the original group. Issue one- make sure the group is broadly based and fully committed to ensure a more successful result across the whole range of subject areas.Try and have at least five people in the team who want to be challenging themselves and who can speak to a number of faculties.
Pam and I blogged, discussed and planned a number of projects together and tried to include other staff in our activities with varying degrees of success. Marie-Josee started blogging in her classes and really moved into web 2.0 with enormous enthusiasm. We created wikis for our Year 11 classes on a number of texts, we used Inspiration for mind mapping and started discussion forums for our students. As the year began we were in the middle of a $4 million refurbishment of the school which caused major disruption to all areas of the school and did not end until just before the mid year break. This in itself did not create a climate for learning new skills as teachers struggled to get a basic teaching space and to have available resources to teach as all of the school was affected and staff lost their teaching resources as they were boxed up to be moved around the school. Not a great environment to ask people to undertake more change when they are already struggling to cope. As well as the physical environment being radically changed, the school has had a major upgrade of the school computer network and this has had a number of problems which made many staff very disheartened and cynical about what they could possibly do with computers in classes. Despite a climate of more funding by the Federal Government for funding of better ICT access for all students, we are still yet to see any effect of this money in the school. Many teaching areas have been left with poor or no access or very outdated computers as we wait for the new machines to arrive and as this is taking so long staff morale is extremely low and this affected our ability to create a sense of enthusiasm among teachers. Thses issues are still current. Issue 2 Be realistic about how much change is possible in the life of a school.
Raising the profile of the project was difficult in the huge number of other changes happening in the school at the moment. VIT registration changes, the current agreement which changes peoples ability to attend ISE the need for accreitation and curriculum changes have made it difficult for us to get meeting time in the formal compulsory sessions- so we ran our own Sandpit sessions on a non meeting day and worked that way - usually with a small group. As the time for us to report came near we finally were allowed a session with the whole staff and we presented the ning to those who attended and some videos to start discussion. We filmed this session and have plans to keep getting people to see it as a real and active resource centre for their own use. Issue 3 Patience, Patience Patience
It is only through 1 to 1 conversations by team members that things have been happening. I am so frustrated by the process so much of the time and then suddenly people are asking me about some app or activity. Displaying work of students helps create interest and targetting particular faculties and change instigators in faculties has been good. So yes I have moved down a path that has no going back. Yes I have gained some new people skills . Yes I will keep going and 'Yes the PLN I have acquired in the last two years has changed everything' and I mean everything!! I have now organised two groups - one for networking teachers in Australia and New Zealand and a local one for Mac users in my region. I am out there making connections and doing just what I want my students to do. Thanks PLP Reflecting on Powerful Learning - International Cohort for PLP (2 August 2009) http://internationalplp.ning.com/profiles/blogs/reflecting-on-powerful http://snipurl.com/oivvu
We also produces a blog as part of our final presentation which contains all the digital objects we created in the period of the project
Certainly seeing all the blogs and wikis and nings we created as part of the project I feel that we have achieved some things but I still have some concerns and I do want to express them .
The programme is a fantastic idea- creating cohorts within schools and having them recognised as doing something important is an essential part of raising the profile of 21st century education. Linking them to an international programme is a really powerful tool for change- getting teachers to connect beyond their staffroom is fabulous. Sheryl and Will's work has been beyond reproach- they have been supportive and inspiring - something which must require a huge personal effort to hear the same conversations over and over and to be still enthusiastic and engaged. I am not in any way trying to criticise their work. My concerns are about a broader issue.
My school received a grant of $15,000 to be part of the programme. That is a huge amount for a grant, but I have only heard once from the department regarding how we have gone with the project and that was at the very start. No-one has spoken to me about our presentation or what did- or didn't happen with in the school as described above. Surely this can't be correct? All the other school except one sponsored by SLAV were private schools with far fewer funding issues than us- including funding of internet access. The connections were interesting- but we constantly felt like the very poor and under resourced country cousins.We didn't get time or much real support for what we were supposed to do and a bit of follow up and department weight would have helped to get some attention paid.
My next nagging thought is 'Why did we need to pay $15,000 to have two American leaders tell us what we knew needed to be done anyway? Why did we need people from the US to get this rolling? Are we so unsure of ourselves that we needed Will and Sheryl to get us going on change? Why could we get $15,00 for us to attend two meetings f2f and several online ones when I could have bought 15 desperately needed Macs for my year 8 centre? I still can't get the funding for them despite showing with the five I got last year what could be done with them. Another nagging thought what is the result of all this money- what will come of the project? Were we a trial? Why hasn't it been followed up? Although we are sighing with relief that we got the presentation done- what happens next? I know it is up to us as a school to keep it growing and I know that will happen, but I wonder if the other teams have discussed post project plans. On a final note, it was faintly amusing that as we got ourselves set up on Wednesday for the meeting and showcase we found that the departments chosen meeting platform Elluminate was blocked at school and we had to pack everything up and rush around to Pam's house and do the presentation there and then sit and listen to the voices of teams from three other schools do exactly the same thing! Yep there is still some distance to go..
Following a post by Adam Brice at Skoolz Out I took a second look at Simply box . In the constant onslaught of new apps and variations of new apps - it is easy to say this is too hard I will stick to what I am doing, but after watching the video and reading the post i am going to give this a try with my Year 8 class that is studying the topic of Refugees. Simply Box seems to have so many ways to teach social book marking in such an accessible way. Sure I still love delicious and Diigo, but this has more power in terms of selective capture and the use of visual prompts rather than just text. I am sure the kids will love it.
Adam has also written about Shelfari and I am going to get my students to construct a Shelfari of their fave books on their blogs for all of us to read what they like.
Thanks Adam for your timely posts. I have seen these tools before many times but your posts have made me rethink my attitude to these and I am looking forward to trying them out. If you go to Adam's blog make sure you check out his new book all about Digital storytelling and the work he has done with primary school students on film making- it is absolutely fabulous!!
Thanks to Andrew Churches from Educational Origami for posting this video by Kellie - I think it is great - a good starting point for lots of discussions especially about blogging!
One year one from my ACCE tour to NECC and I stop to look at how my world has changed. I spend so much more of my life online but I am also feeling more connected to people in a broader sense. Fellow bloggers are at NECC in Washington or watching from afar like me. I am trying to stay awake at night to catch sessions online and I am missing the social magic that came from meeting people whose work I so admire face to face. It only lasted four days but I still think about it all so much.Other bloggers are travelling the world and I keep connected by their blogs and tweets.
At the moment I am dithering around being a presenter- still so terrified of the gaps in my knowledge, but wanting to move on to the next level. I have just picked up the green chromakey and a stand from the post ofice and have organised lights and a spare computer so we can have the TV station actually working in the Year 8 centre. I applied for a secondment position as an Innovator Trainer at the Ed Dept two weeks ago and actually got an interview, but not the job. I applied for another emerging Tech grant for using Ipod Touches in class and didn't get that either, but that is ok cos we did get one last year. I am still working on how to complete our PLP project with only three of us to work on it- this one is tricky but I will keep at it. I have requested being released from a two period class so as to do some regular coaching in others classes. I am trying- I am seeing ways into moving things forward and I am wishing I was over there for another drink of the Cool- Aid!!
The plan for the Year 8 Centre is to run the Murder Mystery unit as a cross curricular one in english, sose , maths and science. I will use the resources we have built up plus the ideas from the Sleuth English festival I ran as part of what happens. Incursions, dress up days and across the centre displays will be all part of what we do. Maybe a Detective TV edition? This is a catch up ramble here and my thoughts are racing across a number of subjects and classes, so I apologise to any reader but that is how it feels in my head at the moment. I am organising two bloggers feasts - one for Judy O'Connell who pens the amazing Hey Jude blog and one for Julie Lindsay who is a co founder of the Flat Classroom project.
I am exploring podcasting with my classes and movie making as we finally get some access to the macbooks I got a year ago but haven't been able to use this year.The slidecast above is about Mahara - New Zealand free product that is directed towards use as a digital portfolio platform so I will be researching this one. I am trying to train myself to use ILife09 and IWork 09 properly and be able to teach and use them effectively. Adam Brice and I are hoping to set up EMUG an eastern region Mac users group and I just love the name and the possibilities. Off to a meeting about planning a conference now- yep life has definitely changed and I am loving it!
Hello blog! This is just a short hello to let you know I still think of you and have often pondered whether my thoughts are worthy of a post. I haven't written for a long time for a number of reasons: laziness perhaps is the first- so many other things have moved up the list that demand my time. The terrible fires and summer we have had in Victoria have distracted me and made me feel that most of what I would say would be so trite and trivial that is is best not said so I tweet and try and keep up with what has become at times a deafening torrent where once it was just a river that I loved.Frustration has been another thing that has made me hold back. After the excitement of the last year - to be sitting at school dealing with a half speed network and a staff that is not remotely interested listening- if I was given time to speak to them because they are so frustrated with our new network and the continual issues of kids with no money for internet.
The same dull and hopeless things that were stopping change have not moved at all- but I have and for such a long time my thought have been governed by the idea that it is best not to write negatively on my blog. Well, I am feeling so tired of trying- I don't know how people who have been trying to create change have managed to keep going for so long- I am such a woos for getting down after such a short time. The PLP project we are doing is stuck in this dreadful inertia - we need the staff to do the Epotential test online and hardly any have done it. We have started a wiki for staff training but no time slots have been allocated to the team during staff training sessions.Therefore we are not going to have a project that is adequate ready for presentation in time. What can be done? Life keeps crowding my focus and it seems so hard to find a way in for change. Sorry blog - had to rant somewhere hope my next post is more positive!
