Too tired to write,but this is great!!

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Found this wonderful thought provoking slideshare by Scott Elias on how to not use powerpoint. Great work Scott and thanks for the link Patrick Higgins on Chalkdust Catching up on my reader while recovering from chrissy - a really lovely one but I am still cleaning up !!

A great Presentation by a fifth Grader!!!

Just found this one on Teacher Tube - a presentation by a grade five student based on the novel 'The Giver' By Lois Lowry. What a great effort!

A Notable Week.

This is a big week at school. One of the cross-curricular programmes I started eight years ago is called Night Of The Notables. It is now run right across the Year 9 programme and 250 kids are presenting this week over two nights. My class were presenting on Tuesday night and they did a fabulous job. It was 37c on the day but thankfully by the evening when it all happens it was cooler - and it isn't even summer yet here in Australia. The range of choices made and the stands done were really impressive. What astounds me each year is how much improvement there is in the standard of work done.The fact it is now an expected part of the year has something to do with the success of the week. It is also about choice as the students select their own notable based on a criteria of actually having done something to benefit the world.They have a range of tasks to complete for three different subjects. It is the most powerful moment to see a student who has been struggling to be engaged all year be galvanised by the ownership of their work and a really positive way to finish the year. For the stronger students it is a chance to really shine and the incidental learning from seeing how others approach the task is huge. Anyway, in the midst of drowning in exam marking, correction and reports, this is a shining moment that reminds me of why I am still doing this job. I cannot recommend the programme highly enough. This link is to the promotional movie made by our IT Co-ordinator for the school tv station and for the introduction of students to the programme . It takes about twenty minutes , but it really captures the evening and the excitement of the planning process. I hope people will watch and give me some feedback. I am so proud of this and the wonderful movie.

Kim Corfino says it so well

Just because this presentation says so much so well, I want to thank Kim Corfino for her great work. This presentation is one she prepared for the teaching It! conference in Singapore 2007 and appears on the Developing The Global Student Wiki Take the time to look and absorb her message if you haven't already seen this .

And then it all happens at once..

Perhaps I should rename this a blog about gardening and education as so many entries are about my garden and how it occupies so much of my time and thought.I live on the top of Mount Dandenong in a very special environment that is semi rainforest with (generally )high rainfall and extreme fire danger in summer, so keeping the growth under control becomes critical at this time of the year as well as trying to remove huge infestations of weed species- holly, ivy,sycamore etc that have taken over this landscape. We have lyrebirds, wallabies and wombats on the block and are at the head of a stream that becomes a creek. Four acres of ex-rhododendron/camellia/ foliage plant nursery that has grown flat out for twenty years untended! So I spend autumn ,winter and spring trying to clear and replant and summer worrying about bushfires and drought.
Well I have finished my burning off before the fire bans - essential to clear the amount of weeds and planted some fruit trees and reclaimed the forest floor for the lyrebirds of another quarter acre. It is slow work but things are slowly becoming more established and this year has been an absolute joy with the most amazing display from plants that were nearly dead when we arrived here.There is finally starting to be a sense of real achievement after so much backbreaking work as it is all on a hillside.I have been racing home from work to do some gardening as it is now daylight saving and then on the computer when it is dark.Busy busy but sooo beautiful...
Ok enough gardening chat! I have to thank Jo Mcleay who is such an inspiration to me for the amount she does and the breadth of her knowledge, for the lovely review she gave me on her blog. She is so generous in her spreading of the links of new bloggers and a real connector in every sense of the word Thanks Jo !!
As well as Jo's great blog , the most amazing post for me as a newby lately has been the one by Vicki Davis where she describes her most useful blog tools . It is such a comprehensive list and I shall be working through it with care as I am gradually understanding how to make use of these tools. The Victorian Knowledge bank conference (see my previous post) was quite a success and it is all online and used Elluminate very successfully. Great for Australian teachers/bloggers to have a look at the recordings- some very timely resources there.
In class ,thanks to the persistence of a very talented colleague of mine - Debbie-we have started literature circles across six year 8 classes and as we move into second and third sessions it is fantastic to watch the levels of participation and engagement among students of all ability levels.This all relates to the Leading Schools project and our new building starts being construted soon.Year 9s are making their poetry anthologies and getting ready for the big Night Of The Notables on the 20th. First they killed my father is really engaging my boys year 10 class and we are doing reflective diary writing as assessment -next year I hope this will be blogging when we have an economical option to use, but this is definitely a great success. Exams for seniors and report writing, WRAP training and then I might fall over the line to get to Xmas!Next year is looking interesting as I might finally get to use my qualification in Horticulture as a teaching subject in a year 10 small business unit- I'll get to wear overalls at school yay!!!
So that plus a Masters in IT Education sounds like a busy year- and a daughter doing Year 12!

Spring is sprung but where is my spring?

After a wonderful two weeks of holidays I have returned for the final term of the year and things have been busy. My gardening- an ongoing saga for I have a four acre block that is on a hillside and full of weeds - has been keeping me busy and absorbed as I try to create an orchard or even some thing resembling permaculture.The weeds and the piles for burning grow faster than I can cope and so I have been 'away' from my keyboard.
The other reason is something that has been on my mind about how isolated I feel at my work in terms of people who I can talk about what I am reading about. It has been so frustrating to have ideas and then be up against such a weight of the system being unable to change.The potential is so exciting, but so huge is the onslaught of ideas, podcasts , twitters, tags, gadgets and general ruminations that I sometimes just give up. The K-12 conference is on at the moment but I have had trouble finding the times for Oz. The other conference coming up is the Knowledge Bank Online Conference which features Marco Torres as the keynote speaker is also approaching,as is an IT Innovations conference in Sydney. So many things and no-one to bounce ideas off. I am also wondering about doing a Masters in IT education.Ah well, usually these overload situations create their own solution and I can find the path I am looking for.
At school lots happening, starting Literature circles with six year 8 classes doing the mystery unit, writing folio responses to the Crucible at Year 11, 'First they Killed my Father'with year 10 - first time - and Year 9 have finished City Zines and are doing Notables and poetry. Having fun with Facebook!Busy, busy... and husband in Italy for two weeks !

What's in a name?

I'm now in the second week of our September break and the Grand Final day is over and the world still goes on! Finally I am having a moment to think about what want to write about and have been spending probably far too many hours trying to catch up on the blogs of other teachers and get on their wavelength about what they are doing. I am looking forward to seeing what the K-12 conference will have to offer and so many writers are excited because of last year's one being so good. So many online meetings are happening that I read about, but most are in the wee small hours for us downunder so I hope that the conference will be available for me to digest in small bites.
Spring is wonderful this year and I have been doing lots in my big garden and when it rains I come in and read blogs. Jane Nicholls has posted about this problem of our virtual selves taking over and lately I feel this is something that is so true as I spend so much time clicking and reading and playing with new programmes.That leads me to what I wanted to write about- why I chose this name for my blog. I didn't want it to sound like the usual carping voice but more like me when I find someone who has the patience to listen to me when I start talking about my discoveries online. It is always 'and another thing I found was...' Am I driving my friends,colleagues and family crazy by this behaviour? This is such an exciting and exhausting journey and I feel I am only just hanging on to the ends of threads. I really want to be more involved, but how real is all this virtual communication? To me it is the first time I have explored my passions in teaching with others and though they may not be aware they are talking to me, what they are saying is giving me such a sense of community even though I have only met a few of them in ' real time'. And to think I didn't keep going with my second life avatar!!Maybe I could have a second life after all? Oh the possibilities, but now I'll do my marking!
My two final very belated blog day reviews are for Everyone learns a blog by Mike Muir at the University of Maine in where he writes about a school that is trying to provide success for underachieving kids using a programme called Project Foundry which is project based learning. His writing explore the issues and assumptions related to what school is and should be for students and is definitely worth a read.
My second blog of note is Jane's E-learning pick of the Day. For those who are into gadgets and great new things to waste time on - which probably explains my current state of mind- this is a blog with a new thing everyday. How does she do it? It is a wonderful resource and though I don't get to look into everything she has lead me to some great new programmes and silly stuff too.This is the latest Elearning showcase Now I am subscribing to a book chapter a day.Ahh where does the time go?