Tuesday, February 27, 2007

ICT everywhere.

I have sat down many times to write a new post over the past two weeks, and each time stopped to think carefully about what to write. What do you say that is going to be of interest to others? I have done many things over the past two weeks, that will hopefully be of benefit to staff in my cluster schools. I have also seen some incredible examples of ICT. I have done protocol training and de Bono DATT ( Direct Action Thinking Tools) Training. Attended an ICT Professional Learning afternoon at McLeod College where a colleague used an impressive site from INTEL to compare staff and student understanding of "communication" . I also visited Huntingtower School in Mt Waverly. A school confident enough to have their parent survey results displayed on their website.
Somewhere along the way I discovered The Web is Us/Using Us on Youtube. Well worth a look. It had a million hits in its first week and 3200 comments. An interesting lesson alone for students. What would YOU say to a million people?
My son's friend showed me his MYSPACE - to my amazement he had had 6800 hits, and 415 friends registered. No wonder the kids are addicted to them.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Where to now ?

On Monday a forum was held for all the state Educators. We heard about our uncertain future. Student outcomes have improved but the data collected cannot prove a direct causal link between this and the I & E initiative so will the government be prepared to fund us for another twelve months ????? No answer on this yet.
The Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) seems to be heavily influenced currently by the writings of Professor guy Claxton. His paper on Expanding the capacity to learn was widely discussed.
I attended a session by Gavin Grift , the Educator for the Mulberry Hill Cluster. One of the best things about these forums is the networking and sharing, seeing what other schools and clusters are doing is often inspiring and can be quite amazing. Gavin and other members of his cluster have designed a Planning Tool that is incredible. It has links to all the domains, standards, thinking tools, and strategies. It has been taken up by the Department and will soon on the website. As soon as it is I will link to it.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Learning from others

As I spend time reading other blogs Ikeep discovering interesting and fun things that I could use. I spend time practising putting them onto my page so that I can help staff and the students when we start doing this at school. Jo McLeay . alerted me to the Dave Walkers free cartoon blog. where I obtained the cartoon below.
cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Have you ever noticed ???

Well my first week was off to a flying start. After not knowing what to do with myself initially, I spent quite some time assisting the two Legal Studies teachers, met with all the Principals or Assistant Prins from the five schools in my cluster, produced a newsletter on ICT and began settling into my new office.

When I taught Legal it always amazed me that whatever topic I was teaching that week seemed to be in the news. It was great for the kids as it made the topic interesting and relevant. Well the same thing has happened with "blogging". There was a blog competition in our Local newspaper, an article in the Sunday Herald Sun Magazine about Baby Blogs and DEE&T (Department of Education, Employment and Training) have established a web site for teachers to publish work called e.potential. You can log on to to view an excellent Powerpoint on Blogging.