What a week ....

It must be almost December, there is so much happening all of a sudden. This week is full of exciting things in my cluster, and for me. Today (Tuesday ) I went to the VITTA conference There was a range of interesting people speaking, I was just one of huge number of presenters... actually i felt quite strange a "humanities and Legal Studies " teacher presenting at the Information Teachers Annual conference !!

After lunch I was fortunate to attend a session by Professor Stephen Heppell on "Building the revolution - starting at your own school" I must admit my ignorance ( I have been so busy writing job applications lately I hadn't done my homework and checked out who he was !) He was fabulous. Entertaining, humble, inspiring and so articulate about "how schooling and learning SHOULD be,, my only question is WHy isn't he talking to our Educational Leaders.... ???





I loved his 5 Things to try now





1. Get the KIDS to run a staff development day on what they think the teachers need to learn ( How kool is that !!)
2. Give kids a pre-paidmobile and let them TEXT in ideas, complaints, suggestions ... he went as far as to say let that replace the school council ( WHOAHHH )
3. Set up a learning research project for examle " how does sound and music change our learning"
4. Knock down some walls - Give the kids 5 sticky labels each, ( and staff in a different colour) and get them to choose a wall. How quickly you will discover where all the Bullies hang out !
5. Give the kids a STOP watch, get them to press stop when packing up and moving around the school and START when actualy working. (great way to prove the need for longer lessons to get through some deeper learning.

He also has a Phone Blog .... takes a picture and adds text and zaps it direct from the phone . Another idea i am definitely going to try. Imagine the instant publication of student observations, recordings, excursions.... loved it.

My session was called " From Dinosaur to Avatar - You can too" I discussed my journey from only ever using a data projector two years ago to what i do now. I think i got TWO party bookings ! Ballarat Grammar and maybe one other.
As soon as i adjust the timing on my slides with video clips, I will save it as a Podcast and put it on my blog.... i may even get some more party bookings

Catching up...

It has been a BIG few weeks for me. The conference at IGS for VITTA was great. Fascinating to meet all the people from cyberspace who I had been visiting but really did not know. I loved the 'just in time learning' that I experienced - it forced me to upload to Youtube, something I had wanted to do for a while. These workshops were really interesting in the range of people attending, from people who had never used youtube and didn't even know what teachertube was, to people like Sue from andanotherthing who taught me things. Thanks Sue for Animoto ... I must admit to wasting time playing with that now too.

The next day was my Full cluster Professional Learning day. And what a huge success that turned out to be, certainly helped by Colin Pidd and Gin and Trevor from Dramatic Edge . ( I 'm sure they will update their website soon !!) We ran workshops on Inspiration, Blogging, Comic Life, Movie-maker, Digital Portfolio's imovie and Photo-story. The staff loved it, think we even converted a few !! Requests arrived for more workshops on Blogging... it is interesting that many teachers are just unaware of what the possibilities are.

The next week I completed my Eleanor Davis School Leadership Program . That was a valuable and rewarding experience, although I am not sure it is the direction that I wish to pursue. I am still concerned about what Principals' know and how much influence they have on what is going on in their classrooms.

Fellow travellers ... my friend would say

One of my friends used to refer me to as a "fellow traveller", it is an expression I have come to appreciate as I meet many other teachers who fit into this category nicely. Joseph from Ivanhoe Grammar Plenty campus is one such person. We have met only briefly a few times but we think alike. Actually blogging has proved that you do not even need to meet a 'fellow traveller', you communicate with people who you know are just like yourself.
Joseph invited me to the Plenty Campus on Friday 25th May to take part in a SKYPE with
Tom Barrett Tom is currently an assistant headteacher and Year 6 teacher at Priestsic Primary and Nursery School in Nottinghamshire, England. He was a finalist in the Best Wiki awards for Edubloggers in 2006. He talked to us about the many ways you can use Google Earth in the classroom. This has huge potential not realised by most teachers. He also showed us a site that records where visitors to your blog have come from. Many people visit and read blogs but do not comment, a little disturbing for the kids who look forward to seeing if anyone has been visiting them. digital point shows where 'visitors' have come from. It looks like this in a blog. ... hmm yes I know no-one visits mine !!! but you can see how this would be interesting for kids and it spring boards discussion and interest about other places in the world.

Whilst at the Skype I met two ladies from VITTA and they invited me to speak at a mini conference being held at Ivanhoe Grammar Ridgeway Campus in August. I will be speaking about Teachertube and Mojiti. Quite amusing when you think that two years ago i didn't even know how to use the video camera !!. The conference is being held in conjunction with a visit by Will Richardson. i have added his blog to "blogs I read. Anyway keep a look out for their conference details it sounds really interesting.