All Blog Posts (404)

It started as a normal, fairly mundane school day.........

Well connected teachers will  find there are many ways to learn, share and teach, teachable moments arise constantly and interruptions to normal routines may become the norm. Yesterday was one such day, when normal classes were planned and a relaxing night at home anticipated, but....

World Museum Scratch Day Saturday, May 18th

Year 8 students are participating in  the Squares, Circles and…

Deficit (noun):  Inadequacy or insufficiency, an unfavourable condition or position, to be lacking or a shortage. From the Latin – it lacks

Developmental (noun):  The act of developing from a simpler or lower to a more advanced, mature or complex form or stage

I received…

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Our Hawkesdale P12 College year 6 students linked up virtually with Lismore Primary School (approximately 1 1/4 hours drive away) to share war stories of their great or great great grandparents. As Australia celebrates Anzac Day tomorrow, April 25th, to remember those who fought for our country, this was great use of polycom equipment and  smart boards to be able to connect and…

  Human beings, like all species, are very physically oriented. Up to 70% of the brain is devoted to movement and operating in a complex environment. So it comes as no surprise that research in the latest Behaviour and Brain Functions journal that adding movement to rehearsal can improve…

The Ecosynergy Group carriers out a number of storytelling research projects in the Education sector. The aim is to identify the narrative elements that optimize impact on their audience. This methodology was developed in a foundational research project whose findings supported key reports, such as the 2011 Mayoral Taskforce on youth employment. These reports outlined that youth want to be exposed to and learn from diverse peer role models.…

Quite often, developing powerful and meaningful key understandings is an area that teachers struggle with as they create and plan authentic rich task units. This is a critical step that many teachers can gloss over in planning but can make a profound difference to having clear, powerful units that provide great learning opportunities.

What we have experienced…

I consider professional growth is vital to fulfilment in any career... if we are not flexing our mental muscles, they atrophy and waste away, making us weak engagers. Since qualifying as a teacher in 2004, I have been shifting sites fairly continuously, and have worked 7 sites in 8 years with the contracts becoming shorter, not longer. I have finally shifted out of government schools to the private sector to try and gain permanency so I can develop one set of skills rather than continuously…

A conversation I have been having with teachers I have been working with for the past 6 months revolves around creating structures of accountability for students. This stems from the analogy I use to contextualise the importance of scaffolding student centred learning.

The essence of the argument is that…

Students in year 7 are learning how to use some of the lesser known features of MS Powerpoint. After creating animations in Powerpoint, I was going to get them to create games in Powerpoint. This was dependent on them accessing a file in the network drive in a 2011 folder. To my dismay, the folder had been removed. Now what!

I had just finished chatting to Lorraine Leo in skype re the imminent hurricane that was soon to…

We have been approached by a number of teachers over the past few months to discuss the value of streaming students in ability groupings as a way of improving performance. There is also a big push amongst education unions to lower class sizes as a way of again improving performance of students. The…

Your professional learning network (also known as personal learning network or PLN) is all the people and resources you engage with (this includes your online and face to face contacts). This network is personal to you, and you can choose what it looks like, who is part of it, how and when you use it.

You can use your PLN as a resource to:

• Search for information or ideas
• Ask questions
• Make new contacts
• Share your plans, drafts for feedback,…

I have been following with much interest the blogs, news articles and debates about teacher rating occurring in the USA. Part of my interest stems from the discussion that is starting to occur in Australia, driven by our Federal Government, about teacher performance and productivity.

I want to…

Hands were up all over the classroom from students new to Scratch trying to complete their sprite. Patiently the teacher moved around the room, answering those questions.  

But.............. the teacher ........

1. was not in the physical classroom, but passed around the room, on the screen of an iPad using skype
2. lived 1000's of kilometres away in Boston USA (my…

Hi All

If you work for a Learn local Provider or Adult Learning Australia ,Broadband for Seniors or Tafe please join us in the Adult Education Group

Regards

Junita Lyon

"The Sun Never Sets" is one of the scheduled sessions offered as part of Connected Educator Month.  It will be held on Friday August 3rd at 5pm, UTC or Saturday, August 4th at 7am, Melbourne Australia time (GMT+10).

This is a panel and open discussion about global connected education trends and how connected educators around the…

As I enjoy watching the Olympic games and wish to pursue aspects of the London12 Games with my students, I wanted to add a live tweetfeed widget to my global2 class blog(a campus of edublogs) As part of this exercise, I will also get my students to add the widget to their blogs. (See Tiff's blog) 

Rationale and Learning Intentions

• these games are…

Twitter was the topic of  conversation for this week's Tech Talk Tuesday session. With a mix of prepared slides and application sharing, twitter was introduced to those who may be new to its use. It was great to welcome a global audience with participants from Austria, Honduras (Central America), Moscow, Russia and Australia.

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Cathryn Stephens – Lead Educational Designer, Intuyu Consulting

The start of a new term brings with it new stationery, new ideas and a new countdown to the next school holidays! Many teachers spend the last few, precious days of their break becoming increasingly stressed out – not necessarily about the curriculum to be…

I thought I would provoke some discussion and thinking up front in today's blog. I want to be especially confronting to the status quo that schools are in at the moment because we have a belief ... opinion ... viewpoint ... that most schools are living in lala land about the Australian…