Archive for category school

AGQTP Action Research

Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, online tools, research, school on December 2, 2008

Today was the final day of our participation in this year’s AGQTP project – the end of year presentations in Sydney.  The project focussed on linking our collegial support program to school-based action research in the area of Element 5 of the NSW Institute of Teachers Professional Standards.

Element 5: Teachers create and maintain safe and challenging learning environments through the use of classroom management skills.

I’ve uploaded my workshop slides on slideshare.  If you were at my presentation, or have any questions about the project, please leave me a comment!

AGQTP: Element 5 Action Research

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: school education)

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Getting students involved in blogging

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on November 29, 2008

Barriers to getting involved:

  • Access issues – power in rural and remote areas
  • Equity issues – not all students are digitally literate
  • Equipment access – access to computer labs, laptops, broadband
  • Home access – students with no computers or internet access at home
  • Behaviour management – ICT TOO EXCITING!

Please add any ideas you have for overcoming these barriers…

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STOP WORK

Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, school on November 19, 2008

I’ve just come home from this morning’s stopwork meeting organised by the NSW Teachers Federation.

Read more about the Teachers Federation Staffing, Standards and Salaries campaign here.

The meeting finished half an hour ago, but I am resisting the urge to use the time to finish off some school work…not just because I think it is important for teachers to ‘stay true’ to the stopwork by, well, stopping work, but also because I am so burned out with school work right now that an imposed 2 hour break is a welcome relief.

Over the past couple of weeks my blog has been neglected, emails have gone unread, and I haven’t even been opening Twitter.  No comment from me about Barack Obama’s historic win in the US election.  No comment (still) about the proposed National Curriculum, and (perhaps worst) no reflection on my teaching or engagement in professional learning.

So, while filling up on petrol that had nearly run dry because I’ve had no time to fill the car, and after picking up some take away breakfast because I had run out of time and skipped mine earlier in the morning, I decided to use the rest of my stopwork time to write this post.

A little bit of a cheat of course, because as far as I’m concerned blogging = professional learning, which = work!  But the school workload atm is so depressingly huge that I’m prepared to cheat on this…until reports are finished at the end of this week, I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to blog again…

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Cool tools for schools wiki

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on September 30, 2008

click, click, click…

After reading my blog comments I clicked through to Lee Mowbray’s Twitter account, then through to her shared blog Stepping Stones for teachers, and from there I found a link to a wikispace called Cool Tools for Schools.

The Cool tools for schools wiki stores information about a wide range of useful web-based tools, sorted by category (video tools, writing tools, image tools, quiz and poll tools etc.)

I love expanding my professional learning network!  Thanks Lee 🙂

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Do YOU know how to get a website unblocked?

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on September 30, 2008

ED: 19th March, 2012 – the information contained in this post may no longer be relevant. See visitor comments at the end relating to changes under the new ‘DEC’.

A recent post by Will Richardson, Filter Fun, got me thinking again about the situation with the (highly sensitive) web filter in my DET school.

I wonder – if only more teachers were proactive about applying for blocked websites to be UNBLOCKED, would the filter crew start to get a sense of how much they have (unnecessarily) blocked?  If they were hit with as many UNBLOCK requests as we are hit by ‘Blocked Site’ pages, would they be a little more careful about blocking potentially useful sites?

This term has been a constant struggle for me – teaching video games as a text in the English classroom required students to use internet searches for information and images relating to video games, game characters and game consoles.

At every turn we were blocked by the web filter.  Reason?  The sites we wanted to look at fell under the “Games” category.

Well…yeah.  Of course they did!  We were researching ‘games’!

I have to admit that, for my part, I did not apply at any stage this term to have a website UNBLOCKED.  Doing this is a pretty easy process if you are in a NSW DET school:

  1. Log on to the Portal
  2. Choose the ‘My applications’ tab
  3. Click on ‘Account Administration’ from the list below
  4. Choose ‘Web Filter Check’ and fill in the forms as instructed.

In my defense, however, I musy explain that the research work that we were doing required the students to search the web independently, which meant the focus was not on websites that I had found and unblocked for them.  As the unblocking process is not instant, it is of little help for teachers and students in the middle of a pre-booked lesson on the library computers!

If you are working within the NSW DET filter, here are some instructions for applying for a website to be unblocked that I made for my faculty.  Let me know if I got anything wrong – otherwise, spread the word that sites CAN BE UNBLOCKED!

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Goodbye Year 12

Posted by kmcg2375 in HSC, personal, school on September 23, 2008

I had my last class today with my HSC English class – the first HSC class I have ever taught, so they are a very special group for me.  It was a pretty emotional day (have to admit having a bit of a cry when the bell went, but the dears came and gave me a big group hug which was really very nice of them!)

This is an especially refelctive day for me, not only because they are my first HSC group, but also because it has been ten years since I finished high school myself…this feels like an important milestone.  To top it all off, I teach at my old high school, so today really was a trip down memory lane!

So much has happened since I finished high school…people are married (and divorced), some with kids and/or step kids; some people now live and work overseas; some people have drifted apart while others have stayed friends all this time.  People have bought houses (some have already sold and rebought), or are saving up to get into the property market, while some are renting (not sure if anyone still lives at home – bound to be some!).  Some have struggled (and some continue to struggle) with substance abuse and addiction.  Many have experienced problems with mental health at some point.  Some went to uni (and some left uni) while others took different paths.  One or two have died.

Ten years ago I would have known that all this was going to happen – of course it was all bound to happen – but I could not have imagined what it would feel like to be on the other side.  Nothing can really prepare a person, I think, for the constant pressure of adulthood.  But the other side of that coin is the independence that comes with adulthood, and for some that is the bigger surprise.

I wonder how “my” students will fare over the next ten years?  What joys (and sorrows) will they know?  And I also wonder…will anything I have taught them in English help them to get through life?

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Learning to Change – Changing to Learn

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on September 22, 2008

I love this short (5 min) video by the Consortium for School Networking (COSN).  A range of ‘big wigs’ give their two cents worth on why schools need to become more ICT intensive – The following arguments especially appealed to me:

  • Students have a more stimulating and richer environment outside of school (how sad)
  • Kids are now very rich content developers and communicators, but we are not utilising their skills – instead we BAN everything from school which might ‘distract’ students from the learning we have designed for them
  • There is a need to defy the industrial narrative of control and order that positions students as factory workers, which maintains a stranglehold on the majority of schools and classrooms
  • Every turned off device is potentially a turned off child.

As Stephen Heppell says in the video, it may be the death of education, but is it the dawn of learning…and that is exciting indeed.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Learning to Change – Changing to Learn“, posted with vodpod

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Internet Filtering

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on September 21, 2008

A video that talks about the current problems with school internet filtering:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Internet Filtering“, posted with vodpod

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Top 25 FREE Tools

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, school, technology on September 3, 2008

Thanks to Amy for the link to this excellent site – I am such a fan already!

Among other things Jane Hart has composed a list of TOP 25 most popular free tools on the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 list. Here is the Top 25, from Jane’s Slideshare.

After looking through the list for tools I DIDN’T have, I was reminded to try Slideshare and Jing. I have now joined up, and dowloaded respectively…time to play 🙂

I have already uploaded a the slides from my GaTe Action Research Presentation…now to test out Jing…

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Voicethread

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, social media on August 24, 2008

I can’t wait to start using Voicethread next Term!  I first heard about this tool at the AATE conference in July, and it turns out a few of my colleagues have been using it for awhile…if anyone has links to Voicethread projects they have done with their students I’d love to see them!

My initial thoughts are that I would like to use Voicethread for:

  • Year 9 poetry unit – students compose poetry and read it aloud with accompanying images for other students to view.  Perhaps also some collaborative poetry writing?
  • Debating Training – One week debates.  Students can record a real debate.  Starts with 1st Affirmative speaker, then following speakers get 24 hours each to respond; runs like a ‘real’ debate.

Some great tips and ideas for using Voicethread can be found on Wesley Fryer’s blog.  I have just joined the English Group on the Voicethread Ning, and am hoping to get more ideas and tips from there.

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