productiveness

Posted by kmcg2375 in school on August 10, 2009

HSC Drama students hard at work on their scripts while I ‘teach’.  Thanks for sharing this girls 🙂

Drama

1 Comment

Champions Megamix

Posted by kmcg2375 in random, school on August 10, 2009

Thanks to everyone who suggested songs on Twitter for my Champions Megamix CD, which played on the way to the Senior Debating State Final last Friday.  In case you were wondering, here were the tracks I went with, in order of play:

  1. Eye of the tiger – Survivor
  2. We are the champions – Queen
  3. O Fortuna
  4. Without me – Eminem
  5. With a little help from my friends – The Beatles
  6. Hold on – Wilson Phillips
  7. Long way to the top – AC/DC
  8. Playing to win – Little River Band/John Farnham
  9. All fired up – Pat Benatar
  10. Simply the best – Tina Turner
  11. Champion – Kanye West
  12. Stronger – Kanye West
  13. We are family – Sidter Sledge
  14. The way we get by – Spoon
  15. Today – Smashing Pumpkins

It’s a killer playlist!  Put this on and you will be able to take on the world!  I made copies for the students to listen to while they study for HSC Trials 😛

What would you put on your ultimate champions playlist?  What is your ‘eye of the tiger’?

Leave a comment

State Debating Finals

Posted by kmcg2375 in school on August 8, 2009

I was so proud on Friday to take my AWESOME Senior Debating team to the State Final.

Our team valiantly argued the Negative side of the topic That we should publish school league tables.  It was a close debate, and we had a lot of support from the crowd!  Ultimately the other team won the debate and the Hume-Barbour trophy, but as finalists our team won the English Speaking Union prize, and are now also eligible for the Elite Athletes and Performers Scheme at the University of Sydney (something we did not know, weren’t expecting, and were thrilled to hear!)

Watch the ABC News story about the debate.

One of my students gave the most moving thank you speech at the end of the debate I have ever heard…she said really nice things about me as their coach and we all started to cry!  Can’t believe another group of Year 12’s are almost leaving.  I have had so much fun coaching this team 🙂

finals

4 Comments

Alain de Botton: Career anxiety and success #TED

Posted by kmcg2375 in random on August 3, 2009

An appropriate talk to listen to on a Sunday night before school, when bed beckons, and the marking pile still looms…

Alain de Botton talk about career anxiety and the philosophy of career sucess in this TED Talk:

For me, they normally happen – these career crises – on a Sunday evening; just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life start to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow.  I’m mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem…

,

2 Comments

Video Games and Storytelling

Posted by kmcg2375 in english, video games on July 30, 2009

Came across this excellent animated lecture by Daniel Floyd on Jawbone.tv.  Perfect for an introduction to narrative in videogames for my Year 9 class.  I think I’ll make a listening task for it – will post it up if I do.

,

2 Comments

NSW Laptop Tweets

Posted by kmcg2375 in technology on July 6, 2009

For those of you out there who are about to receive (or are lucky enough to have already received!) one of the NSW DET issue Lenovo Laptops, this list of Twitter contacts may help you build your Personal Learning Network.

The following is a list of Twitter users that wove their hands about with great enthusiasm when asked who wanted to discuss and share resources for teaching with the new laptops:

You can join Twitter and start following these excellent people at http://twitter.com/

If you’d like to be added to this expanding list, add a comment with your twitter username and some info about your role and region.   There seems to be a lot happening in the Hunter/Central Coast region, surely the rest of us can give them a run for their money 😉

Also let us all know if there are networks springing up in other spaces – for example, English teachers can now join the Teaching English with Laptops ‘Ning’, a site specifically focussed on using the laptops in the English classroom.

, , ,

8 Comments

Great expectations

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on June 30, 2009

As I wait with baited breath to receive my new laptop courtesy of the NSW DET, an invigorating post by Melissa Giddins has got me planning how to introduce change to my faculty. Only where Melissa as Head Teacher has the authority to set the pace of change in her faculty (laptops used in some way every lesson for the first few weeks, then moving to every second lesson on average – I love it!), as a rank-and-file classroom teacher I can only lobby for such change.

My major strategy will be resource sharing at our faculty meetings – a new teaching idea each fortnight, starting with using features of Word to annotate texts (using formatting, comment, track changes etc.) and moving through to more time consuming activities such as making a digital story.  Luckily the teachers in my faculty are all quite excited about the arrival of the laptops, though some will need more tech (and moral!) support than others.

Download my handout on using comments in Word

Download my handout on tracking changes in Word

During these meetings I’ll also be able to model some key pieces of software starting with Audacity (for making podcasts), Adobe Premier Elements (for movie making – most staff are familiar with MovieMaker…), and taking a look at where to find things in Word 2007 (most still working on 97-03 versions).

Another important strategy is to share work samples from my own classes and discuss what worked, and what didn’t work.  For teachers to feel confident in explaining a task or activity to student, I think they have to have a picture in their mind’s eye of what the product will look like.

All very ‘lead a horse to water…’, I know.  So far though, so good – I’ve been doing this kind of thing (without the software modelling) all this year, and the mood in the faculty is feeling far more positive these days.

But…what could people a bit higher up than me initiate that may bring about change more rapidly?  How about:

  • Head Teachers set high expectations for their faculty – laptops to be used in some way every lesson for the first few weeks, then moving to every second lesson on average, sounds good to me
  • Paper based ‘Daily Notices’ and ‘Staff Bulletins’ be sent electronically – ensures that teachers check email daily/weekly to retrieve these
  • Form a Technology Leadership team, with representatives from each faculty, to meet regularly to share ideas/resources and take ideas back to the faculty level
  • Add links to resources for teaching with laptops to school intranet homepage (e.g. TaLe, Curriculum Support)

I’m sure there’s loads more.  What can you think of, or what have you been doing already, in whatever role you are in at your school?

,

5 Comments

Triple J Hottest 100 Of All Time

Posted by kmcg2375 in random on June 25, 2009

Just voted in the Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time. Some tough decisions were made. I’ve listed my choices in this post as well as the full shortlist of 25:

1. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
2. Rage Against the Machine – Killing In The Name
3. Pixies, The – Where is my Mind?
4. Bright Eyes – First Day Of My Life
5. Mountain Goats, The – This Year
6. The Grates – Burn Bridges
7. The Shins – New Slang
8. Kimya Dawson – I Like Giants
9. Björk – Hyperballad
10. PJ Harvey – Good Fortune

11. Metallica – One
12. Guns N’ Roses – Estranged
13. Pulp – Common People
14. R.E.M. – Be Mine
15. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
16. Spoon – The Way We Get By
17. Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Under the Bridge
18. Green Day – Longview
19. Pearl Jam – Go
20. Silverchair – Israel’s Son
21. Smashing Pumpkins, The – Today
22. John Denver – Leaving on a Jet Plane
23. Simple Minds – Don’t You (forget About Me)
24. Blind Melon – No Rain
25. Fleetwood Mac – Dreams

The list isn’t strictly ranked, other than the top 10 being the ones I submitted to the Hottest 100, and number one is not accident. Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit will absolutely, undoubtedly, be the number one song in this countdown. Unless enough smartarses vote for Joy Division 😉

2 Comments

Clay Shirky on Twitter and the internet #TED

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, social media, technology on June 21, 2009

A message that many of us are becoming increasingly familiar with, but which is expressed so elegantly in this TED Talk by Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter and Facebook can make history.

Clay explains how the 20th cebtury media landscape – made up of the printing press, telegraph and telephone, recorded media suach as photos and movies, and broadcast media such as radio and television – is slipping away.   The media landscape that we knew, where professionals broadcast messages to amateurs, is changing in a world where media is ‘global, social, ubiquitous and cheap’.   By using the internet to form groups as well as support conversation,  former audiences are increasingly full participants.

With some great examples of how the internet is used (and restrained), this 17 minute talk is well worth watching and sharing:

2 Comments

Narrative Unit: Texts

Posted by kmcg2375 in digital storytelling, english, school, technology on May 19, 2009

An update on how things are coming together for my unit of work on Narrative, which combined more mainstream print and visual texts with ‘new technology’ texts.

The texts I have selected to study are:

  1. The Raven – Edgar Allen Poe (poem)
  2. And antoher thing – Anthony Dennis (Sunday Life opinion article)
  3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (novel)
  4. Fairytale and fable selection, possibly using a webquest
  5. Fox – Margaret Wild (picture book)
  6. Inanimate Alice (multimedia)
  7. and, if time permits, The Castle – Working Dog / Sitch (film)

After/while studying these texts, students will be creating their own narrative compostions:

  1. An individual digital story on the theme ‘Dreams and Nightmares’ (term 2)
  2. A group drama enacting a fairytale of students own choosing (term 2)
  3. A short story using hypertext to link to flashbacks in the story (term 3 – using new laptops)

I’m loving teaching this unit – so far we’ve looked at the poem and the magazine article, and are now reading Curious Incident…if we finish looking at the book by the end of week 5, that will leave plenty of time to look at the other texts (not a ‘close study’ – just exploring select aspects of narrative) and do some work on the assessment projects.

More updates to come!

,

1 Comment