21classes
I’ve just been browsing through Jo McLeay‘s student blogs, which are hosted by 21classes. I know I have heard of this site before, but I have been so happy with Edublogs that I haven’t bothered to pursue any other providers. The main features that 21classes lay claim to are:
- Host and manage blogs for your students
- Use a Class Homepage to communicate with students
It looks at first glance like 21classes provides an easier structure for teachers to link student blogs to a main class blog. Another selling point is that students apparently don’t need an email address to sign up for a blog…good news for DET teachers whose students don’t use their DET email, but also can’t access their Hotmail or Gmail accounts on the school computers!
Is anyone out there using 21classes?
Has anyone used 21classes AND Edublogs, and can comment on how they compare?
Organising School Debating
Once again it is that time of year when school debating teams start to pass the zone level and compete for Regional and State titles. This also makes it the time of year when debating coaches like myself need all the support from staff they can get, but unfortunately seem to have used up all their favours just getting the zone rounds done.
I think that debating is such a worthwhile activity for students to be involved in – both competitively, and in the more relaxed environment of in-class debating. However, I think that schools that are entering teams into debating competitions need to understand the full range an amount of resources that are needed to support the teams. Here are my first thoughts on what a school needs to plan for – can you add more?
- Each team will participate in at least three zone-level ’round robin’ debates. This means cover of some kind for at least three half days for each teacher taking a team.
- If a team wins their zone, they go on to play schools that are progressively further away. This usually means close to a full day of cover is needed for each debate beyond inter-zone finals.
- If my Year 11 team make it to the State Final they will have been in around nine debates. This means up to nine days away from most classes!
- Debaters need lots of coaching to do well. Weak debaters need coaching so they feel comfortable in the competition; strong debaters need coaching if you want them to go as far as possible in the comp. This could mean losing around one lunchtime per fortnight, or missing more classes – you will probably try to use your ‘free’ periods, meaning the kids will always be out of the same classes.
- Do they have clean shirts, ties, blazers etc.? Or will “someone” i.e. the coach have to organise this? The school may need to develop a system for borrowing formal uniform items.
- Debates have associated equipment – bell, stopwatch, palm cards, chairperson forms, glasses for water on the tables… You will need a designated storage space so these things are easy to find, especially in schools with more than one teacher coaching the teams.
I’m hoping to work out a real ‘budget’ – both for funding and staff support – for debating in my school. We’re always going to want more than we can have, but schools need to at least be realistic about what they are signing on for, I think.
Using Renzulli and Gagne together
In an earlier post I discussed the way in which our school uses the trait’s of giftedness as identified by Renzulli – we focus heavily on ensuring that students who possess above average ability also develop high levels of task commitment and creativity.
The NSW DET, however, does not feature Renzulli’s traits of giftedness in their Gifted and Talented Policy. Instead it uses Gagné’s (2003) Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT), which states that:
Gifted students are those whose potential is distinctly above average in one or more of the following domains of human ability: intellectual, creative, social and physical.
Talented students are those whose skills are distinctly above average in one or more areas of human performance.
What I like about Gagne’s model is that it explicitly recognises that students may be gifted in a range of domains; it is not limited to intellectual giftedness, but also recognises creative, social and physical giftedness.
I also think it is very useful to conceptualise ‘giftedness’ as being potential for excellence, while ‘talentedness’ is actual performance at an above average level.
But I still am unclear about how our school uses these two theories together. Certainly they both bring something to the table, but are they supposed to work together in some way? Anyone have any ideas?
I wonder if Renzulli would tell Gagne that combining task commitment and creativity with high ability is the key to moving gifted students beyond potential to performance!
Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog
Posted by kmcg2375 in Uncategorized on August 10, 2008
Just browsing through the ‘Best of Bamboo’ on Michele Martin’s blog The Bamboo Project and learned a lot from her post titled Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog. You can read more about this at Michele’s blog, but the six reasons in short are:
- You sound like a press release
- You sound like an informercial
- You sound like a know-it-all
- You haven’t shown them how
- You haven’t created the right atmosphere
- You just don’t seem that into it.
A great list, and one that really got me thinking. My last few posts have included some lengthy accounts of what I’m doing with my classes at school. I’ve specifically been blogging about the videogaming unit that I’m using with my Year 9 G&T class, in part because I know others who are interested in how the unit is working, but also because I am using this blog to store information about this unit as part of an G&T Action Research project I am part of at school. I’ve also started adding detailed info about how I am running an AOS on The Journey with Year 10. This is in part to reflect on my own teaching, but also I have lofty imaginations of teachers scouring the web for units of work and getting really happy when they find my blog with all of this great information!
I find that the problem with such posts is that they don’t explicitly invite discussion or reflection from readers. I think this is a result of reasons 3 and 4 – while I don’t exactly sound like a ‘know-it-all’, I haven’t problematised any of my work, merely recounted what I did; and while readers might technically know how to comment, they can’t see a clear invitation or need to add their thoughts.
What do other people do here? What makes a truly engaging blog post?
recycling ‘The Journey’
This term our English faculty have decided to teach Area of Study-style units with our Year 10 classes, in preparation for the concepts and style of learning that they will encounter in Stage 6. While most teachers are using the old HSC units on Change, a couple of us have elected to study The Journey instead…another recycled HSC topic 🙂
In the spirit of preparing the students for Year 11, I’m reflecting the new, broad AOS topic of Belonging by simply teaching the overall concept of The Journey i.e. not breaking this down into a smaller topic of either Physical, Inner or Imaginative Journeys. Read the rest of this entry »
Gifted and Talented Action Research
Posted by kmcg2375 in english, research, school, video games on July 28, 2008
In my school I am part of a group of beginning teachers that are completing action research projects in their gifted and talented classes. Our school is half-selective, meaning half of the students had to sit an academic exam for entry. The rest of the school is made up of local students, but we also run a G&T class in years 9 & 10 of the local stream. The class I’m using for my action research is my Year 9 G&T class, and the unit I am studying is the videogame unit…fun research 🙂
In our school there is a focus on developing three traits of giftedness as identified by Renzulli:
- above average though not necessarily superior general ability;
- high level of task commitment or intrinsic motivation;
- and creativity
The students in my class certainly do display above average ability, and my aim is for my teaching units thie year to boost their levels of task commitment, intrinsic motivation and creativity. The videogame unit so far is proving successful in these areas – in today, the third lesson of the unit, students worked in their groups for the first time, taking turns at playing the games (Need For Speed: Carbon, and Street Fighter II) and at creating an account on our class wiki and making some new pages.
So far the level of task commitment and intrinsic motivation is sky high! The creativity is off to a slow start in some respects, but I think we did some important work today in laying the foundations for creativity. I spent a lot of times with the groups on the laptops today, making sure students were comfortable with their roles as writers/authors on the class wiki. This creating of information, along with activities in later weeks where students will create their own video game concept and characters, is all designed to lead students into higher order thinking.
Year 9 Wiki
Posted by kmcg2375 in english, school, video games on July 24, 2008
I’ve just finished creating a new wiki, this time for my Year 9 class, and this time it is one that I am actually going to use!
I’ve created two other wikis before – one for my HSC class, which I made using wikispaces. My Year 12s were struggling with the blog as it was, so the wiki never really got a start there. The other wiki I made was a general purpose one, which I imagined all of my classes would contribute to, on every subject that they studied. This way all of my classes, from years 7-12, over time would come to access this kind of mega-source of information. What a plan! What a community! But I decided not to run with the idea, because I don’t think the students really will go for the idea…I’m not convinced it’ll be so much fun adding to the site unless you really know the others that are making it too.
I’ve added a couple of YouTube videos on using PB wiki to my vodpod (click here or in the right-hand side bar). Anyone else out there using a wiki ATM? What is (not) working for you?
ACMI games resources
Posted by kmcg2375 in video games on July 22, 2008
Just found this great page of games resources on the ACMI webpage.
I’m going to use information from their pages on games genres as well as an excellent essay by Matthew Sakey on ‘understanding character in videogames‘. Here is an extract:
The protagonist, however richly conceived, is ultimately a cipher for the player. The less we know about the character we play, the more possible it becomes for us to project our own personality onto them. Developers are reluctant to force a persona onto the player, but they do also want to accomplish their creative goals. The challenge of interactivity lies in encouraging players to take control while still experiencing the story that the game developers want to tell.
Yes, you are in fact a digital immigrant
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences on July 15, 2008
Many presentations at this week’s AATE conference referenced Marc Presnky’s research on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. In a conference where many papers and worshops discussed multimodal texts and the changing (increasingly digital) nature of texts and classroom practices, this is unsurprising. What was a bit surprising was the backlash that I witnessed, paper after paper, from teachers who resented the label ‘Digital Immigrant’.
I can see where people are coming from on this – especially teachers who have invested a lot of time in learning about new technologies and increasing their technological proficiency. However, learning or knowing about the digital world just does not make one a digital native.
I have found it very helpful to think about the other aspect of Prensky’s argument – that Digital Immigrants can of course learn the Native language, but they will always “have an accent” (for a great explanation of this, see Mike Jones lecture on Blogs, Wikis and the New World Order for the ScreenSpeak series for NSW HSC English teachers.) In fact, I think that in a lot of ways the Digital Immigrant who ‘learns the language’ will often learn to use the language better than a Native speaker – just so it is when Japanese speakers learn English, or when the English learn Dutch!
I didn’t have my own computer until I was about 14, and even then it was a computer that my boyfriend set up for me and helped me to use. But before that I did own an electric typwriter. I have never really been interested in programming or electronics. I am still happy to buy CDs (although I will then put the tracks onto my iPod). At only 27 I am in fact a Digital Immigrant…but I am learning the language quickly and my accent is becoming less broad 🙂 And in so many ways I have mastered the digital language far better than my Digital Native students; this makes me an ideal teacher for them. I also have a deep empathy with the students who, through economic or social disadvantage have not engaged in the same level of technology as their peers; these students are in fact Digital Immigrants themselves, despite their young age.
Digi-Stories
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, digital storytelling on July 12, 2008
The most engaging keynote that I saw at the AATE conference would have to be Daniel Meadows’ presentation ‘New Literacies for the Digital Age’. Daniel is an artist/photographer/storyteller from way back, and his keynote was about the power of storytelling, specifically the power of the digi-story.
A digital story, or digi-story, is a story that is told using a series of photos or other images, with narration and other sound layered over the top. Ideally they should only be about 2 minutes long, and use about a dozen images and a narration of about 250 words.
Daniel shared a number of digi-stories of his own, and from the Capture Wales project – what was refreshing was that his keynote was actually based on these digi-stories, with short explanations in between each to provide context, to highlight theoretical frames and positions, and make connections between the stories. I was so inspired by Daniel’s keynote that now I plan to use digi-stories in my year 9 class next term. I’ll still be basing next term’s work around ‘making meaning’, and the first 5 weeks will definitely still be focused on video games. But now in the second half of term, rather than students using a collection of digital resources for composing, I’m going to get them to make a digi-story!
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