Posts Tagged school

Technology Leadership Team

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on December 14, 2008

Last week I went to my first meeting for my school’s new ‘Technology Leadership Team’.  I am so excited about working with other teachers, especially because they are mostly from other faculties, who are also excited about using technology to enhance learning.

The focus of our group is to plan and/or provide collegial professional development for other staff members in areas of technology.  We all agree that an important aspect of this will be PD in using online tools, such as blogs, wikis and podcasts.

Another exciting thing about the group is that we are planning to trial Moodle with some of our classes this year, and depending on our success, introduce Moodle as a tool across the entire school in 2010.  I can’t wait!  I’m interested to hear from anyone who is Moodling already, about how their school introduced it, and what kind/level of PD was needed.  Are majority of teachers in Moodle-schools using the system effectively?

I’m going to send my blog URL to other members of the team now – I hope they drop by and leave me a comment!

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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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Online Pedagogy

Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, online tools on November 28, 2008

In today’s conference workshop I will be exploring four important issues relating to learning and teaching strategies for using online tools:

  1. How the purpose of your site relates to its form
  2. The intended teacher-student dynamic online
  3. Students and internet safety
  4. Getting students involved and monitoring contributions

Please respond with comments to this post if you have any questions, information or anecdotes from your own teaching context.

(DET Interim Guidelines for using blogs and wikis)

(from the ETA Annual Conference @ UNSW )

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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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