Posts Tagged twitter
I give a Gonski
The Federal Government commissioned David Gonski to conduct a comprehensive review of school funding in Australia – the final report was released in February 2012.
I wanted to post here the series of tweets that I sent out yesterday, when Peter Garrett was in Brisbane:
What comments would you make in relation to the Gonski recommendations?
Are you a public school supporter? A public school teacher?
What do you think it will take to close the gap?
Storify – ACARA Senior English subject drafts #ozengchat
On 19th June I shared the role of leader/discussant with @vivimat in the 8.30-9.30pm Tuesday #ozengchat stream that takes place on Twitter.
The topic: the draft Senior English subjects proposed by ACARA.
You can check out the ‘Storify’ made by Vivian to see all of the tweets from the discussion that night collected in one place:
If you haven’t yet found where to download the draft curriculum documents from, here is the URL: http://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum/draft_senior_secondary_australian_curriculum.html
Consultation on these documents ends on 20th July, 2012 (THAT’S SOON!) You can contact your professional association to ask if you can add comments to their response, or lodge your own response at the ACARA consultation website: http://consultation.australiancurriculum.edu.au/ (you will need to register first).
Some interesting comments made during the #ozengchat were:
- That an ‘English Literature’ (EL) course would flow nicely into university study
- That the EL course did not look significantly more difficult than the ‘English’ (E) course
- That the assumption is that in NSW, the current Standard course aligns with ‘English’ while the current Advanced course aligns with ‘English Literature’ – but this is not at all the case
- That bridging the gap between Year 10 and Year 11 & 12 needs a stronger focus
- That the proposal to organise Senior English into semester-long units seems to align with what currently happens in Western Australia…but we’re not sure where else (?)
- That the local state/territory bodies would still be responsible for assessment and examination; i.e. many did not realise that the NSW BOS would still be responsible for setting the HSC reading list
- That English Studies as exists in NSW (non-ATAR course) filled a big gap – the hope is that ‘Essential English’ (EE) turns out to be like English Studies (or English Communication, a similar course in QLD)
- That English would likely remain mandatory in NSW, and people wondered why it was not so in other states/territories
There is so much more to talk about when it comes to the proposed Senior English subjects!
I hope to have a new post up soon with some of my personal thoughts about the drafts. In the meantime, if you’ve been thinking about (or wondering about) the curriculum ACARA has proposed, drop a comment here – let’s chat about it!
AATE / ALEA 2013 National Conference
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, english, learning community on June 18, 2012
This year in Sydney, as with last year in Melbourne, AATE and ALEA are holding separate national conferences.
Despite promises to myself earlier this year to go to less conferences, I’ll be heading along to both 🙂
The ALEA National Conference, which is about to be held in Sydney from 6-9 July, has already sold out all available places (Well done to Lisa Kervin, the conference convenor!) I’ll be sticking my head in on the last day of this conference to hand out promotional material our conference in Brisbane…it’s hand over time, baby!
The AATE National Conference will be held a little later this year, from 3-4 October. I’ll be there with Five Bells on, presenting a workshop with Bianca Hewes on ‘Success, obstacles and ethics in online teaching’ as well as on a panel about teacher blogging. I’ll be joined on the panel by the likes of Bianca, Troy and Darcy, so you know it’s going to be a power-session; not to be missed!
Once these two conferences are wrapped up, it’s next stop: Brisbane 2013!
Our website won’t go live until after the hand over in July, but there is a Facebook page you can like and Twitter profile you can follow:
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/englishliteracyconference
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/EngLit2013
We’re working like crazy to get the Call for Papers and everything else ready for the launch, but here’s a sneak preview of things to come:
…will I see you in Brisbane in 2013?
Pecha kucha at the first #TMBrisbane
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, learning community, online tools, social media on March 2, 2012
I really enjoyed meeting new people and hearing them share their work yesterday at the first TeachMeet in Brisbane.
Steve Box (@wholeboxndice) hosted the TeachMeet at Moreton Bay Boys College (thanks Steve!):
TeachMeet Brisbane
I presented a 7 minute pecha kucha on how to construct ‘fair’ assessment when using project-based learning (PBL).
My presentation included shout-outs to @BiancaH80 @malynmawby @Vormamim and @benpaddlesjones who are some of the wonderful people that have tweeted around ideas with me on my PBL journey. It was the first time I presented a pecha kucha and adhered strictly to all the rules! Making cards to help me stick to the topic helped a lot (something I haven’t done since school tbh):
Actual palm cards - old school!
If you’d like to check them out I’ve put the slides up on slideshare. I hope that showing these resources helps future TeachMeeters plan their Pecha Kuchas – I loved the mode of presenting and highly recommend it!
Congratulations to TeachMeet Sydney on their WORLD RECORD ATTEMPT tonight! I hope the next #TMBrisbane event at the State Library of Queensland will be able to be video streamed online like #TMSydney was tonight, I had a ball watching along and tweeting with everyone from home 🙂
TeachMeet Brisbane
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, education, learning community, social media, technology on January 23, 2012
During 2011 a range of TeachMeets were held throughout Sydney. A central wiki was set up to coordinate the events and the hashtag #TMSydney ran hot during the meets.
The events were great successes, described by participants as welcoming, supporting and positive. This is not surprising, when you consider that the ethos behind the event is that it is strictly free professional development run ‘for teachers, by teachers’. What I thought was most attractive about the TeachMeet structure was the short presentations – either a 2 minute ‘nano-presentation or a 7 minute micro-presentation (or Pecha Kucha). It sounds like an ideal way to hear a little bit from a lot of people.
You can therefore imagine how stoked I was to hear that someone was organising the first ever TeachMeet in BRISBANE!
#TMBrisbane
TEACHMEET BRISBANE will be held from 4-6pm at Moreton Bay Boys’ College on Thursday 1st March 2012.
If you would like to register or get more information, you can visit and join the TMBrisbane wiki: http://tmbrisbane.wikispaces.com/
Of course, I was so excited to see the event come to Brissie that I had to volunteer to present. It will also be a great chance for me to refine my pecha kucha style!
(I also look forward to the #TMBrisbane hastag drawing together more of the Brisbane edu-community)
Pass it on
If you would like to be involved in TeachMeet Brisbane, or to support the event, take a look at the flyer available for download on the wiki.
In the Twittershpere you can participate in the backchannel from anywhere (not just Brisbane!) on March 1st by adding #TMBrisbane to your tweets.
Finally, this video about TeachMeets made for Sydney West is a great one to pass around to folk who are new to the TeachMeet concept…enjoy!
Google+ by Molly Rocketboom
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, learning community, online tools, social media, technology on July 26, 2011
If you’re still not sure how Google+ fits into your existing world of Facebook and/or Twitter, let Molly of Rocketboom break it down for you. Approx 4.5 mins:
Motivation and Participation in Asynchronous Online Discussions
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, research, social media, technology, university on March 24, 2011
I was very interested to read the findings of Xie, Durrington and Yen (2011) published in the recently released issue of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. Given my current use of Twitter in my own university unit for preservice teachers, I was glad to read that others were also observing a relationship between participation in online asynchronous discussions and students’ level of motivation. I have reproduced their abstract here:
This study investigated the relationship between students’ motivation and their participation in asynchronous online discussions during a 16-week online course. Fifty-six students participated in
online discussion activities as a normal part of their classes. Their motivation for participating in online discussions was self-reported three times throughout the semester. The findings continue to
indicate that students’ motivation has a significant relationship with their participation in online discussion activities at time two and time three. Students’ perceived value, autonomy, competence,
and relatedness have different levels of impact on their online discussion behavior. This study also found that students’ intrinsic motivation and their perceived value of online discussions remained at a moderate-high level over time, although the perceived value had a significant drop from the midpoint to the end of the semester.Keywords: Asynchronous Online Discussion, Motivation, Distance Learning, Collaborative
Learning, Learning Community
Reading this article has motivated me to collect my own data in the next week of classes, to gather some initial responses from my own students. I look forward to hearing their views!
Hunting for twits
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, online tools, social media, technology, university on March 23, 2011
Of the roughly 85 students in my English Curriculum Studies unit, currently about 62 are following our class twitter account @CLB_018
No mean feat considering it is only week 4.
However, it is week 4 of a 9 week unit, meaning we’re almost half way done (eek! I still have so much to SAY!)
Aaaand, I’m aware that a small handful of those followers may be spamish.
So today I am embarking on a twit hunt – hunting through my list of followers to see who has not tweeted anything (many only joined for class and only follow the class profile). I’m going to DM each of them individually and privately to encourage them to participate.
Am I going overboard in doing this?
On one hand this looks exactly like the kind of time-consuming ‘tech monitoring’ that teachers often tell me they don’t like about teaching online.
On the other hand, I see it as analogous to checking students’ workbooks a few weeks in to term and pointing out their missing work. Is this something that University teachers see as beyond the scope of their ‘job’? I don’t.
But please – please – tell me if you think this is too much, or if this seems like a good strategy to you. Especially if you do something similar – did it work?
Stuff I believe
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, politics, reflections, social media on March 21, 2011
It was interesting to follow the tweets of @BiancaH80 and @durk94 tonight, as they discussed the school funding data available on the MySchool website.
To be honest, in the interests of keeping myself in a positive and generative work state of mind I’ve avoided looking at the new MySchool site at all (and no, I’m not going to hyperlink to it because I don’t think it deserves the traffic). Next week I’m going to have to though, so I can talk about it with my students in class.
ohmmmmmmm…
Even though I now work at a university, which involves striving for curriculum excellence in schools in every sector, I maintain my firm commitment to the social justice agenda of supporting public education.
However, government departments of education tend to be clunky, inefficient, wheel-reinventing institutions. I know, I used to work in one. And if I returned to teaching you’d find me back there.
But while funding and resource benchmarks are a large part of the problem, a widespread lack of willingness to consider radically shifting our models of curriculum ‘delivery’ prevents the construction of a meaningful way forward, in my opinion. The composition of the local student ‘community’ and its relationship to the related local ‘campus’ needs to be significantly rethought.
So I’m posting my tweets for tonight up here, just for the record. I’d be interested in hearing other people’s visions for the school campus of the future. Will there still be a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’?
I hope not.
Alain de Botton’s University of Twitter
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, education, personal, reflections, social media on March 20, 2011
A delightful, insightful and helpful series of tweets on the 18th March from contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton.
I highly recommend his twitter feed, I find something helpful to me every time I visit. If you like that, you may want to check out the DVD or book of his series on Status Anxiety, another favourite of mine.
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