Monthly Archive

OK, I’m catching up now: I’m really typing this on Thursday; not typing over the weekend and not getting around to posting until Thursday.

I didn’t get much work done after school this afternoon, and I don’t think I will most Thursdays for a while.  The Creative Arts Expo after school rehearsals have begun.  Like their previous incarnation in preparation for Wakakirri (in 2005), there’s an infectious buzz around them and through the school on those (increasingly colder) Thursday afternoons that’s hard to resist.  I’ve agreed to assist next week with preparing some old Wakakirri backdrops for a new life in our water-themed performance.

Walking around the school this afternoon soaking up the atmosphere left me thinking.   Why don’t we always have this buzz?  Why can’t Religious Education, English, Maths, and all the other KLAs gather so much interest?  Why is it that we’d never be able to get dozens of children to stay behind after school to do extra schoolwork?

We clearly have a big challenge as teachers around the whole issue of student engagement.  Not only do we owe it to children to provide such a stimulating learning environment, but we owe it to ourselves as well.  Disengaged students often become misbehaved students.  Unfortunately, though, it’s often easier to attribute blame to the student; “they don’t listen”, “they won’t give things a go”, etc., etc.  It’s easier to believe the problems lies with the students themselves rather than be confronted with the possibility of our teaching being a contributing factor.

Or at least we think it’s easier to apportion blame on the disengaged student.  I’d rather put the effort into reinvigorating my teaching than trying to manage (which is the best you can hope for in such situations) students who can’t see a point to what they’re doing.

Here I go again trying to get a move on with maintaining my own blog.  It seems to be the thing I get around to last every time.

The fact is, there are so many things I want to comment somewhere about, that I should simply get straight on to blog to make my thoughts known.

As far as blogs go, I’ve been too busy keeping up with things on my school’s learning technology blog, Technoblog, to worry about my own; and you can see a little gimmic or two that I’ve been trying out on it, like the Clustr map.

Maybe updating posts will be easier with this new tool.  I’m giving it my first go on the Flock web browser.  I was alerted to this new browser by reading a post on Chris Betcher’s Blog.  I’ve also been listening to Chris’ podcast, The Virtual Staffroom, which I would highly recommend.

Anyway, Chris Betcher posted on Flock, which integrates Web 2.0 tools into the browser itself.  Now Firefox had already started this by extensions for del.icio.us and the like.  But with Flock, you’ll find the tools within your browser to post pictures straight up to Flickr.  You can also type up a blog post in a little window, click on the publish button, and up your post goes!  A copy of the post is also then saved on your hard drive.

Well, if you can read this post, then it works!  An interesting experiment… I wonder if we’ll ever see these tools pop up in future versions of Internet Explorer (if they do, it’ll probably be only to Microsoft-owned photo sharing and blogging products)?

P.S. My restart stalled! Silly me tries to publish a post while edublogs is under maintenance.  So you’ll see this up there once they’re up and going again, and when I re-open Flock and publish this post.

Blogged with Flock