Monthly Archive

Firstly, a request for leniancy: If this post starts sounding disjointed, it’s probably because I’m writing it in between parent-teacher interviews that I’m conducting tonight and tomorrow.

Parent-teacher interviews are often the signal that the end of Term 2 is here.  Normally, after committing yourself to so much time and energy writing reports, marking assessment tasks and preparing portfolios, not to mention about seven hours of parent-teacher interviews, the one thing you look forward to is a nice, relaxing break.

It seems, however, that those in the computer world (often already known for their warped sense of humour) think it would be a good time to hold a conference or two for those technology-interested and focussed teachers who want to learn more.  I’ve shared the school holiday offering I’ve been made aware of on technoblog.

So, what to go to… if anything?  Well, I have to say each of them grabbed my attention.  Two of them overlap, however, and I’m not sure about spending too much time in conferences and forums given I want to dedicate time to really planning Term 3 in my classroom.  So I’ll give the Catholic Education Commission’s Learning with Web 2.0 forum.

It will be interesting to see how I find it.  I have to say the workshop offerings suggest a target audience that’s a little less familiar with Web 2.0 than I am.  Not that I’m an expert, but I got a good introduction from a Teacher-Librarians Professional Development day last year hosted by the Parramatta Diocesan TL Network.  Judy O’Connell will be presenting (amongst others), but I think I’ll give her social bookmarking presentation a miss, given I’m already familiar with some of the tools; primarily from participating in a workshop by her on exactly the same topic at the same TL PD Day.

One thing I’m thinking of doing is producing a podcast afterwards to share some insights from the forum with staff via technoblog.  Perhaps I can take some portable recording equipment (there are several inexpensive mp3 players nowadays that include voice recorders) to capture live the thoughts of others.  Maybe I could even find a minute or two to interview some of the presenters from Parramatta who I know?

Presented by the challenge of joining by Diocesan Web 2.0 “guru” Judy O’Connell, I decided to find out what Facebook was all about.

My initial thoughts (before signing up) was that it was another in the MySpace, Bebo, etc. line of sites; which it is.  It’s definitely a social networking site.  Not that I appear to be very social at present.  My public profile invites people to view my 0 photos, 0 wall posts, 0 notes and 0 groups.

But I do have friends (now doesn’t that sound sad)!  Besides Judy, upon registering I discovered that a friend of mine from my uni days (my BEd days, 1998-2001) was also on Facebook.  I kept on looking, and found another friend from past days.  Not surprising she would be here (or on some other social networking site) given that we used to keep in touch via MSN Messenger and she documented her overseas trip using this tool called Blogger which I thought looked good, but I hadn’t thought of an educational use for .  Thank goodness that’s now changed.  Further searching now suggests that compared to some of my friends, I’m a little bit behind the times.

I suppose I’ll keep playing and looking around; seeing what Facebook can do.  It seems to be a bit more ordered and “clean” than say MySpace or Bebo, so I’m wondering if, like those sites, it has/will have a “demographic” that prefers it over other social networking sites?

As far as Web 2.0 tools go, I don’t think I’m doing too badly.  I’m doing the whole blogging thing (on several platforms for a variety of audience and purposes), engaging in social networking and bookmarking, made a small start on Flickr, set up a wiki for a work Professional Development program and podcasted for the same.  Add SlideShare presentations, and a whole lot of extra things I’ve probably forgotten, and I’m pretty busy.  Not bad for a someone who’s still technically a digital immigrant!

Today my classroom finally became radically different!  Our installation team came in and installed my class’ new interactive whiteboard.  We’re still sorting out one thing or another (like a USB cable – must get an order out tomorrow), but it’s up and running.  It all looks really flash (our installers did a fantastic job), but now I have to make good use of it.

Now I have to start thinking about the rest of my term and what great tools we have that we can start using.

This is somewhat off-topic, but a story that I’m finding particularly important at this point.

Tonight the people in and around the NSW rural city of Maitland wait to see how high the Hunter River will rise and whether flood waters will spread.  It’s a situation of personal interest to me as Maitland is the home town of the Barden family – my dad was a chlid in Maitland during the famous flood of 1955.  None of our relatives are currently under threat (to the best of our knowledge), but it’s still concerning.

Being two hours’ drive away in Sydney, I naturally began searching the Internet for news on what is happening.  The Sydney television station news sites were about as useful as their news coverages; showing quickly dating video footage, and light on the specifics.  In an age of instant information, finding the latest and exactly what is happening where became frustrating.

Confident in the reliability of our national broadcaster, I turned to ABC News’ website and, following a link here and there, struck an information goldmine.  Since the severe storms and flooding in nearby Newcastle on Friday, ABC Radio Newcastle 1233 AM has been streaming their broadcasting live over the Internet.  Interested people are listening from all parts of the globe.  There is simply no more comprehensive or authoritative source available.  Their input from local callers, and the work of their staff, have resulted in first-class coverage.  Regular updates from emergency and recovery teams on the ground around the Hunter region has helped bring comfort and confidence to a disaster-stricken community.  Many listener-posted photographs can help give us Sydneysiders (and others further afield) a sense of just what’s happening “out-of-town” besides the running aground of a coal tanker on Nobby’s Beach.

This is yet another excellent example of why ABC funding must remain a high priority for our federal government.

It’s also a lesson on how we need to teach children to be critical locators and selectors of information.  As many of us experienced web users know, the first source that comes up in Google search is not always the best.

At last report, the Hunter River at Maitland was at 11.4 metres, less than half a metre from the top of the levee bank.  Let’s hope that it stays at this forecast peak.

Finally, as a Catholic school teacher, my thoughts go out to Maitland-Newcastle’s Catholic Schools, that will remain closed on Tuesday while their staff assess any damage from storms and flooding.

This afternoon, our staff broke off into their core learning teams (Religious Education, Literacy, Curriculum and Mathematics) to continue our work towards achieving our school strategic plan and our goals for 2007.  I have been working in the Curriculum team, and with another colleague, have been given the challenge of reviewing the school’s K-6 Scope and Continuum in Creative Arts.

So far, it’s been a slow process of reading the existing units and mapping out exactly what’s being covered, in order to identify gaps and overlapping in the learning, and work from there.

The discussion slowly turned towards the idea of the “Key Learning Tasks” that what bring the units of work to life in the classroom.  We reflected on what they were originally supposed to be; rich learning tasks that brought together skills and knowledge, employed higher-order thinking skills, provided an opportunity for all students at all levels to access the curriculum, were meaningful, directly linked to assessment and to stage outcomes, etc., etc.

Our professional critique was that some of the tasks described in the whole school program were richer than others.  Others sounded like they had great potential, but how they were described on paper just didn’t do justice to them – “you have to see it in action to fully understand…”

So, amongst all the learning agenda that our team needs the school to address, let alone the other dimensions of the learning agenda from the other teams, plus the competing agendas that impact on the work of teachers, where do we find the time and the strategies to re-evaluate the very basis of teaching and learning?

We need to ask ourselves:

• What is a rich learning task?
• What does it look like?
• How is it programmed?
• What demands should it make of students (and of teachers!)?
• How is it assessed?
• How is it resourced?
• How does it incorporate good strategies like cooperative learning, higher-order thinking/Bloom’s taxonomy/multiple intelligences/integral learning, use of technology, etc.?

Then, set this against the learning agenda outside influences (governments, etc.) wish schools to pursue, and the two can seem out of synch.  Just because the curriculum calls for children to learn about the British Colonisation of Australia in 1788 doesn’t mean we have to adopt 18th Century educational philosophies in order to teach it.

Unfortunately, it seems that the attempt to find answers only leads to more questions.  Yet, we press on…

In the other blog I write and manage, Technoblog, I wrote once about the importance of children developing thinking and information skills while at school, as these are what will truly empower children to operate successfully in the 21st Century world they will step out into. I shared this personal belief of mine with the parents who attended our Parents & Friends association meeting last Wednesday and listened to my presentation on learning with technology at St. Michael’s. It’s important to teach a certain amount of important content, but without the lifelong learning skills, how will children the content they specifically need, and the new content that will be created, over the course of their adult lives?

As such, I’m a fan of the information skills process. Not that I believe I’m an expert (or even a good teacher, for that matter) of it, but I like to do my best to teach it, simply because it so accurately reflects what we actually do as independent learners. If nothing else, my liking of the information skills process makes me popular with teacher librarians!

So before the beforementioned P&F Meeting last week, I told my teacher librarian that I would be referring to “the process” in the meeting. The first response I got was “oh, they’ve just reviewed it.”

And so they have. The NSW Department of Education and Training is sharing its work on the process on its website. As all its work is complete, the full results will be available from their school libraries page. They’ve done some good work here. I really like the lists of indicators of what behaviours and strategies children should display in working through different stages in the process.

You can also download it all in a pdf. A bit crowded for my liking, but it’s all on one page, which is always a good way of not losing people’s attention with a document.

The thing is, we’re currently working through the process in my class at the moment (we’re working towards writing explanations on the cycles of the seasons and the phases of the moon). I don’t I’ll have time this term to update my process posters. It’ll have to wait a little while until I can get these reports finished.