It’s merely my humble opinion, but it’s one of the most impressive performances of Advance Australia Fair that I’ve heard or seen.

Happy Australia Day!

The Year 2 team were in busy planning the way forward for this year with the children I taught last year.  I would have liked to have spent more time with them to tap into their ideas.

The principal was in too, busy planning for our Leadership Team meeting on Wednesday when we’ll start drawing last year’s evaluations and ideas into achieveable and realistic goals.

“You look well” I was told.  At least twice.  A point was made of saying it?

Did I not look well last year?  With the amount of energy last year demanded of me (my blogging being one thing that suffered), I would not be surprised if I didn’t.

I’ve found a new gadget that I want to try. It’s the Flip Ultra from Pure Digital.

I’ve been looking for a video recording product for the school for a while now. So far I’ve been leaning towards some of the SD-based cameras out there so we don’t have any tape dramas, no internal disks get damaged if the camera cops a accidental shunt from a student, and we can get files onto the computer via USB or a card reader.

All that was until I came across this on Marco Torres’ blog. Not only does it all look great and very easy to use, it’s very smartly priced – always a good feature for schools looking to maximise the limited dollars. All reports indicate that one of it’s great features is it’s abilities in low-light situations.

So, all I need to do is get one for the purposes of testing for school. Perhaps I can get the kids using it too…? Maybe they’ll need to get it out of my hands first…

1. I was acting assistant principal today.  Ok, that’s a very long stretch – a system leadership meeting in our Diocese today left me as the second teacher in charge.  Fortunately things went nice and smoothly.  What I really enjoyed was being included by the teacher in charge in the day’s happenings around the school and treated as a member of the team.

2. I’m going to Melbourne.  It was a last-minute decision at our school to send at team to the Interactive Whiteboard Conference that’s on next week at Firbank Grammar.  I’ll write more later, but it’ll be the first time I’m travelling such a distance for the purpose of professional learning.

3. I’m using Ning.  Well, sort of.  IWBNet has set one up for the conference.  I’m signed up, now I just have to get on to using it.  Another Web 2.0 tool I’m finding a need to become familiar with.

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.

With only 22 in class today (4 still absent), we started at least to begin the language that I wanted learning immersed in this year – teamwork, cooperation, respect, etc.

We also started our very first work on introducing cooperative learning roles for working in groups. There’s still a long way to go. There’s little idea of just exactly how these work, as least within the dynamics of a new class. Lots of talking across each other, reluctance to take on the given role, etc. I at least still have several management strategies up my sleeve like the Team Stop signs from Laura Candler’s Cooperative Learning File Cabinet (her site’s been on the net for a number of years now, but the resources can still prove to be useful).

I was pleased though to see the children with the “presenter” role respond well to their task. Once one got up, did their best, and found they were well supported by the class group, they started to jump at the chance for the next turn.

Still, it’s only day one. We’ve made some good progress for a few hours of work. I have been prepared to concentrate completely on these skills for as long as necessary, so we’ll continue to follow this up in the days to come.

Headed into school on Tuesday to do what I could about planning for next year.  I suppose more than anything else it was a way of calming the nerves and being able to assure myself I’m doing something productive simply because I left the house with the laptop and went there!

After spending some time throwing away more useless paper (and filing the occasional useful piece) and doing some more work on re-vamping both the school’s website and Intranet, my mind started to play on me again, reminding me of my main purpose: “so what exactly are you going to do this term?”

Finding no easy way of putting it in front of me to see, I turned to the classroom whiteboard and starting setting out the key learning areas, units and what could be done.  The idea is to take the Living in Communities integrated unit (HSIE and Science & Technology) and use it as a context for learning in other KLAs as much as possible (Creative Arts and English start to get a go).

The main learning experience for the term appears to be starting to structure itself around students planning to build an imaginary community.  We used a bit of the old classic Sim City software in this same unit last year and thought we could take it a step further.

All the “LT”s in orange on the board also show where I’ve come up with ways that technology could be embedded into the learning process.  It started with the idea of “well, let’s get on to Google Earth and find our piece of empty land in the local area and use it to start building on”.  It’s snowballing a bit from there.

We’re certainly not expecting plans that would be sumitted to a surveyor general’s department or anything like that.  The idea is that in having to put together their own community, they’ll need to take a look at what makes their real community tick, and incorporate those features (and those learnings) into their new one.

There are still two KLAs I don’t have a starting point for yet.  Religious Education may prove too difficult to integrate at this point, at least with the units set in their current scope and sequence.

Now I need to get the learning sequence organised so that the students can acutally tackle it head-on.

Back for the new year!  Welcome to 2007.  I deliberately stayed away from the school work after the term ended to give myself a break, but my mind’s already started thinking about where to head to this year.

One thing that needs to be carefully considered is how and why we will do the learning that needs to occur in the class this year.  There are existing units of work that are part of a whole school program.  What I suppose is the focus for me is relevance.  Not that what we’re teaching is necessarily irrelevant, but sometimes (or perhaps often) we fail to see the relevance of it, and therefore fail to make the learning relevant to our students.  Often we can assume something needs to be taught simply because we’ve always taught it.

Not only does the content need to be relevant, but the methods of learning as well.  We live in quite a different age nowadays where the ability to negotiate change has become one of the most essential life skills.  There is a need to carefully embed technology into classroom learning.  Yet it cannot be more lock-step, observe and reproduce methodology that has prevailed in the past.  Children need to be taught how to take control of, and responsibility for their learning.  If we complain that children want to be “spoon-fed”, then who do we really have to blame?  After all, if these children are with us for six hours a day, 200 days a year, then we have a significant opportunity with which to change the assumed norms of our classrooms.

So, the next challenge is to creatively structure how the learning will take place in our key learning areas for Term 1, 2007:

Religious Education: Talking & Listening to God (Prayer), Lent, Easter Triduum
English: Exposition text type (had a blank on the literary text)
Mathematics: TBC
Human Society and Its Environment: Living in Communities
Science and Technology: Built Environments
Creative Arts: My Dream House (painting), Music (specialist teacher)
Personal Development, Health and Physical Education: Social Skills

Take a look at the classroom photo. It looks like a typical classroom in our school, and probably like most schools in Australia. Yet this is the very problem. Take the computers out, and this photo could have been taken twenty years ago or even earlier. In fact all this classroom’s had done to it in its twenty-one years of life is new furniture, air conditioning and computers. While all this is great, has it really been shaped over time to meet the evolving needs of our students today, and their future needs that have not yet been realised?

Come on, it’s not too hard to work out where in this classroom the chalkboard is.

The desk arrangement this year has made some efforts to accomodate collaborative and cooperative learning, and to provide social learning networks. Yet it’s still a classroom where such learning groups are still focussed on the one task. The room needs to be restructured yet again to allow for different things to happen in different spaces in the room. Working spaces for groups as well as individuals. Spaces for sharing and presentation, spaces for reading, writing and composition. Spaces for sitting on chairs or to be sprawled out on the floor. Spaces that allow for concentration and comfort.

It may be difficult to achieve all this in the smallish space we’ve been given to work in (floor space 8 x 6.15 metres plus wet area with sink), but there’s also some wasted space that needs to be better utilised. So while other teachers are moving classrooms, I think I’ll be throwing away just as much – especially the outdated resources that no one before me has been game to throw out (and have left behind for me to inherit).

“… Now with all that stuff gone, and a bit more shifting, I won’t need all four of those bookcases anymore… that’s a start…”

The reason for this desire to change is that I need to very carefully ask myself whether teaching and learning is effective as it can be. Our teacher-librarian was one of a number of Parramatta Diocesan educators who recently heard Marco Torres explain our three options when faced with this dilemma; namely “complain”, “quit”, or “innovate”.

My hope now is to take up option three. For this to happen, a lot of what happens in my rather “conventional” classroom needs to be critically appraised and changed. If the world is different today, if children are different today, then teaching and learning needs to change with it.

I’ll leave it as is for now. There’s a lot more needed to break this open, and hopefully I can now do it using this blog that for months has sat here while I’ve asked “what worthwhile purpose can I actually use this blog for?”

I have no idea whether any of this is going to work. I don’t even know if I’ll find the time and motivation to get it all done for a whole year. There’s no harm in trying though, is there? Hopefully, even the smallest success will make any effort worthwhile.