Lesson Planning on a Blog

Posted onFebruary 7, 2009 
Filed under Blogs & Blogging, Digital Portfolio and tagged , , | 3 Comments

Earlier this week I established my classroom blog which I use for all of my four classes. The students just select the category for their class to see the posts relevant to them. Apart from kids forgetting the URL and needing to ask too many times, it has worked really well. If I run out of time in class, or if kids forget what the homework is I just tell them to find it on the blog. A few comments from students have been:

I’ve told my students that they are expected to use the blog to

I’m using the blog as my lesson planning tool as well. I don’t use a big heavy teacher’s planner. I usually nut things out with a pen and paper (in very messy and fast handwriting), formulate it into some sort of organised list and then write up a coherent post about it for the students. I have also got on the blog Unit outlines for my Year 12 classes (with my Year 11 and 10 ones to come soon).

I will often get my students to respon to questions by leaving comments on the blog, which I have already done once for this activity which asked students ‘What Is Technology?’

I’m hoping also that my classroom blog will show my development as a teacher in how I plan my lessons and what sort of activities I get my students to complete. The real reflections on all of that will happen here on this blog, but the examples will probably all be there. My students won’t be writing on the blog, but I’m planning that at least one class will have their own individual blogs, and maybe two classes will be involved on a ning network. See what develops there.

Have you got a classroom blog? How are you using it?

A New School and New Goals

Posted onFebruary 7, 2009 
Filed under Digital Portfolio, Goals & Resolutions and tagged , , | 2 Comments

This year I started at Coburg Senior High School as a History and Politics Teacher, a far cry from Hawkesdale P12 College in South West Victoria where I spent the last three years teaching Chinese. Hawkesdale is a very small predominantly Anglo-Saxon farming community. There are around 240 students at the school from Prep to 12 and I taught all year levels. At Coburg, there are about 220 kids, but only from Years 10-12. I’m not teaching any Chinese, and the students come from an amazing range of ethnic backgrounds. Coburg Senior has been open for two years and is really trying to make a different approach to learning work. Some great things about Coburg:

The staff and students are also highly respectful of each other and the students love that they are treated like adults. The Year 10s, who are new this year, might take a little while to settle in to how things are done but they are a good bunch and will ‘get it’ soon enough.

Both staff and students are expected to keep a digital portfolio of the development of their learning. I intend to use this blog as a basis for that so hopefully I can get some external thoughts and comments helping me along my way.

I haven’t really thought about it enough to set them in stone, but my goals for this year are (apart from getting my kids through their VCE courses which are brand new to me too!):

The subjects I’m teaching are:

So, assessment, thinking, choice, independent learning and self-directed learning are what I want to make sure I’ve got sorted. Of course I have many other technology realted goals such as learning how to use GarageBand properly as well as a whole host of other Mac programs, but I’ll manage them fine.

If you know any classes doing the same or similar things I would really like to get in touch with them. Please pass on my details!

What are your teaching and learning goals for this year? How will you go about achieving them? Advice,  suggestions and resources to help me with mine are very welcome :-)

Technology Through The Ages Assignment – Suggestions Wanted!

Posted onFebruary 7, 2009 
Filed under Digital Portfolio, Lesson Plans & Ideas and tagged , | 2 Comments

At Year 10 I teach a subject called ‘Race Around The World’ which is a cross of history/geography/whatever else all tied together by an essential question. I am working with another teacher and this term we are creating a unit on technology. The reason for this is that the school we are at, Coburg Senior High School, has a great emphasis on using technology discerningly to create and extend learning opportunities for the students. There is lots of computer access – both iMacs (desktops) and MacBooks (laptops) – open plan learning areas, nothing is blocked (well, almost nothing and working through the new firewall restrictions!), and all staff are encouraged to create podcasts to deliver lessons, keep a digital portfolio, and use as much technology as possible (but questioning what is good use and what is just unnecessary).

For this unit on technology, our ‘Engage’ phase this past week has seen us get the kids to create a Wordle on their definiton of technology, take photos with their phones of the technology they find around the school and bluetooth the images to me, and to complete a survey on what technology is, what they own, what they want to own etc. You can see the results of the survey here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pcCGhlERvyQ7Ud2QZc3XcLA

This week, after we do a bit on what their definitions of technology were and what answers were given in the survey, we are going to give them an assignment to find out about technology through the ages. This work will involve the kids working in groups of 3 to research 3 different and significant developments in technology in a given era. Here is the assignment. I would really appreciate some feedback on how I can take it all just that step or two deeper. This was originally written last year by another teacher, but I have changed it slightly to suit our class.

technology-through-the-ages

Technology Through The Ages

AIM – The aim of this assignment is for you to explore how technology has developed over time. This may challenge or confirm your current understanding of what technology is or isn’t, and this assignment will give you the change to reflect on that. By completing it you should be able to discuss what you understand the meaning of technology to be and give some relevant examples.

In groups of 3 you are required to research the major technological developments of one of the following eras:

➢    Cavemen to 800s
➢    800s to 1500s
➢    1500s to 1800s
➢    1800s to 1900s
➢    20th century
➢    21st century so far
You need to include the following information for 3 significant items created in your era:

•    Describe what the invention is
•    When was it invented
•    Why it is so important (in other words, justify why you feel it is one of the most significant inventions)
•    What it meant for the world as we know it today

•    In your presentation you also need to include a definition of technology. You can use the Wordle you created if you like. After you have completed your research, think about whether or not your understanding of technology has changed. Comment on this somewhere in your presentation.

You must use a minimum of 2 websites for your research on each item. Don’t just rely on the information you find on one site. Make sure you note the website you source material from on the bottom of the keynote slide. Directly after the website write the date accessed, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventions accessed 8/02/09

Format: Use Keynote to put your presentation together. Your presentation needs to include a voiceover – and all of the voices in your group need to be heard. Then export the presentation from Keynote to Quicktime, creating a movie file.

Submission: Your completed presentation is due by the end of our last class for this week. You need to upload it to the RATW folder on StudyWiz. Your final presentations will be uploaded to TeacherTube and YouTube. Students and teachers from around the world will be invited to comment on your work. You will also be asked to view and comment on your classmates work.

NOTE: Please DO NOT use your surnames on your work. First names only because they are being uploaded to the internet.

Key Questions About New Tools

Posted onJanuary 13, 2009 
Filed under New Tools and tagged , , | 2 Comments

What key things do you consider when looking at using a new tool in lessons? There are so many new tools out there to explore and have fun with. So many new things to learn that it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Or, if you are anything like me, you might feel a little too excited and rush in to try to use lots of different things and then realise that while many of them worked really well, you could have probably thought about it a bit more to make sure something of slightly more substance was produced, or realised that it wasn’t the best tool on offer! Ah well, that might just be the natural order of learning all of these things. When first introduced to Web 2.0 goodness it is easy to get involved in everything , join everything, try to try everything, think everything is magic. Then when you are exhausted from all that (I write with myself in mind!) you are still as enthusiastic, but with the understanding that you have to have the right tool for the job. So, this year I want to come up with a few key questions that I will apply to each new tool that I want to use, and even to ones that I am already using. The beginning of some sort of framework for critically evaluating Web 2.0 tools if you will. Here are the questions that jump out to me:

Last year sometime I was at an eLearning conference in Geelong and in his keynote speech, Andrew Douch covered this same topic. Two questions that he asks really stood out to me:

He also mentioned that he asks whether or not something is a pencil or a space pen – The Americans spent lots of money developing a biro that worked in space. The Russians used a pencil. What do you see as the most critical points to question when deciding to use a new tool? Do you have a framework you use to make an evaluation of new tools? I’d like to be able to whittle the list down to 4 or 5 key questions that I can remember easily and that cover the most important points – which would probably be about letting students create, the time factor and whether or not it really is allowing something to happen that would not have happened before. What do you think?

Image is: ‘Nailed It’ by Cayusa.

Tagging Variations

Posted onJanuary 12, 2009 
Filed under Diigo, Social Bookmarking and tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Today I was supposed to get stuck right back into planning for Term 1, but alas, I was found to be procrastinating. Not entirely a waste of time though as it saw me doing something I’ve been planning to do for ages – tidying up the tags I use for bookmarking sites in Diigo. The reason I wanted to do this was because I had several tags for the one thing, for example: socialnetworking and social_networking and ‘social networking.’ I know, I could tag each site that I wanted to use this tag on three different ways, but I really am in favour of keeping things as simple as possible and so wanted to use just one version. Which one though? Does it matter?I actually like the social_networking version best because it separates the words making them easier to read but keeps the whole phrase clearly together. But, I didn’t choose to go with that version because after looking around a bit at what other people were doing, most people use the version without spaces – socialnetworking.

On the edit tags page on Diigo it tells me how many times I’ve used a particular tag as well as telling me how many times that tag has been used throughout Diigo. For example, you can see here that I have used the tag google_earth 6 times, but it has been used throughout the Diigo community 1251 times to tag different websites.

If I change that tag to googleearth as one word then let’s see what happens:

Ah! Now I see this variation has been used 4378 times throughout the community.

So, what’s the moral of the story? For me, it’s a few points:

Here are a few questions I’ve had about tagging for a while:

Tagging is something I have found confusing in the past and a while to get used to so if you’ve got some great advice, I’d love to hear it!

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