A treat for Teachers on World Teachers Day

(With Geraldine Doogue, the Master of Ceremonies, of ABC fame)

 An inspiring couple of days were held in Canberra, as Australia celebrated World Teachers Day. Award winning educationalists – teachers, principals,  SSO staff and schools and communities representatives were brought together for the Australian Excellence in Teaching Awards. This successful event was organized by Teaching Australia.

Highlights

• awards ceremony at the magnificent Parliament House on Capital Hill in Canberra

• shaking hands with the deputy Prime Minister, Federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard
• meeting face to face my twitter friend @kimpericles - It is always special to meet online friends and Kim was no exception. Kim does some amazing work with her class, especially in relation to gaming.

 

• discovering that @adrian_camm was there and had won both a highly commended teaching award, plus the Minister for Education’s new award – Excellence in ICT

• meeting and connecting with so many amazing educationalists who are achieving astounding outcomes with students
• the professional exchange with activities organized by Eric Frangenheim, pushing our use of Thinking Skills

Eric encouraging us to continue innovation

• the dinner at the recently opened National Portrait Gallery with guest speaker

At the National Portrait Gallery

• the closing presentation by the highly innovative and successful teacher, Andrew Douch

Andrew Douch - MS World Innovative Teacher of the Year

Lowlights

• plane being 60 mins late taking off in Melbourne due to malfunction

Thank you to Teaching Australia representatives who made our visit memborable and enjoyable. All was superbly organised, we were made to feel special, yet encouraged to further our connections and continue on the innovative work.

Global handwashing day and some blog action!

Global handwashing day is on October 15th. My students will be writing a post on this global event and answering these questions as a post:-

1. Why would there be a global handwashing day?
2. What purpose would it have?
3. Write about good handwashing practise – what is handwashing, why handwash, where…., when…
4. Think of at least 12 words that come to mind when you think of handwashing. Put these words into tagul to make your word cloud. When finished grab the code and embed it in your post. Make sure that you refer to the site and link it to tagul.

Blog action day is also on October 15th. The theme this year is climate change.  Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance.

It is hoped that  some of our global connections will email us a photo of them washing their hands so that we can put these up on our noticeboard for discussion purposes.

It is important that we involve our students and classes in global events such as these:-

1. Encourages students to think on a global basis.
2. Gives them an authentic task with a global audience.
3. Raise awareness of the impact of the H1N1 flu strain, the effects of the current typhoons, tsunamis etc may have on the increase in disease etc
4. Makes students realise that people throughout the world have similar passions and goals, and if we work together we can start to solve some of the worldwide problems.

Disaster strikes our global class mates

Natural disasters seems to be striking our Asian class mates. Several weeks ago, it was the earthquake in Western Java. Last week it was a typhoon and floods in Manila. Sometimes our virtual classroom linkups with Claret school, of Quezon City, are not possible, if Manila is enduring typhoons.  The school canbe closed during these forces of nature.

Typhoons are something that we do not experience where we live in Australia, so it is difficult for us to imagine what it would be like to witness them directly. It was with great joy that I got an email response quickly from Rox, my online teaching friend, to say that he was okay, as were his students and school as they lived on higher land when the recent typhoon and heavy flooding occurred. His school was going to be used as a relief operation centre and as such would be closed to students for two days.

See the horror of it all in this  video. If you can, please give generously.

One of the amazing stories to come out of this is of @mariak who I follow on twitter.  Here are a selection of her tweets during the typhoon.

Sept 13th   Just got an email that my daughter arrived safely in Manila.On her way to Cebu Island for marine research.

But next….

• Sept 28th  Trying 2 get news on my daughter Abby who is in Manila w research team.Haven’t heard from her in 2 days.Need help from anyone.retweet plse.
• @manilaflood Trying to get info about Univ of Phil. campus status. Have a daughter visiting there w OceanGenomeLegacy research team. Worried
• is there anywhere i can call to get updates.Any elec. or phone service in Manila. thanx for your tweet.I’m a worried mom.
• Thank you. My daughter is safe. A tech teacher in Manila found her at the University and sent me a message.
• http://twitpic.com/jjv08 – This is one of the pics I received this morning from the wonderful teacher in Manila who located my daughter.

That tech teacher was my friend Rox. How proud I am to know him! This again shows the power of web2.0 where tweets, email, skype, mobile phones, video cameras can  achieve almost impossible results. The other wonderful person in this story is Lorraine Leo who introduced me to Rox and who has also shared classrooms with all of us. It was Lorraine fjrom Boston, USA, who connected with Rox on the basis of @mariak’s tweets.

What are those boys doing?

First day, term 4 did not start well at all. The internet was so slow, in fact the whole network was slow….. .and I, of all people had forgotten my password for the electronic roll marking software! But worse was to come, I found that both gmail and twitter had been blocked over the holidays.

Monday is a 6 lesson day for me and during lesson 6, I have year 8s who can be a challenging group at the best of times. However, as students love talking about what they do in the holidays, they were given a choice of writing a blog post using text, a wordle or a toondoo cartoon. Some of the girls had joined the blogging challenge. As they had missed three weeks due to the school holidays, I worked with them to ensure they at least got started.

I noticed three boys in the corner of the room, talking intently to each other, engrossed in one screen that bore no resemblance to what they had done in the holidays. Containing my rapidly welling- up anger, I approached them and started to reprimand them in an effort to get them back on task. It was then I noticed the folded up newspaper and the image of a property on the monitor. Upon quizzing them, I found out that one of the boys had brought in the newspaper and checked out the website of  a real estate agent. This boy’s Dad worked on a big property as a farm manager but the property was now on the market. The three boys, none of whom were highly skilled in literacy, were busy reading the fairly complex text in both the newspaper and website, to each other, comparing figures given for the sale price, the property size and features , finding contradictions and discussing why this was so.

Further to this, they were asking questions about the property, its features, checking out the residences that it featured and teasing out the answers to the questions that they wanted answered from the lad who lived on the property. I quietly retreated and left them to their self directed learning – a far more effective lesson than the task I had asked them to complete.

Yet when the bell went, the boys had also completed the task that I had asked of them.

Conferences – great for Connecting

Conferences are a great place to make connections and further develop a personal learning network. Personal learning networks are crucial to the successful uptake and continuation of successful learning and teaching.

Recently I attended the 21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong. Let me share how I made some great connections.

Waiting for the buses

• On the buses It all began on the bus! We had arrived in the hot, humid heat of Hong Kong to our hotel, having left a back pack on the A11 bus from the airport, that included my netbook, video camera, itinerary and other printouts for our time away etc. One hour was all that I had to change, shower and get down to the foyer where the bus was to pick us up and transport us to the Hong Kong International School, a 40-50 minute drive away. The foyer soon filled with chatter, people, a variety of accents and people were soon introducing themselves to each other. Once on the bus, I was priveleged to sit next to Kerri-Lee from an United World College of South East Asia in Singapore. Within minutes of the drive we were engrossed in her iTouch, with demonstrations of use by the primary school students. The magnificent views etc were all forgotten, while we discussed web2.0 tools, applications and teaching methods etc. Several days later, I was able to meet Kerri-Lee at her school and spend time there with her. Another valuable bus contact was Anita from Seoul, Korea.
• Meal times A casual affair as people chose where to sit after getting their meal and conversations began
• Organised activities On the first night, a scavenger hunt, forced us to go and meet others who used a number of technological tools or applications. I was fortunate to make some wonderful contacts, one being Andrew from the Renaissance school. This connection enabled me to go and visit this forward thinking, progressive school several days after the conference.
• Sessions Great contacts can be made through the sessions. These people will often have similar interests. Saeed from the Canadian International School of Hong Kong was kind enough to show me around his school, after meeting him in the Flat Classroom Workshops.
• Tweetups A lunchtime tweetup was organised by @kimcofino on the last day where I met further people from the twitterverse and added them to my twitter role
• Unconference sessions Some conferences will provide unconference sessons where interested people can put up sessions for further discussion, sharing and connecting. These will often arise out of existing conference sessions.
• The ning A great place to make, continue and maintain those valuable connections.

One of the eating areas plus views!

Over the next few days of the conference, business cards were exchanged and further networking made. Although the conference was primarily attended by teachers from the international schools, these schools tend to be well resourced technologically with teachers who are progressive in their outlook. Teachers at the conference came from the Middle East, USA and across most of Asia.

Outcomes

• Visits to some the Canadian International School and to the Renaissance School through my contacts
• Must remember to get some business cards printed as these are a great means for further communication
• Add the details of the business cards onto a laptop so they will not be lost. Also a means of remembering who was who.

Lost in Hong Kong – technology to the rescue!!

Coming home (to our hotel on Hong Kong Island) from a day in Macau and a visit to the night markets in Kowloon, my feet were swollen, sore and bore massive blisters. My husband led the way taking the subway train from Kowloon to the closest sub station to where we were staying. He promised me that it was only a 10 minute walk home as I was ready to catch a taxi! After 25 mins of going around in circles, getting more confused and starting to get anxious, we did call a cab!

This morning, I was fortunate to be taken on a tour of Renaissance International School - a visionary school with fantastic resources and technology (more to be written later). However, I had to be there at 10:00am, so could take no chances in getting lost, as there was a 15 minute walk to the station and a need to change mtr five times to get from Hong Kong Island to the New Territories. So, my good friend Lorraine Leo reminded me to use my mobile phone to take photos of key landmarks or streets. Instead I used my digital camera to take photos of streets to be used, clocks for timing and subway stations to change at. One single ticket got us there. Here is a snapshot of some of the photos that I took.

landmark icons

Change lines

time cues

Street sign cues

landmarks

Virtual debating

 

Virtual Debate in progress

After weeks of trying to successfully use MS Communicator, we succeeded today, in linking our grade 4/5 netbook students with students from Beeac Primary School for an online debate. This was the first time that our grade 4 and 5 students from this grade had participated in a debate.

The topic:  ”Too much money is spent on space exploration”

Who:- Two teams of three students from each school. A classroom audience of 25 students

Where: The grade 4/5 room,

Hardware/Software:  Interactive white board, a netbook preloaded with MS Communicator, a USB microphone and webcamera on the netbook. My name was registered on their remote server for login purposes.  A music stand was used our end for students to stand at, rest their notes on and sit our usb microphone on.

Time allowed:- 1 hour as this fitted in with each of the school’s busy timetable as it is the last week of term 3. (This was not long enough to have two teams compete)

Preliminary organisation: 

• All contact via email,
• a 10 minute test session, in MS Communicator,  on Friday to ensure the video, audio etc would work. (It did although our image was not so clear at their end and sharp movements pixellated the student image)
• Use netbooks for online research for speech content

On the day

• logged on 15 minutes early to test again (Test is such an important element for successful connections)
• problems for us with feedback, speakers etc which we continued to tweak throughout the session.
• Beeac were the team for the affirmative and they sat at a table to present. They started the debate.
• One by one each of the students spoke to their topic. All spoke eloquently, clearly and well. Both schools could see each other well and despite some sound feedback could hear each other.
• Unfortunately, the bell beat us and the final speakers in team 2 were unable to speak.

Learning outcomes:-

• Highly successful exercise, students in the class as well as the teams were fully engaged
• Students all spoke well, introduced themselves and it was a fantastic exercise in oral communication, confidence development
• Students had written their speeches and researched the content – great for literacy!
• ALWAYS fully test equipment prior to the formal start of the sesion.
• The usb desktop microphone although adequate may need to be replaced with a better one to enable improved audio transmission
• Need to work on body language and keep any movement to a minimum to prevent pixellation of video.
• Concentration and advanced listening skills required.
• Requires constant pre-communication between organizers for success
• Liked the software MS Communicator – a secure environment but restricted in use across schools
• Innovative yet obvious use of technology.

Possible extensions

• Bring in a third school as a judging panel, or bring in other experts online as judges
• expand the program
• debate with students in another country.
• involve global teams
• Mix teams of students  across schools. Use the netbooks for brainstorming,  communicating and preparing the team debates.

Obama speaks to students, our Premier speaks with students

Obama speaks to students, our premier speaks with students

The Premier online

What a very special day it  was! Year 10 students from 20 Victorian schools all came together in the one virtual classroom (elluminate) with the Premier, John Brumby and the Minister for Education, Bronwyn Pike. The session was entitled “Leading on line with the premier”. The premier discussed with the students, issues they face when using  online technology, the benefits and possible risks  of using the technology, and what they do to minimise risks.

Students in class with the Premier

 
Initially discussion centred around the AFL finals – a sure winner with the students. But it soon turned towards more serious discussions on the use of online technology. The chat section of elluminate was soon driven hard by the students. Promotion of safe online use brought forth a variety of answers from education, help from celebrities, tv ads during primetime, facebook, school google etc. Further discussions took place around:-

•  responsible leadership online,
• the potentials of a digital world,
• what are some of the risks,
• who students would go to for help,
• what it looks like and feels like to be respectful online and finally
• what can we do.

This was a very successful summit with students working the chat to its fullest capability, giving their ideas, experiences, thoughts and general responses to comments made, questions raised and opinions when sought.

This is a predecessor for the student summit at the MCG in early October, when students from 20 Victorian schools will discuss the academic, social and wellbeing potential of new technologies and the issues that affect them as citizens of the digital age. Students will have the opportunity to reflect on the role that they  may play in promoting responsible and the ethical use of digital technologies at home and at school.

The key purpose of the summit is to involve students as partners of the DEECD as it continues to develop and refine its policies and practices around the responsible use of digital technologies. This will be made possible through seeking student voice and developing an understanding of their view of a digital world.

A big thank you must go to all those involved with such a monumental occasion. Congratulations to all involved. It shows the power that technology now gives us to allow key stakeholders from the breadth of Victoria, to all be involved in powerful decision making in the one room.

Listen to the elluminate recording

I can learn – NOW!

The news on the radio awoke me this morning and alerted me to the fact that Western Java in Indonesia had suffered a major earthquake with some known deaths but there was now a tsunami warning out. Shivers ran down my spine, it is never pleasant hearing about natural disastors, but my good e-friend, Endang, her students and schools come from Pekalongan in the northern coast of Western Java.

Immediately, skype was checked but Endang was not online. However, her skype  message said that her town (of 200,000) had been in the earthquake. Next, twitter was searched for tweets marked earthquakes and google used to grab the latest news. Before going to school, I quickly emailed so she knew that we were thinking of her. By recess, I had a response to the email to say that the earthquake was not as strong in her city and she was okay.

During period 3 after recess, I noticed that Endang was available on skype, so I texted her to see if she could talk. To our surprise she said ‘yes’ and that she had one student with her. So, my lucky students were able to talk to them about their experiences. They had experienced two quakes which lasted about 5 mins each. Although the earth shook and the buildings, no-one was hurt that they knew of, nor any buildings damages. However, they were still under strong tsunami warnings. They still felt very frightened and the one student lived right near the sea. The connection was not strong enough for lengthy video reception but we were able to talk to them for appoximately 15 minutes via text and video chat.

How amazing is that! My students talking to the earthquake victims, before they had even seen the news on TV! Surely this shows the absolute power of the web and the direction that education may take. It can now be  immediate. Students feel  personal  empathy as world experiences take on a whole new perspective when speaking directly with the victims. Is this a glimpse of web3.0?

Students proceeded to search for:-

• tweetmaps
• twitter feeds
• google searches for online news, broadcasts and videos
• images

The bell went……. and nobody moved!

Postscript As I am part of the plpnetbooktrial program, I am working with 120 educationalists from Victoria with Sheryl Nussbaum Beach and Will Richardson. I added this post to our ning there and I love this comment that I got back from Will.

What a great model for the immediacy of learning that can happen these days, and the relevance. When you think about all of the things that your students could learn and practice here, interviewing skills, geography and geology, information research, retrieval, editing, organization and sharing, all in the larger context of perhaps assisting those in need who were thousands of kilometers away. I want to make the point, however, that it’s all grounded in your own understanding of these technologies and the ways in which they can help us connect. If you didn’t have that knowledge and experience, this probably would not have happened, and that really is the goal of what we’re all trying to do here, get more comfortable in using these technologies to learn in our own practice. Thanks so much for sharing this great snippet of learning from your classroom.

Victims of the earthquake

WIWOW

Two staff members came into night for Walk In Walk Out Wednesday

Present: CW, Darren, AM

Topics of interest:-

• How to find what might already be saved on our school network on the topic of volcanoes and where to find resources online!
• How to write a blog post!