Just before my session “Beyond Classroom Walls” at LT2009, Moolooba commenced, I asked my twitter firends who were online to respond to my audience with a hello, to show the potential power of my personal learning network. They came from many different countries, including USA, Thailand and Israel. Some came from conference participants, but the most special of all was that one of my students responded back at school. How precious is that! Below is the twitterfall:-

1.  colwar @murcha Hi Anne, from our session at #lt2009. I met you via Twitter & we finally met f2f at this conference!
2.  ErnieEaster @murcha #LT2009 Hi from New Sweden, Maine, USA. Settled 1870 by Swedish immigrants. Love Twitter & my PLN with all their resources.
3.  skytrystsjoy @murcha Hi Ann, I’m Simon Brown at #LT2009 at Mooloolaba – mostly I’m from Brisbane, Oz
4.  nzchrissy @murcha Hi Anne! from a kiwi teaching in Thailand
5.  zecool #LT2009 @murcha Bonsoir Anne, from New Brunswick Canada, where I just tucked in my daughter for the night. Twitter is my PLN par excellence.
6.  hshawjr @murcha #LT2009 Sidney, Maine, USA it’s going to rain tomorrow
o 
7.  jamescroft @murcha #lt2009 current news? I’m desperate for more news on Google’s Chrome OS. I need a wave-style demo video
8.  digitalfprint @murcha #lt2009. winchester UK. rainy, wet, dark! Marking essays in the warm!
 zecool @murcha Bonsoir Anne, from New Brunswick Canada, where I just tucked in my daughter for the night. Twitter is my PLN par excellence.
 njtechteacher @murcha Hello from drizzly New Jersey. The temperature is actually not too bad for this time of year 57°F/ 14°C – enjoy your session!
9.  susant @murcha Hello participants @ #LT2009, I’m in Israel, time 02:55, temp 13%C looks like some progress made on release of Gilad Shalit
10.  NancyWhite @murcha Hello from downtown Mooloolaba (had online mtg, on my way over!!) #LT2009
11.  hurricanemaine @murcha from western PA. Cool rainy day but inside at a wizard of oz musical at college alma mater. Hello to everyone.
12.  congerjan @murcha Hello from Collegeville, PA. USA (57-raining) watching the Syracuse University/Cal State basketball game from Mad Sq Garden, NYC
13.  azapetersen @murcha G’day Anne and everone at #LT2009. I’m in Melbourne and I’m looking forward to today’s cool change!
14.  tonnet #LT2009 Saying hello to all @murcha’s listeners. Tweeting form the Garden State sometimes and some other for NYC. Glad to meet you all
15.  tomgrissom @murcha hello from Illinois farm country
16.  @murcha from you ITA class at hawkesdale college and the school’s been shut down because of gastro and water contamination
17. melanieh @murcha #LT2009 Hello from mega hot Sydney City. Top news items include the current heatwave and tips to keep cool.
18.  RobinThailand @murcha Hi everyone at #LT2009 from Bangkok, Thailand. Cool morning here – 23C. Latest tech news: http://bit.ly/fimG8
19.  ashleyproud @murcha Hello participatns at #LT2009 You are at the Sunshine Coast aren’t you?

Parents watch their students

Whilst in Mooloolaba for the Learning Technologies conference, schoolies week started. Students were seen entering the sea in school uniform, with many interested parents watching nearby. By nightfall, various parts of the school uniforms were seen scattered over the sand. Despite bad press over the years, we only saw students being sensible:- swimming, barbecuing on the foreshore, shopping etc

The end of school footsteps

School shirts at nightfall

Alec beams in from Canada

Nancy White - opening speaker

Report on Day One

Where: Beautiful Moolooba, Sunshine Coast Queensland

Venue: Sunshine Coast TAFE

Conference Paricipants: drawn from all levels of education

Pluses

• the location – absolutely beautiful Mooloolaba
• Nancy White with a great keynote address to set the scene
• the keynote speakersmeeting my wonderful twitter and online friends – there are so many here and it is wonderful to meet them face to face. Some I have known for more than two years. They include @clayburell from Singapore, via Korea,  (whose wedding I attended virtually nearly two years ago), my wonderful elluminate coach and colleague @cmcculloch, catsnpyjamasnz from NZ, @colwar from my own state and many more. Other online friends present (whom I had met before) included @theother66
• using videoconferencing technology to bring in guest speakers – shows in real time the power of the technology and is purposeful demonstration of the technology.
• range of practitioner led presentations – practical tips, sharing of approaches, learning outcomes etc

Minuses

• the long drive to get to the airport
• the start of schoolies week in Mooloolaba

Interesting:

• conference was live blogged with tweet feeds etc
• Pirate activity to force people to meet each other, use technology and online sites.
• Liked the time given to the vendors at 15 minute spot sessions as they helped sponsor the session.
• the uncoference session at the end of the day with Nancy White, Clay Burrell and Liddy. I attended Liddy’s impromptu session on using scratch in the classroom

Clay Burell and Colin Warren

catspyjamasnz - a twitter friend

demonstrating the use of elluminate in the classroom

Year 9/10 students who are part of the flat classroom project were offered the opportunity to meet with the class mates from Germany and Beijing. Time zone differences mean that they had to be in their homes on their computers at 9pm. Three students were able to successfullylogin to the elluminate student summit moderated by  Julie Lindsay but one of my keenest students frantically used gtalk with me in an attempt to login. However, Flick kept failing but stayed on gtalk to relay her requests and what she would be able to do for the outsourced video component of the project.

The students were on task, talking to each other, discussing the content of their videos, requesting the video clips that they required and found partners to complete their clips. The chat was quiet initially and then took momentum. Unfortunately, the mics did not work for my students but they text chatted as required.

What an amazing experience! The benefits included the fact that parents could be in the room with my students watching the fantastic classroom exchange. Partnerships with parents are crucial to the success of 21st century education.

By 10:15pm our time, it was off to bed for our students, tea time for the students in Beijing and the start of the school day for the German students. Wow! Listen to the recording!

Last week, year 11 accounting students were privileged to speak with Ally using discoverE virtual classroom software. Ally is a first year business studies student from a university in Saskatchewan, Canada. For one of her subjects she is under the tutelage of Dean Shareski.

Students were more interested in listening about Ally herself, and time did not allow us to discuss  the accounting subject that she is studying. Although my students were able to use and were encouraged to use the chat feature, it took a long time for them do so. I soon realised they were intent about listening to what Ally was talking about and trying to make sense of the accent. Indeed, they were fascinated.

My students are still rather shy about speaking on the microphone to a virtual audience. Only one  of my students was confident enough to speak to Ally. It must have been a very difficult task for Ally to make conversations all the time, but she did so with ease and watched for the questions as they came up in the chat window. The 50 mins soon went and our lesson was over.

Outcomes

• An interesting comment was made by Ally, when she asked my class who was going to uni, and none responded positively. She wanted to know “Why not?” as is was such a great experience and such fun! (This was highly motivating for my students.)
• Students have commented back on my blog post  and on Ally’s to thank her for her involvement. It is always netiquette to do this and important if students wish to maintain a connection.
• Students have written a post about this session (An important record in their digital footprint and eportfolio)
• They have asked repeatedly whether they could talk to her again.
• I need to keep giving my students these opportunities to work with others globally giving them a vital communication skill for the 21st century. (Students in our school tend to be shy of public speaking and using microphones.)

Again, I need to thank Lorraine Leo so very much for connecting us.

 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 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.

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.

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 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.