Hi, I am Anne Mirtschin a commerce and information technology teacher and ICT Co-ordinator at Hawkesdale P12 College, in country western Victoria, Australia. I am co-founder of the Australia eSeries, moderator of Tech Talk Tuesday, an Australian representative on the Global Education Conference leadership team and proud to be a Global Educator. I am proud to have received many awards for the innovative work that has been done in this field through the use of technology and have been asked to present at many conferences – locally, nationally and internationally.
Hawkesdale P12 College is a small, rural school of 250 students and approximately 30 staff. The majority of students come to school on a bus and are culturally and geographically isolated. There is no mobile phone service at the school or where I live. I enjoy teaching and innovating with the use of technology and have been fortunate to win awards for the work I do. As I married a local farmer, I have taught here for more than 25 years and can be seen after school and on my holidays, helping my husband with sheep work. I am particularly passionate about:-
- immersion of technology into learning and eLearning
- rural education
- global education and am a member of the Leadership Team for the amazing online annual Global Education Conference
What I teach: (See my class blog)
- 2014 ICT years 7-12, business management year 12 and accounting year 12
- 2013: ICT to years 3-12, business management to years 11 and 12
- 2012: ICT prep to year 12, accounting
- 2007-10 Information Technology to years 2-12, accounting years 11 and 12.
- 2011: Years 9 to 12 Information Technology and Years 11-12 Accounting, including a virtual accounting student from Balmoral College
Other roles/involvements
- Leader of the Student Summit for the Flat Connections Conference, Sydney 2014
- Web conference coach 2011-14
- Co-organiser and moderator of two weekly webinars:- Tech Talk Tuesdays and eT@lking
- Local, national and global Presenter both face to face and virtual. See conference presentations and PD Sessions
- Advisory Board Member for the Global Education Conference 2011-13
- Facilitator of virtual participants, Flat Classroom Conference, Yokohama Long term participant in the Flat Classroom Projects
- Lead teacher Global Classroom Project
- Participated in a partnership with Country Education Project and the University of Ballarat to trial a virtual teaching round practicum with three pre-service teachers. (2010)
- Welcoming Host for Classroom2.0
- Partner one day per week with Innovations and Next Practise, DEECD
- Australasia Mentoring Chair, Global Education Conference 2010
- Advisory Board Member for the flatclassroom projects.
- Writer for the “Kick Start Your Blog” Advanced Teacher Challenge 2011
My students and I love:-
- partnering and learning with global classes and schools
- being involved in global projects
- learning with each other
- immersing technology into our classes
See a 1 minute video, summarizing some of the exciting work in the classroom
The World is my Classroom and Big Little Classrooms
Awards Received
- Global Classroom Lead Teacher 2012, 2013, 2014
- Innovator of the Month for April 2012, Innovate Here, DEECD
- ACCE Teacher/Educator of the Year 2012
- ICTEV Teacher/Educator of the Year 2012
- Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association (VITTA) Outstanding Secondary Teacher of the Year 2010
- Microsoft joint Innovative Teacher of the Year 2008 Victoria, Australia
- ICTEV Leader of the Year 2009
- Bailleu- Myer Rural Leadership Scholarship Winner 2009 ( Country Education Project)
- Australian Excellence in Teaching Award, 2009.
- Finalist in the Victorian Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) “most innovative curriculum awards” 2009 and “Outstanding Secondary Teacher Award 2010”.
Other interests:-
- My family – four adult children (one in London, one in Sth Africa), two grandchildren.
- gardening
- travelling
- music
See how I got started in blogging
Mentions made of our work
- Student/Teacher newsletter of the Victorian Education and Early Childhood Development, October 2008
- Australia and Korea -Partnership for the Future
- And the Walls Came Down – VIT publication on our trial virtual teaching round practicum in conjunction with CEP and the University of Ballarat
- in the Top 100 Education Blogs Onalytica June 2013
- Featured teacher Classroom2.0LIVE Jan 15th 2011
- Hawkesdale P12 College in Learning Impact Awards at the !DEAS 2008 conference
- Learning and Teaching with my students both face to face and virtual.
- Edublogs awards nomination and shortlisting for best teacher blog 2008 and 2010
- Sharing an Anniversary with the Edtech Crew podcast
- Storytelling with Shawn Callaghan in elluminate using my twitter story as a foundation.
- Presentation at the ILE Expo at Torquay
Twitter/murcha
Del.icio.us/murcho
Skype/anne.mirtschin
GMail/Anne M
Blog/Anne M
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On an e-Journey with Generation Y 
Great to see more Aussie teachers dipping their toes into the Web 2.0 waters – we need more switched on educators like yourself prepared to take some risks and work out the potential benefis to our students.
Hi Anne, Congratulations on your blog and all your fabulous work with Web 2.0 and the Rich Picture Case study you submitted to the Department. I’m going through your work today and am wondering if you are available for a direct chat about the range of stuff you’ve included and what would be your priorities to attach – given some capacity limits we’re facing – that would best reflect the process. It all looks so good it’s just hard to choose! Sorry for interupting the holiday with worky queries. All the best, Heather
Dear Anne
You work is inspirational. Heather Blakey has been singing your praises (and work of your students) for ages, but I have not responded until now. I think your work at Hawkesdale P-12 College would make a good fetaure for our Education Times and ePotential. Kind Regards, Janice Youl, eLearning Unit, DEECD, Victoria, Australia.
🙂
What an amazing site. Its really early here in NZ at the moment… 7:26am and Im suppossed to be running a Rugby tournament, but I’ll come back with my students (Y8) 13 Im not sure exactly if thats the same as Australia and check this site out in detail… looks fantastic!
Myles Webb, R6, Tamaki Intermediate
Auckland, NZ. tamakitoday.blogspot.com
Wow, what you have achieved in what I see as a short time is just mind blowing Anne. I need inspiration as at present I am feeling overwhelmed with all this web2.0 newness, baby steps it is. I’ll be back.
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Dear Anne,
I was just having a quick look at your blog and thought I would contact you to see if you or your colleagues might like to try our beta educational games site http://www.tutpup.com
It’s entirely free and we have quite a few international users (20,000+) but many of our school users are in the UK where it’s now the summer holidays, so things have slowed down a bit on the site. We are currently working on some new games and a rewards/incentive system, most of which should be deployed by Sept.
It’s nice to see so many great Australian education blogs, although I can’t see any from Wangaratta (VIC) where I went to school. My wife and I used to own a farm at Johanna which is only about 100 miles from Hawkesdale, although this seems a long way from London where we now live.
Cheers
Richard Taylor
Director of Play@ Tutpup
London
What an amazing amount of information here! This has been really useful to help me drag my teaching kicking and screaming into the 21st century! I thought I was pretty up to date with all the latest technology…I was clearly very wrong! Thank you for sharing all of your hard work here, as others have said ‘what an inspiration!’
Hi Anne! Thanks for the comment on our Blog! We are so excited to get started! I used Picture Trail to make the picture Flick for the campout pictures, thanks to Mrs. Knee! Enjoy spring! We are bracing ourselves for the upcoming winter and enjoying the crisp fall weather!
It’s great to ‘run into’ a teacher technology person from the other side of the world! Keep up the great blog. I’ll be tuning in more.
Hi Anne
Thanks for the inspiration and practical examples. So many of us are following in your footsteps or trying to.
Some day would you comment on what timeframe is involved in your activities – number of periods per week, blocks of time etc? Flexible timetabling?
What does the ideal arrangement look like?
Carole
Thank you Carole for your lovely comment. I will certainly put my timeframe up sometime as that could be of interest to others. I have been blogging for 15 months and experimenting with web2.0 for about the same time. It has taken about 12 months to work out where we could go with it all and teach the students the necessary skills. However, now that some have started and have advice, it would not take as long for others following. It is great when others are forging ahead as you can adopt the best of their ideas and use some of your own. I will write a post on this but until I do, I have grade 2 for one lesson a week (50mins) all others for 2 lessons per week, except year 9/10 combo for 3 lessons. This year has been such a chaotic one as I also had teacher professional leave together with Jess McCulloch to lay the eplanks for a web2.0 school. However, the journey wont end and just keeps on getting more exciting.
Just another note, Anne.
I think that between all the links from your sites and those of Sue Waters will be enough to keep me busy for the school holidays coming up.
Regards, Bill Oldhan
Anne, I am very impressed by the use of tech in the classroom. My next mission is to use Skype to video conference my classes of 6th graders with other classes around the world. Looking for ideas on this adventure is what lead me to your page. I have a few questions to get started. I’ll start with asking how you tackled timezones when Skyping w/ the US and Canada. My school is just north of Atlanta, Georgia (USA), and I’m hoping to connect with Canada, Georgia (the country), Australia (would you volunteer to meet with us), and South Korea. Also, if you have contacts to help us sucessfully connect with those countries, I’d greatly appreciate it. Thank you! Enough questions…for now 🙂
Now I have a WordPress. Looking forward to your response.
hello! I’m a teacher in the Uk and seem to share a lot of the same principles as your good self when it comes to using web 2.0 – it’s also really made me realise I ought to sort myself out and upload some of my students podcasts onto my blog. Thanks for the insight – I shall be back to read more.
G’day Anne,
I was on the Edublogger birthday post and saw your comment, so thought I would visit your blog to tell you about a student blogging challenge that will be starting in March 2009.
Students may use either a class blog or their own individual blog. There will be activities each week and they will be posted on my class blog http://wyatt67.edublogs.org
If any teachers or students are interested in registering, please do so here http://wyatt67.edublogs.org/2009/01/18/a-new-year-means-a-new-challenge/
A similar challenge was held last year and nearly 500 students from nine different countries of the world took part. These students are still blogging and running a collaborative blog at http://studentfriends.edublogs.org
Would love to make contact with you in relation to Web 2.0. We have 3 staff on professional leave this year. We are researching the use of Web 2.0 in teaching and learning. You seem like a wonderful resource.
You can find me on twitter also – web2schools
Cheers
Hi Murcha
Some great example of how blogs are and can be so beneficial to education amongst some other great examples of ICT usage.
Thanks for your comments on my IVC blog
Cheers Kylie
Very impressive Anne !!!!
Hi Anne,
If you want to add Facebook or email sharing buttons to your blog posts, there’s a plugin that does it for you: http://tinyurl.com/sharebuttons
Hope you find it helpful!
Cheers,
Hello Anne, thank you for such practical examples of community formation and social multitasking. I am looking for opportunities to Skype a Year 7 Information Literacy lesson. Would you like to conference?
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Hi Anne,
was wondering if you know anything about flip cameras – esp about whether they can be used with PCs and what else you need to support them?
Congratulatio0ns on what you are doing!
Louise
Anne, I have been getting lots of notices that new posts have been placed on your blog – pornographic ones. Not sure if you c an do anything about it – if it is a problem at my end or your end – but I thought you’d like to know.
Louise
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Hi there, my name is Alexis and I am a writer for onlinedegrees.org. I am currently writing a list of the top 100 technology blogs for teachers and I am including you on my list.
I was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me so I could include more information about yourself under your blog.
Please respond via e-mail with your answers, thanks ahead of time for your help!
Hello,
I was wondering if you accept guest post for your blog. If you do, I would like to submit a few. You can see a sample of my work at LaptopComputers.org under the author James Mowery. I’ve also written for several high-profile blogs like Mashable, Perfromancing, and CMSWire. Thank you for your time.
– James
Hello Anne,
I am one of the school owners who attended the meeting at “clubefl” last Sunday, inThessaloniki, Greece. I would like to thank you for your exciting ideas, you are doing a wonderful job! I am teaching esl and I am trying hard to use technology with my students for all the benefits it offers. The problem is that our students don’t have enough time to blog and also some parents are against their children using the internet. We are trying to inform them about all the advantages of using technology, we still have a long way to go…
Thank for all your ideas,
Regards,
Evaggelia
Hi Evaggelia, I do hope that somewhere in your curriculum, students can be given the time to blog or learn how to, so that they can choose to use this medium at home if they wish especially for their school work. We have a number of students who choose to blog from home, so that is always encouraging to see. Our parents are also very nervous about the use of the internet, especially with all the problems that the use of facebook etc can create. However, we have had information evenings, weekly newsletter items etc keeping parents fully informed and encouraging parents to read their student’s blogs and leave comments.
It takes a long time to embed it and little steps is the best method. I loved working with your group and hope that I can work with you again. Thanks for your comment.
Hi ..Anne
I am a teacher that has left teaching in the state system to pursue my passion in international education.I would really like to chat with you if you have the time. I am Adelaide based 0400880394.
Hi Anne,
Great blog! Thanks for putting it together.
I wanted to let you know about a free site I built for students that you may be t interested in. It’s called Enterthegroup.com and it provides students with tools to manage their group projects online.
Please contact me if this is something that interests you.
Thanks!
That is great
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Hi Anne,
Just checking out your about page as part of the Edublogging Teacher Challenge ! I really like how it includes a run down of the work you have done and how you have incorporated photos into you work – something I think I might add you mine.
Hey Scott, I don’t think mine is very good at all, so that blog post challenge was written very much with me in mind and what I need to do. Thanks for being complimentary anyway. I also want to add my interests, my passions (both within and outside of education)
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Dear colleague,
I’m co-editor in the “Didactic Strategies and Technologies for Education Incorporating Advancements” collection, which will be published by IGI Global (www.igi-global.com), February 2012.
I would be glad if you produce a content to be submitted to the reviewers.
More info about our project here:
https://sites.google.com/site/yourdropintheocean
I kindly ask you to circulate the Call for contributions.
Please let me know if you have any questions about the paper submission.
I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Best wishes,
Elena Favaron
Editor
hello
i am from kerala i am working as teacher at 10+2 level interested in IT
Hi Sudheesh,
Nice meeting you here. Anne is a friend of mine. Annie, Sudheesh is one of my team whom I initiated into eTeaching a couple of years ago
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So, Anne…I am participating in an online PD with my school district here in Houston, Texas. The entire PD is about integrating technology into our curriculum. Honestly, I’ve been a bit board with it because I already utilize so many of the Web tools that are included in the PD. ::sigh::
I have found a couple of new tools, however. One of them being…CoverItLive. I was intrigued by the link to an educator that it utilizing the tool successfully…and when I clicked on the link where did I end up? At your blog!! I should have known! The link on ‘how’ you use CoverItLive is broken, though. Would you be willing to contact me and give me some examples? I have some ideas of how I want to use the tool, but it would be awesome to share with an expert!
Kudos to you! All my Best!
Estie Cuellar
The blog link below is strictly for the online PD. My regular blog is found at: http://estiesgifts.blogspot.com
I like the way your district is going, offering online PD to teachers to learn more about technology.
I used coveritlive a lot, about 4 years ago and use it quite a bit. I really liked it. It was like a backchannel in real time where we could combine global classes and kids could learn about each other by asking questions. We could share images, audio podcasts etc. We linked up with a class in the USA several times, this way. I also used it for surveys – and could make sure every student answered my question. I set up the live blog, embedded the code into my blog or wiki so I have a permanent record of responses, shared the link to the live coverit blog, asked them the question, they responded. When they had all responded, I asked the next question. The students loved using it, they liked reading what the others said and were fully engaged.
However, the bandwidth at our school is really sluggish so it would often ‘hang’ and slow the proceedings.
The most amazing live blog was when I was involved with a group who were watching the start of the Vendee Globe race in France. Rich Wilson was the US skipper and my online friend Lorraine Leo – a teacher from Boston created a coverit live blog. We had a teacher in France who was blogging about what he could see, whilst Lorraine and I asked questions of him. Another teacher from Taiwan joined us. The teacher in France sent us photos immediately, interpreted the French dialogue on the French TV etc and it was as though we were there!
Here is the link to my blog post on it https://murcha.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/live-blogging-in-education/ It has advice etc on it. What I liked is the teacher registers and the kids just need a link to join in, no need for them to register and participate. I must get back and use it again as it is a valuable tool.
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Hi Anne, thanks for replying to my culture shock survey. It’s interesting what things bring us down. Food and regular (in our countries at least) rituals and holidays seem to be the things we really miss abroad. I’d love to read your responses to any of the questions. I’m happy to share the information I get, and your comment about hoping to incorporate the answers into a curriculum has made me wonder about how children, exchange students or those who move with their families, experience culture shock.
Your blog is really interesting, I’ll have to tell my mum (also a secondary teacher) about it.
Dear Ms. Mirtschin:
I am Hsu-Wan Chen from Taiwan, a graduate student at National Taiwan Normal University. The other day, I came across this website and I totally got inspired. Currently, I am doing a research on school teachers applying social network sites and/or other web 2.0 tools to the classroom settings. If it is so, I would like to know how you and your kids use social network sites/social media platforms for learning and maybe collaborating with kids from other regions/countries. I would like to have a skype interview with you if that is possible. For sure, I will send you the interview protocol in advance. Please feel free to contact me at: chenshuwan@gmail.com
Thank you very much!
Cheers,
Hsu-Wan Chen
I’m glad that I found you-I think through Sue Waters, but can’t be certain as that’s what happens with you do lots of hyper-linking.I look forward to reading your tweets and learning more about the work that you are doing with students in rural areas. You have quite an impression list of accomplishments and many, many interesting activities to consider in working with students!
Laurie
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Hey there. This is Brad from Participate Learning and VIF. What’s your email address? I’ll send you a few links that illustrate what we do. See you tonight!
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Hi,
Just following up as I didn’t hear back from you, sorry to email you again. I noticed your page murcha.wordpress.com/category/tech-talk-tuesday/ links to http://www.timeanddate.com from timeanddate. Unfortunately, that site isn’t very accessible for the sight impaired. Would you consider adding a link to a more accessible version like http://www.thetimenow.com which is WCAG 2.0 compatible?
Also, if you ever want to see how accessible a page is, I recommend wave.webaim.org. It is really helpful.
Thanks,
Shane Buck
Hi Anne, I hope you are well. Just trying to track you down to ask if you would like to present to Masters Students at university of Melbourne? Please get in touch.
Amanda
Hi Amanda, I am sorry I have only just noticed this comment. Will try and get in touch with you.
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