" If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow" (John Dewey, Educational Philosopher)
Welcome to the ISC "In the Know" blog. This will be an ongoing blog that supports the learning outcomes of our school.The ISC staff hope that it will become a useful source of information about a range of topics that are related to information,resourcing,new technologies and pedagogies.
Sadly, we farewell Annette at the end of this term as she leaves to take up a position at Flinders, Traralgon. Annette and her family moved to Traralgon two years ago and we do feel privileged that she was willing to do the Traralgon-Sale commute for so long.Annette has been a most valued member of our ISC team over the past six years and her contribution to our school community has been outstanding. Annette's intelligence,enthusiasm and natural aptitude for applying technology in an educational setting has played a very important part in cementing the eSupport role of the ISC.We will of course miss her but wish her well in her new role as Curriculum Administrator at Flinders.
The Victorian Department of Justice has just created the excellent video below about appropriate use of using social media in the work situation. Although it targets Department of Justice employees its messages are just as relevant for schools and students using social media
Thank goodness for experts like Richard Byrne from the "Free Technology for Teachers" blog who keeps us updated on the best new resources he has discovered . Richard has his finger on the pulse and he has just released his Best of the Web for 2012. With the exception of about 8 tools, Richard shares 61 new tools that he has used for the first time this year!He must have been a busy boy!Click on the link above to view his compilation.
Although I dedicated a whole post back in August to the growing popularity of infographics, I thought that you might be interested in this easy to follow tutorial from the School Library Journal. It shows you how to use the tools easelly and infogr.am to make your own infographics from scratch.The tools are free and would enhance any tasks that require students to depict data
After my post last week on the growing popularity of Open Education Resources, I was very much interested in the Saturday's Age article about how the number of people enrolled in free online subjects at Melbourne University has overtaken enrolments at its campuses.This is amazing as this service was only launched in September! Since then, more than 52,000 students have enrolled in the University's MOOCS.This is 5,000 more than students enrolled in undergraduate and post graduate courses!
Melbourne University has joined a host of institutions,like Harvard and Berkely who are offering free online courses,partnering with online course provider,Coursera.
The courses mostly run for about seven weeks and include lectures, videos, quizzes and the opportunity to discuss ideas in chat rooms.Although classes are not-for-credit and no academic awards are granted,certificates are received at the completion of the courses.
The article also mentioned that La Trobe University offers online lectures through the iTunes U service.
I was also alerted this week to the very interesting video below which is about the future of learning in a networked world.I hope you can find the time to watch it, as its ideas are very thought provoking,exciting and challenging.The video features well known eduational thinkers,Stephen Heppell,Sugata Mitra and Seth Godin who speak about how technology is impacting on learning. Also,the CEO of Coursera speaks about the growth of their online course platform.
For more information about MOOCS watch the video below
A brand new online resource for K-12 students and teachers has just been launched called ABC Splash. It is a partnership between the ABC and Education Services Australia and provides 100's of free video clips, infographics and over 200 educational games.These have been specially selected for Australian schools with links to the Australian Curriculum.
It is visually vey appealing,with large icons to help teachers and stuednts get around easily.You have the option of searching for content by learning area or by phase of schooling.The site acts as a media archive and the clips come from a range of ABC programs including BTN, Catalyst, The 7:30 Report and Four Corners.
An excellent feature is the information box that accompanies each resource.This helps students to correctly cite their work,whilst checking and adhering to copyright details, a great tool for teaching digital literacy.
The ABC promise significantly more content in the coming weeks and so this is the start of a very exciting journey for the ABC and its partner, Education Services Australia.
Last July I wrote about how the non profit organisation,Creative Commons, was providing us with a solution with regard to reusing other people's creativity responsibly. Creative Commons,introduced in 2008, provides us with a multitude of royalty free sites and its licencing allows us to reuse content and share our own creativity with the rest of the world, legally.
In the same spirit,OER Commons was created in 2007 and it provides teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse without charge legally.
The evergrowing worldwide OER movement is rooted in the idea that access to high quality education should be available to all.Its an alternative to rising costs of education and also gives us the opportunity of trying new ways to teach and learn.
OER (Open Education Resources) has over 120 major content partners
Some examples of OER Materials are:
MOOCS (Massive Online Open Courses).These courses are offered freely online by leading universities including Standford,Harvard and Edinburgh.
Gooru is a free search engine for learning and a OER.Teachers and students are able to search for rich collections of multimedia resources,digital textbooks,videos,games and quizzes that have alll been vetted by learning professionals.It is currently an excellent resource for Science,Maths and Environment Science teachers as it has a fantatstic library of multimedia resources for these subjects.
What is also brilliant about Gooru is that teachers can customise "playlists" of resources for their students.
Once registered, creating your own ‘play-list’ or ‘Collection’ is an easy search, drag and drop process. Teachers are also able to include key vocabulary and learning objectives in the collection overview, and are able to add voice narration to direct students or highlight points within the collection.
The collaborative nature of the site allows teachers to use and adapt collections that other professionals have created and shared. Gooru encourages users to share; it is part of the growing OER (Open Education Resources) movement.
Once again Jane Hart has compiled a list of the top 100 tools for education based on the votes of over 500 professionals.The top tool for the 4th year running is Twitter with Youtube (2nd) and Google Docs/Drive(3rd) retaining their places for the third year in succession.In terms of trends,this year's list has seen an increase in the popularity of tools to "organise" digital resources (Scoopit, Pinterest) as well as note taking tools (Evernote, MS Onenote)
To see the list access Jane Hart's Slideshare below
eSchool News Online also has just released its new list of best education apps for 2012. Rated by teachers they range from maths games, 3D imaging of the periodic table and special education apps.To view the list click on this link
Teachers of Australian History might like to take a look at a new creative networking tool called Treasure Explorer .It is an educational website where students and teachers can contribute and engage with Australian history.It also provides an online resource to find out more about the objects,archives and stories represented in the Natioanl Library of Auustralia's Treasures Gallery.
If you haven't accessed Scootle for some time you might not be aware of the Improveonline interactive formative assessment tool which has been developed by Education Services Australia.This tool can be used by both teachers and students to improve learning. Your students join classess via your Improve Teacher PIN code.You can create customised test and quizzes for students, and access Naplan literacy and numeracy tests as well.
Using the Question Creator, you can create five different types of questions:
multiple choice with images or text
multiple response
short and long free-text response
Follow up learning resources can also be attached to your questions by selecting a resource from Scootle
After students complete a test or quiz,Improve provides each of them with a report on their test results and provides them with individual learning paths based on their responses,suggesting one or more activities to improve their learning.
As all tests are automatically saved you can monitor student progress and idenify areas for improvement.
To access Improve go onto the Scootle website and select Use Improve from the menu bar.
You have probably heard alot of talk about the "Flipped Classroom" this year and wondered what it is all about.In a nutshell, it is when teacher lectures are done outside of class time, so that more time in class can be spent by the teacher working with students on learning activities.Flipping the classroom changes the mix of what is done inside the classroom and what is done outside the classroom.It allows teachers to become facilitators of learning and move away from "the sage on the stage" approach to teaching.The clever and creative video below will explain the strategy in more detail.
Teachers can set up their own flipped classrooms by creating their own videos, podcasts and vodcasts and posting them to a blog,wiki or school portal.(the mobile learning environment) There are a variety of creating tools to do this but it does take time and planning. A good way of "dipping your toe into the water" however, is to have your students watch lessons that have been already created by other educators.These can be found on the open source platforms below. Khan Academy You Tube For Schools Ted-Ed School Tube Watch Know Learn Teacher Tube
ON the 19th July, the State Library of Victoria hosted a TEDx event on EducationalLeadership.Presenters were Will Richardson and Jenny Luca.
Will Richardson is a leading US educator and Joy and myself were very lucky to hear him speak some years ago at a SLAV Conference.Will passionately believes that learning in the 21st century is all about networks and the connections we make to other learners in our own community and around the globe.
In his talk below he speaks about how schools are failing to respond to the digital shift and how the Digital Revolution is challenging our basic assumptions around what the roles of schools are and how we define what an education is.
Earlier this year the ISC had the privelege of visiting Jenny Luca,Head of Information Services at Toorak College, Mt Eliza.Jenny is a leading advocate of "nurturing and growing" networked teachers who have an understanding of how to create meaningful learning experiences using the technology that we have in our schools today.As an example, at Toorak College, all students have a blog(Edublog) as their e-portfolio.This planned approach ensures that students leave the school with a positive digital footprint.To find out more about what Jenny had to say,watch the video below.
On the 6th and 7th August we were delighted to have author, Archie Fusillo, at Garnsey Campus as our 2012 Author in Residence. Archie was born in Melbourne,the son of Italian migrants.A prolific writer and engaging presenter, Archie travels widely to run writing worshops for students and teachers in Australia and overseas.Ths was actually his 4th visit to our school. Once again he had a big impact on our students and there is no doubt that he helps to nurture a reading culture at Garnsey Campus. He ran writing workshops with our Year 7's and presented to the Year 8 and Year 9 cohorts.Although two days never seems enough time with an author,it at least exposes our students to professional creative writers and gives them a "taste" of what it must be like to be a writer.
Last week was the CBCA Book Week and we were delighted to hear that Sot Gardner's"The Dead I Know" won the Older Readers' Category. I loved this novel - it was engaging,challenging and raw like so many of Scot's other novels. I would highly recommend it to anyone in Year 9 upwards.Scot must be on "cloud nine" at the moment. He is a Gippsland author,lives in Boolarra and has been a popular presenter at our Year 9 Wellington Writers' Gigs in the past.
Below is a "book trailer" response to the novel, created by Ross in 9A
To help celebrate Book Week we ran a Book Quiz that was won by Calista in year 7.We also launched the "Get Reading" challenge that recommends that everyone reads the 50 books from the "50 Books You Can't Put Down" booklet.Come to the ISC for a free copy of this guide.
Below are some literature websites you might like to access:
Jake's 7C Science Class has just finished creating Feral Pest Quizzes,using the web tool called Photo Peach.This is an easy tool to use and is a great way to convey knowledge.As well as allowing you to create quizzes, Photo Peach also allows you to easily use images and music to tell a story.
Jake decided to use Kid Blog as the class platform to embed the students' quizzes.
Here is an example of one of the student quizzes
For some very helpful information on why and how to use Photo Peach go to TeachGenNow
Each year the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on K-12 Education and creative expression over the next one to five years.
The areas of emerging technology cited for 2012 are:
Time to adoption: One Year or LessMobile Devices and Apps
Tablet Computing
Two to Three YearsGame Based Learning
Personal Learning Environments
Four to Five YearsAugmented Reality
Natural User Interfaces
You might like to subscribe to the NMC Horizon EdTech Weekly App.($2.99)"It delivers curated, relevant, and timely edtech projects and news to your iPad or iPhone weekly. It also includes the entire NMC Horizon Report series on emerging technology across various learning sectors, and a rich, searchable, re-mixable database of educational technology and innovation resources."
If you are interested in finding additional up to date information on the latest research into the use of technology within schooling, I recommend that you subscribe to DERN (Digital Education Research Network) which was developed and is managed by ACER .
Leah also alerted me to a great website that will help you stay updated called Edudemic.She follows it on Twitter.
This year I have discovered a brilliant educational website called Edutopia.It documents and disseminates information about exemplary programs in K-12 schools around the world. It is basically a place to learn about innovative approaches and best practices.It covers many topics and you are able to browse through grade levels as well. Below you will find the links that are relevant to assessment:
Its "Schools That Work " series is also an excellent resource, profiling particular K-12 schools and programs that have dramatically improved the way students learn.In this section there are videos, helpful tips as well as resources such as rubrics,lesson plans and assessments.The video below showcases how a school in Singapore is preparing students for 21st century learning.
Today we wound up our Year 9 Book Trailer unit with our inaugural "Book Trailer Award" showcase in the Lecture Theatre.Our Year 9 cohort enjoyed watching the top trailers from each of the five English classes as did the teachers who were present. At the end of the showcase, Liana announced the overall winner who was David from 9B. His book trailer"Laws of Magic" was deserving as it demonstrated an excellent combination of understanding,creativity,mood and engaging elements.
See his trailer below
For our PLP this year,Year 9 English teachers Will White,Tyler Smith and Joy Reid and myself worked collaborately to introduce this wide reading unit called Book Trailers.The goals of our project were to:
Introduce Year 9's to wikis as a learning and communication tool.
Teach year 9's an engaging and useful presentation tool (Animoto) whilst simultaneously encouraging them to read and appreciate literature.
Help students to understand their legal and ethical responsibilities as users and creators of online content.(Copyright and Creative Commons)
Increase collaboration between Year 9 teachers and our teacher librarians.
Well, we certainly achieved our goals and we were all very excited with the learning that occurred for both students and teachers involved.Yes, we were all on a steep learning curve but an enjoyable and engaging one!Thanks must go to Shane for his invaluable ITsupport and Will and Tyler for their risk taking as technology in the classroom is rarely seamless.It's now a "thumbs up" for this unit to be embedded into the Year 9 curriculum and we look forward to further developing it in 2013.
At our Staff Conference on Monday, 16th July, Donna Sweeney from St Pauls will be speaking to us about the importance of teachers knowing their students as individuals and employing a range of flexible teaching strategies in responding to them. At the end of her presentation she recommends the following three resources that I have ordered for the ISC and they should be here early next week.
You might also like to re-acquaint yourselves with the two blog posts below from last year that covered pedagogies that personalised learning.
Visible Thinking is a research - based approach to teaching thinking,begun at harvard's Project Zero.It develops students' thinking and comprehension abilities.The book contains a varied collection of practice,including thinking routines -small sets of questions or short sequence of steps - as well as documemtation of student thinking and comprehension.
In this book Dylan Wiliam stresses the importance of formative assessment as a key process for increasing teacher quality whilst having the biggest impact on student outcomes. This book offers over fifty practical techniques for classroom formative assessment that every teacher will be able to implement into their regular classroom practice. Formative assessment strategies include classroom questioning, learning intentions, productive feedback and collaborative learning.
This book,focussing on Years 9-12, explores how teachers incorporate differentiation principles and strategies throughout an entire instructional unit. There are annotated lesson plans for differentiated units in English, mathematics, history, science, art, and languages.There are Samples of differentiated product assignments, learning contracts, rubrics, and homework handouts.An overview of the non-negotiables in differentiated classrooms and guidelines for using the book as a learning tool
As technology continues to evolve at an ever increasing pace, the area of copyright can be a minefield for educators.With constant online connectivity and students now publishing beyond their classrooms,students need to know what they can legitimately copy when creating their own work.
Luckily there are a number of excellent resources to assist us : Smartcopying - The official resource for Australian schools and TAFE Australian Copyright Council - An excellent resource explaining all things to do with copyright
Copyright and Copyleft - This is a one stop shop intended to provide educators and students with a simple to understand overview of Copyright, Creative Commons and other licences that exist. Nothing Beats the Real Thing -This free Australian online resource features ready to use units that investigate copyright,film and TV piracy issues. A variety of learning areas are covered. All Right To Copy - An interactive online resource from the Smartcopying website.It is designed to teach students about copyright, and how it impacts them as both users and creators
The Copyright Friendly Resource Link - This is the link on our ISC VLA that accesses copy friendly resources.
At the end of last term, for our PLP, Will White,Tyler Smith,Joy Reid and myself introduced and began implementing a Book Trailer Unit into the Year 9 English curriculum.We are very excited about this unit of work.It is still in progress and I will report on it in this blog after its completion.However, one of our goals for this unit was to increase our students' awareness of copyright issues and upskill them so that they could become more digitally responsible.Consequently, one lesson was devoted to copyright issues and the prezi below was used as a teaching tool.In this unit students were introduced to Creative Commons resources and are required to attach a Creative Commons licence to their own videos.An example of a licence is below the prezi.
The State Library is now offering a new service that allows you to borrow Australian non fiction ebooks on cooking,travel,sport etc. for up to seven days .To access the Electronic Book Library (EBL) you need to be a registered user.Click here to sign up for a library card.
Last year I also blogged about how you can now subscribe free of charge to eResources and have access to indexes,full text articles and guides from the National Library on a range of topics. There are many excellent and expensive databases on offer including JStor,Austlit,Art Index,MacquarieNet and Applied Science and Technology.Scroll through all the free resources on the link http://www.nla.gov.au/app/eresources/list/licenced
I would highly recommend that you sign up to this fabulous service and encourage your senior students to do so as well.
All you need to do is sign up for a library card here eResources
Year 7B and 7D have recently completed their "Living in Asia" guided inquiry learning project.This collaborative unit between Rupert,Lucas and myself required students to
formulate their own questions
use Inspiration to make and organise notes
generate a bibliography
complete a PMI chart
create a video using MovieMaker Live
After the completion of these tasks,students were able to share their learning and peer assess other students work via the Discussion Board platform on their Geography Virtual Classroom space.There were lots of skills to be learnt and students were very proud of their achievements.Check out the video task below.
To help us mark the 2012 National Year of Reading, the ISC put forward a proposal to run a Readers Cup as part of our House Cultural Festival this year. We were delighted when this proposal was accepted and we were happy to trial it for our Year 7's and 8's.The Readers Cup is a competition that promotes and recognises the importance of reading and seemed to fit nicely into our Cultural Festival.Each House had a team of four students who read four novels and on the day showcased their reading,teamwork and creativity through their participation in a Quiz and presentation of a multimedia response to one of the novels read.
Leading up to the event, I must admit I was getting somewhat concerned.Usually we would have a tight rein on the organisation of an event like this, but as we had handed it over to the House Cultural Captains it was a matter of "let's see what happens".My sleepless night was not necessary as the event was a great success and all involved had lots of fun.We were extremely impressed with the participants efforts and loved their multimedia responses.It was also great to have boys as well as girls competing.Well done to the winning House,Cranswick Dargo and Emily Harrison,Annabelle Lamb,Felicity Ried and Ally Hardy.
Click on arrows below to see the Readers' Cup video and creative responses
This term all year 8 students have now completed the unit,"Book in a Bag"Once again this unit has been extremely popular with our Year 8 English students.Year 8 English teachers,Joy and myself have also been most impressed with the overall quality of their presentations this year.Our students have very much enjoyed the "hands on" nature of this project and have put alot of thought into their five chosen items that represented their story.Bags created are currently on dispaly in the ISC.Watch the Animoto video below to see a sample of student's work.
Although not represented in the photo above,Year 10 students were priveleged to hear Barry Heard speak at our school on the 28th May.Barry is a Vietnam veteran and author of several books and participant of numerous awards."Well Done Those Men",his personal and harrowing account of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, represents Victoria in the 2012 National Year of Reading.Barry has also just signed a film contract for this book and I look forward with interest to see how his story is protrayed on the big screen.
You could have heard a pin drop in the Lecture Theatre when Barry was speaking.Our students were moved by his presentation and I'm sure he will have a lasting impression on all those who attended.
There has been much excitement in our camp this week as Year 10 Geography students have been presenting their glogs. This term the eSupport team, John Fraser and Fiona Dawson have put their heads together to come up with a technology enhanced existing unit of work.Although happy with the previous content, John believed that the current Year 10 Geography unit "Human Impacts on the World Environment" needed some "jousing up"In the past students had shared their knowledge by creating a poster and as John said "it's just not doing it for them anymore."Introducing them to glogs seemed the perfect answer.Glogs are online interactive posters in which you can embed images,text,files,videos and links and share them with others.They are created by using the web tool called Glogster and we love it because:
● students don’t need email addresses as the eSupport team registers the students.
● it is easy to use and interactive.
● it allows you to make Glogs in a private and safe online environment (teachers monitor their students’ Glogs; students can access Glogs that their classmates create).
● it uses an easy to use drag and drop interface containing multimedia elements.
Both John and Fiona have commented on how engaged and focussed their students have been in this unit this term. This tool has given them far more scope to express their creativity, knowledge and ideas and we have been thrilled with their efforts.
Click on the links below to view a sample of the students' work.The video in the USA glog is a "must watch."Click on the arrow in the centre of "Reduce,Reuse,Recycle."The animation on the Pakistan glog is also excellent. Find it at the bottom of the glog as an attachment
To celebrate its 80th birthday, the ABC has launched 80 Days that Changed Our Lives.Its a collection of audio visual archival material that captures memorable events in our history.It explores 80 key events that have shaped our world and has organised them into themes and a timeline.Its a great introduction to key events that have shaped our society and visitors can make comments in the forum and vote for their most memorable moments in history as well.
We are now seeing QR codes everywhere!On business cards,brochures,magazines and newspapers.A QR (Quick Response) code is similiar to a barcode in that it encodes information and they are a very convenient way to connect people to further information such as written text,websites,phone numbers or email addresses.In the ISC we are now thinking about how we an use them to promote our resources.This week, Joy has created QR codes for our Childrens' Book Council of Australia's 2012 short listed novels,linking them all to book reviews.There is a display of the titles with their QR codes on the western glass panel in the ISC. Copies of each of the novels also have the QR codes on their front covers.With the growing number of mobile devices in the school, it is another way our students can access further information about the shortlisted novels.
Yes, I have previously posted about apps that can be used in the classroom but this resource, The iPad As is absolutely a winner and a "must" visit.The list is driven by learning goals that promote critical thinking,creativity and collaboration.
At conferences these days,the sharing of favourite apps is becoming a topic of conversation.Last week at a SLAV Conference that Annette attended, educators were singing the praises of Evernote, a note taking application. Its main advantage over other note taking systems is that it provides a searchable catalogue of all your notes which are synchronised across a variety of devices.This gives you access to your notes no matter where you are or what device you are using.It also allows you to add voice recordings,handwritten notes,photos and screen clips from web pages.Yes it can keep track of everything!
Watch the introductory video below
Evernote can be an excellent research tool for students,enabling them to capture,organise and maintain multiple sources of information from any device.
In last month's post on ipads for learning you might have noticed that other educators had used Scoop.it to collect articles about ipad usage in schools.Scoop.it has become a popular social networking platform that allows you to curate and dissemminate information.It is basically a website that allows you to collect relevant or interesting articles from the web based around your topic of choice.It differs from other social bookmarking sites in that rather than you trawling the web looking for resources it trawls the web searching for content which it then suggests to you.Other Scoop.it users who are following your topic can also suggest new resources to you.A quick way to build up you resources.It would be great for research work and an excellent tool to develop students 'critical thinking skills as they would still have to decide which articles are worth collecting.
Its layout is "magazine" style and so is visually far more appealing than the Delicious and Diigo curating tools.I like the way you can click on the articles and go straight to the article itself, and have websites suggested. You can even follow other peoples' Scoop.it.
You can subscribe to Scoop.it for free if you limit your topics to five.However, the ISC will subscribe to an education account which is US6.99 per month, allowing us to have 20 topics.This will be a great way to provide access to resources for our students and share professional learning resources with teachers.
Watch the You tube video below for a quick introduction or for more detail click on the link below. Scoop it training video
There is now a formative assessment tool called Improve on Scootle.I haven't heard of anyone using it as yet but it sounds very useful and well worth exploring. You can create customised tests and quizzes for students as well as access a number of English and maths tests and quizzes (NAPLAN) that already exist.
Students are able to join classes via an Improve Teacher Pin code. After they complete a test or quiz Improve provides them with results and access to other activities to help them to further improve their learning.
To access from Scootle, just click on the "Use Improve" button on the top right hand corner.
For further details and teacher support click on this link
Last month TED(Technology,Entertainment,Design), the nonprofit organisation devoted to "Ideas worth Spreading" launched its TED-ed "Lessons worth Sharing" Youtube channel that contains short,animated videos for teachers and students.TED -Ed's mission is to "capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world"
Each video comes accompanied with supplementary materials that include quiz questions,open answer questions and links to more information on the topic.
TED -Ed launched another exciting initiative this week that allows teachers to create customised or "flipped" lessons based on any TED -ED video or any video on Youtube for that matter.The creator of these lessons can then distribute them to their classes or offer them up for wider distribution so that others can make use of them.Not unlike how Scootle allows you to customise lessons and share them.TED's curator, Chris Anderson, states that it is not their intention to build an exhaustive video database like the Khan Academy but to harness the talent of the best teachers around the globe by giving them tools that spark and faciltate learning.
For further information click here
To view the video and lessons below,click on this link
