Holiday Reading Function in the ISC

The ISC  team  invite you all to attend our  Holiday Reading Function  on Friday 4th December. It will start at 3:30 pm and drinks and nibbles will be supplied. Liz and Trevor from Collins Bookstore will also be making their regular  "guest appearance" to tell us about the latest summer  reads. We hope that you are able to come along and help us celebrate the end of the year. This function  is a great opportunity to  start unwinding and easing  yourselves into holiday mode.

Day of Stem

Click on the image above to listen to the ABC podcast on Rick Geritz, CEO of Life Journey and advisor to Barack Obama on cyber education. He is in Australia to help promote Day of Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) This is  a national initiative designed to enable every student in Australia to:

• Test drive their  futures by self selecting from leading STEM organisations and living "the day in the life" of a stem leader.
• Be mentored by a guide to help set a path for a future in STEM

This is achieved by students  participating in  a self guided interactive career simulation experience that aims to motivate, inspire and introduce students to real life projects.

There are a number of organisations involved, including the Collingwood Football Club which involves students looking at sports analytics.

 

Schools, parents and students can all be involved. Click on the image below for more information

 

Anti Bullying Animated video

Daisy Chain is a great  Australian  5 minute animated video created   to support young children  deal with bullying. It is narrated by Kate Winslet  and has come about because  the creator's own son was being bullied at school. He couldn't find any suitable books or  videos and so initially created an app. He then went on to create this video which can be accessed via YouTube. For more information read the Guardian article.

DigiConf 2015

For those us who weren't able to attend the annual DLTV Conference held at Swinburne  this year , here are three keynote presentations that you might find time to watch at some stage.

Hamish Curry - Game, Mindset, Match
Nathan Jones - iPad and Assessment
Mel Cashen, Laura Barker,Bec Spink- Digitech in the Classroom

ABC Splash Apps

 

You might like to check out ABC Splash's   free educational apps for primary and secondary students that map to the Australian Curriculum. Click on the image above to access.

 

Luncheon For Champions

Another successful year is over for the Victorian Premier's Reading Challenge. This year 3,600 books were read by our Year 7 and 8's and 24 students were eligible to attend  the Chinese Luncheon last Friday, having read over 50 books. Congratulations to Hannah Husodo and Isabelle Condron for reading 100 books each. What a great effort!

 

Open Education Resources Toolkit

 

An Open Educational Resources (OER) Toolkit for  Teachers, Curriculum and elearning Developers has recently been developed. It  support schools and teachers to understand and make use of OER to create curriculum resources. The Toolkit helps  you to find and use OER and shows you how to go about licencing these resources for incorporation into new learning resources.

OER is a global movement. To touch base again about OER., they are teaching and learning resources that are freely available to anyone. They have licences ( think Creative Commons) that allow free access, use, adaptation and sharing.

Developing Emotional Intelligence

This is a very funny trailer of a film called "The Secret Life of Pets". It would be a great resource to show students when teaching them about self control!

Year 8 Paired Reading

Last week our Year 8 students had the opportunity to showcase their "Reading in Pairs"  blogs to the rest of their class. They also  reflected on their own learning and  peer assessed  in a respectful and constructive way. This is the fifth year  that our Year 8's have used a blogging platform to analyse and reflect on their reading of  a chosen novel. With reading being the central focus, over the past six weeks  students  have completed  a variety of tasks including learning how to customise a blog, add posts and embed multimedia. It has been a satisfying project to be involved in and the blogging platform has certainly given our students  interesting and challenging ways to demonstrate their understanding. Below are some examples.

Grace and Lily
Lucy and Dakoda
Simeon and Ben
Tom and Will
Grace and Keely

 

Mindset Tedtalk: You Can Grow Your Brain Cells

Another Mindset video for your interest. In this fascinating TedTalk, Sandra Thuret, a neuroscientist, discusses research and practical advice on how we can help our brains grow. Our brains can create nerve cells and this is called neuro genesis. You probably already know that neuro genesis decreases when you lack sleep, have a poor diet  or  under too much stress. Luckily for all of us, learning increases neuro genesis. So does activity. So buy your self a fitbit and get moving!

Enhancing Online Safety

Enhancing Online Safety is the new website of the Australian Government- eSafety Commissioner. It replaces the ACMA CyberSmart website. It is an excellent website that I can highly recommend for teaching digital citizenship to our students. Like the ACMA site, it contains many resources for teachers and parents and lesson plans and videos are age appropriate. The "Games,Apps and Social Networking" page is particularly good with links to over 50 sites popular with students.

 

Quick guide to popular social media sites and apps from eSafety Office on Vimeo.

Team Building Games

If you are looking for some fun team building  games that promote critical thinking, Click on the image above.

Strategies To Help Students Thrive

Recently, the ISC has purchased the above book for our Teacher Reference collection. Written by well known teacher blogger, it looks at how teachers can create classroom conditions that  motivate students. Larry Ferlazzo provides plenty of research based strategies on how you can help your students develop goals, grit, gratitude and a desire to transfer their skills to their life outside of school.