TEDx Event in Melbourne

ON the 19th July, the State Library of Victoria hosted a TEDx event on Educational Leadership.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.

Archie Fusillo at Gippsland Grammar

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.

 

Book Week 2012

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:

Dymocks' 101 Best Books 2012
Australian Independent Bookseller
Prime Minister's Literary Awards

Year 8 Science

 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

Keeping Up With Emerging Technology in Education

 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 Less      Mobile Devices and Apps 

                                                                  Tablet Computing

                             Two to Three Years   Game Based Learning

                                                                  Personal Learning Environments

                              Four to Five Years    Augmented 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.

Edutopia

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:

How Should We Measure Student Learning
Core Strategy: Comprehensive Assessment
How Can We Make Assessments Meaningful
Why Formative Ssessment Matters
Assessment Professional Development Guide

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.



There are also many articles about Multiple Intelligences .You might like to take the  quiz  below     What's Your Learning Style?

Year Nine Book Trailers

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

Laws of Magic Trailer by David Ting is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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.

To see this unit  click on Year Nine Book Trailers

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.