Tonight on TV3 television news they had a piece decrying children calling their teachers by their first name. You can view it yourself through this link here. The full text article can be found here.
[...] Tonight on TV3 television news they had a piece decrying children calling their teachers by their first name. You can view it yourself through this link here. The full text article can be found here.
[...] My mate Brian Cosby from Nevada recently posted about a very cool gadget for helping children with proof reading and reading aloud with fluency. With 32 lively children in my class the noise level often rises beyond acceptable levels and children need to be reminded to quieten down- especially [...]
Our highlight from last week was a Skype conversation with @NZWaikato’s class at Melville Intermediate in Hamilton. Every year at Appleby we take time to learn our mihi (Maori greeting). Drawing, as we do at Appleby School, from a predominately European background I find it difficult to put [...]
Sorry folks but after all our efforts our Moturoa class blog did not win the New Zealand Class Blog Awards. I feel gutted as we love our blog as it is a pivotal part of our on-line learning and great way to link class to family and to [...]
I am very proud to say that my class blog has been nominated as a finalist in the Interface Magazine 2009 Class Blogging Awards.
The blog started from humble beginnings with me adding most of the content. Now it is mostly being [...]
A friend rang me tonight and asked what we do at our school as regards the use of pen or pencil for general writing. At my school everyone from five year olds up use a pen for writing and a pencil for maths.
I remember when I first started teaching we [...]
How simple it is to make connections and support the learning of children both in my own classroom and another in Bangkok. Last week Jeff Utecht at ISB, Bangkok, sent out a couple of tweets inviting people to encourage a few of his fifth grade bloggers who were [...]
Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend the day with Dr Alison Davis who wrote ‘Teaching Reading Comprehension‘. This was the first non online or in-house PD I have attended this year and it was an [...] Not sure where to start really as some good things may just yet come out of National Standards if the whole thing is not rushed through and thought is given to the long term consequences and ramifications of National Testing. Unfortunately attending the ‘consultation’ meeting yesterday left me with [...]
A discussion between soon to visit New Zealand, Gary Stager, and teacher Tom Barrett evolved when Tom posted a review of the Developing Leaders NCSL Conference and shared his Classroom Without Walls workshop slides. Gary asked where was Tom’s historical perspective and theory?
I know that Twitter [...]
Darren Kuropatwa put together a slideshow of what it means to be Teaching Well. People were invited to add a slide each. My slide idea sort of came from my blog title and the view is across the bay from Nelson’s Rocks Road. Using Google Docs [...]
I just came across this rather fun use of Google Earth from Alan Levine. Look around your place and see if you can spell out your name by taking a series of screen grabs and putting them all together.
To do it find the images in [...]
Today I had the pleasure of being invited to participate in in the Nelson Cluster ICT day.
It was just the thing I needed to reinforce my commitment to eLearning for my children. Also in attendance were some of NZ’s eLearning shining stars. Dorothy Burt kicked things off with her keynote [...]
This is the first school holiday in a couple of years where I have had nothing to do and I am relishing the early nights and late rising to bank a reserve of sleep that I can draw on when school starts again- yeah right!
As you can well imagine I [...]
@markw29 (Mark Warner) shared this Google Doc on great ideas for story starters and motivation for great imaginative story writing. It is well worth sharing and Mark is open for more people to add to this great document.
Edublogs still won’t let you embed iframes so you will have [...]
People have been asking me how I am enjoying being back in the classroom after a year out and about seeing the world and working with teachers instead of eight and nine year olds. Generally I am enjoying being back in the classroom but had forgotten the hours that classroom [...]
Over the last few weeks we have been having fun in class exploring the world through the eyes of children in Kathy Rice’s class in British Columbia, Canada and today, Brian Crosby’s class in Spark, Nevada, USA. These learning experiences have come to us through Sylvia Tolisano’s [...]
While at the Learning at School Conference Wes talked a bit about The Element by Sir Ken Robinson. I tried to buy an audiobook version in iTunes but it is only available through an American account. In my quest to find out more @teachernz put me on to [...]
The title of this post was going to be ‘When the real and the virtual collide’ but as I grow in the use of these Web2.0 tools the virtual becomes the real. Just because you haven’t met people before or don’t see them on a daily basis doesn’t mean that [...]
Early in February this blog got a little recognition from the New Zealand Education Gazette so I asked the Wayne Erb, the reporter, if I could put a copy of the article on the blog and he said that would be fine so here it [...]
John Sutton wrote an insightful post that turned up in my RSS feed from the UK this morning about internet use agreements.
At Appleby we wrote ours a few years ago now. We review it every year and ask children, parents and teachers to sign it each year agreeing [...]
If you have arrived here from the NZ Educational Gazette. Welcome.
After my hectic return to Moturoa classroom at Appleby School following a year’s leave acting as ICT Facilitator I am really looking forward to meeting up again with virtual NZ friends at the Learning [...]
I came across PhotoPeach via a comment on Chris Betcher’s blog about using Twitter and thought that I would give it a try and I liked it. PhotoPeach is a mash up with YouTube to get the sound track or you can use their audio. I wonder how [...]
I had the good fortune to do a little travelling over our summer holiday spending time in Hong Kong, London, Portsmouth, Abergavenny in Wales, Londonderry, Ireland and Bangkok, Thailand. Until 2008 I had only ever been to Australia which you can hardly count as being overseas- a bit like visiting [...]
Today I had the pleasure of attending Te Whakatipurangi’s Cluster Conference in Papamoa in the Bay of Plenty. Paula Jamieson, the cluster ICT facilitator, had been following my stuff for a while and had been at ULearn08 in Christchurch last year.
I did a couple of workshops- one on [...]
What a great New Year’s present for 2009. All NZ teachers now have free access to the LEARNZ virtual field trips. Usually this would cost $75 per year for your school. All you have to do is verify your Teacher Registration number and provide an email address and you [...]
Only one week of my 2008 employment to go and on my last official visit to Riwaka School the kids sat me down to watch a video they had made entirely by themselves over the last week and then presented me with a stunning bunch of flowers. This year has [...]
If you have good people in your network you learn good stuff. Last night I caught a tweet by Wes Fryer about a another great digital tool called Capzles. He was impressed and so am I as I quickly made a Capzle from a few photos and [...]
Yesterday was our ICTPD Home Group Meeting in Palmerston North where a group of passionate ICT facilitators under the leadership of Marg McLeod come together to talk about their progress and challenges. I was introduced to the ideas expressed by UK’s Professor Guy Claxton. I think I was [...]
I first saw this inspirational video ages ago and it stuck in my mind so I thought I would try and find it and share it with you- shame about the quality of the actual video but I have fiddled with the code and it still isn’t great.
“This very inspiring [...]
This little project has taken a year in the making. In the same way I have a 2009 to do list I had one for 2008 as well. David Kinane’s project ‘Intrepid Journeys’ gave me the inspiration. I had to go over to Motueka on Sunday to help [...]
As posted before “I love my job”. How great is it to get paid to do a job that you love. Here is a little bit of my day today….
Here it is! After its conception nearly a month ago the collaborative video is ready to rock….
Click on the graphic to view the video with TeacherTube.
Angela from CORE asked me to do a write up for it for the Time4Celebration theme so I had [...]
Over this last weekend I have been engaged in the K12Online Conference organised out of America for a global audience.
I had subscribed to the RSS podcast feed and now have an almost full set of videos from the conference to watch, re-watch and share. Look for the podcast channels [...]
This is what you get when you have plenty of other stuff to do. Oh it must be milestone time of the year again. My RSS feed from Sue Tapp in Aussie turned up this link to Yearbook Yourself. You upload a photo and scroll through the decades.
Sue [...]
While I was working wirelessly at Parklands School today we were trying to do a little viewing of a Flickr video and it was all buffering annoyingly so I decided to do a speed test from Speedtest.net. When I got home I tried it again. I have what [...]
While at the ULearn08 Conference down in Christchurch in the school holidays Nick Billowes stuck me in front of a camera and let me burble away. Jedd Bartlett edited out the worst bits and this is what you’re left with. It turned about better than I had imagined. [...]
While at the ULearn08 dinner I thought of organising a flash mob doing the Dancing Man before the Friday morning keynote and had it pretty much sorted before realising that there wasn’t a keynote on Friday morning. Doh!
I’m home safely after another brilliant ULearn08 conference. The whole thing is really such a whirl and I think you do need some time to internalise things but here are my thoughts as they come
to me [...]
For a piece of frivolity I had to share this gem. Play a track in iTunes and go COMMAND + T. This incredible visualisation enthralls you while you listen- the movie doesn’t do it justice in the flesh- it is just stunning.
The track is a Beowulf soundtrack: ‘Hero Comes [...]
Last Friday night I called in the experts. Before heading off to San Francisco I bought myself a 500GB wireless Time Capsule that took 72 hours to do the back-up. Hardly lightning speed! And it only [...]
I spent yesterday afternoon learning more about ClickView- the powerful video resource add-on to ‘The Loop’.
Last year I had the opportunity to participate in an afternoon session of a similar ilk but it didn’t mean much as we didn’t have access to The Loop at that stage. This time [...]
