Throughout this term I have been experimenting with Learning Tasks on the Ultranet with my Grade 3-6 students in their ICT Lessons. The project for the term involved them working in small groups to create a podcast based on our school values of Respect, Relationships, Rigour, Resilience and Responsibility.

On the first Monday of each month, I help to present the online PD series "Ultranet Share N Tell" with Mel Cashen and Anne Mirtschen. The Ultranet is an online learning management system being used by government schools within Victoria that has been developed by the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.We have been running these session for just over a year now. Links to recordings of previous sessions we have held are available through the Guide to Innovation Ning operated by the DEECD Innovation and Next Practice Division.

It is with a sense of disappointment and disbelief I learned that the Department’s literacy and numeracy coaching program was to be scrapped in schools. I have been fortunate enough to work with both literacy and numeracy coaches in my classroom over the last few years and can attest to the value of this program.

It's now about five weeks into the start of the 2011 new school year and I feel I am beginning to find my feet as a specialist ICT teacher.  Being in a brand new school has meant that we have experienced some delays with our ICT equipment getting deployed. This has meant that I have had to be quite resourceful and innovative with my lessons.

I have managed to secure the use of a portable LCD TV that I have been able to connect my laptop to and share images and presentations with my students. I had always planned to start of the year with cybersafety activities, but had wanted it to be far more hands on. That said, I am quite pleased with my achievements in teaching ICT without any ICT.

Below is a summary of the activities I have completed to date with each year level.

Wow! The post for this challenge featured a huge list Web 2.0 resources to use and consider embedding into blog posts. Here's my road test and feedback after using a few of them.

Copyright and Creative Commons was something I had heard about, but never really quite understood what it all meant. I had seen those little pictures inside circles, but again, wasn't quite to sure what they were all about. I too have been guilty of jumping onto Google Images, searching for a picture I liked and then simply pasting it into a document, powerpoint or other piece of work I was creating.

As part of the week-long induction process for my new school (post about this to come soon) we were shown the following video from Ben Zander; the conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.

Since commencing the EduBlogs Teacher Challenge I have….

Tomorrow (Monday 10th January) sees the Edublogging Teaching Challenge kick off and I'm kinda excited :D

Having subscribed to many other blogs,  I know how much I have valued reading and learning from their experiences. I hope that I too will have something worthwhile to say and that others will value reading it.

Earlier this year, I posted about some challenges and frustrations I was having with the way I, my team and my school was going about the teaching of Mathematics.

To summarise:

“We teach Contiki Tour Maths”, I proclaim.

I go on to explain. “The way we teach maths is just like travelling on a Contiki Tour. We climb on a bus, travel around, take a look round and the good stuff and before you know it, we jump back on and move on to the next town. That’s how we teach Maths. We pick a topic, do stuff with it for two weeks then move onto the next topic.”

In reading Doug Belsaw’s blog on how he uses technology each day which led me to read Cory Doctorow’s post What I Do, I felt inspired to do the same. I’ve loved reading what other people use and enjoy looking into if they might work for me. Hopefully this post might inspire you to consider investigating some of these options or your feedback and comments might encourage me to look at alternatives. 🙂

It’s a Thursday morning and I am working with my numeracy coach.

It’s nearing mid-year report time and I want to confirm my judgements about students on the topics we have covered earlier in the year.

I run my eyes over the students assessments. Many of areas are blank. Many of the areas we had “covered” Topics we had covered early in the year.

“We teach Contiki Tour Maths”, I proclaim.

One of the great jobs I have at my school is to be the staff advisor to the Student Leadership Council. Student Leadership has always been, and still is, a passion of mine. (I could easily write a whole seperate post about how I got into it and the work I have done over many years)

This Tuesday, I had the Student Leadership Council present their action plans to our principal team for their feedback and approval. This gave them a real audience to present in front of and a purpose in getting their plans completed.

These plans have been almost a month in the making. They commenced work on them at our Training Day earlier this year and they have worked on them during our subsequent meetings