Here’s the link for the new Ning
View my page on Encountering Conflict Network
this is a network for English teachers who are teaching the new Context. It is for sharing ideas and asking questions about the new Context. Unfortunately the widget won’t work here, it comes up transparent, wish I knew how to use HTML.
Here’s a fabulous video on Teacher Tube about how to set up an edublogs blog.
Download Video: Posted by markwoolley at TeacherTube.com.
I was thinking last night about how to approach the Context work coming up within the VCE study for my year 12s. I have two classes and lots of creative and clever students who would benefit from being encouraged to express themselves in a variety of ways, not just in 100 minutes of class time on paper. I would really love to encourage them to create multimedia texts to fit with the Context ‘Encountering Conflict’. We’re using the text ‘The Secret River’ by Kate Grenville as a prompt for the Context. Students need to respond to the issues as examined in the text. I wonder how much longer the VCE is going to stay in the format that it is using currently when we’re moving in different directions with middle years students?
I am sure that a blog or wiki would be a powerful way of creating texts with more depth of meaning than a written text alone. It would also allow students to carefully consider the concepts of audience and genre in a more detailed way, which is a core requirement. I’m not sure that VCAA have any rules about doing this via multimedia at the moment one way or the other, maybe it is something that I should explore in more detail.
Obviously there are issues of verification at stake and again, I’ll need to explore this in more depth. I think that this is something I’ll work on and do some research. Stay tuned…..
Ok, that’s an oxymoron, but take a look at this interesting article from The Times.
The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
