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.
Here is an interesting (if slightly mad) blog for VCE English teachers. It is written by Warwick Wynne who writes the English Book and is also a practicing teacher. He covers the Context and the issues that all VCE English teachers face. Well worth a read.
Here is another newbie, I found this ning online which has been set up by Jo McLeay of VATE. It’s a great way of working with other English teachers from other schools. It’s focus is the Context ‘Encountering Conflict’ however setting up a ning is easy and you could use of for anything where you need to discuss things with teachers from other schools.
Well, this is a bit disappointing. I tried blogging directly from Word and it would not link to this blog. Apparently it only recognises a small selection of blog providers and this is not one of them. I can do this with my Sharepoint at work, which you would expect seeing as it’s a Windows product, but it’s a shame the functionality is so limited. This would have been a great way to get kids to blog simply by typing into Word. Maybe I’m just too impatient.
I’ve been practising adding widgets and, well, I may have gone a bit overboard. I’ve added my LibraryThing page as a widget and I’ve also added my wiki. I could also have added my teacher tube (or YouTube for that matter) but I thought that this would be taking it too far. It was remarkably easy to do and a good way to link everything that you do. Hmm, maybe I should also add my Diigo page……
much later…..
Well, I did add this in but it was a bit disappointing, if you scroll down you’ll see a tiny blue symbol on the left of the page under my LibraryThing. Wonder how I make it bigger?
This is something I must explore more deeply. It sounds like a fabulous engaging way of teaching, but I would need to explore much further to see what sorts of learning activities could be undertaken. Obviously we could tick the box on collaboration and teamwork, also independent thinking. Depending on the game there could be elements of creativity, especially if students are encouraged to adjust things to suit themselves. I read an article in the VIT i-teach flyer (I can’t really call it a newsletter) that discussed machinima use in classrooms as used in Golden Square Secondary College and taught by ACMI. I will investigate this further.
This could be a new wip.(like I need one!) This blog here has some very interesting things to say about this. The ACMI link is here. This is a very good reason to visit the new Game On exhibition at ACMI too, hmm, research.
I’ve just finished creating a few more intel tools for the classroom to use with my year 12 English class. There is a new assessment area that allows you to create and print rubrics based on your individual needs and to learn about assessment strategies and use rubrics already created.
I created a visual ranking tool for the year 12s doing Area of Study three, using language to persuade. The issue we’re discussing is dredging so I created this tool with a set of reasons for why we shouldn’t dredge Port Phillip bay. Students then have to rank them in order of importance and add short notes explaining their reasoning. They can then check their reasoning against the other groups and are given a correlation score.
I have also created a Showing Evidence tool for the same issue. Students need to provide evidence for the claim that we should not dredge the bay and then justify their reasons for choosing that particular evidence. This assists them in writing their analysis, as they can evaluate the arguments used and then print out their own arguments and those of the rest of the class.
Students are doing a Point of View piece about a current issue, they were encouraged to do this on the dredging issue, but we also wanted them to do their best and so we thought we should let them choose an issue. It will be interesting to see how many choose the issue that they’re analysing as this will give them a much greater understanding of the issue and should help their analysis to reach the necessary depth. We have very little time on this so students will have to be independent. I wish the VCE year was longer!
The new Smartboard files for educators are available in beta and I uploaded them to try in my classroom. They are flash animation files that are easily customisable so that you can create quizzes, question activities and match up games in your class. We used them for revision of persuasive language techniques and they were incredibly easy to create. I plan on sharing them around the department so that I can get a feel for how easy they are for everyone to use. So far, though, I really like these as it took me much longer before to create these types of lesson activities and they did not have the polished look that these ones do.
