Social Reading

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Darcy Moore Reading has always been a solitary pursuit – by definition – in my mind. I never sought membership of any kind of club that met to discuss books. The idea of attending a ‘festival’ to listen to an author, or ask them questions, seemed a little silly. Surely their thoughts and insights, knowledge... Read More

Guest Speaker

My Year 10 English class had a guest speaker today. Rebecca Fernandez spoke about her journey towards making a living as a game designer. Rebecca’s mother is an ex-student of our school and the boys could relate to the experiences of a local person in achieving her goals. The boys listened politely and some were very enthused and asked good questions. Often, Rebecca talked... Read More

myPad

My 5 and 8 year old daughters have monopolised our iPad since we bought it in 2010. I never really used it that much but my partner, who is not at all geeky, would prise it away from the kids for email, browsing, Plants vs Zombies, ABC iView and reading the ‘newspaper’. Wikipanion is her favourite app. A couple of weeks ago, I really wanted to read my ‘book’... Read More

Ethics, Gaming and Problematic Knowledge

From a teacher’s perspective, the Quality Teaching Framework is an important professional document supporting learning in NSW schools. At a glance, for readers unfamiliar with the QTF framework, here’s an overview: I’d like to relate a recent and ongoing class conversation, related to the element of ‘problematic knowledge’, raised in dialogue with... Read More

iBooks Author

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by billaday The announcement of new education tools at the ‘Apple Special Event’ excites many and leaves others with a range of concerns. Here’s a guide to this Apple education initiative if you do not watch the presentation. iBooks Author is what excites me. I think Apple’s hype is justified and this tool will... Read More

Your Daily Bread?

What online and tech tools do you use daily in your personal and professional life? Have they changed in the last two years? What has failed to ‘work’ for you? I am having a little tidy – before the New Year – and was thinking about 2011. This is a brief ‘Christmas’ post (a list really) of sorts. I hope you have the time to add a comment.   Firstly,... Read More

My Edublog Award Nominations for 2011

The Edublog Awards provides opportunity  to grow the community of edubloggers and let others know how professionally and personally important they are to us. It also gives one a chance to update blogrolls. I couldn’t believe that I had left some of my favourite bloggers of my roll. Apologies…and apologies to any friends, colleagues and bloggers that I leave of this... Read More

The hashtag and the citizen

The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages. Twitter Help Centre   Following the #LondonRiots or #UKRiots hashtag on twitter has made me think again about how to explore the important and relatively new concepts (in classrooms anyway) of tag, metadata, metalanguage and folksonomy.... Read More

GOOGLE+

On the road for more than a month now, I have not been paying as much attention to my social media networks as usual and was a little horrified to see that foolishly I had two Google+ accounts. That’s to0 many circles. How did this happen? A colleague needed my (not often used) Gmail account to organise an invite in the first days Google+ was available. I was barely paying... Read More

Connected…or at least, connecting!

The department supports its employees’ participation in social media online applications such as social networking sites, wikis, blogs, microblogs, video and audio sharing sites and message boards that allow people to easily publish, share and discuss content. The above quote is the opening statement in the new Social Media Policy released by my employer, the NSW Department of... Read More