Ruminating on educating

Brainstorming done right

Damien Morgan — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:04:38 +0000

Many teachers use brainstorming to kick off a new unit. I know it’s also used by groups of students to make group work more effective, and sometimes staff meetings employ the technique. OptiMinds and Tournament of Minds competitions require students to be good brainstormers when they take part in their spontaneous challenges. So here’s an excellent video showing how to do it properly.

http://tinyurl.com/3ro9mxm

Missouri bans student-teacher friending on Facebook

Damien Morgan — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:16:24 +0000

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/New-law-bans-student-teacher-Facebook-friendships-126863308.html

Student Wishlist

Damien Morgan — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:17:17 +0000

As part of my school’s move to 1-to-1 computing, we polled the students from Yr 6 to Yr 12 about their technology use at home and at school.

The final question asked them to suggest other aspects of technology which could be of use to them. The Wordle here is a summary of their answers. No surprises in guessing the most popular response!

PhotoPeach

Damien Morgan — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 03:58:58 +0000

The current IWB newsletter alerted me to PhotoPeach, an online slideshow creator.

www.photopeach.com

From entering the site to creating and viewing my first slideshow took all of maybe 5 minutes. This was extremely simple and intuitive. I can see real classroom application for PhotoPeach.

Now, I know that this type of slideshow is linear, and may not be the most creative way to display information, but there is definitely a place for this in the classroom teacher’s armoury of ICT bits and pieces.

Storytelling, excursion reviews, art collections, etc, etc.

My first experiment is a collection of photos from our first day at Shanghai Expo last August.

You can see it here: http://photopeach.com/album/9ou6vo

As I said, 5 minutes from sign-up to production. Imagine what could be with some real time, effort and thought!

Teaching Teachers for the Future

Damien Morgan — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 03:48:03 +0000

Last week, Tony Brandenburg from ACCE invited me to join a forum in Melbourne as part of the TTF project.

Below is the piece my Principal asked me to prepare for the College newsletter explaining my participation…

Last Friday I had the opportunity to travel to Melbourne to attend a forum of education professionals discussing professional standards for Graduate Teachers. The project is called ‘Teaching Teachers for the Future’, and is funded by the Federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations through the ICT Innovation Fund.

The project specifically targets systematic change in the Information and Communication Technology in Education proficiency of graduate teachers across Australia.

On Friday, our task was to work on the first of three components to the project: build explicit ICTE dimensions to elaborate the Graduate Teacher Standards of the National Professional Standards for Teachers. The forum was conducted by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, in collaboration with the Australian Council for Computers in Education, from whom my invitation had come.

The particular group in which I worked had educators from primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, from New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and Queensland. I was the only member of my group not from a metropolitan setting.

These new National Professional Standards for Teachers, which will sit hand-in-glove with the Australian Curriculum, have three domains (professional knowledge, professional practice and professional engagement), and are written for teachers at four stages of their careers (graduates, proficient teachers, highly accomplished teachers, and leaders). In all, there are 35 focus areas for the 7 standards.

On Friday, we worked on the Graduate Teacher standards, drafting and editing elaborations to further explain the various focus points, and then including exemplars of how each might be done, all from an ICT perspective. It was an extremely busy day, and I believe we provided some valuable information for the facilitators to use. The process is ongoing, as all who attended the focus group are now part of an online community to continue the work. My understanding is that a final draft of elaborations and exemplars is to be published during the last quarter of the year.

Read more about the Standards here: http://www.aitsl.edu.au/

Scott McLeod

Damien Morgan — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:37:33 +0000

I could well be the last educator with an interest in technology to discover the writing of Scott McLeod, an Associate Professor in the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University. He has a blog at The Huffington Post which is always interesting.

My attention was drawn by a tweet from Steven W Anderson @web20classroom referring to Scott’s article titled ‘If We Were Really Serious About Educational Technology‘.

His personal blog is called Dangerously Irrelevant.

Video tools for teachers

Damien Morgan — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 02:30:01 +0000

This site came to my attention through a tweet in my PLN from @web20classroom (Steven W. Anderson)

100 Video Sites Every Educator Should Know

The range of sites available here is just fantastic. It includes some of my favourite websites and sources of inspiration, such as TED and Teacher TV, and introduces many, many more. I just have to find the time to sort through them. Could be some late nights ahead.

Visual Taxonomy of Web 2.0

Damien Morgan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:50:50 +0000

Mike Fisher has been playing with a taxonomy of Web 2.0 tools based upon the thinking in Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains .

As he states, “…this is an implementation point, a discussion starter”; and a very good starter it is, as it will challenge you to think about the placements of various tools, and the fluidity of the model. I really like the way he has designed the model to show how various tools can be used in different ways – underlining the fact that learning is context-based.

My first impression centred on how our thinking about learning has changed in just a few years. Web 2.0 has opened up so many doors that we didn’t even see a decade ago.

There are a number of other tools I would consider deserve a place in such a model, but I appreciate that this model is based upon Jane Hart’s 25 top tools for learning.

Take a look, and see what you think. Are you using Web 2.0 tools in these ways?

Educational Apps for iPhone and iPod Touch

Damien Morgan — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:49:34 +0000

Readers of this blog will know that I am an advocate for the use of modern technology in school. In the second half of this year my local campaign has been to lift the ‘ban’ on phones, pods etc at my school (with some success!).

This list of iPod apps was brought to my attention by David Truss via Twitter.

I plan on distributing the list at the beginning of our new school year. Mind you, not many of our students have iPhones (there are a few Touches about, though), but I want the teachers to see the extraordinary possibilities that exist.

Technology used on the Canberra trip

Damien Morgan — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:08:24 +0000

While on the trip I write about below, I kept a daily blog primarily to keep parents informed of where we were and what we were doing. You can see the result here.

This was the first time I had tried to do this (actually it was the second time I had tried, but my previous experience two years previously had died on day one due to technology restrictions), and I was really surprised and pleased with the response from parents and grandparents (and an aunty).

To make it all work, I used the following bits and pieces:

an Acer Extensa laptop computer
a Sony Cybershot digital camera
Blogger
Word
Picasa
Fireworks
Internet Explorer 8
Telstra pre-paid mobile broadband

On almost every occasion everything worked perfectly.

I would be interested in hearing about other hardware/software used successfully (or not) by readers when they have been away from home for a similar experience.