….there's always room for one more….
Brendan Jones I’ve been meaning to reflect on the Staff Development Day (SDD) that took place on our first day back in Term 2, but the impending departure of the Jones collective overseas has left me with too few spare moments to sit down and write. When the focus for the SDD was revealed at our executive … Read more
I recently asked for a commitment on maintaining funding for Digital Education Revolution laptops after the next election from the Federal Minister for Education, and her opposite number. Here is the Government response. What do you think? The Response I’m yet to hear from Christopher Pyne. I’ll let you know if I do.
I’ve reproduced here an email I sent to the current Federal Minister for Education (Julia Gillard), and her potential successor (Christopher Pyne). I would encourage everyone to do the same as the Federal election grows nearer. Dear Minister and Shadow Minister, I am the Head Teacher Personal Development, Health and Physical Education (PDHPE) at Erina … Read more
In the near future, my family and I will be going on a trip to Italy. During our conversations about what we would like to do and see there, my eldest son had a request about our visit to Florence. He began to rattle off names of landmarks and historical figures associated with Florence and … Read more
I’ve always prided myself on being prepared for lessons. This week though I found myself in a situation from which I was able to extricate myself relatively painlessly, with the help of an interactive white board (IWB), my DER laptop and some fast thinking. For some reason I thought I had Year 9 Outdoor Recreation. … Read more
TaLe has created an excellent resource called Laptop Wraps. Basically they are self-contained interactive lessons, which I think are perfectly suited to PDHPE theory lessons and the vehicle that is the DER laptops our kids now have. Last week I tied to run a lesson from our Moodle site. The kids had to use some … Read more
Dear Julia, How was your week? My year started off pretty well. The vacations finished with me feeling excited, but a little nervous about the year coming up. Excited because I love teaching, nervous because the way I do stuff is going through a bit of a revolution (oops – sorry..you already know about that … Read more
With school resuming in under a week, I’m going to go against all the advice you hear from the experts and make some resolutions and predictions for the coming year. Some will be goals based on dreams that I have for my own satisfaction, others will be the result of expectations from above (specifically my … Read more
One of my dreams, right from the start of my journey with technology, is that one day I could eliminate paper entirely from my job. Pipedream….perhaps, and up to now I’d never quite cracked a method that would allow the dream to become reality. Recently, I was helping out at a Moodle workshop and I … Read more
This week I’ve played with a few things that might come in handy as far as student engagement goes in the next few months. As the roll out date for our DER laptops draws nearer (11 days and counting), I tried some things that I can lead my faculty through as simple but quality engagement … Read more