Date: Thursday 17 May

Time: 9.30 am – 11.30 am

Venue: Treasury Theatrette

 1 MacArthur Street, East Melbourne

 Cost: No charge – limited places

 RSVP Monday 14 May. Email your name and school details to:

compton.leanne.l@edumail.vic.gov.au

 The Ultranet and Digital Learning Unit invite you to a session with Stephen Heppell, who is a leading voice on the role of ICT in learning. Stephen’s experience includes a vast portfolio of effective large-scale projects over three decades; he has established himself internationally as a widely and fondly recognised leader in the fields of learning, new media and technology.

 Stephen has worked, and is working, with governments around the world, with international agencies, with schools and communities, with his PhD students and with many influential trusts and organisations. This session will be an opportunity for Stephen to share practices he has seen where technology is effectively used to improve the quality of teaching and learning practice across the world, and for you to ask Stephen your burning questions about the role of ICT in learning.

http://heppell.net

        tall poppies grow here

Do you know a promising Victorian Student in Year 10 to 12 with a creative talent?

Help them grow into a Tall Poppy inside the ACMI Hothouse: where skills and creativity are cultivated.

 ACMI Hothouse 2012 explores game making and design. 10 lucky students will spend 1 week of the July school holidays in a fast paced creative studio. Their team will include creative artists as well as programmers. Together, they will learn how to design an iPhone game. Professional game designers will give them hands-on experience and career advice. They’ll get the chance to meet some of the world’s best game makers, set to visit Australia in July for the ACMI Game Masters exhibition.

Students don’t need games experience to apply! It takes all kinds of creativity to make a game, from character design and concept art to computer programming. So – whether they’re artists, designers and media makers exploring career pathways, IT talents, or dedicated gamers – this is an amazing opportunity.

The Hothouse application pack takes students through tasks like pitching, developing creative treatments and presenting a folio. For teachers, it is a potential classroom activity in itself.

How to apply: Visit http://www.acmi.net.au/hothouse.aspx to download the application pack.  Please email hothouse@acmi.net.au with any questions. Applications Close Fri 18 May 2012

 Does it cost anything? No! The Hothouse is free, though limited to applicants who are selected. Application is also free.

The Ultranet supports teachers to provide personalised, quality learning opportunities for students. It allows teachers to implement a continuous cycle of curriculum planning and delivery. Teachers can leverage their current practices by using the Web 2.0 tools available  for collaboration
and communication, and the functionality available in the Ultranet Learning Tasks and Learner Profile  for curriculum planning and delivery, assessment and reporting.

The concept for Students Conferences first came from Global 2 blogger, Ben Gallagher.  He and Mel Cashen had organised a year 6 student from his class at Meredith Primary School to speak to her class at Lightning Reef in Bendigo about woodworking skills.  This worked out perfectly for the Lightning Reef class who were learning to make chairs and needed some wood working skills.

Ben was so impressed with how well Harris was able to share and articulate his knowledge he felt this could benefit students all over the world.  If only they could get the opportunities to present to peers. This is where the Student Conference Series was born.

Students use the Webinar program Blackboard Collaborate  which is provided by the DEECD Virtual Conference Centre to present on a topic of their choice.  Based on the idea of a professional learning conference, classrooms from across the world can access the presentations that peak their interest and they can log in.  As each presentation is recorded they can access the blog at anytime and find a link to a variety of presentations.

The Call for presentations opens every term and students are requested to complete an application for their presentation and complete a summary.  Students are then allocated a Thursday or Monday afternoon session where they are given 20 minutes to share their presentation and answer any questions.

A new addition to the blog is a Video presentation section where students can submit a video presentation which can be accessed via the blog.

Already this year the Student Conference Series has had  presentations from schools across the globe and on a variety of subjects such as Chelsea Football Club, Shade sails and Stop Motion animation.

If you would like to listen to any of the presentations you can find the on the Student Conference Series Blog.  Subscribing to the blog will allow you to keep up with any news.

You can also read about the presentation that started it all here.

Post supplied by Mel Cashen – Teacher , Quarry Hills PS, Victoria.

On March 28th, join DeforestACTION for an exciting online collaborative learning event!

Let them take you deep into the heart the Borneo jungle to connect with orangutans, hear from Dr. Willie Smits and the Eco Warriors about the work they are doing with the Masarang Foundation, and speak with other schools around the world taking action to stop deforestation. There will also be some incredible updates and surprises!

This live event will take place on Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 as follows:

1) Asia Pacific (GMT/UTC-01:00; Jakarta-08:00am; Sydney-12:00pm)

2) North/South America (GMT/UTC-16:00; Calgary 9:00am; Sao Paolo – 14:00pm )

3) Europe, Middle East and Africa (GMT/UTC 09:00; London – 9:00am; Abu Dhabi – 1:00pm)

Register here: http://www.tigurl.org/march2012

Support DeforestACTION and help empower youth around the world to understand and act on one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time.

Visit www.deforestaction.org to sign-up!

The Department, in partnership with Intuitive Media, has made SuperClubsPLUS available free to all Victorian Years 3 and 4 students in 2012.

The following short video is from Spring Gully Primary School. Have a look at how they are engaging students through SuperClubs Plus to support online learning.

Join up to SuperClubs Plus here.

Global2 has many great teacher contributors and this year we would like to encourage your students or whole class to guest post on global2.
To get involved simply email global.teacher@edumail.vic.au your chosen post to be included. We look forward to reading about your class observations, start up projects, affirmative action or even solutions to unanswered questions!

Global2 is very excited about the latest and greatest updates from Edublogs so have a look around your new dashboard and explore!
I have included some of the important changes from as discussed by edublogs below :
1. A new dashboard look

This will be the first thing you notice if you haven’t already. Everything is still in a familiar location, but the look and feel is a bit more polished.
As you explore the made over dashboard, you will find several improvements such as better search for themes, easier ways to sort posts and pages, and other little tools built in that should make blogging a bit easier.

2. The Admin Bar
Across the top of your blog you will find a new Admin Bar which will help you navigate around your blog and our site.
You can turn off this bar under Settings > Admin Bar in your dashboard if you would prefer – but we find it handy to quickly add a new post, login, or go back and forth between the site and dashboard.

3. Custom Menus
Under Appearance > Menus you will find a brand new area for customizing the order and layout of your menus.
The drag-and-drop menu creation allows you to add links to any site on the web, specific categories, and more.
Adding custom menus is easy, and detailed directions on how are here.

4. Blog and User Creator
*This feature may not be available depending on how blog and user management is handled on your site.
We took some of the complexity out of creating new users and blogs that we had before by rolling everything into this new and improved creation tool.
You will be able to more easily create additional blogs, student blogs or accounts, and set it up so that you can manage them right from the get-go.

A team of Middle students visited Prep H on Friday afternoon to record that week’s episode of ‘What’s News’. We had a great time and the Prep students did a fantastic job in front of the camera.

Thanks to Mr Holloway for letting us visit.

The film crew were Will R and Kyle S.

What do you remember about being in Prep?

You are invited to a session with Stephen Heppell, who is a leading voice on the role of ICT in learning.

Date: Tuesday 22 November
Time: 2.30 pm – 4.30 pm
Venue: Treasury Theatrette
1 MacArthur Street, East Melbourne
Cost: No charge – limited places

RSVP Wednesday 16 November. Email your name and school details to compton.leanne.l@edumail.vic.gov.au

Stephen’s experience includes a vast portfolio of effective large-scale projects over three decades; he has established himself internationally as a widely and fondly recognised leader in the fields of learning, new media and technology.
Stephen has worked, and is working, with governments around the world, with international agencies, with schools and communities, with his PhD students and with many influential trusts and organisations.

This session will be an opportunity for Stephen to share practices he has seen where technology is effectively used to improve the quality of teaching and learning practice across the world.

School leaders, teachers and anyone who wants to find out how to use technology to boost the learning of their students will benefit from this opportunity. You will come away inspired, with a focused vision for your school and classrooms.
Professor Heppell’s writings

Global2 blogs are growing and we would encourage you to spread the word to promote global2 blogs in your school and across your personal learning networks.

This is my eighth year of teaching and in that time I have taught Grades Prep, One and Two. I am currently teaching a Grade Two class.. I endeavour to learn all I can about Literacy education in the Early Years of schooling and I believe my students benefit from my explicit and innovative approach to teaching the foundations of reading, writing and oral language.

A couple of weeks ago Kathleen Morris and I were busy preparing for a presentation we’re giving to our staff next term. The message we are trying to get across is

The illiterate of the 21st century will be those who can only read and write across traditional platforms.

In our classroom we integrate technology into our daily Literacy program to cater for our students. Technology is not an “add-on” and we don’t feel pressured to include one-off ICT lessons. Our lessons are designed to include technology. Our planning sessions always involve us brainstorming how technology fits into the lesson focuses. We find websites, web 2.0 tools, apps, stories and activities that help our students achieve their individual learning goals, in both Literacy and Numeracy.

We are lucky to have access to some great technological devices and our students are reaping the rewards while being engaged with their learning. Here’s a snapshot of what you might see if you wandered into our classroom during the two hour Literacy Block.

iPod Touches

- The iPod is the “Listen to Reading” component of our Daily 5 program. Students listen to stories (we like Story Home on iTunes) and write/draw a response.

- Students complete listening/following instructions activities, such as origami, which has proved very popular. We like How To videos on HowCast (through iTunes).

- Students test their comprehension skills by listening to a podcast or watching a video. They then complete a follow up activity, such as sequencing activities (eg. correctly sequencing the steps in a recipe). Again, HowCast has some great videos for students of all ages.

Classroom Computers

- During our Reading Groups, we have a computer group each day. This is the “Work on Writing” component of the Daily 5. Students write a blog comment on our blog, reply to a comment or write a comment on one of our blogging buddies’ blogs.

- The focus of the computer activity is that the students carefully read the post they are commenting on and respond. They need to include questions in their comments and editing their comment is crucial. We often read these comments as a class during share time.

Interactive Whiteboard

- When we incorporate the interactive whiteboard into our Reading Groups, we use it as the “Word Work” component of the Daily 5. Check out this post I wrote recently for some word game ideas students enjoy.

iPads

- We have two iPads in our classroom and we’re experimenting with how to best use them. We’ve used them in Reading Groups several times, taking advantage of some great free apps for young students. We’ve used word games, stories etc and the students have also watched videos/shows with a particular literacy focus.

- Recently, we’ve been focussing on having the students ask questions during whole class sessions. For example, after we watch a BTN episode, rather than asking questions myself, the students come up with questions for the class about the episode. They’ve been encouraged to do this after watching a show or episode on the iPad too. It’s a great way to tune them in, develop their metacognitive skills and keep them engaged and focussed on the task.

Netbooks

- We are very fortunate to have recently received a bank of 20 netbooks in our classroom. Our students were so excited when they started using them in the last week of term! Kathleen and I are completing an “action research project” with the netbooks and we’re excited about the possibilities.

- Our new student bloggers have been using the netbooks to get started with their blogs.

- When school goes back we are going to train up a few students who will become ”techxperts”. They will help troubleshoot problems, assist students with difficulties with the netbooks etc.

- We’ve had the students use the netbooks for publishing stories, completing research and looking up definitions of words while reading.

- I set up a Livebinder which had the websites our students would need for the week. This is a good way to save sites and students can easily access them during the Literacy Block (and also for Numeracy).

- We’re also helping the students improve their typing skills. We had a session in the last week of term where the students used a few online typing activities, including Dance Mat Typing, Keyboard Climber and Type for Gold, and the room was absolutely silent! They were so engaged and keen to develop their typing skills and speed.

- We are looking forward to having our students work on projects and use a variety of web 2.0 tools on the netbooks next term. We have a great opportunity with these netbooks and we can’t wait to see what the students learn and create!

************************

This is just a brief overview of how we incorporate technology in our Literacy program. And, it goes without saying, our students read “traditional” books every day and regularly write with paper and pencils. Our priority is providing our students with a Literacy program that includes texts across all platforms. We are making them transliterate learners, that is, helping them to become literate across multiple forms of media.

We teach ICT skills explicitly and incidentally every day, and it is so rewarding to see our students’ using technology to further develop their reading and writing skills. As we often say, we’d be doing our students a disservice if we didn’t integrate technology into our program!

I’m a teacher at North Fitzroy, I’ve been working their as the Music Specialist for the past 9 years and have taken on the role of ICT Coordinator in the last 5 years. When it comes to children’s music I am a huge believer in encouraging composition, demystifying the role of the composer and getting all kids to have the self belief and skills to do it.

Taken from illegal harmonies…music and ICT education

Currently I am involved in a fantastic project titled PLP Connect U a joint project with the Department of Education and Powerful Learning Practice. It is a fairly open ended project designed around creating better learning and teaching practice through the development of networks and communities of learners. The approach seems to be a fairly organic one where outcomes are not set in stone but are variable dependent on where the groups push or pull them. This approach creates some fairly messy as well as interesting discussions as well as generating confusion. Confusion is one of my favorite states and a state I thoroughly endorse when it comes to teaching practice as it seems to allow for new models of unexpected thinking to push through. I was recently at a conference where clarity was the buZZ phrase. Students must have total clarity of the desired learning outcome at all times to better enhance their learning ability.

For me that is a method that while having some merit some of the time is not necessarily something that will lead to new thinkings within the students mind so therefor has it’s limitations.

I am part of a group within the PLPConnectU Project entitled Creativity and it is full of great thinkers trying to deepen their students educational experiences and allow for a more creative approach to learning. We were recently asked to comment on the subject of what we were wondering about and I replied with the following.

I am wondering about the following things I’ve read recently. While sounding esoteric they might actually be relevant in a group with the title creativity,

The first is a short statement by Arthur Rimbaud a French Poet

“I say a man must be a seer

Make oneself a seer

The poet makes himself a seer by a lengthy, massive and deliberate disordering of all the senses”

1871

Secondly a statement which follows similar lines found in a book called The Art of Looking Sideways.

“Creativity is a compulsive human urge which demands ritual actions or routine responses and is valid only when one is trading beyond experiences.

The word creativity is frequently appropriated to enhance the mediocre or justify the mundane. That ceaseless and frenetic activity -easy to mistake for purposeful action – which without anything new to say only produces noise and aggregate. No new thoughts no magic moments just more activities in which process becomes product. The true creative act is something else it produces something which never existed before. Whether of small consequence or great significance. A glimpse of the blindingly obvious ignited by the heat off the wires caused by short circuiting thoughts. Insight is unreasoning.

Of course what might appear to be a spontaneous thought may well have been a long time cooking in the unconscious.”

I think these two comments make powerful statements about true creativity requiring alot of work and space and dedication and support to allow it to find it’s way through because to “deliberately disorder all the senses” is a courageous and difficult thing to try. Reordering of the sences is talking about realigning meaning to everything or reassigning different meaning to things.

This is something I personally do alot of and it is something that has come to influence almost all of my art practice. I know how difficult it is to do and the consequences of doing it are sometimes very confusing. Sometimes by reassigning meaning you actually rub up against society and the norms of society which can be very powerful things. But generally out of that confusion comes a moment of absolute inspiration. This is the creative thought. This is the new thought, this is what allows me to percieve the future and this would never have come to me if I had been told the intention of the lesson. Confusion can be a good thing and I wonder how much of it do we allow our students to live in it. Creativity is so much more than providing an art lesson or finger painting or whatever other process based work you would like to see an outcome to.. it is about a commitment to original thought and the difficult process that actually is.

Feel free to comment, these are just thoughts I am trying to better formulate in my own mind when it comes to teaching practice.

I am currently a Grade 5/6 Teacher at Lightning Reef Primary School. Easily inspired by others, I am always trying something new, especially around the area of technology in the classroom.

Taken from Captivating Classroom

This week’s challenge in the Global2 Challenge is to reflect on blogging in your classroom. So tonight I took a reflective walk through my class blog and I soon realised the huge journey it has taken since the first post on 27th May 2010;

Welcome to Miss Cashen’s blog. This site will allow you to have all of the wonderful things we do at school at your fingertips – literally! All of the websites, activities and examples of our work will appear on here. So whether you are at home on your netbook or at school in class, you can find all of those wonderful links to work we are doing.

I first began our blog after coming across Kathleen Morris’ class blog and felt that it would be a great tool to bring different links together in one place. It was to be the perfect place to collate what we were working on in class. So 15 months ago that is what I did and boy has it grown!

As I had planned I filled the side bars with links we were using in the class, sorting these into different groups and then using the posts to share the work we had been doing. But the more I used the blog and saw what other’s were doing on theirs, the more I could see the amazing learning opportunities within blogging.

Soon we began to look at how to write a good comment and the power of leaving questions for readers in our posts. And of course the joy of seeing blogging as a reciprocal community where leaving a comment on another blog can earn you a visit in return.

Then we delved into HTML, something I had no idea about before blogging. But this opened the world for the plethora of Web 2.0 tools available to assist in learning.

As the excitement of our first global visitor to leave a comment enthused us, we began to focus on how to write a good post and to look at the blogs we were reading in an evaluative way, learning more about writing a quality post.

Our class blog has not only taught us to be better digital citizens but has given us an opportunity to respond to what we are reading and to write for an authentic audience.

If you were to look at our class blog now you may be thinking we hardly post on it but in fact this is because we have been busy setting up student blogs. Our journey is now about writing posts to interest our readers and build readership. Now we can look even more closely at the community we participate in as bloggers.

I look forward to the next chapter of our blogging journey.

If you’ve answered yes to any of the above then you should sign up with the Global2 Collective Knowledge Construction Challenge which has begun today. Sign up for the challenge via the Global2 Collaborative Space ID 114652913 or by going to the Global2 Collective Knowledge Construction blog.

Our aim is to build our community in Global2 so that we become a sustainable blogging platform for Victorian teachers and their students into the future. We are endeavoring to follow in the footsteps of the excellent Challenges set by the Edublogs team and will be hoping for you to share this with your colleagues, friends and PLN’s.

We encourage all our government school teachers to JOIN US in the Ultranet and invite you to play a role in our Global2 Collaborative Space ID 114652913 . Go check us out!

The Globla2Challenge will focus on the current work of Richard Olsen’s white paper, Collective Knowledge Construction. Richard Olsen is the Assistant Director of IdeasLAB.