Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Like many tech-savvy teachers, I’ve been in the habit of filming my lessons from time to time and evaluating them. Although I don’t think I’ve hit the ‘saturation’ point, my kids often look at me and roll their eyes when they see the camera emerge and hear me slip into my best renditions of Michael [...]
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Tags: catholicism, spirituality
Having spent the last three days in a state of mind akin to an excited teenage trance over the purchase of my new toy, I have to finally sit down and reflect on how it is going to change (and not change) my life at this point. Many technology-minded teachers are now going down the [...]
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Postscript: due to formatting problems from Pages to Word, I had to do the guide and blank summary scaffolds as PDF files. The storyboard is still in Word format.
Many teachers have come to me lately asking for ideas on how to get started making movies with kids in the classroom. As part of my school’s [...]
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Like most teachers, I’m constantly driven by the need to be as productive as possible, as much of the time as possible (is it little wonder that we so often compare ourselves to machines?) So, when I look at the end of the holidays back on the last two weeks, I have to ask myself: [...]
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As netbooks continue to soar in popularity and we look at the issues surrounding bringing them into schools, I feel that one particular issue comes to the fore: the choice of OS.
For many people, this isn’t a choice at all. Most are happy to use XP (which now runs as standard on over three quaters [...]
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You know that any given technology has hit the mainstream when your grandmother starts telling you all about it. And so it well may be that most of us bare witness to the humble, netbook which has taken the technology world by storm since its debut in late 2007. Technology analysts forecast sales of up [...]
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Tags: government, netbooks, schools
Being an occasional blogger, I struggle with the pitfalls and perils of not maintaining an online presence as frequently as many of my blogging colleagues. Perfectionism is always a dangerous thing for bloggers, is it not?
But when I hurled myself headlong into our new Connected Learning (an integrated curriculum) program and introducing Google Docs to [...]
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Slam that poem!
As the year comes to a close, many teachers tend to become a little sentimental and melancholic about letting go of classes we’ve enjoyed so much. Without a doubt, the pride of my teaching joy this year has been my year 8 English class. Consisting of students who have been identified as major trouble-makers in [...]
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Tags: GarageBand, hip-hop, iMovie, performance, poetry, slam
Go hard, go GRUEN!
Last week I had the pleasure of team-teaching with my wonderful English coordinator Michele. Like myself, Michele is a devoted fan of ABC’s Gruen Transfer, a program about how advertising manipulates our thinking. We used the program’s Consumer’s Revenge feature to access video and audio snippets in order to assemble advertisements around the ficticious “Gruen [...]
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Tags: critical literacy, English, Gruen Transfer, video
