Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
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
Collaborative Writing (part 2)
This morning I was hunting around for ways to integrate multiple editable sections from pages within wikispace all onto the one page, as you would see in a typical wikipedia.org page. Discovering this post on a wikispaces discussion forum, I was easily able to set up a complete essay page which combines all the essay [...]
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Tags: collaborative writing, English, wikispace
Feeling the weight of the HSC world on our shoulders, obstacles in the path of innovation – syllabus dot points, exams, misperceptions of incompetence – all too frequently plague our thoughts and stop us from taking risks where it often matters the most. Sometimes I have to stop and take a deep breath before I [...]
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Tags: Board of Studies, collaborative writing, English, HSC, Standard English, wikispace
An Open House for Open Source
Who would have thought that with Windows Vista fast going down in history as the slowest, most cumbersome and least intuitive operating system, that a solution was right under my nose all along? Up until last weekend, I’d long since known about Linux, but had put off giving it a try – making every excuse [...]
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Tags: free, Linux, open source, teaching, ubuntu, ubuntu studio
Fifteen minutes of fame…
Some say that Andy Warhol was a visionary when he predicted in 1968 that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” With the explosion of web 2.0 and the constant demands of maintaining the interest of the online world’s alarmingly short collective attention span, sensationalism of the kind Warhol may have been [...]
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Musical Mashups and Radiohead
Since the start of my life as a high school Music teacher five years ago, I’ve been steadily exploring the potential of multi-track recording (recording, editing and mixing audio files) in the classroom. It’s amazing to note how technology has really made this accessible in recent years. What was formerly the domain of cashed up [...]
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Tags: audacity, mash-up, multitrack recording, music, Radiohead
This morning I worked with our special needs teacher and school librarian to promote reading amongst a group of year 7 students who struggle in developing their literacy skills. This task involved students reading aloud The Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French and recording their performances with web cams before watching their recorded videos, [...]
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Tags: literacy, reading, web 2.0, web cams
Today I tried a more advanced sequence of mini research tasks using Google Reader. Students have been using their own RSS subscriptions as part of wide reading for a unit on contemporary Australia, and it’s fascinating to see how the areas of interest they have developed over the past few weeks have really motivated their [...]
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Tags: critical literacy, google reader, junior english, web 2.0
This morning I tried Google Reader in the classroom for the first time. This was a particularly exciting moment for me in many ways. Personally, I regard RSS feeding as the most significant development in the web 2.0 world and one that has major repercussions for teachers. RSS feeds have enabled me to become a [...]
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