Ted-Ed and all that

There’s been a bit of bite-back recently around the ‘Ted-Ed’ concept and the usefulness, relevance or otherwise of the whole shooting match of powerful people spouting powerful ideas. Apparently, they censored a Ted Talk that was critical of the inequity at the heart of American society. That idea sure ain’t going anywhere fast. Gary Stager [...]

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Change and continuity in teaching Literature

I’ve been trying to be more actively interventionist in my Literature teaching this year, inspired by some thinking about Personalised Learning I’ve been moved to consciously work on some ‘high impact micro-teaching strategies’ that might help student learning as a follow up to some thinking on formative assessment over the past couple of years. So, [...]

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The Flipped Classroom

I’ve been a bit interested in the Flipped Classroom lately; the idea of turning things on their head so that the predicatable, the ordinary and the mundane gets tackled with technology and the real learning takes place in the classroom. I became interested in this a while ago, even bought a microphone to do more [...]

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What is e-learning now?

Yesterday I got the opportunity to speak again at the Chisholm Institute ‘Ripple’ Conference at the Mt Eliza Business School, overlooking Port Phillip Bay; this time with a focus on what e-learning looks like to me  now and how can help support teachers through change. Last year I focused on the students who were coming [...]

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Creating an online learning hub

I liked this image from Free Technology for Teachers about building an online learning hub. I’ve tried to do some of these things in various ways over the years, sometimes making the mistake of having too many different places for students to go for various aspects of the course. The key here is that there is [...]

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Keeping a sense of wonder

I was pointed to an interesting post this week, an interview with award winning primary school teacher, Tim Thompson, on how he uses technology such as podcasts, blogs and video in his classroom. I liked the following observation particularly; a key thing for teachers I think, is to continue to play with these technologies. And [...]

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Teacher Tech and Productivity

An interesting non-edublog post from a high school maths teacher talking about technology, productivity and what software schools should be supporting teachers with. There are a lot of comments and suggestions at the end of the post too. The post describes the multi-pronged problem as: I have found it increasingly annoying to hear from on [...]

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Performance Pay for Teachers

The ABC reports today that the Federal Government plans to push ahead with a trial of performance pay for teachers despite a lack of evidence that it will actually work (in improving learning) and with a woeful lack of understanding of the complexities involved. My fear is that the Federal Opposition will play tweedle-dum and [...]

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Digital students in analog schools

A teacher I met at the ICTEV Conference put me on to this video from TeacherTube. Isn’t that the best thing about those conferences? Download: Posted by marottam at TeacherTube.com. They say: I attended a BLC06 conference last summer and keynote Marco Torres, was a keynote. In one of his smaller sessions he showed a [...]

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TCPK

You’ve gotta like this site. Great diagram, and nice use of the pbwiki interface. TPCK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) argues: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. [...]

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