Flashcards+

I’m always a little envious of those kids with piles of flip cards. Bundled up in big wads, encircled with rubber bands. ‘This is what I need to know’, they seem to say. Here is the contained knowledge. They sit at their desks and spread them before them, almost smugly. So, I wanted to have [...]

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Monitoring (and celebrating) class behaviours with Class Dojo

A little while ago I was lamenting with my Literature class that it wasn’t always easy to document how that class went and establish what to do next, both of which are critical for effective planning, reflection, and formative assessment practice. I take notes on student progress (formerly in OneNote, latterly in Evernote) but it [...]

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Should I be on “The Facebook”

In the normal classroom discussion the other day I was interested to find that everyone in the class (16 of them) have joined a Facebook group that one of them set up as a Literature study group. They’re all there, I asked and checked, and are discussing and asking questions and supporting each other (I [...]

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Google +

I’ve been playing around with Google + for the last week or two and am hopeful that maybe, just maybe, this  might be a better social tool than the elephant in the room that is Facebook. Like most schools, we’ve struggled with some issues to do with student access to Facebook and I think that [...]

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More on wikpedia

From the man who brought Wikipedia to the world; a potted history, that follows up on my earlier post.

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Excuses, Excuses

What Are Our Excuses, Again, For Not Putting Computers in the Hands of Our Children? So began Scott McLeod’s blog post today which was backed up by an inspiring Ted Talk video about kids learning from each other. I couldn’t agree more that, with the price of powerful computing coming down and down we’re still [...]

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Time has run out for NING

Let me begin by saying that nobody owes anybody a free tool, and that schools aren’t always the best customers. Money is always tight and anyway the teachers don’t have their hands on the credit card; that’s down in the Bursar’s office because we’re happy to trust our children with you, but not our credit [...]

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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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21st Century Education

A new take on ‘Shift Happens’, but this time with a bit more of an educational focus. Interesting to see this kind of video coming out of a learning system!

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The end of Ning

One of the worrying things about ‘free’ online tools is that one day you may have to pay the price. Which is what is happening at the moment with NING, an online tool that educators have taken a lot of interest in,which announced last month it would be discontinuing its free service. It took me [...]

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