My Bright and Shiny VITTA Evening

Yes I was totally surprisd and I want to thank Jo McLeay for doing such a wizard job of getting to the VITTA conference dinner thinking I would see all my NECC pals and then having her get up and make a speech about me. What a fantastic and memorable way to finish off what has been a very up and down year. I have only a few days to go in my old job in the state system and after 29 years in the same school, I am definitely leaving with a whole lot of mixed emotions and I will miss my dear friends and hard working government teachers who struggle so hard against huge odds to do a wonderful job for kids.

But as this blog is a large testament to, my view on schooling has changed so much that I cannot sit and wait for things and people to catch up with the changes anymore and I am taking my plans and dreams and heading off into the sunset - or as many have said going across to the dark side. I am so excited about next year and I hope that my expectations are not unrealistic and that I can meet the school's expectations too.

So, thankyou so much Jo and VITTA for the award, and Upwey for allowing me to grow and explore all this new and challenging frontier in education. What a way to finish one chapter in my life !

Cartoons and Comic Life

Tap Into The World Of Comics

View more documents from S. Hendy.

It seems my life has been all about Comic Life recently This is a video that has been made to help teachers who are training to use netbooks and are wondering how to use Comic life Thanks to a very easy session with Russ Blackwell who filmed the session with my class working beautifully behind me

Comic Life in the English teacher's classroom from Rusty Gates on Vimeo.

I also gave a presentation at the second EMUG meeting on the 29th October at Mooroolbark SC about Comic Life and the work my class was doing while the film was being shot was shown as examples. Great fun and I hope it has some impact for kids in classes as it is a wonderful tool. If you are interested in learning more about Comic life, Deb hicks has created this stunning wiki and Russ Blackwell is developing a great repository of ideas and training films on this wiki I will try and put some of the kids work on here too.

My friend Julie also was filmed on the day talking about Comic Life and how she has been using it in LOTE classrooms and here is her movie.

Emug No2

Great Quotes about Teaching - a Flickr Group Slideshow

Techy tips for non techy teachers and even techy ones too!!

Just discovered this great site created by Mark Warner who I met in America last year. It is called Ideas to Inspire and  it is full of great ideas and resource suggestions . This slideshow is fabulous - well worth taking a look. Well done Mark!!!

Unnamed 09/04/2009

• Teaching Resources | Media Education Lab

  tags: aup, medialiteracy

• Teaching Literature: Lord of the Flies vs. The Hunger Games

  tags: literature, Hungergames, Lordoftheflies, reading, comparison, YA_lierature

• Photojojo's Photo Time Capsule

  Photojojo's PhotoTimeCapsule Setup the Time Capsule with your email & Flickr account. (60 seconds, tops) Twice a month, enjoy an email with your photos from a year ago.

  tags: flickr, photos, photography, photojojo, timecapsule, nostalgia, web

• Home (GoogleApps ePortfolios)

  tags: e-portfolio, google, portfolios

• 10 free tools to help you create online presentations - Teaching, Learning, Information Technology Tools

  Good list of tools for creating presentations.

  tags: tools, presentations, lists, eci831tools, eci831

• Get Going with Google Apps In Your School by Lisa Nielsen

  tags: google, googleapps

• 100 Essential Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers

  tags: web2.0, resources, technology, top100

• 10 Great Classroom Icebreakers

  10 Great Classroom Icebreakers

  tags: icebreakers

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Emug, iphones and Ulearn

Life moves on sometimes slowly, sometimes imperceptibly and then you stop and consider and things have happened which should be noted. Emug has begun - we had our first meeting last Thursday at Ringwood North Primary School and Mark Richardson and Deb Hicks from the western Macschoolsnet group came along to give their blessing and their advice for our fledgling and help us get started. For a group that sent out ning invites by twitter and a fairly small number of channels we now have 107 members for the ning and we had thirty people turn up for our first meeting. It was lovely to have such a good start and Adam Brice has done a superb job in getting the ning on the go and organising the meeting.

 

The recent storms took their toll as a tree fell on our cubby- a place that was a favourite play area for our girls when they were growing up. In a moment it was gone as the earth heaved and a beautiful old tree fell  and crushed it completely - the cleanup will take a while .

I have finally been able to upgrade to an iphone and I am having such fun learning how to use it and make the most of this amazing little device. It is incredible- video, camera and voice recording plus apps plus a phone - I am loving the apps and how many more productivity tools I can make use of... 

As the term draws to an end the number of conference flyers coming to me has increased, but the one I am most interested in is Ulearn in Christchurch in New Zealand in October. I have applied for a study scholarship from the school council and am hoping to have the opportunity to visit all my tweetbuddies over there and see some of the great ideas they are working on.