Wednesday, October 08, 2008

ULearn08 Day One

Tony Ryan's ULearn08 workshop today on roles for the transformational teacher gave me some much needed energy after a very early start due to cancelled flights. He showed part of the Where the Hell is Matt? dance video which I'd seen before but is worth seeing again.



Some things from Tony's presentation that struck a chord with me were the need to develop awareness of self-talk in our students, developing active listening skills and the need for more educational intrepeneurs, innovating from within our schools.

He asked what I felt was a very valid question about the percentage of time we engage in positive dialogue about education. It is very easy to get caught up with what is wrong. There is so much we can celebrate, with many great things going on in and out of classrooms. We need to share these more.

The Ulearn08 tweets are providing some more thoughts on the conference, some valuable, some not so much . How many pens people have does seem to be getting a lot of attention. Not hooked on Twitter but have made some valuable links with other educators and definitely providing some links to resources.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Just started using Twitter. Have resisted in the past because it seemed to be a place where there was a whole lot of chat about what people had for lunch or similar inanities, but it seems I was not doing it justice. There seems to be a thriving educational community who are twittering. I've already picked ups some useful resources. I think maybe the short posts might suit me better. As you may have noticed I'm not a consistent blogger but Twitter seems a little easier so maybe I'll use it more, time will tell.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

I saw a video by Michael Wesch today which is worth a watch. He is the guy who put together The Machine is Us/ing Us. It is called 'A Portal to Media Literacy' and examines assumptions about information and how students get meaning from their education and how they can make meaningful connections.



The video is just over an hour long so you need to set aside some time to watch it. In the video he talks about a project he does with his students and there is also a video about that: 'Twitter and the World Simulation". This is only about 4 minutes long.