Heyjude’s posterous

Learning in an online world 

Beecroft bush in the holidays

January is a time to stay at home for us this year, but it's still holiday time in Beecroft.  If you jump over our back fence you could scramble along the dry creek bed to meet up with the part of the bush at the bottom of Day Road in Cheltenham (edge of Malton Road). Once at the bottom of Day Road, you  can walk down the bush track that connects to the Great North Walk which is a 250 km walking track that runs between  Sydney to Newcastle. Phew!

The Great North Walk was developed from Gary McDougall's and Leigh Shearer Heriot's proposal for a 'Sydney to Hunter Track', consisting of about 300km of walking tracks, submitted to the Australian Bicentennial Authority in 1988. I have been told that it incorporates a few convict tracks along part of its route, but I have only ever walked parts closest to home.  It is estimated that more than 40,000 local, interstate and international visitors use the walk annually, either taking the challenge of the full 12-16 day hike or enjoying shorter walks of one or two days in different sections of the walk.

The bush is very solitary - yet you also meet lots of people walking or on bikes along the way.

Here are some mobile phone shots of the walk near home.

       
Click here to download:
Beecroft_bush_in_the_holidays.zip (1611 KB)

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Beginning our Powerful Learning

This morning 5 wonderful teachers and myself began our journey into Powerful Learning in the 21st century.

We are attending the official launch of the Australian cohort of the international Powerful Learning Practice program being run Sheryl Nussbaum Beach and Will Richardson.

Welcome to my fellow teachers from Joeys, and enjoy the next 12 months on this wonderful rollercoaster pedogogical journey.

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Back to [Virtual] School

The most recent issue of EDUCAUSE has a fantastic focus on Virtual Worlds in their Back to [Virtual] School issue Volume 43, Number 5, September/October 2008.

"Whether it is Second Life or another virtual world, this foundational movement is not going away. The question to be addressed in the coming months and years is how higher education and, subsequently, individual institutions will determine the best way to continue to move forward with virtual worlds"

I highly recommend a read. I have grabbed for myself the PDF copies of "Virtual Worlds? Outlook Good" and "Educational Frontiers: Learning in a Virtual World". You might like to pick out other articles for yourself.

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Good intentions win the (Second Life) day!

I love our online technology world!!  This morning I was up and online at 6 am for the ISTE Webinar From Good Intentions to Best Practice: Teaching with Second Life in Middle School.  I was ready to listen to Peggy Sheehy (Maggie Marat) from Ramapo Island talk about her Second Life work - Peggy inspired the Aussie crowd at NECC, so i knew I would be hanging on her every word . The presentation was all about kids researching, building, discussing, creating, exploring and more, with teachers who are taking excellent pedagogy from their classrooms into a virtual world - in which students can extend their understanding and learning in many different subject areas.

Peggy reminded us that teacher preparation is vital. We need to Get Informed: read second life press and forums; read SL education wikis; and belong to SLED - the educator's email listserve. We need Experience: get a SL account; tour popular places; visit educators spaces for collaboration and join groups; and start to learn to build simple objects. We need to Develop: identify a learning objective; build curriculum with appropriate space!

She explained that we are not looking for extra time in curriculum, but looking for opportunities to move existing curriculum into a space that will engage students in a more powerful way. We still need structure, feedback and quality assessment.  Second Life is an equaliser - reticent students blossom and converse and contribute. It's the teacher strategies that count!  The skills learned carry right back into the real world classroom, and both students and parents are reporting profound benefits from having a learning environment that incorporates Second Life.

There was a great deal of superb information in this ISTE Webinar. Follow Peggy's work Ramapo - Suffern Middle School in Second Life

           

Click here to download:
Good_intentions_win_the_Second.zip (114 KB)

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Write a book in a day!

Today we embarked on our first Write A Book In A Day competition. Five teams, ten boys in each team, were set the challend to create a book from scratch - write, illustrate and publish a story of no less than 4000 words.  The paramaters of this competition are set by the Katharine Susanna Pritchard Foundation, an organisation that supports writing and writers in Australia. The parameters for each story include 3 characters, one male, one female and one non-human, a  setting, an issue and five random words!! The rest is up to the creativity of the students. Write a Book in a Day is a fundraising activity, and the judging is undertaken by an Australian author.


We had an amazing day! thanks to my dynamo teacher librarian, Joan. She has run this activity at her previous school for two years now, so it was great to have this happen for us at Joeys in 2008.

We're looking forward to joining the national competition in 2009.

 


   
Click here to download:
Write_a_book_in_a_day.zip (246 KB)

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Check the image!

Righto...lets see if a jpg works differently on Posterous, compared to a tga file!  Why did I choose a tga file?  Silly chicky - that's a file good for Second Life..not for blogs :-)

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So cool, so easy!

Naturally, I am now testing the other bits of fun associated with Posterous.   Well, I am using my Gmail account, because my work email sends to Posterous all the privacy stuff that we have at the bottom of our emails. Now, to test sending a pic along with the post.

Here's a pic from my phone.  Oh, and we can't send stuff via SMS from OZ yet...unless we dial to the UK.  Sometimes, just sometimes, it might be worth it.  Otherwise via email is pretty cool.

So this is crossposting to my blog, twitter, and of course to Posterous. Nice  :-)

Click here to download:
River.tga (768 KB)

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Innovation these days? New tools new options!

I've just set up a posterous account via email, and it totally blew me away. This is the quickest thing on earth to set up and get kids blogging. It's the quickest thing on earth for cross posting. Well, I just like it ...it's fun.

What's more you can attach any type of file and we'll post it along with the text of your email.
We'll do smarter things for photos, MP3's, documents and video links

I'm off to test this with an email right now!!  Cool.  Thanks to Maureen for sending me a recommendation :-)

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The trouble with innovation is..

that it can be so simple, or so hard...but either way it is about change!

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