Journeys in Education » ramblings

Happy Birthday to me!!

ldumicich — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:57:07 +0000

So it has been just over a year since I started blooging as a teacher, reflecting on my journey with education. It has been a great year! From overseas trips to NZ and the US on the ACCE study tour to all of my staff completing their ICDL to seeing some great stuff happening in the classroom to particpating in an ICT development network with the Victorian Christian Schools. It has been busy and hectic and an incredible learning curve. In that time I have learnt about the value of a personal learning network, the value of good pedagodgy (how it is not just about the technology), all sorts of technological things (including geocaching!) and how adults learn and the what is the uptake for changing the way teachers teach!

Looking back over my blog it seems to be a very ecclectic mix of posts, from reflections on what I am doing, to conference sessions I have attended, to things I have done on holidays to information pages for Wild Wednesday Workshops at my school. Which really does reflect the wide variety of things that I have learnt and done over the past 12 months.

So what will the next 12 months look like? Who knows but this is what I am going to challenge myself to do

Put in a paper to be considered to present at a conference (although I am not entirely sure what in)
Create an onlilne presence to collate all the good resources and ideas that I come across
Really examine my teaching and student learning and see whaat I can change given the restriction of teaching a final year subject with high stakes assessment
Work how to better inspire teachers to change their pedagodgy at my school

I wont write too long a list as I don’t want to be unrealistic given I only work two days a week!

Anyway to finish I am including a clip of Susan Boyle from Britains got talent singing I dreamed a dream from Les Miserables (My favourite song from my favourite musical) she just goes to show you never know what talent lies beneth the surface. Impartant to remember as a teacher and as a person!

Britains Got Talent 2009 – Susan Boyle

Getting educators involved with using web technology

ldumicich — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:25:50 +0000

I had a very interesting time at a staff meeting on Thursday afternoon. To set the scene…… we have purchased a you-beaut, whiz-bang Learning Management System this year and we were having our first all in staff training session. We had all the teaching staff in a computer lab, a Go-to-Meeting set up with eduKate up in Qld and the lovely Kate from eduKate on the phone for the voice component. The session went for half an hour and to me it seemed fairly simple. But at the end of the meeting there was a few enthusiastic looking staff members and the rest (about 95%) looking at me absolutely shell shocked! At first I wondered why? To me it was nothing new I have been looking at learning management systems for the last year anda half, there has been lots of talk in our local area as well as in our school system about schools getting LMS’s set up and what they were doing with them. The staff had all gone through basic ICT training the precious year, and I had been talking to them about eduKate for the last 4-5 months! I assumed everyone would have a basic understanding of what a LMS is and have the basic ICT confidence to be able to make a start on using it. Hmm I was very wrong as the silence of my staff was overwhelming! But then my lovely Principal jumped up and gave a fantastically reassuring talk to the staff that it was OK to be totally overwhelmed with this and that we have a year to learn how to use it. Immediately the mood changed in the room.

Some things I realised…..only 1 or 2 of the staff (other than the small group of teachers that have commenced expert training) members had actually seen a Learning Management System before and knew what one was! I had assumed (incorrectly) that because staff had completed the ICDL last year that they now had the skills to explore all web 2.0 and ed tech has to offer by themselves. But obviously they don’t! So what to do?? How do I inspire, encourage engage this group of adults to embrace ICT and want to integrate it into their curriculum, to encourage collaboration and to look at Project Based Learning? Without needing constant hand holding?

My current strategy up to now has been to showcase a little bit of everything to the staff and hope that they will pick and use some of it. Whilst this has worked for some people; the people who have a natural tendency and a confidence with technology and aren’t afraid to try new things, it hasn’t worked with many of the staff who have found all sorts of excuses not to use technology in their classroom. I don’t think it has been a deliberate attempt to thwart my efforts but it is borne out of a genuine fear of the failure and a fear of the unknown. Our culture demands that we have the right answers all the time and that we don’t make any mistakes so experimenting with something as ‘risky’ as technology (so much can go wrong) is going to be a major issue for some staff.

So I am changing my strategy some what. I am still going to showcase lots of different web2.0 tech for those staff that are willing to embrace it. But for the staff that are struggling with the leap I am going to encourage them to pick one tool and gain mastery of it. E.g. master the Interactive whiteboard or a class blog or wiki. A tool that is foundational that will lead to the use of other tools. For example if they are using a blog well and then want to pop up some video footage of what they have been doing in class then that will enable them to explore the Flip and You Tube etc, etc. I am also going to resource as much material as I can from educators who are not tech gurus who can inspire my staff that all you have to do is take the first step. Sometimes having someone who they see as an IT geek talking to them all the time does not help as it produces the “well that’s OK for you, you’re good at IT!” response.

I have realised the importance of baby steps and keeping thing simple, and trying a strategy that build confidence and not fear or resentment.

This post has been written on Ideas for getting educators involved with using web technology as part of The Edubloggers birthday celebration competition.

Wordle!!

ldumicich — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:27:02 +0000

Well ages ago when everyone was doing Wordles for their blogs I did one for mine that I really liked but could never post it in my blog until today!! I have trouble with images for some reason….oh well one day I will work it out!! SO here is my wordle! I love that my main words are Students can!!

7 Things Meme

ldumicich — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:09:00 +0000

Wow it has been a while since i have written a blog post, I have been waiting/tossing up as to whether to become a subscriber. (Which I finally took the plunge and did! Now I have to make the most of it!) And trying really hard to think of scintillating things to write has been a problem too! Oh well. Anyway I have been tagged twice to do this 7 things meme by PamelaJ and loisath. I have really enjoyed reading other peoples meme’s and have found out some very interesting things about people. It is amazing what different lives we live and unique interests and experience that we have. It makes for an interesting tapestry of life doesn’t it!

Well here goes my 7 things…..

1. I am the youngest in my family by 16 years. I have 2 older sister and 1 older brother. I was an Auntie when I was two years old and a Great Auntie at 23! My Mum would often get mistaken for being my Grandmother, poor Mum!!

2. I spent most of my childhood years reading books about teachers. I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder the best and must’ve read the books a hundred times. I almost memorised it! When I think back about it it was so obvious I was going to be a teacher!

3. I am a Christian and go to Church regularly. I became a Christian when I was 20 after realising that the party, alcohol and boys lifestyle that I had longed for so much as a teenager was a pretty empty lifestyle to live when I finally gained some freedom at Uni. I found that fulfillment in following Jesus and have never looked back! (I still like parties, alcohol and boys (well one boy anyway, my husband ) just don’t need all of that for true peace!)

4. I absolutely love musicals and have seen lots of stage musicals and movie musicals. I especially love Les Mis and have seen it 8 times including once in the West End. Now all I have to do is see it on Broadway!

5. I was a massive Judy Garland fan as a teenager and in my early 20’s. I was even part of her fan club. I loved her movies and her beautiful singing voice she always sung with such emotion. I would hunt shops for her memorabilia. I still really like her I am just not so extreme about it!

6. I love to sing. I am average at it and really enjoy singing in the choir in Church and the occasional go at being a back up vocalist. I get very nervous when I have to sing by myself and my voice always ends up being very wonky. No problems with talking to large crowds though!!

7. If I wasn’t a teacher I think I would run a travel agent or run a B n B or run my own tour company! I absolutely love travel and love the Mornington Peninsula so would like to combine these somehow?? A winery tour perhaps with a BnB to stay at after the travellers have partaken of the gourmet delights of the region??

OK now the hard part who to tag so many people have already do it?? I tag Colin Becker, Steve Collis, Amanda Rablin, Camilla Elliot, Colin Warren, Suzy Arnott

VITTA conference plus more…

ldumicich — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:01:28 +0000

So I have been incredibly neglectful of my blog over the past couple of months! It has been crazy at school setting up reports for the new semester, completing the timetable (which I haven’t really quite finished yet) finishing off the ICDL, VASS, developing a new college website, handling the implementation of eduKate and general ICT PD and support plus teaching! So tomorrow I am off to the VITTA conference which I am really looking forward to. I can’t wait to catch up with some people I went on the ACCE Study Tour with and to see some new ideas and get some inspiration. I am only attending the Monday and Tuesday of the conference as our reports are due in this Friday and this when staff have the most tweeks and queries on their reports. The conference has free wireless Internet access so I will try and blog each session that I attend. This is what I am planning to attend

1101 LAB: Keynote Address – Shift: Tectonic and granular
1209 LAB DBL: Tablet Notebooks Computers Across the Curriculum
1209 LAB DBL: Tablet Notebooks Computers Across the Curriculum
1410 LECT: Cybersafety in schools
1510 LECT: Blended Learning – a working model
1601 LECT: Open Source for Education
2101 LAB: Games in Learning
2215 LECT: I’ve Got a Blog and a Wiki so What’s Next?
2312 LECT: Google@School: Bringing Google Technology on Campus
2412 LECT: Podcasting :: Ed Tech Crew way – first hand tips and tricks
2516 LECT: Collaborative Student-Centred Learning Using an ePortfolio

2009 Plans

12 Business Management

I am teaching a full class (not job sharing) next year and I am planning how I am going to integrate technology into this subject. We have eduKate next year but I would also like to use an external blog as it has greater functionality and I can collaborate with other classes. This year in Business Management (year 11) I had a central blog and the students had an individual blog. It worked to a point but was hard to set up as our students don’t have school email addresses and of course hotmail, yahoo mail etc are blocked. So I thought that I would set the students up as contributors to a central blog for ease of use!

PD Plans

Well I am going to be busy doing eduKate training but I would also like to continue PDing staff on web2.0 and we also have to keep on with the IWB training. We had a great session the other week from Callie Whelan from Beyond Chalk which was really well received by our staff. I am really incredibly blessed to have a staff who are champing at the bit to integrate ICT and are doing some great things with blogs and wikis! I am planning to use any official meeting times to do eduKate training and then to run some informal sessions on web2.0 during the first 5 weeks of each term.

Well that’s all for now must be off and get ready for tomorrow and of course watch the Australian Idol final. Go Wes!

Encouraging collaboration?????

ldumicich — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:51:53 +0000

So over the holidays I have been thinking of how on earth I can encourage collaboration between teachers at our school and between teachers at our school and other teachers at other schools. Our school is small and traditionally has had many one person departments, for example I was the only Business Management teacher for many years. So there isn’t a strong culture of teachers working together and collaborating on projects or curriculum although in some areas of the school it is starting to change. So my challenge is to encourage teachers to collaborate more, encourage conversation and dialogue about powerful learning all with the purpose of helping staff to integrate ICT into the curriculum and to develop 21st century teaching and learning. I know, I know easy peasy what am I worried about, right????? NOT!!!

So to help with this I am going to get teachers to set their own professional learning goals next year that I will meet with them to help develop and meet at various times during the year to check their progress. I will also tailor the PD that I run/resources I show them etc, etc to their Professional Learning needs.

So to “encourage” staff I thought that I would use a web2.0 platform to run this Professional Learning Program out of and at the same time to encourage some dialogue and perhaps some collaboration. But which one??? A central blog and get all staff to comment on the blog entries at various times? A wiki and use the discussion page for teachers to post their goals and discuss their progress whilst using the wiki pages for resources etc?? A ning where every staff member has a page where they put their goals and can comment on their goals and others as well as add photos and do blog posts etc? Or each staff memeber having their own blog to reflect on their own learning. Too many choices! Or we could do something inhouse via Moodle or eduKate. Or perhaps another format all together. Anyone with any ideas??

On another note all together I thought I had made a decison about the LMS that we are looking at for next year being eduKate however I had somehow all this time overlooked to little but very important words “per annum”! Yes that right I tought the price was a once off price but no it is a per annum price and when I realised that i nearly fell over!! $6500 per year is fairly steep I think. So what do I get for that? I suppose it pays for the help desk support that you wouldn’t get with Moodle and it pays for upgrades but it doesn’t pay for any training which is additional. Now I am totlaly unsure of which way to go as for that amount per annum we could have an absolutley cracking, gorgeous installation of Moodle with lots of bells and whistles. However we wouldn’t get with Moodle the integration with TASS which we use quite heavily and eduKate links directly into our reporting system which is good. If anyone has used either sytem and can offer me some advice that would be great!

Anyway now that I have those questions of my chest back to lovely holidays and PJ days having a lovely relax and unwind from a very hectic year!

Funny….but so apt!

ldumicich — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:15:04 +0000

Found this on hemseeboo’s blog a Mauritian teacher. I really liked it!

Starting to plan for next year

ldumicich — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:30:50 +0000

So I have been at this blogging thing for the last nine months and been at the trying to transform my school thing for about a year (well really 13 years but officially….). What a year it has been! We have gone from a non networked, the odd class doing the odd thing in ICT to a fully networked, IWB’d school with very concrete plans for computers in all P-9 class rooms two and a half labs for the 10-12’s plus Media room facilities, teachers using, blogs, wikis and talking about global collaborations etc. It has been very cool! We still have a long way to go though there are some staff who are really struggling to cope with change, but they are trying very hard and for that I am proud of them. There are still staff who are going to the labs once a term to look at the Internet and therefore ticking off the ICT ‘bit’ of their curriculum and thinking they have done enough. To conquer that will all take time. I am planning next year to sit with every staff member and to help them to set learning goals for themselves to achieve over the next year (just as we expect the students too! Radical hey…not!) then I can direct PD their way through out the year. I would like the teachers to learn about professional learning networks, sometimes being a small school can mean that you tend to stick to your own as your community becomes very small. I would also like to encourage the staff to become contributors themselves, make comments on others blogs, contribute to wikis etc for some reason I think that this is going to be the biggest learning curve of all!

Blog wise I am trying to work out how I would like this blog to appear! I think that trying to espouse my opinion and wax lyrical on educational philosophies is just not me! As much as I would like it to be and I have tried with some posts but basically failed dismally! I think I have worked out that if I keep it true to myself that would probably be the best. (I sound like Anne of Green Gables realizing that she needs to write about Avonliegh and not fanciful romances!! ) so I am going to try to make it about what I am doing and a sounding board for what we are researching in regards to 21st century learning and anything that i see that is interesting. I think that sums up me in a nutshell! I am not a natural writer and one day I would like to take this blog into the podcasting world as I am more of a speaker than a writer, however finding a qiet spot to do that at this point in time maybe more of a challenge.

So what is on the agenda at the moment? Well there is LMS for my school which at the moment I am favoring eduKate, headsets for the whole school, actually getting us officially registered for the ICDL (this has been a ridiculous nightmare admin wise which hopefully will be fixed soon), policy writing for a student email policy, planning next years PD topics idea so far are delicious, RSS and Google reader, Google Docs (or Adobe Buzzword which looks cool), and some basic movie editing seeing as we will hopefully be getting some more Flips next year. As well as the standard IWB training. Am also working on my next newsletter and how to get it viewed in html by a very basic web based email reader. All of that as well as reports, timetable and VASS. Very busy at the moment!! So had best be off and whip those teachers into line (all the way from home!!) as reports are due today!

It’s all in the planning

ldumicich — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:13:25 +0000

Well today our ICT committee meet to review our 5 year strategic plan for ICT across the college. It has been a year since we developed the plan and I cannot believe the incredible learning curve that I have been on. The college too has seen some great changes we have Interactive Whiteboards, teachers and students using a variety of blogs, staff increasing their ICT skills, Photo story being used, teachers who had never used technology starting to use technology and think about it, we have networked the college and have a very high uptake on staff laptops. It has been great. But there is still some areas that I would like to see change in. Number one is staff looking at teaching and learning in a 21st century context, and a movement from such a didactic model of teaching and learning to a more project based way of teaching or a constructivist approach where appropriate. The other area is the skill development of students. I am currently working on my thinking in this area. What is the best way for students to learn ICT? Is it by integrating it into the curriculum solely or do we still need specific, directed, targeted skills development? Or do we need a mix of the two? At this moment I am leaning towards having a mix of the two. I liken it to my ability to play basketball. I love playing the game but I took it up as an adult (therefore I am a basketball immigrant) so I missed out on all the skill development that I would’ve recieved as a child learning the game. I played netball as a child and therefore some of the skills are quite transferable however I find that my dribbling is well below average as are some of my understanding about the strategies of the game. I really need some serious skill development if I am ever going to play the game well. I suspect that is the same with ICT it is good to intgrate the skill developlement into projects and lessons but I wonder how much more effective student would be in their ICT use with periods of concentrated skill development. SO we do we achieve this without teachers then falling back into old ways by saying ‘well the kids are getting their ICT in that subject so I don’t have to bother with it?’ How do we develop skills and change thinking. Most importantly how do we paln for this? So what I am looking for is students who have a great foundation of transferable ICT skills that arfe further enhanced and developed by what they are doing in their individual subjects. not asking much really! Hope my ICT committee has the answers!

Second Life, Real Life and other musings

ldumicich — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:56:00 +0000

So call me crazy, call me a plebe but I don’t get all the fuss that is being made about Second Life! Don’t get me wrong I can see how it can be used as a good way to meet online and run professional development, I can see how could be used in education for some powerful learning activities (MaggieMarat’s presentation at NECC about students and body image was a great example) but I am not sure that I get why you would want to do more than that? Why do you want to spend your real life living in an online, virtual world? It is hard enough as a Christian to be not of this world, but in it John 17:14-16 but then to be not of this world but be in it in a virtual world, it does my head in! Also wonder about why it is exciting to ‘do’ things in world when really you are just sitting at a computer operating a keyboard and mouse. I think it is more exciting to do real things, see people and talk to them in the real world. I know, I know that makes me not a real ICT purist and with that I am very happy. I do like to meet (or at least see) people that I have an online relationship with. I think it enriches the online relationship greatly. I also wonder about the loss on inhibitions that can happen in a virtual environment. I have seen students gain incredible amounts of confidence when online and for some it gives them a voice that was previously unheard which is great, however when people feel like they can throw away normal moral boundaries, be a bit flirty, be a bit of a bully or generally behave in manner that they would never do in real life what happens then? Is that OK? Are you still answerable for your actions in Second Life or is it amoral because you don’t know the real person? I think as tools such as Second Life are embraced in education serious discussion needs to take place about educating students about appropriate online behaviors and moral consequences.

Enough confused ramblings now onto the task of Learning Management Systems and a ICT resource wiki!