Playing for change

It has been Social Justice Week at our school this week. It finishes today with a lunchtime debate between students and staff. Many students and staff are part of a variety of small, and not so small, activities/actions. Be it collecting mobile phones to help protect the habitat of gorillas or collecting money for East Timor, from being [...]

Mr Winkle and the 21st century education debate

From the Bright Ideas Blog,a video of an old story retold. Rip Van Winkle wakes up and goes wandering around the world as it exists today. He finds many changes but some things not so diferrent.
Created as a conversation starter for professional development on the use of educational technology.

This is a great and [...]

Searching with Google – new options

After the launch of Wolfram Alpha, or perhaps because of it, Google has enhanced its search facilities.
I like always to use the Advance Search and try to explain to students about the benefits. I don’t get into all classes and they can forget so the new searching options are a further guide to making a search more [...]

Useful Links (weekly)

50 Tips, Tweaks and Hacks to Make the Most of Google Calendar | Virtual Hosting Blog A good list of productivity tips and tricks using Google Calendar.

Alltop – Top Children’s Literature News Compilation of great children’s literature news. Offers links as well.

9 Amazing Software Mashups – Killer Free Apps that Work Better Together | Maximum PC Some useful [...]

Authors given voice (and video)

Writers Talk 2009 is being put up onto the web. WritersTalk 2008 and WritersTalk 2007 are also still online and well worth investigating. These sites offer a greate resource to everyone interested in writing, YA Writing and just how different authors go about their task. So far,  Tohby Riddle, Randa Abdel-Fattah, James Roy and Mark McLeod have [...]

Some interesting new trailers

Still looking at trailers, especially book trailers, so that I can build up a bank to use as examples for students. They are also a great way to promote books to our students. They grab attention and arouse curiosity and can start some good conversation as well. One trailer that my colleague Tania Sheko liked [...]

Better presentations.

I helped to assess year 8 presentations just over a week ago. One class used PowerPoint others created videos to assist them in their class presentations. Some were excellent, some less so. I know that many teachers still ask students to create a PowerPoint document and I wondered how much instruction is given to the [...]

Wolfram Alpha and information searching

Wolfram Alpha, announced on morning TV today and on everyone’s lips as the news got around. Earlier this week a tweet alerted me to this new kind of search engine and I watched a demonstration screencast about how it might work.

The statements about “killing” Google that are going around seem, to me,  to be a bit silly. Wolfram [...]

Useful Links (weekly)

Eon, by Alison Goodman Interesting site to add to the narrative in the books

Alison Goodman: author of Eon: Dragoneye Reborn and The Two Pearls of Wisdom The journal section of Alison’s site

Ideabook.com Tutorials | Graphic file formats A tutorial about vector bitmap resolutions etc (Saxaphone image article) 

TwitterFox – Firefox extension for Twitter This extension adds a tiny icon on [...]

Same book, different titles

I am often a little bemused as to just how publishers make decisions. Take Alison Goodman’s latest YA book. In Australia it was published as The Two Pearls of Wisdom. As this title it won or was been nominated for a number of wards. In January The Two Pearls of Wisdom won the 2008 Aurealis Award for [...]