Planet thinked

As one of the culminating activities of this term’s Inquiry Unit “Who Makes The Rules?”, my and my co-planning partner’s classes are heading into the heart of Adelaide for a tour of our state’s Parliament House with our local member of Parliament being our guide. Two classes together makes for nearly sixty students which is too many for a tour all at once. So, we will be going in two groups an hour apart which leaves one group to pursue another activity - a walking trail that ties in with major points of interest nearby.

So, borrowing heavily from resources on the Adelaide Unplugged website, I put together a trail that looks at a number of significant buildings and momuments while checking out some of the intriguing outdoor art within that part of the Adelaide CBD. I’d like to share the Trail documents I’ve created but I’ve copied remixed quite a bit of content that can’t really be posted online. However, if you are a teacher in Adelaide and are interested in seeing what I’ve concocted, drop me a virtual line.

I used Google Maps to create a map to guide our Trail and when Maria (my co-planning buddy) and I were working out the exact route, it was a great tool to use Street View to be really sure of what we wanted the students to take in. When we wanted to work out how to get back from the front of the South Australian Museum across to the Festival Centre, zooming right in to see the backs of buildings and possible pathways removes a lot of the guesswork. The only thing we can’t be totally sure of is whether we can cover the whole Trail in the hour!

View Larger Map

Not every learning experience needs to be technology loaded, but using Google Maps does make sure that the hands on excursion involves a lot less guesswork.

Our very first online conference is fast approaching. The WMR Ultranet Team has been sponsored by the Knowledge Bank, DEECD to host an online conference.

The purpose of our conference is to support our teachers and leaders in the Western Metropolitan Region, as well as others from around the state and globe. Our three key themes are Create, Collaborate and Communicate. Our program is designed around these themes with a look at tools such as wikis and blogs, digital stories, mobile technologies, and strategies around thinking, cyber-safety, budgeting and resourcing for effective eLearning.

We have some wonderful presenters lined up with Kym Nadebaum as our keynote presenter. Kym’s session “The Song Remains the Same” is sure to raise as many ICT questions as it answers. Other presenters include Anne Mirtschin, Stephen Palmer, Tony Richards, Peter Davis, Trudy Brentnall, Louise Bowe, Rob Pyers, Colin Schot and Martin Mielimaka and the Ultranet Team.

Our online presentations run between October 7th and 9th. To support these sessions we have also planned hands on workshops between October 21st and 30th. So I guess, it is a hybrid - virtual and f2f.

A full program can be seen on our Ning and on our wiki. You can also join our Ning and create your own profile.

A poster can be seen here - now-conference-poster.

Hope others can make it too

I’ve encountered some funny “nude moment” incidents in primary school libraries.

During the furore of Pamela Allen’s Mr McGee (he of the “biting flea” picture book fame) getting shortlisted by the CBCA for getting his pants off a few years ago, someone on this list announced that she’d made him a lovely pair of yellow tissue-paper underpants. We never did find out if she was
joking. I wonder if the wretched nude castaway of Armin Greder’s “The Island” also sports fashions from the House of McGee at that school?

At my previous school, there was an extremely popular donated yearbook of Australian photojournalism in the library, and it was always being found hidden under a chair, or with the “Where’s Wally” and “Goosebumps” books behind the heaters. Eventually I realised it must have had something controversial inside, so I held the spine in my hand and let the book fall open at its most-used pages - and my trick revealed a rather lovely distance shot of Bondi Beach’s topless bathing end. Cleverly framing the shot was a closeup of a blurred naked female breast..

Eventually, someone destroyed the photo with a Texta and I tried removing the page in an attempt to give the rest of the book a bit more life. Several months later, I realised that the so-called “offending photo” was actually also shown, in a much smaller size, on the book’s cover - and nobody had ever noticed, even though the breast wasn’t as blurry in that smaller size.

One of the things that I have found in my career is that there is always a stack of ‘reasons’ or ‘excuses’ for not being able to do something or to believe in something. This week was interesting and I found myself listening to the ‘but’ word over and over, and almost felt defeated by it.

I watched Kevin Kelly tonight on TED and what he said very much resonated with me. He said we ‘have to get better at believing the impossible’.

I feel I am an optimistic person, some might think naïve possibly. However, without believing that things can be done we will give up on trying to make them happen. Like with new technologies and new ideas. Why can’t we have laptops in classrooms? I’ve had them in my rooms. Why is this so hard for others to believe this possible? Why can’t we use the web2.0 for learning? Predators, paedophiles? Surely there is more than that out there for our students. Some believers are using blogs and online technologies to the highest advantage for student learning, whilst others ‘are not ready’.

I like to believe in the impossible and to give things a go. I think this is what makes education rich and authentic. And I applaud the teachers who are out there doing what most people say they can’t

‘Most games are lost, not won‘ ~ Casey Stengel.

It’s that time of year. All manner of sports are culminating in that one final Saturday (or Sunday, but Saturday seems to be the cultural, ideological ‘day’ for stuff like this, so let’s not bicker, eh?) when two teams meet for one final, ultimate gladiatorial contest to see who earns the right to hold aloft that premiership token at the end.

Yes, it’s Grand Final season, and all over the place various sports have been winding up with grand final matches played on various weekends. Junior footy has drawn to a close, the netball season has concluded last weekend, and soccer and baseball wind up this weekend.

The last three weeks I’ve been to catch a few of them. Some of the boys from previous years kept me relatively up to date with their footy team’s progress, and three weeks ago I heard they had won their first final by a point. Their reward? A play off to reach the grand final the week after. Against a team they were fully expecting to be belted by. So I wandered down to watch them play a final and that would be that.

But they won. They held them out from the beginning and were never headed, and won their way into the grand final by five points. Yes, that stuffed up my following Saturday.

They played off the following week (half the kids missing for training because we sent the 5/6 grade to camp for the week!) in the grand final against the team that has been undefeated all season. And were done by eleven goals. In fact, their only goal came in the last quarter, but did we cheer it home when it sailed through!

You don’t go to watch the kids win, you go to watch them play.

So this morning, football over for the year, one of my class kids made it through to the soccer grand final. They were going for back to back premierships. I don’t particularly enjoy soccer, but I like the kid, so I wandered in to have a look.

A nil all draw at full time, so five minutes either end to decide the premiership.

Ten minutes later, nil all draw again, so both teams were awarded the joint premiership instead. To me, a suitable conclusion. Neither team deserved to lose after such a game, although they’ll need to get a second cup and set of medallions.

Sometimes victory is not letting the other bloke win.

Which brings us to tomorrow… a few of the kids play their baseball grand finals. I’ll have to find out Monday morning how they fare though. Father’s Day is tomorrow, and I doubt I could adequately explain to the old man why a bunch of 9 year olds pushed him out on his special day.

The Stage 2 students and I had a great time this week writing up their sports reports for the Beijing Olympics & Book Week 2008. They came to the library with their class teacher (who is brand new to rapping) - usually we’ve had two rotating groups instead, but with the industrial action of yesterday morning, there were lots of students still absent in the afternoon.

We went through the key elements of a newspaper sports report/article, using the supplied Rap Sheet, then read and analysed the “Kiwis vs Wallabies” report from The Shaggy Gully Times by Jackie French & Bruce Whatley. When it came time to break into writing groups, the students were highly motivated, and they were so empowered whenever they made up a clever pun. Of course, it really helped that one of the students was fresh off the plane from her recent visit to Beijing - and that the extremely fast gold-medal winning Jamaican athlete she told us about had the highly punny surname of Bolt!

By the way, it only occurred to us later why that Shaggy Gully football match was being played at night!

Yes, it’s been a a busy term, but traditionally Term Three always is in school libraries: Book Week, National Literacy & Numeracy Week, and all that.

Rap Point 2 stretched across two weeks this time, on purpose, and it was also okay to post a bit late, since each school in the rap tends to work at a different pace. There had been a few new schools only just starting to look around the pages and/or noticing the newer messages on earlier rap points.

I decided to concentrate on prediction that week. I like to get the students to anticipate what might be coming next, so we predicted how we would:
* find the rap blog, with which search terms (eg. on Google)
* recognise our post from last week (ie. look out for school crest avatar).

Also, we predicted the contents of the page of The Shaggy Gully Times we’d be reading in the rap session. I asked one group of students to make predictions as to what they’d see inside the local newspaper when I unrolled it (fresh from my front lawn). Local newspapers are a great free resource, and many times they only get noticed by the students when they are asked to clean out the budgies’ cage, or collect newspapers for covering school desks during art, or when making papier mache.

The students were very engaged in skimming the layout, quickly identifying and confirming almost all their predictions about the newspaper. The standard of talking and listening was very pleasing - they were perceptive, and supportive of each other’s earlier ideas.

I hope this is an activity they will be able to repeat with their parents. (And that the newspaper they choose doesn’t have too many full page ads for local attractions such as “Wild Boys Afloat”, etc.) Several students reported recently that they’d personally gone online and shown their parents the current rap blog on their home Internet computers. One girl said, “I even printed out the page that had my name and comment on it.”