A rather pleasant and unexpected outcome of the classroom and individual blogging has been the things I have learnt about our students. I check the individual blogs of my students most weekends and I have had the most extraordinary insights into who they really are. The powerful thing about this is that the incidental, personal things I have discovered, are the things that make the students who they are. They are the previously unknown things that they bring to school with them each day, and influence whether they are going to be happy and settled, or upset and distracted.

For instance, I have learnt that:
• one student goes rodeo riding when he goes to stay with his dad
• another student travels to Queensland every now and then, to see her dad
• despite being “all grown up” on the outside, most of the kids adore their pets and have an amazing soft spot for them
• most of the children “blog” with a very mature sense of responsibility and an enormous sense of pride
• several of them are involved in sports outside the usual high profile footy and netball
• one student loves blogging because she enjoys sharing what she has been through
• one student shot a wild boar last weekend, which was chasing his uncle in Pooncarie
• another can now “jump” his motorbike without falling off
• another student is sad about his cat Shadow dying and wrote a beautiful poem dedicated to him on his blog

I love reading the student’s blogs and most of all, they love when somebody leaves a comment. Blogging is the most exciting and authentic tool I have used in my entire teaching career (almost 28 years). I appreciate the privelage of getting to know my students more and I know that they enjoy sharing parts of my journey as well.

MPS students love creating digital animations.

Here are some examples of their work.

Power Point Animations

View Animation

Second Life is a virtual world. You download the software to your lap top and then you can enter this world. When you do, your avatar represents you. An avatar is a digital representation of yourself. When you select this avatar you have to give it a name. I named my avatar Mazarine Rhode. I have just spent an hour or so changing Mazarine’s look from this:

to this:

Of course she looks nothing like me (I have blonde hair and wear red glasses!) but that’s part of the fun of it. You can change all sorts of details of your avatar - the size and shape of any body part, how far or narrow set the eyes are, skin colour, freckles, height, weight etc. I must prefer Mazarine’s new look! I hadn’t spent much time playing around with appearance until now. Now I’m ready to party!

A few weeks ago I went into Second Life with a few other teachers from the OZ/NZ Educators network. It was a session for newbies like me. We spent the time on the island of Jokaydia. I took a quick video so you can see a very little bit of what Second Life looks like - in an art gallery! I recorded this with SMART Recorder and the quality isn’t great, but it will give you a bit of an idea if you are interested!

I never thought I’d be really interested in this sort of thing. I’m not into computer games at all, and so I didn’t think I’d like it. But, it’s great fun, and there is heaps of potential for education and business! People are making real money in Second Life doing all sorts of things. Lots of conferences on all themes are held in Second Life. Just search ’second life conferences’ in Google and there will be a whole bunch listed.

I am hoping to spend some more time in SL and start thinking about using virtual worlds for language learning. I’m a member of the Second Classroom Ning, a social network for educators interested in students using virtual worlds. I’ll keep you updated…

What a difference a few months of working with the web 2.0 tools can make to students and teachers alike. Prior to being introduced to these amazing tools of trade by our two dynamos Anne and Jess, project presentations were somewhat tedious to say the least.

At the start of the term, when I proposed the idea of a “project” and brainstormed methods of presenting them, the preferred option for students were posters or books! I was horrified.
That’s when I made the decision to hop onto the blogging wave which was swamping our school. The students all had their own blogs, and they had in place some of the tools that became pivotal to our progress. Once my home internet was reconnected and I could access the technology from home again, it was all go, go, go.

The students helped design our presentation rubric, where we explicitly pin pointed the things that made a presentation a “good one”. Then we brainstormed a number of ways in which we could use these tools of technology, to help us enhance our projects. The results have been amazing.
The students have used:
• Powerpoint – and then slideshare to embed their presentations in their own blogs
• Smartboards and wireless mouse (does anybody else have their tongue out the side of their mouths, or feel like they have had a stroke while using this? )
• Photostory
• Podcasts
• Video interviews and role play
• Voicethread interviews
• Quizzes using “mystudiyo”
• Voting – using “polldaddy “ and “zoho”
• And of course, the faithful old wordfind and crossword puzzles
Below is a quiz created by one of our students, who did a brilliant presentation on Albert Einstein. Tzigane created this quiz using polldaddy and it was a huge success. It was the finale of her presentation. She chose the same number of children as she had questions and as each child got the answer correct, she issued them with a lollypop.