I don’t normally make requests like this but if you are reading this and you teach using any sort of Interactive Whiteboard, I have a small favour to ask…
I am currently in the middle of writing a book about the use of IWBs in schools. I’m actually co-authoring it with Mal Lee, an ex-principal and one of the most knowledgeable guys around when it comes to interactive whiteboard research. Mal and I are trying to finish the book over the next few weeks (we have an actual book contract with the Australian Council for Educational Research… with a real deadline and everything!) It aims to be an overview guide looking at the appropriate pedagogy and logistical considerations to think about when you become an IWB user. We are trying to keep the book as brand-agnostic as possible, even though we are aware that the majority of readers will be on either a SmartBoard or an Activboard. The real focus is on pedagogy, logistics and other practical classroom considerations.
Here’s where you come in…
I would really love to include some highlights in the book with short examples from teachers all over the world about how they work with their IWBs. Mini case studies if you will. They don’t have to be long and involved, but if you teach regularly with an IWB I would love to hear from you with respect to the following questions. Don’t feel you have to answer all of them… in fact they are really just prompters to get you thinking. I’d be happy for you to write about any aspect of teaching with an IWB that you feel is relevant or important to you.
In what ways has an IWB affected your classroom and how you teach?
What do you see as the three biggest advantages of teaching with an IWB?
What advice would you offer to teachers just starting out with an IWB?
Describe the process you use when you develop teaching resources for your IWB.
How do your students respond to the IWB?
What is the most innovative thing you’ve ever seen done on an IWB?
Remember these are just starting points. Anything you want to write is fine. No more than 500 words please.
Since you know I’m planning to include these in the book, I will assume that if you write something then you give me permission to include your response in the book. If there are any special conditions you’d like to ask for, please let me know. I’m not in a position to pay you anything, but naturally I will give you full credit for your contribution. If you do want to write something, I’d need it within the next week.
If you’d like to help out, please send me your contributions to chris@betcher.org, or just add it as a comment at the end of this post if you’d prefer.
One of the new year’s resolutions that Linda and I made for 2008 is to try and be a little kinder to the planet; whether that be to walk and cycle more instead of driving, to buy products that are more environmentally friendly, or to make an effort to generate less waste… even small changes may help the planet. If we can encourage a few others to do the same, it may help even more.
There are plenty of great stories about the Power of One… the effect that one person can have if the ripples from their actions spread far enough to influence others. One of the great Power of One stories is that of Earth Hour.
Earth Day started in Sydney last year with an idea that if we simply turned our lights off for one hour the overall effects could be substantial. Of course, it was a symbolic gesture more than anything else, but on 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. During this single hour, the collective effort of turning off the lights reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2%, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road. What started as a grassroots community idea quickly took hold among the corporate and government sectors, proving that a simple idea like turning the power off for an hour can gather enough momentum to make a noticable difference and raise awareness of the problems our planet faces.
In 2008, Sydney wants to spread the Earth Hour concept to the rest of the world, turning a symbolic event into a global movement. In 2008, other cities around the world will join Sydney - Copenhagen, Toronto, Christchurch, Tel Aviv, Chicago, and many others - and at 8pm on March 29 will turn off the lights for an hour.
Although I live here in Sydney, I don’t watch a lot of news so I never heard about Earth Hour last year until it was over. However, if it was being talked about in the blogosphere I probably would have known about it… so this year I want to put it out there, and ask you to pass it on. If you think it sounds like a good idea, tell others about it. Blog about it. Get your own city to do it. Do it yourself. But especially, tell your students about it.
This is a wonderful, simple idea to share with your students. It can make them feel part of a global movement, but more importantly it demonstrates that individuals CAN come up with simple, sharable ideas that make a difference.
The Education Network Australia, or Edna for short, recently did a little survey of why people blog (or don’t blog) as part of their eLearning Insights series. They did it on their Vox Pop service, a rather neat little web app that enables people to record an audio grab directly to a widgety thing on the page, a little like Evoca or Voicethread. This sort of technology is neat because you can embed audio into a page without the need for special software and there is no messing about with uploading files, etc. How very Web 2.0…
I left a comment on the service, but I was also quite intrigued to hear everyone else’s responses to the question. Those who blogged regularly seemed to focus on the idea of community, collaboration, conversation and the whole idea of “wisdom of crowds” thinking. I thought the responses of those who didn’t blog were rather interesting though, with reasons ranging across not enough time, finding it all too revealing and personal, and not thinking they had anything to say.
Anyway, it’s worth a listen if you get a few minutes. Click the link below to play the audio…
Today is Australia Day here in Down Under land. It celebrates the arrival of the first fleet into Botany Bay, marking the beginning of white mans’ occupation of Terra Nullius - literall meaning “Empty Land”. Quite a large presumption really, and to the aboriginal people who had already lived here for over 40,000 years it was not quite such a cause for celebration. Even today, Australia’s indigenous population still refer to it as Invasion Day. Anyway, that could be the subject of a whole other discussion …
The point is that January 26 in Australia is celebrated as Australia Day and a quick visit to the Google Australia home page at www.google.com.au has the Google logo swapped out for another one with an Australian theme. Swapping the Google logo for temporary logos derived from the original one is not new… Google does it all the time and you can browse the collection of past special logos in their Holiday Logo gallery.
The logo being used today is a little different… it was designed by Janelle San Juan, a Year 6 student at the School of the Good Shepherd, in Victoria, Australia. Janelle’s logo was chosen from a competition run by Google Australia called Doodle for Google. Watch the video below to find out more about the logo, the competition and how it all happened.
You can see from watching the video that it must have been a wonderful experience for the students involved, getting them to create and collaborate on an authentic, real world task that was not just about producing work to make the teacher happy but rather to meet a genuine design brief for a genuine problem for a genuine company with the opportunity for their solution to be displayed to a genuine audience. We need to think about how we can create more opportunities for this type of learning in our classrooms.
Congratulations to Janelle and all the other kids who took part, and good on you Google Australia for running the contest. We need more of this sort of thing.
The Kiwis got there a few hours before us, but Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations have come and gone for another year. Linda and I caught the train into the city last night, along with more than a million other Sydneysiders, and watched $600,000 worth of gunpowder get launched above the harbour. As always, it was quite the spectacle. We got in there a couple of hours before midnight and wandered through Martin Place, then down George Street towards the Quay. The crowd was getting pretty raucous the closer we got to the harbourfront so we turned up Hunter Street and tried getting a spot at Mrs Macquaries Point but it was completely full. We kept walking all the way past Wooloomooloo, Garden Island and eventually found a decent vantage point in Potts Point, just below St Vincents School.
I took a little bit of video, as I promised I would on Twitter… here you go Jen Wagner! At the time of posting this, the Pacific, Australia, Asia, Middle East and Eastern Europe have all already ushered in the new year. London is about 30 minutes away while Canada the Americas are still another few hours away yet. It’s a big world.
Anyway, Happy New Year and all the best for 2008, no matter where you may be in the world!
One of the runaway success stories of Australian television is a subversive comedy show called The Chaser’s War on Everything. This very funny show takes constant potshots at every conceivable social and political norm, often drawing attention to the many stupid and inconsistent things we do. During 2007 the show aired every Wednesday night on ABC TV, and was also podcast via www.abc.net.au/chaser
My son Alex is a huge fan of the Chaser, and one of his favourite sketches was one in which the show’s host, Chris Taylor, rants about how annoying those waiters are that interrupt your meal to ask you if you’d like any cracked pepper. The sketch goes on to look at a variety of interesting situations in which a pepper-toting waiter might interrupt to offer his wares… if you’ve not seen it, here is the clip…
So the other day I took Linda and the kids for lunch in Coogee. As we strolled down the sidewalk past all the funky little restaurants and bars, both Alex and Kate noticed that the Chaser’s Chris Taylor just happened to be sitting at a window-side table with some friends having a drink. “Dad, that’s the guy from The Chaser!” said Kate excitedly.
We kept walking and ended up sitting at a nice little restaurant a few doors down. Once seated however, my 15 year old son Alex started musing on the idea of how funny it would be for a waiter to offer Chris Taylor cracked pepper. Never one to pass an opportunity to make people laugh, Alex decided to borrow a pepper mill from our restaurant and, you guessed it, go next door to offer Taylor some cracked pepper of his own. I followed him up the street as he wandered into the restaurant with the pepper mill behind his back, walked up to Taylor and interrupted him with “cracked pepper sir?” I was standing on the sidewalk with Kate, intending to capture all this with my mobile phone’s video camera but was laughing so hard all I got to do was watch it unfold. Taylor was a good sport, and just smiled at Alex and said “No thanks”, to which Alex responded with “Are you sure sir?” Perhaps you just had to be there, but it was very funny.
The thing that amazed me the most was to see just how brazen Alex can be when he needs to be. He is normally a pretty quiet and introverted kid, but he had absolutely no trouble wandering up to this well known TV personality and turning the tables on him. I know it’s not exactly a paparazzi moment, but it was pretty funny.
Of course, trying to decide what to include in Alex’s Christmas stocking this year was easy… yes, he got his very own pepper mill. Cracked pepper, Santa?
Last night Linda and I went in to the Sydney Carols in the Domain Christmas concert. All this southern hemisphere Christmas-without-snow was causing some mental disconnect for Linda so she was having a bit of trouble getting into the spirit ot the season… seems that the carols has gone some way to helping alleviate that. (And Sydney really does know how to throw a great outdoor event.)
For those that live on the top half of the planet, here are a few photos to show you what an Aussie Christmas looks like…
I spent a lovely afternoon in the city yesterday showing My Linda around. We walked around Darling Harbour for quite a while before heading down to the Rocks and Circular Quay. Sydney really is a very pretty city.
While we were at Darling Harbour I took this shot. (click to enlarge)
This photo-panorama is actually a composite of 20 individual photos. Each photo was taken slightly overlapping the previous one, and there were three rows of photos - one across the middle, then a row above and a row below. They were then taken into a wonderful piece of Mac software called Calico, which I think does an incredibly clever job of stitching them all together into a single shot. You don’t even need to tell Calico which bits go where… just dump all the photos in and it figures out where the overlaps are.
Windows users might like to look at a similar product called Autostitch.
I don’t normally make requests like this but if you are reading this and you teach using any sort of Interactive Whiteboard, I have a small favour to ask…
One of the new year’s resolutions that Linda and I made for 2008 is to try and be a little kinder to the planet; whether that be to walk and cycle more instead of driving, to buy products that are more environmentally friendly, or to make an effort to generate less waste… even small changes may help the planet. If we can encourage a few others to do the same, it may help even more.
The 
Today is Australia Day here in Down Under land. It celebrates the arrival of the first fleet into Botany Bay, marking the beginning of white mans’ occupation of 
