edna.edu.au

Connecting Online conference February 2011

On the weekend of February 4-6 I took part in an online conference Connecting Online 2011. The conference included some great presentations from educators around the world, and I particularly enjoyed Kelly Mendoza's session on digital citizenship, Peter Palme's paper on social learning, Anton Pienarr on Social Constructivism and Pheo Martin on the Pearls and Perils of online learning.

My own paper at the conference was delivered at 7.30 am Saturday local time (!) and was entitled "What time is it? Time zones, spheres of influence and neo-colonialism in a global online world". The essence of my argument is that the internet is open 24 hours a day , and those planning online learning events need to be flexible and inclusive as possible in catering for people from any and all time zones. I also argued forcefully that events which cater for a global audience should use UTC (formerly known as Grenwich Mean Time) as the time standard for planning, as this provides an inclusive and level playing field for all concerned, as well as avoiding potential confusion such as that created by Australia's absurd 5-zone summer Daylyght Saving confusion.

The slides from my presentation are available for viewing in my Slideshare acount. 

The handout, which contains some useful online timezone conversion tools, is saved as a Google Doc at http://tinyurl.com/CO11nbm

Posted at 10:20PM Feb 10, 2011 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

Adjahdura country field trip

I attended a field trip to the Yorke Peninsula with colleagues from Open Access College on November 17-19, 2010. See the report on my other blog here .[Read More]

Posted at 08:47AM Nov 26, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

Global Education conference 15-19 November

I was involved as a member of the Advisory group in planning the Global Education conference which was held online from 15-19 November.

Together with some colleagues from Open Access College I also made a presentation which can be viewed here.

This presentation showcases some of the work that we have been doing in an English unit with year 10 students. It covers themes of Racism and Identity, as well as working to increase students' digital literacy.

Link to the Global Education Conference website

Posted at 03:17PM Nov 16, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

English - Australian Curriculum conference 16 October 2010

A combined conference of the SA Englist Teachers Association and the Australian Literacy Education Association.

One of the frustrations of this conference is that the final documents for English in the Australian Curriculum have not yet been made available, and will not be until December. Nevertheless, from the documents that are avai;able there was a fair bit of useful information to be shared. I attended the keynote presentations from Christine Ludwig and Tony Hole, a panel of secondary teachers discussing their vision of what English teaching will look like in the next decade, and two workshops on IT resouorces for supporting English in the Australian Curriculum.

Posted at 08:02AM Oct 17, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

Cluster meeting for English teachers 9 September 2010

This was a meeting with a very similar format to the PLP Clarifying forum, except that it was less formal. Teachers from a number of schools in the region met together at Charles Campbell Secondary School to discuss assessment tasks and marking in the various SACE stage 1 English subjects. It was a very useful session, and once again I was pleased that the tasks we have been using and the marking standards I have been applying were quite similar to what is being done in other schools.[Read More]

Posted at 07:02AM Sep 14, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

Personal Learning Plan (PLP) Clarifying forum 8 Spetember 2010

This was a very useful session working together with colleagues from other schools and representatives of the SACE board to examine tasks and assessment grades for the PLP. 

I was pleased that both the tasks we have been using and the accuracy of my marking were affirmed during the session.

Posted at 06:59AM Sep 14, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

Personal Project - research training for teachers

Adelaide University has been hosting an excellent series of seminars to equip teachers with the skills we will need to supervise students in the Personal Projectwhich is not [part of the SACE.

The sessions are:

Unfortunately I missed the July session due to a short trip interstate, but the other sessions have been very useful.

 Presentations and other materials from the seminars are available online at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/schools/training/

Tags: personal project sace professional development
Posted at 08:07PM Aug 17, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

Moodle for teachers

During July I attended a Moodle for teachers (Intermediate) course conducted online by Integrating-Technology.org. The course ran over five consecutive weekends with a one hour session online using the WiZiQ virtual classroom. The sessions were at 10.30 pm on either Saturday or Sunday evening SA time, and involved learning and using a variety of moodle tools as well as a major emphasis on collaboration and web 2.0. Students in the course were divided into small groups and we communicated synchronously and a-synchronously using skype conferencing and chat.

The course gave me an opporuntiy to further develop my moodle skills, connect with some fascinating educator colleagues in Canada, the USA and China, and add to my repertoire of web 2.0 tools.

Tags: moodle
Posted at 05:25PM Aug 07, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  | 

MoodleMoot AU 10

On July 11-14 I attended the MoodleMoot in Melbourne. 

It was fantastic to meet together with 450+ other educators and moodlers.

I have saved a powerpoint about the Moot and some other relevant documents in a Google Docs folder which can be accessed here.

I have also saved many relevant links on my delicious page.

Tags: moodle moot moodlemoot
Posted at 05:09PM Aug 07, 2010 by Nigel Mitchell  |