Entries from February 2008 ↓

Ah, Saturday morning! The one day where you can sleep in. After the hectic existence that is my week at school I always look forward to Saturday. That was until the usual “peace and quiet” of living in a smallish, coastal, tourist shanty, which at this time of year has, thankfully, shrunk down from the influx of Summer Holiday Maker’s to its normal nice population size making their not too loud noises on a Saturday morning, was totally shattered by the Helicopters!! (I think there were more than one, but I didn’t look).

Very loud Helicopter type Noise!! Ahhhhh, open one sleepy eye to look at the clock, 7:00am, Saturday morning. What the?? Why are there Helicopters flying round and round my house?

Then I remembered that we have the “Interclub Fishing Tournament” on for the next 2 weekends, starting with a “sail past” at 7:00 am this morning. 2 things immediately come to mind:

1. “Sail Past?” Do Game Fishing boats normaly have Sails, and if so why aren’t they using them?
2. Why does a Sail Past have to include a Squadron of Helicopters?

So, my morning of Peace and Quiet has been shattered. I didn’t get back to sleep, and now I’m cranky. I’ve had my fist coffee and it did nothing. I’ve been trying to catch up on all my RSS feeds, but my kids have breached our Data limit and I’ve been shaped to Dial-Up speed.

Think I’ll go and take it out on My Son’s broken down Mini that’s hogging all the space in my Garage……….

I received an email this week that included a link to Chris Jordan’s series Running the Numbers. Although Chris is based in America, and therefore uses American statistics, it would be a great way to show excesses using his Photography as an art form to portray the enormity of these daily events.

Check out his other Series “Intolerable Beauty” and “In Katrina’s Wake.” Chris uses his Photography as a Medium to raise awareness of what he sees as the start of America’s downfall through its excesses, and the devastation Nature can cause.

Your Students might get that they can use many different ways to get their point across.

One area that has seen great improvement at our College this year was in the management of our “Swimming Carnival.”

This was run last Friday, and now that we’re using HyTek’s Meet Manager the whole record keeping process ran like a charm. This was the first year that we had been in a position to use this software having used paper and pens to manually keep track. It was so much easier to do it this way and have the software spit out the results, and scores as we went.

In reality, the way in which “twisted” and I input the data was the key to its success.

No really it was.

Its a shame that it took us so long to take up this way of doing it, then again, its a bit like using Technology in the Classroom for some too. We’re still working on that.

Mark Schumann from the MITIE usergroup has released edutagger.com, for K-12 Social Bookmarking. It works like Digg or del.icio.us.

Mark says this about Edublogger, and himself:

The reason i’m posting this here is for two reasons. The first is that i’m trying to get the word out so that it can achieve a “critical mass” appropriate for this style of collaborative user-driven content. The second reason is that the types of links and resources on EduTagger can be quite relevant to the subjects discussed on this forum. I’ve even created an “Administration” category specific to the non-teaching aspects of K-12 educational institutions (e.g. the password reset program discussed recently could be a great link).

I’m working in the IT department of a K-12 school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, and one of my aims has always been to easily share interesting resources with the teaching staff. Additionally, a way for teaching staff to share those same resources with each other is surprisingly difficult. EduTagger is really one possible solution to these aims.

Looks like a handy site, its based around Education, and its Australian.

Have a look, and like me, start adding your links.