Politics and Education

This year is going to be an incredible one for our students. The world's population is at boiling point, and thanks to the internet, we have a wealth of resources (unless they suddenly disappear, like some have already) right at our fingertips. Our students can write important, topical discussions that engage both with literature and the world around us in real time!

With oral presentations this year, we have an opportunity to do something I don't think my kids get enough of: look at pretty bad speeches. We tend to lean towards exposing them to the most powerful (rather than the mundane), encouraging them to "have a dream," but perhaps forgetting to show them the effects of poor speaking (other than on their marks, that is).

This week has offered many good examples (inauguration, anyone?), but I'm going to start with this one: the new president's speech to CIA staff (video). Then we're going to compare it to Obama's speech to the same purpose (video).

I'll let you know what they think!

What is a task you'll work on in Term 1?

2017 Reading Challenge

Like most teachers, I'm a big reader. It's common for me to read around 60 or so books a year. If I could, I would read all day! (Which, btw, I'm doing today!) This year I'm going to join our librarian, Steph Ellis, in her double 2017/2016 reading challenge. (Plus, I just logged myself into the GoodReads 2017 challenge, with my standard 60 books - I'll see if I can do better!) While we're both going to do 2016 and 2017, I will be encouraging my scholarship students to partake in the 2017 list, which I think will be great for their wide reading.

I've already got 2016 planned and covered, and I'll be posting my list here later! 2017 is going to be more of a challenge, but an enjoyable one that I'm looking forward to.

What will you be reading this year? How will you encourage your students to try reading material they may not have considered?

Big thank you to Steph for the inspiration!

Back for 2017

It's been quite some time since I've posted. If you read the last post, you'll know why.

Anyhow, I thought this year I would make a post a month...from the past. It turns out I have about 12 posts sitting in my drafts folder. Going over them made me realise that they are still topical. So while I'm going to post about other things this year as well, I will also have a "retro" post each month.

Happy new year, all!

Daily tool/resource & apology 1 March 2015 (Tunefind)

Good morning! I'm back with another cool resource for using in your classroom/lessons.

I'm going to start with the apology - when school began, time got pretty tight. But then I got word that my mother is ill - very ill - and I've been consumed with phone calls, documents, travel arrangements, emails, and it's taken all my mental space. But I'm determined not to let my blogging fall by the wayside, so I'm back! I will not be posting every day; I simply cannot keep that commitment while I'm running around. But I'll do the best I can.

So here's today's resource: Tunefind.

Ever heard a song in the background of a television show and thought: "wow, that's really effective?" Or "I love that song!" Or "gee, I wonder who that was?" But you have trouble finding that kind of thing on imdb.com (and excellent resource for film and television, btw, and easy to use - maybe another post later)? Well, Tunefind can bring you right to that song, where you can listen or download!

Here's how it works (so easy!).

Step 1: go to tunefind.com

Step 2: Choose the show you want to look into via the browse or search functions.

Step 3: Choose what season the episode it is (you can find this in your online tv guide or through imdb.com). I looked for the finale of Grey's Anatomy, because I feel in love with Snow Patrol through a scene on there!

Tunefind will list all the seasons, so pick the one you need, and then it will take you to the list of episodes:

If you scroll down, you can see that the site is community managed; you can ask/answer questions and submit music.

I actually meant to choose Season 1, and missed, so pardon the "season 11" at the top of that pic. What I discovered is that I misremembered that episode, and so I went to Season 2. The mini-synopsis of each episode was a real help with this.

As you can see, the song I wanted was the second one on the list (I could tell from the synopsis of what was happening when the song was playing, though I think this particular one could be better). When I clicked on it, I got this:

It is playing the song at this point, and offers options for purchasing/downloading the song for my use.

Pretty nifty stuff, especially if you're wanting to just listen or engage emotion, say, when teaching how a certain song can set the tone of a scene.

Daily tool/resource 3 February 2015 - Diigo.com

Some people still use just their browser's bookmarks/favourites to save sites they want to remember. However, there is a better way! Social bookmarking is a terrific resource for several reasons, and I settled on using Diigo ("Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff"). about 7 or so years ago because:

1. you can access your bookmarks anytime, anywhere, on any device.
2. you can sort/order your bookmarks in a more user-friendly manner (I like to list and sublist, because I'm weird, but at least with diigo I can satisfy that need!) as well as with tags - plus, I see they've just started a new organising thingie called "outliners" which I'll have to look into.
3. you have access to others' shared bookmarks, which is great because rather than doing a google search for something and getting a trillion results, you can search other teachers' bookmarks for resources for a particular study.
4. you can subscribe to others' bookmarks.
5. you can join bookmark groups and subscribe to the groups' bookmarks.
6. you can easily import bookmarks from all the random places you've been keeping them.
7. you can annotate any webpage and share those annotations (great for researching and collaborating - I'm looking at you, Level 3s!).
8. you can share folders with students/others.
9. the amount of folders you can make is, as far as I can tell (I have heaps) unlimited.
10. diigo has its own community/ies where you can have discussions.

Just add the diigolet to your extensions bar and you're good to go. Access your bookmarks, anywhere, anytime, and share with anyone you choose.

Daily tool/resource 5 February 2015 - youtube

ok, i know this one seems like a no-brainer - everyone knows about youtube!. but seriously, there is more to youtube than cat videos and "my reaction to xx trailer." i've used youtube to:

• learn how to tie a half-windsor knot for my husband's tie (while i was at it, i learned 3 other knots!)  extra note: this guy had the best how-to video on ties out there. too many others assumed i'd tied a tie before and glossed over important aspects! this one was truly step by step.
• replace the charging port on my samsung chromebook (easy as 1-2-3)
• how to ice a layer cake into a "swirl rose cake" (daughter's 21st) - it was ombre on the inside, too 
• to view the annual xmas cartoons from my childhood on xmas eve (who doesn't miss the heat miser and the snow miser? and rudolph, and, of course, the grinch!)
• to rethread my overlocker, and also how to change the foot on my sewing machine

to name a few.



when it comes to teaching, i've used youtube to (random selection, not exhaustive!):

• demonstrate how cinematography made the ending of the sopranos totally obvious (!)
• how an aural bridge from credits/black screen to first image sets the tone of a film (darn, these have been deleted :(  )
• how/why directors choose songs for lyrical meaning (essential for the opening scene of hot fuzz. also good for teaching homophones)
• to publish student book trailers
• as a place for students to make a file of video shorts for a speech when embedding them into something else wasn't optional/reasonable (for whatever reason)
• teaching advertising through jingles
• public speaking demonstrations (particularly voice, but also structure and content)
• to repeat (over and over) an excerpt of film we are studying
• pronunciation (like chiaroscuro, for example) 
• to share documentaries, like that of murdered teen emmett till, in order to bring forward wider ideas from a text
• to develop the concept of national identity through lyrics (the muttonbirds, but lots of pre-teaching here)
• doodle 4 google
• to discuss how astronauts use the toilet when watching apollo 13 (i, too, was curious!)

youtube is a fantastic resource for teaching and learning. i haven't even touched on the resources for khan academy, TED, SXSW, flipped classrooms, etc. you can learn how to do just about anything on youtube. 

Daily tool/resource 4 February 2015 - edchat

Of course, twitter is an invaluable resource. If i'da been smart, I'd have used twitter as a daily resource :)

edchat/edchatnz and subject chats are great ways to jumpstart your teaching ideas. Meeting new folks,
accessing new links, being energized...that's what edchat is all about.

Do a search for your subject edchat too; you'll be glad you did!

In NZ:

#edchatnz
#engchatnz
#scichatnz
#mathschatnz

I couldn't find an ICTchatnz, but there is a #ictchat.  Here is a shared doc of other various international chats. Feel free to add chats in the comments section!

Daily tool/resource 2 February 2015 - QR Codes

QR Codes have come and perhaps gone, but I still find them useful and engaging at times. I learned about using QR codes from @daikinane at uLearn11. Here are the collaborative notes from that year,

and the notes from our session are about halfway down. The following page details uses in education.

I use qrstuff to make my codes, and then use them to link kids to my ncea flashcards, homework assignments, readings, etc. They generally get a kick out of it (though more so if they already have downloaded a reader).

I refer my kids to QRreader at the play store. It's free, and doesn't make an annoying noise every tine they scan a code.

I even use a QR code on my cv these days! They take literally a second to make, and are quick, easy, and fun. Give it a go!

Daily tool/resource 30 January 2015 - Kahoot!

Last year I was introduced to Kahoot at #SecondaryHB Unconference. It was wildly appreciated, and I think everyone in my department used it for revision.

Kahoot is an interactive competition/game that classes of all ages (including adults) enjoy. It keeps score and does all the tallying for you, and it even has countdown music. And you don't even have to make your own; there are heaps of already-made games available! You create/choose your game at the main website, and it gives you a PIN. Students go to Kahoot.it to play. You don't to have a laptop; we take our kids to the library, have them connect to the wireless on their phones, and off they go!

Highly recommended.

Daily tool/resource 29 January 2015 .pdf to .jpg

Today's tool, which I just used for the umpteenth time, is a free online converter, pdf2jpg.

Our school's scanner scans everything into pdf, and I quite often need them as a form of picture, so being able to quickly convert them is necessary to me. I just scanned our University of Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival poster so that I could pop it into publisher and add the entry details. I started with this:

and converted it so that I'd only need about 20 seconds or so to make this version.

Nifty note: pdf2jpg plants a tree for every 5000 conversions!

Daily tool/resource 28 January 2015

Today I heard about vocabulary.com via a comment string on another blog post (comments can be so helpful!). So i tried it out. It is a fun game that helps student understand vocabulary in context. It also offered image clues for some questions. It looks fun and engaging and I'm keen to see how they track user progress, since I'm able to make an account rather than logging in via Facebook (though students may like using the fb login).

Already off by a day! Daily tool/resource 2015 (28 January 2015)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions :) Today I will offer two tools: unroll.me and this new one that was just shared via LinkedIn, Assessment Alert.

Unroll.me is a great tool for managing your email. It is free, but after using it, I would pay for the service! Unroll.me "rolls up" your daily emails into one email. For example, I subscribe to a variety of companies whose emails I do want to receive. However, I don't necessarily want 45 new emails in the morning! Instead, unroll.me puts them all into 1 email with good sized "thumbnails" for me to quickly peruse. Unroll.me asks you who you want to roll up, and you can easily manage your subscriptions in your account. If you'd like to see more about it, check out my quickie preso here (slide 6 - 16).

I've just heard about Assessment Alert, and it looks like a nifty little app! I will definitely be offering it as a recommendation in our emeeting later this term. It is available in both the app store and google play.

Goals for 2015

I have been a bad blogger. So often I feel that I don't have anything to say, or that I'm not doing anything useful. I've really got to change this mindset, because it's not helpful to anyone! Secondary teachers especially need support and resources to get started, and I've got to remember that my little blog can be of use to another teacher who is starting out with minimal resources.  

So here goes, my blogging goals for 2015:

1. a "photo" a day. this can be anything related - a screenshot or link to something I've used that day, or an actual photo of something happening in my classroom.

2. a post a month. remember that not everyone is racing ahead of me with resources and that other teachers need a place to start, too. sharing what i'm doing can help someone else.

Not an extensive list! The idea is to keep my use of technology in the forefront of my mind rather than taking it for granted! And with a second #SecondaryHB Unconference on the books for Term 1, action, not words, needs to be my focus for this year.

Happy New Year everyone!

PS: First lesson of 2015. You cannot search for CC images from within the blogger posting page like you can in Google Docs!

SecondaryHB Unconference

SecondaryHB held its first unconference today at Napier Boys' High School. Although we had a small contingent, as Fiona said, "the people who show up are the people who are supposed to be there."  Although catering forgot about us (darn holidays!), we ended up with a nice group who at least had cake and coffee!

We discussed far more opportunities for learning than were scheduled to present. That is the beauty of an unconference - you can take the discussion anywhere, because no one is expecting just "this thing I'm here to talk about." We even had a presentation from NBHS's newest staff member, who doesn't even start until Monday! And we were in awe (and envy) of Iona's 1-1 BYOD.

Here is our preso, and our collaborative notes, which include a wealth of teaching and learning options.

Thanks to everyone who attended today. We have already had interest from other schools in doing it again in Term 1, 2015.

You will find SecondaryHB here. Sign up to the mailing list and be the first to know the date/time of the next unconference!

Follow #secondaryhb on Twitter.

Being a Connected Educator - I am not alone

In celebration of connected educator month, this post is specifically for the Week 1 Challenge: What It Means to be a Connected Educator.

When I was a little girl, I had a nightmare. In it, I was a grown woman on a small, square raft, afloat in the middle of the ocean at night. It was very scary. Eventually, I could see a giant ship, and I was afraid it would run me down (I'd seen The Poseiden Adventure - those giant propellers!). I shouldn't have worried, though, because an enormous great white shark burst from the water and swallowed me whole, raft and all.

Sometimes, teaching can be like being alone on a raft in the middle of nowhere, and the pressures of

secondary teaching can sometimes, especially during terms 2-3, be compared to being circled by hungry sharks. Everyone is so busy, and at secondary, so pressured for results of different kinds, that it's easy to feel stressed and alone and at a loss for ideas. It's kind of like being pressed through a pastry tube during terms 2-3, and frankly, term 4 is no bowl of cherries either!

Being a connected educator is like salvation for a teacher drowning in the morass of secondary pressure. At first, it may seem like just another insurmountable item to check off your daily to-do list, but I described it today like so: twitter is like a river, always moving; it is not static, like facebook, where a post will politely sit on your homepage until you respond to it. no - twitter is full of life, and will pass you by if you're going to sit on the sidelines! but if you come prepared in your togs with your towel, and jump in and have a play, you will soon find yourself surrounded by others who engage with you. And unlike the fella sitting on the bank wondering why no one wants to play with him, you have, by the single step of jumping in, made yourself a part of something. Discovered a place where you are not alone, that there are others like you, and discovered, also, a river of another kind: knowledge. Twitter is awash with nifty ideas, links to resources and
tools, and friendship.

And it's not just Twitter. Once you've opened that door and started embracing what's out there in the online world, it's almost like Charlie entering the Chocolate Factory! So much stuff! Sitting down at my computer is like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning. I am filled with the same excitement and wonder, every day! Between social bookmarking, professional groups, and online PLNs, I find I am not alone - far from it! I benefit from being a connected educator, and so do my students. They get a teacher who feels rejuvenated, who is keen to try things with them, who offers the opportunity to do things differently, in a new way.

Remember, YOU are not alone! Become a connected educator. You won't regret it.

#SecondaryHB Unconference - Connected Educators Month

October is a huge month for teachers. No, I'm not referring to marking (or report writing - we do that in our "spare" time, right?)! It's Connected Educators Month, and there's heaps on! I'm really excited that we can be a part of it; NBHS is hosting the #SecondaryHB Unconference on Thursday, 9 October at 10am. This is an opportunity for secondary teachers to experience an unconference event similar to educamp (we've been asked by the primary sector to avoid using educamp in our branding, but the idea is the same). An unconference is a relaxed environment that provides small group (and in our case, 1-to-1) professional development for teachers. An unconference demonstrates that we are all teachers and learners, simultaneously.

Unlike a regular conference, where you browse a programme to see who is presenting on what, and sign up to attend different lectures/workshops where you are the student, at an unconference the attendees are also the presenters! Because everyone knows something, and that something is worth sharing.

I was warned in advance that it is difficult to get secondary teachers onboard, and it has been ... challenging. We do, however, have a small group attending, and I hope to see more on the day. Not everyone has filled in the attending form yet, so I am unable to amend the presenting list. It's a work in progress! However, this is a chance for those who feel they are the "lone nut" to come out and socialise with other, erm, nuts :)

I'll be updating here with the collaborative doc. In the meantime, you can check us out here (updated for the programme and collaborative doc access), and tell your friends!

Google vs MS Office 365

My school is going to roll out Office 365 in the near future, so when I saw the webinar E-Learning Conversations: Where Pedagogy and Technology Collide. A conversation with Adrian Francis about Office 365 and Google Apps (Blake Seufert & Mike Reading) (27 March 2014) hosted by Teachers Training International I was keen to go along and find out if Office was ready to supply what I needed for my students. As I understand it, "Office 365" is a rebranding of sorts for LiveOffice, utilising the SkyDrive (now called OneDrive).


Teachers Training puts on a great webinar. There were plenty of teachers in attendance, with NZ teachers being predominant, though there were teachers from around the world. About 22 teachers joined me in the Google Doc for some collaboration, confirming Google as the gold standard for collaborative work (even the MS guy stated that Google leads the pack when it comes to collaboration, and that MS is always trying to "catch up"). Please feel free to utilise the doc in your school's discussions.

A webinar is a fantastic form for PD, with live video on G+ via Youtube, live questions in the sidebar, and a collaborative doc all running at the same time - amazing! I recommend Teachers Training Intl' as a resource. If you are not following them already, you definitely should. When the resources are posted later, I will update this post to include them.

uLearn13 - In Summary

Good morning from Hamilton! I'm sitting in the auditorium at the Claudlands Events Centre in beautiful downtown Hamilton, waiting for the welcome/keynote speaker Ken Shelton to begin. People are flowing in steadily - it's going to be packed!

Ken's main message is that we have to be the agents of change. Change doesn't need to be huge or a lot. You can create huge transformation with just a small thing. He also believes that kids should publish, publish, publish! in all forms. you can see my notes (and many other great links) here.

My first breakout this morning is Googlefest. Here is my slideshow.

Googlefest 2013 from Kelly Faulkner

====================================================

well, actually it's a few days later! just got too busy with all these ideas and great things going on around me, and meeting heaps of other teachers! after the keynote, i went to googlefest.

firstly, googlefest was quite scary - when we filled in the google form for the 'fest, i purposefully put my name in the middle of the list. after fighting my way to the venue with my trusty umbrella, scared to death i was going to fly away like mary poppins, but unlike her cool, collected self, be deposited into the river, i arrived wet and bedraggled, only to go on first! i was so nervous, i kept waiting for them to tell me to shut up, that my 5 minutes were done, but no! apparently i only went on for 4 minutes, even though it felt like forever. now i really know how my students feel. it was really interesting to see how different subject teachers were using google apps. so interesting that i forgot to tweet after a bit! i didn't even manage to take any notes on this session, because it went by so quickly. i meant to go back and top them up, but to my utter surprise, my name was drawn for the new chromebook! (it has a delete key - yay!) i'm still not quite over the shock of winning something! i haven't seen the picture that was taken after - probably unpublished as i stood there with my mouth hanging open looking like a dork.

i spent wednesday afternoon doing some shopping, and was so tired i totally forgot about the tweetmeet for dinner, and i was dying for mexican food to boot!

thursday started amazingly well, with ken shelton's google docs workshop. this was a fantastic workshop (and i'm stealing nathaniel's tweet idea - all credit to @nlouwrens!)

here is the list of things we did. this one is my complete set of notes so those things make sense. so many tricks and tips to make a teacher's life easier. seriously - my life this year could have been a LOT easier! from file names to searching within a document to creative commons - heaps of time savers. the citations tools made me so very jealous - thinking about all those hours (in high school) i spent in the library with our librarian's old upright typewriter, retyping the same page over and over to get the footnotes formatted correctly, and my students need only press a button! they are so lucky to have such phenomenal tools available to them, and all FREE. for goodness sake, do yourself a favour and follow ken at @k_shelton. he is one smart cookie, and not too hard on the eyes, either.

thursday afternoon i gave my own workshop on reading and qr codes that some of you will remember from NZATE in july. i added the qr code at the end so that my delegates could quickly save the resources. yet another purpose for qr codes.



thursday night was the dinner, and the theme was "all that glitters." i made a quick stop at the $2 shop for some glittery thingies (after a quick google of "dinner theme").

the primary teachers, as usual, put us secondary slo-mos to shame. they were decked out in amazing dresses, glittery suits & ties, and one memorable tutu! much dancing was had. however, us more sedate folks, @kaiakowilson and i, had a great time with our other seatmates (and what a yummy meal).

SOME of us had an early night, as friday was still a big day. i'm ashamed to say that i missed out on my first workshop, because although i arrived early in order to meet with some of the vendors in the exhibition room, i got caught up with eTV. it turns out that our school subscribes to eTV, and it's a great resource: you can view and edit anything off nz television - and you can request stuff from them too! i had a look at how many teachers from my school were using this resource i had heard very precious little about: a grand total of 0 teachers had used it in the last school year. seeing as how we had no PD at all on this, i spent quite some time at that booth learning about how to use the resources, and this will indeed be very helpful to me and my department, if the school continues to subscribe, and not cancel on the basis that no one is using it. many apologies to +Claire Amos - i had really been looking forward to your workshop, and thanks for the links on core-ed.

friday afternoon i gave my second presentation: text study in the digital age:

Text Study in the Digital Age #ulearn13 from Kelly Faulkner

i have just discovered that you can add audio to slideshare, so will think about doing that! we had a lot of fun in this session, and the group put together their own inquiry-based presentation, though they were as loathe to present it as students are! you can view it here.

after the session, i immediately headed on the long drive home to napier, happy to see my husband and daughter again in time for dinner. and no, i didn't eat all the donuts on the drive home :)

don't forget, you can access the materials from all keynotes/presenters at the core-ed site here. and you can pick up links to collaborative notes, photos, and all kinds of goodness at #ulearn13.

as always, ulearn has re-energized me for term 4. next year's conference is in rotorua - a great venue. hope to see you there!

Doodle 4 Google 2013 Chosen Selection

Well done to all the Year 9 students at NBHS who participated in the school's Doodle 4 Google competition for 2013. The theme was "If I were an explorer, I would..." We had three classes participate this year, then all three classes voted on which 4 to send to the national comp. (We kept two choices back as "teacher's pick.")

Here are the winning doodles in no particular order (whoops, slideshare shrunk the titles a bit):



Best of luck, boys!

Doodle 4 Google 2013

Hello students. Please view the slideshow below.

Then go to the voting form and fill in the numbers for your top 4 choices.

Google doodle comp 2013 from Kelly Faulkner