Volleyball Boys 

Volleyball Girls

Hockey Girls

Recently I attended a two-day forum that focused on the critical importance of our closest neighbours and major trading partners in the Asia regions.  For our students to make sense of their world and be active and informed citizens, they need the knowledge, skills, values and understandings that is defined by the term Asia Literacy.

Kathe Kirby, Executive Director, Asia Education Foundation, explains that ‘Asia literacy is foundational and deep knowledge, skills and understandings about the histories, geographies, societies, cultures, literatures and languages of the diverse countries that make up our region.’

Providing a curriculum that embeds Asia Literacy is a priority for all schools as the new National Curriculum is implemented and ensures that we deliver a future focused, twenty first century learning for our students.

Our primary school colleagues had requested to follow groups of year 7 students for a ‘typical’ school day and see them engaged in learning across a variety of subject areas.  I was able to catch up with the primary school teachers during lunchtime and was delighted to hear of their positive experiences in our classrooms.  The teachers commented on how different it was to have set times allocated to different subjects and for the students to have a range of different teachers during a single day.  They compared this to their own teaching experience where there are many days in their program where they are with the same group of students for the entire day. 

The visiting teachers were surprised at the level of excitement their presence generated with students who knew them from their primary schooling.  Students were keen to say “Hi” and catch up on the news from their primary schools.

The day finished with a structured reflection activity where the primary school teachers were able to consolidate their learning and discuss further with students what works well with secondary school transition and areas where the process could be refined.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank both staff and students who were such wonderful hosts and say a further thanks to teachers who opened their classrooms to our visitors.  In the near future, we will be participating in a similar visit from our colleagues from Beverley Hills PS and Biralee PS.  The next phase of this initiative involves our staff visiting the primary schools for a day to learn more about our future students learning experiences in the primary setting. 

The growing professional relationship that exists across the Manningham Network of schools will no doubt translate into improved learning outcomes for our students.

Or if you would like to go straight to making a new blog click on the link below.

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Understanding Web 2.0 Technologies

Many of you may be thinking, “What is Web 2.0″ and “Why change how we have taught for the past 5, 10, 20 or more years?”. Well, we are living in the 21st Century, and it is a very different world our children are growing up in, than what we grew up in. In Victorian government schools we need to prepare for the eventual deployment of the Ultranet (looking at term 3 2010 at this point in time), a government provided Learning Management System designed to encompass all areas of teaching, learning, assessment and reporting. This will require a huge shift in the way many teachers work, so by developing 21stC skills with Web 2.0 I am hoping we will have more teachers better prepared for its implementation.

But, how effectively does one use this search engine? Many a times, students and myself have tried searching for something and end up getting over 10 pages of unrelated websites. Key words and features like “” and +  are used, but still, it does not narrow the search down as much as I would like.

So how can I help myself and my students to refine the searches? Well, have a look at the poster below and see if this helps!

More posters like this are available from the Google for Educators site. If you have not checked this out, I suggest you do. Make it a priority – the tips you can learn will ultimately save you time and effort!

Words that describe the College

Some of the reasons for it’s popularity, as I have discovered when using it with my Year 9 class, is because:  

• it is very simple to use 
• a visual medium to present new language and concepts
• support prereading strategies – code breaking or text analysis tasks
• improves student’s vocabulary skills
• allows for individual personality’s- increase in student motivation and engagement

How to use Wordle?

Simply click on the create icon, paste or write in your text (if you want some words in your collection to be larger than others, simply type them in several times) and then, click on go. You can then edit the shape, the colours and the font in the cloud and even remove words you don’t like by right-clicking on them.