Learning Gems

My latest discovery… I’m very excited about this one because many similar tools don’t work on the iPad. Wordsift is a tool that allows you to visualise the words in a piece of writing. Simply paste your writing into word sift: An added bonus is the availability of other visualisation tools, including a visual thesaurus [...]

I’ve had a wonderful time learning with my iPad. Now that I can easily blog from it I might just return to the glory days of blogging once a week. Blogging began as an educational experiment. I like to try all the tools and techniques I think will help students learn. The iPad began in [...]

Alas, the real world has interfered with my blogging …I have not posted in some time and now find myself blogging out of sheer guilt. The one positive from my lack of real time is that I will have to share my ‘Learning Gems’ in record time and with minimal waffle. Behold, some of the [...]

The Expanding Learning Horizons (ELH) Conference is over for another year and I am left, once again, feeling lost and flat now that I am back in the real world of work and daily minutiae.  I miss the connection with like-minded educators and the stimulating conversations that accompany such connections.  However, I am also mindful [...]

Web 2.0 has changed the way we do so many things. So I wonder if it is possible to sustain a piece of fiction using only Web 2.0 tools…a story told through blogs, wikis and other tools.  Not your usual piece of digital storytelling – I’m thinking major pieces of fiction, possibly serialised, that follow [...]

Why is it that so many students seem to have lost the desire to play with words and language?  I used to love English lessons based around word games and language puzzles.  It was fun for me.  Unfortunately, it seems to be a different story today…often such activities are viewed as tedious, boring or ‘too [...]

At my current school we have a regular assembly for the senior school once a fortnight.  Fortunately, I had a few Web 2.0 tools to help my home group complete the half hour presentation.  Thank you Animoto and Google maps for making this job a little easier.  We used the idea of Harmony Day as [...]

My Web 2.0 journey began exactly a year ago, inspired by a few questions at a professional development activity and fuelled by my own desire to understand ‘what all the fuss was about.’ As a way of celebrating this milestone I thought I’d revisit the key discoveries of the past year.  My journey was an [...]

Thanks to Elizabeth Koh who tagged me for this meme which was started by TJ: “List FIVE changes you would like to see in the educational system. Your responses should represent your perspective and your passion for learning and students…tag the following people…from a variety of perspectives. If you have been tagged, tag as many [...]

This meme represents my first official ‘tagging’ and I have to admit I’ve enjoyed every aspect of it, particularly reading about others in my PLN.  Thanks to Anne and Ali Hall for tagging me My 7 things: My life has been without major drama or loss and I appreciate that I am one of the [...]