Do you get annoyed when your students come to you for every little thing? Or conversely, maybe you sometimes feel yourself getting frustrated when one of your students speaks up about something they know lots about, rudely interrupting you when you are trying to teach that very same thing to the class. Schools and Read More…
The One Best Pedagogy
Teaching is like walking through a maze… you are often sure that the turn you took was the right decision, but you’ll never be able to be absolutely sure that the turn you ignored wouldn’t also have been a good one. A thought that has been weighing on my brain is something I heard Mike Mattos say at a PD Read More…
How to Let Your Students Set Up Their Own Classroom
You know that feeling you get? That one where you finally have had enough of your summer break, take yourself into school, and look at the blank walls of your new year’s classroom, just itching to fill it with colour and decorations and a reading corner and intriguing objects and all sorts of learning? Isn’t there Read More…
The Things that Counted: Reflecting on 2016
When I moved up to grade 4/5 last year after teaching only the early years in my career so far, one of the things I both looked forward to and most feared was how to engage students in their learning by making it real. At the end of that year, I chatted with my kids about what Read More…
Why I Hate Classroom Themes
At the beginning of each school year, my Pinterest feed fills up with tons of pictures that fall under the heading of “Classroom Inspiration”. Teacher friends will send pictures of their freshly decorated rooms to each other with questions about where to put the book corner. Ikea experiences a massive spike in sales of those giant canopy leaves Read More…
Hexagonal Thinking
Hexagonal Thinking is a visual tool to help people make connections and organise ideas on a topic. I first learned about hexagonal thinking through the No Tosh Lab who encourage the use of it for going from the messy idea stage of the designing thinking process to the stage where ideas are organised and ordered to work Read More…
#DigiCon16 Presentation: Coding in the Primary Classroom
This year I presented a couple of sessions at #DigiCon16, DLTV‘s annual conference. One of the sessions I presented was Coding in the Primary Classroom: An Inquiry Into Gaming with Tamryn Kingsley. We took participants through the process of a unit we taught together with our grade 2 classes. The unit was an inquiry where students made their own games Read More…
Google Slides for Collaborative Literature Circles
My students are participating in Literature Circles this term. This has been introduced in response to a need – it is a way for students to analyse and discuss texts with the support of others, and to encourage accountability for deep comprehension and critical thinking about literature. The focus is not on the book, but on the Read More…
Google Translate: Removing EAL Barriers
I have a student in my class for three weeks. She lives in China but has come to Melbourne for a short time. Naturally she has had some trouble being able to communicate because English is not her first language. Off their own bat, two girls in my class decided to help her out by using Google Read More…
Campfires in Cyberspace: Creating Classroom Spaces for Learners
Having moved this year from a modern open plan, flexible learning area school, to a classroom in an old red brick building built in 1922, I have had some new challenges with learning spaces. I have been considering and implementing the notion of ‘Campfires in Cyberspace’, a term coined by David D. Thornburg The Campfires in Cyberspace theory considers Read More…