The past few weeks have been quite tough for me as I have been grappling with my leadership and my passion for the job. I have realised that when you are passionate about your role and education, sometimes it is hard to separate yourself and you can have a tendency to take things personally.
Anyway the feedback is I am learning and growing as a leader. I am slowly changing which has made me a little proud of myself. I still have a long way to go but I am growing. It is noce to reflect and celebrate sometimes.
On Friday I was talking to about 100 year 8’s at school about promotion for their sustainability inquiry. The students were shocked when I suggested youtube as a medium to do this by. The funny part was that they were shocked I knew what youtube was. I really shocked them when I told them I also have a facebook, a myspace, a twitter, use msn and skype.
However we spoke about what content they look at on youtube. What I found amazing what that every student there had seen a video called “Old Greg” They had not only seen it but memorised the whole dialogue about 7 minutes worth. I have added a small excerpt of Old Greg here if anyone has not seen it.  Â
Now I started thinking about the amount of learning involved in memorising 7 minutes of dialogue. It is a heap of learning. Now I am not suggesting we all start dressing up as man fish and start teaching our students but old greg did give me some food for thought about how to engage and motivate the students. This engagement needs to happen, but engagement alone is not the answer as it needs to be purposeful. It is wonderful that our students are engaged with old greg but imagine if we could get the same amount of energy, time and devotion from our students with maths? Could be great!
The students in year 8 have also obviously been thinking about the power of comedy and youtube to promote, as a group of students has developed a trailer for their sustainability project. I hope you enjoy it.
Today was a lazy Sunday which was wonderful. I spent most of my day looking at the rss feeds I do not have time to read during the week. One the feeds I read was a new blog by a teacher in Victoria. It had many videos and looks promising in regards to providing a site which has links to information on Inquiry and other educators work.Â
One thing I noticed about this site was that it was copyrighted all rights reserved. This copyright made me think about the web and how we use it to share and learn. Copyright does not allow for this freedom. It also enters bloggers into a potential minefield as when you copyright others work you leave yourself open to a legal minefield.
A better way is to use a creative commons licence. Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” CC work allows for the web to be used for continuous learning where people work together and share instead of shutting up work and limiting creativity.   I have added a short video about CC licencing.Â
Every Sunday my guilty pleasure is waiting around for postsecret to be updated. This project shows the power of the Internet to connect and reach out. This week there were no secrets but there was a video about postsecret. I thought I would post it here because I have learnt many things about people and life through this site.
I know many people have seen this before. I used it in a presentation for ICTEV earlier this year. However now the globalteacher blogs can embed video I had to add it onto the blog.Â
