Great Art & Craft ideas for Teachers and Students

Scribbled.com.au is a highly creative site for those who want to learn about innovative art and craft ideas.   

Scribbled is packed with activities to suit all abilities but best of all everything is laid in in step-by-step directions with photographs to support them.  There are a number of themed ideas for all major events of the year with new crafts and activities being added each week.

Teachers will also love the video tutorials and printables to jazz up their classrooms.  There are also  activities and games particularly aimed at younger children.

Take a look at scribbled today and release some of your creative energy.

Education in the 1960's vs 2010

I think this cartoon really sums up the shift in parental approach to teaching over the last half a decade.  Thanks to Daryl Cagle for his cartoon.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Bogan Parents and ADHD: A guide for Teachers

I came across thingsboganslike.com a few weeks ago and have been trawling it for many a laugh.  For the uninitiated the Bogan is an Aussie term for a 'Redneck' or 'Feral' or just a general 'Yobbo. 

I found this great article written about parents, teachers and ADHD.  I think every teacher could see many home truths in what is being said here.

read it for yourself and let us know what you think about it. 

The bogan’s desire for glory manifests itself in many different ways. There’s the uninformed gambling, the process of getting huge, the killing of things, and so much more. All of this glory-hunting takes up significant slices of the bogan’s time, so the bogan is prone to taking shortcuts on other things to ensure that it can fit in the viewing of a Twenty/Twenty cricket game before going to the pub to watch a cover band butcher “Sex on Fire”. One of the things that regularly get short-changed by the bogan is the adequate raising of its children.

Click here for the entire article

2 Great sites to teach your kids about Cybersafety

I have written quite a bit about cybersafety in regards to parents, teachers and students taking ownership of the issue and not just burying our heads in the sand and hope that it goes away and in attempt to find out more about it today I came across two great resources that teach students about about cybersafety, protocol and correct use of the internet.

Hector’s World is a valuable educational resource for use in the classroom. Its cybersafety messages are relevant to younger primary school age groups, particularly 5 – 7 year olds.

Age-based lesson plans and activity sheets for each of the episodes have been designed for use in the classroom. The learning objectives are consistent with the principles set out in the national Statements of Learning for Information Communications and Technology and Statements of Learning for Civics and Citizenship.

At a teacher’s or parent’s discretion the Hector’s World stories may also be used for children under 5 years of age and for older primary students aged above 8 years.

Suggestions for the classroom:

• view the Hector’s World episodes with the class
• use the lesson plans as a guide to enforce key learning objectives
• install the Hector’s World Safety Button™ on classroom computers
• encourage parents to install the Hector’s World Safety Button at home
• use the downloadable Hector’s World learning activities to enhance the learning experience

Cyberquoll is aimed at older kids and looks at the issues of cyber bullying and the undesirable elements of the web and how to deal with them from the perspective of a teacher, parent and student.

Hope you enjoy them and would love to hear of any others you might know.

Is report writing really worth the headaches? Not according to my Parents!

Currently down here in the land of Oz nearly all teachers are busily stooped over their laptops daily and nightly, reading and rereading, testing and re-testing to finalise reports before we all take a well earned break over a long hot Aussie Summer.

Some teachers I work with claim to putting in over 3 hours per student in writing time alone to get them done to a standard they are happy with.  Personally, I find that a little ridiculous and put in considerably less time, but I can say that after completing my masters last year that writing a semesters  worth of reports for a class was more time consuming and stressful than completing a postgraduate unit of study which had a 6 month time allocation versus around 1 month.  Doing both was not much  for anyone.

Surprisingly, a survey completed at my school 2 years ago to all parents uncovered that the majority of parents spent less than 5 minutes reading reports and the bulk of that time is spent looking at the progression points ( or Grade Points for our international audience) and reading the summary section only.  Nearly every parent I have spoken to from a range of schools were not satisfied with their child's reports branding them impersonal, uninformative and uninteresting no matter what style and approach they had.

So it would appear from the very small amount of data I have at my finger tips that teports are not pleasing parents or teachers to any great lengths and the information contained within them can often raise more questions than they answer.

Are reports just the burden of teachers to balance out the benefit of frequent holidays?  Or is there a better way?  Is there a smarter way?

Personally, I send home a digital portfolio with my reports with hundreds of samples of work, photos, student reflections and authentic assessment pieces such as videos of classroom presentations.  Unlike reports I am not obliged to do this but I find it far more effective in telling mum and dad what little Johnny has been doing at school and it is a genuine record of 6 to12 months work versus a couple of months of intense testing.

So I am asking you to take my grain of salt survey results in the global scheme of things and let me know if I am the only one in this boat? And,  if so what am I doing wrong?  And more importantly what could we all do to make reports more effective for all involved. 

If you agree and have similar stories to tell either as a teacher or even parent I would love to hear them too.

Parents need to take more ownership and responsibility of Cyber-Bullying where it happens... At home.

Recently in Victoria Australia we have had mass media coverage over cyber bullying following the tragic suicide of a teenage girl in Geelong who was found to be a victim of cyber bullying; and worst of all she was the 4^th suicide from that school in the last 18 months alone.

Media outlets lapped it up including 60 minutes because it was yet another societal story of doom and gloom of epidemic proportions that did not involve the global financial crisis, Swine Flu, Iraq, Afghanistan.  What made this cheap journalistic booty so appealing to current affairs programs across the country was that it had a real fear factor for parents, suggesting their kids could be involved in this in their bedrooms late at night right now and we could quickly start shifting the blame to our schools for it as this is where cyber bullying manifested itself in reality.  After all this is where their teenage sons were all filmed as mourning friends, stressed and angry parents teachers and principals the next day.

As an ICT leader in a numerous schools over the years I have had a number of parents increasingly approach me to seek instant solutions when they finally find out what their kids are up to online at home and are looking for someone to blame and rectify a massive problem with a click of a mouse.  I have dealt with irate parents looking for someone to blame as they have simply too lazy to enquire or invest any interest or time into what their children are capable of at home on a computer. 

Click to read more ...