Author: admin

  We’ve recently adopted a number of new strategies integrating educational technology at my school. Over the last couple of years we’ve moved from a school that had a few laptops and no projectors to a school that is almost 1:1 (and will be soon), has Apple TVs in all the rooms, and is now…

So I’ve been playing around with a little bit of App Smashing in my classroom – or App Synergy as it is sometimes called. I just like the smashing part – it must be the cave man in me. Anyway, App Smashing is when you use more than one app to produce a quality final…

For me, one of the most exciting parts of any school day was when the teacher rolled out the old TV-on-a-Trolley and said, ‘We’re going to watch a film.’ Bad teachers would let us sit through a whole movie – Stand and Deliver was a favourite, I think I must have seen that and Dead…

I am a big fan of educational technology – that should really be a pre-requisite for being a teacher these days, simply due to the nature of the student experience in Australia today – but I get frustrated when I see it being used poorly in schools. I’ve lost count of the number of schools…

I was at a meeting recently where it was communicated to me in no uncertain terms that the only thing that mattered for students at my school was whether they were above state average. I have no intention of discussing that further on a public location like a blog, but to my mind it does…

I’ve had a fairly broad experience in education: I’ve worked both in public and private systems in Australia and England, so I think I’m at least reasonably aware of the direction of education. Something that has perplexed me lately is the gradual disappearance of computing studies in schools. When I was at school (which was…

One of the most common heard complaints that I hear in my work as a technology integrator is that ‘Students still have to do a written exam at the end of the course, so they shouldn’t bother doing any assessment on their iPad or laptop or other mobile device!’ It’s hogwash, of course, but that…

In addition to interviewing, I also sought to gather data about the Justice Citizens through participant observation. Observation has a long history within qualitative research, originally being associated with ethnography and occurring within settings that already exist. Observation in educational research has been drawn from anthropology, and is either unobtrusive observation or, more likely, participant…

We’re barely five months into the first term of the Abbott Government, and there are people around the country who are drawing a deep breath, ready to say, ‘I told you so.’ While that does nothing but make them feel better – if it even does that – the reality is that, failing some unforeseen…

I’ve been to a lot of EdTEch conferences in Australia and overseas, and they usually fall into two simple categories: the ones that are worth the registration fee, and the ones that aren’t even worth the travel time. That might sound simplistic, but bear with me. What sets apart a great professional learning experience from…