Stumbled upon this vidcast from Canadian educator Dean Shareski given at the 2007 K-12 Online Conference. Dean’s nicely produced 25′ video discusses the importance of design in education. He’s even produced a teaser trailer on YouTube. Now that’s innovative! Dean roams across design principles introducing some innovative ways of thinking about classroom space as well
Continue reading ...I’ve been in blogland for months, have produced no podcasts, and I’m starting to feel withdrawl symptoms! I’m prepping for another couple of lectures in a theatre history course I share with a colleague. I’m itching to accommodate the new Keynote audio feature, but think I’ll stick with Garageband to produce the podcast. I’ve written
Continue reading ...Like zillions of other bloggers, apparently, I am exercising my mind on Blog Action Day. How can I make a difference in my niche area? Now this is a challenge. Will putting my class notes online, and not distributing via paper do the trick, or will my students go and crank them out anyway? Will
Continue reading ...Fellow-blogger Sue Waters cry for help on how to organise herself for a conference trip, evoked a stream of advice and tips. I couldn’t wait to join the queue ready to tell her how to reduce travel-anxiety, make lists, pack the right stuff, and arrive unflustered, have a great conference, and leave with everything (including
Continue reading ...This curve-ball question came straight at me this week in class. I had confidently tossed off one of my favourite bon mots ‘As an actor your most important muscle is imagination.’ Back came the question and it’s a good one. How do you cultivate your imagination? Got me thinking. I came across a post this
Continue reading ...Update: In the 2 plus years since I wrote this post, live blogging during a conference presentation has been overtaken by the even livelier Twitter, which forms a back-channel to most presentations nowadays. Comment on the fly with hashtags makes following, interaction, and searching easier and the whole thing is much more dynamic. Twitter was
Continue reading ...I came across this neat way of taking notes some time back, but it’s come back again like a boomerang! Perhaps it’s the time of year when students in Queensland are starting to eye the calendar nervously. The jacaranda trees are putting out the first blue blooms … a traditional sign that exams are round
Continue reading ...There’s the talk of creativity in the air. Did it every go away, or is it just spring or serendipity that the creative play approach for educators is all around. My own presentation’s premise on Purposeful Play (at last week’s USQ 3rd International Pedagogies Conference) was reflected in a nice post Unlocking Teacher Creativity: a
Continue reading ...Welcome to Groundling. This is the first post of what I hope will be many. I wanted a place to write about my love of theatre and good acting with others. Since I was introduced to theatre as a child, I’ve never found anything more thrilling than spending a couple of hours in a big,
Continue reading ...I spent the last day of the working week at yet another conference. How much of this can a girl take! USQ’s 3rd International Pedagogies and Learning Conference was held this year at the Springfield campus, in the outer Ipswich-Brisbane suburbs. This corridor is one of the fastest growing in Australia, and if the immigrants
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