After a weekend of trying to make my old eMac keep up with the new Leopard OS, I took the plunge and bought an iMac. Not just any old iMac, but one of the new, beaut 24″ shiny screen jobbies with lots of speed and power … just like all the cats that Mac uses
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 ...Spring has sprung in the southern hemisphere. The days are warmer, the outdoor delights increasingly drawing the devoted blogger from the desktop. But wait! What’s that on Google Docs and Spreadsheets? It’s (drum-roll) Google Presenter. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. Those amazingly creative and feverishly fertile (spring analogy) folks at Google
Continue reading ...It’s true, Mac users have more fun. I’ve been testing out the new iLife 08 suite and its companion iWork for the past week or more, and I love what Apple have done with these apps.You can read reviews of these beautifully designed, easy to use software packages elsewhere…just Google it…take a guided tour, watch
Continue reading ...Every time it happens I’m reminded of that first axiom of good teaching: take nothing for granted. Again today, a couple of bright students indicated how nervous they were about tackling the whole online thing. I suggested using either Google Docs and Spreadsheets or the excellent Celtx open-source software so that they could publish their
Continue reading ...Another intriguing, and free app which is creating some noise out there, is the Tumblog. You can read all about them at Tumblr’s own site. Some of the comment in the official Tumblr blog actually questions whether or not this is pandering to the verbally-deficient, but I rather think it is akin to dynamic scrapbooking,
Continue reading ...It’s been a week of mulling over approaches to teaching during the coming academic year. I’m keen to try my hand at preparing a rubric for one of the projects in a performance-based course I teach. Met up with rubrics and the way they operate a couple of years back at the VASTA (Voice and
Continue reading ...Yes a long-ish drive to Brisbane on the hunt for the perfect swinsuit, but it was also a chance to start listening to a new audio book as I did. The swinish hordes of shoppers were not a bit swinish, and looked very much like me, and indeed were not horde-like … the crowds had
Continue reading ...Christmas is over for another year. Can’t say I enjoyed the rampant materialism of the “ka-ching” factor: all-night trading, nightly bulletins trumpeting how much had been taken at the cash-registers etc. The quiet time I spent at home with my son seemed oddly, and wonderfully out of step with what was, and is happening elsewhere.
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