Do you know what you’re doing in October? I know what I’ll be doing …….

Waiting for this ……..

to start!

For those of you that haven’t yet indulged in a K12 online conference – it’s an absolute must!

And it’s completely free!

Since there doesn’t seem to be any spare PD money for me to attend our local ICT conferences, this fabulous, timeless, powerhouse collection of top-notch presentations will most definitely ease the pain of not being able to attend NZ’s very own ULearn08 in Christchurch.

Did I mention it’s free?

Just look at the wicked keynote speaker line up!!
Stephen Heppell, Alice Barr, Cheryl Oakes, Bob Sprankle, Gardner Campbell, Chris Lehmann, Vicki Davis, and Julie Lindsay

You can attend in your pj’s if you want.  You can even download presentations and play them on your iPod nano if you want!

Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?

Got a few minutes to play?  Thanks to the guys over at Simple Spark Catalogue, I’ve had an abstract ten minutes!

I quite enjoyed taking time out to create my very own Mr PicassoHead. Not that I overly-rate my abstract art skills!

This could be a new way to create an avatar, or explore the elements of abstract portraits without needing to be able to draw in the first place! (Excellent for “Mrs Can’t Draw’s – like me!)

There’s even a rather large gallery of inspiration to check out if you’re stuck!

Check out Mr PicassoHead here!

Now I’m off to play with MapME - another Simple Spark recommendation!

Thanks to Alec Couros over at Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy for sharing this video from Dancing Matt.

It made me smile so I hope it makes you smile too!

Imagine taking this kind of idea (everyone doing the same thing but in a different part of the world) and putting together a video as a collaborative online project!

Anyone interested?

Things have been a bit quiet on the “posting” front lately (apologies for that dear readers!). It’s taken quite a while to settle back into routines in the classroom since my two month stint out in Argentina and Beyond!

But things are slowing returning to normal and though I’ve not been blogging very much, I’ve been reading an exceptional amount of blog posts.
Lately, many people have been playing around with wordle and their de.licio.us links.

Coolcatteacher (Vicki Davis) refers to it as  “seeing a lot about who I am”

I couldn’t resist seeing who I am …… via my de.licio.us tags!

Have you wordled your tags?

CoolcatTeacher (Vicki Davis) just blogged about this video that she enjoyed called
Lively Loud Reading Fun with the Crazy Professor’s Reading Game by Chris Biffle

I love the simplicity of this idea to encourage and enthuse students about Reading. I think that anything that makes Reading fun is worth a try. SO, I’m going to give this a try with my 11 year old students – I just hope that they don’t think it’s too silly. If we just do it every so often I think that it might just work. I know that it would work brilliantly with younger students!

I’d be really keen to know if you try it and how it goes. I will blog about how it goes with my students when we’ve had a go.