Jul

10

It takes years to be good…

July 10, 2008 | 2 Comments

This video from Ira Glass, radio host of USA’s This American Life on National Public Radio, provides pertinent advice for those of us, teachers and students, who are trying (and failing) to create quality media products.
Glass’ advice is that it takes years before you can produce work that is where you want it to be [...]

Oct

28

Why Design Matters…

October 28, 2007 | 1 Comment

Dean Shareski has created a Design Matters Keynote for the 2007 Flat Classroom Project.
This is a remix of his presentation for the K-12 Online Conference in which Shareski challenges the fact that “creativity and design are often seen as frivolous or at best icing on the cake of learning” and presents reasons why design [...]

Aug

11

Lifting the fog

August 11, 2007 | 2 Comments

As an English teacher, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be literate. It seems obvious to me that “literacy” has connotations that extend beyond the ability to read and write. This is tied to a consideration of the “21st century” skills students need to be successful lifelong learners. These [...]

Jul

9

Being the change you want to see

July 9, 2007 | 1 Comment

In a previous post, Lighting Fires, Not Filling Buckets, I wrote about my Year 10 class which created some imaginative digital protest texts. The task was fairly open-ended and I was really pleased with the work these students produced. I have uploaded some of these to a protest wiki. If you get a chance, check [...]

Jul

5

xtimeline - could it make timelines interesting?

July 5, 2007 | Leave a Comment

History is one of my passions in life, but I’ve never found timelines very interesting activities. This could all change with xtimeline, which helps you create a timeline on any subject and multiple users can add information and still images to an ongoing project. You can set up privacy settings to moderate who can contribute, [...]

Jul

3

The meaning of colour

July 3, 2007 | 1 Comment

An understanding of symbolism is at the heart of effective visual representation and I’m going to focus on exploring this in more depth with my senior classes to better prepare them for visual representation assessment.
To quote Steve Jobs: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Colour is a key element and the Colour in Motion interactive site is [...]

Jul

3

Visual Literacy - Making Meaning

July 3, 2007 | 1 Comment

“We must prepare young people for living in a world
of powerful images, words and sounds.”

UNESCO, 1982

I have been thinking about the concept of visual literacy a lot lately and its significance to students I work with. My previous job [...]