Journal

Sunday, 1st March 2009

I'm glad to be back on my laptop. The repairman replaced the hard drive and motherboard even though it was a software issue. Speaking of software, I uninstalled all antivirus software. I'm sick of being told to restart my computer all the time. Antivirus software is the biggest virus of them all as it wants to take over your whole system.

My meeting last week went very well as follows:

Rhonda: I explained my revelation that I should treat the Grade sixes as students in their first rather than final year of multimedia. This means I will now focus on animation rather than HTML webs.

Barry (university): Barry inspired me not to be polemic against issues like web 2.0 as there is obvious potential there. He promised to keep me informed with the progress of his international project so I hope to meet with him again.

Janice (DEECD) was also very helpful. What she seemed to respond to most from our conversation was my use of animation. Animation seems to reoccur as a focus which is fine as my Animating Best Practice findings are still fresh in my mind.

I was also encouraged last Friday as James (a Grade 3 teacher at Elwood Primary) asked me how he can assist his Grade in implementing my ideas. I had the last hour free so I spent about 20 minutes in his grade showing the children how to make cartoons. They seemed to be quite excited about trying this out for themselves.

Sunday, 7th March 2009

I received some feedback from the University Ethics Advisory Group so fine tuning my submission is now my research priority.

I also had an interesting week in my classroom. Due to a different timetable involving swimming sessions, I had one grade twice in the same week. I considered the second session bonus time for them so we expored some possibilities involving the creation of classroom animations.

Thursday, 26th March 2009

I'm about 31,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean at the moment en route to New York. The revisions to my ethics submission have been made and posted back in. Although such processes are always tedious, they do tend to yield results in terms of clarity of thought in various areas:

1/ Metacognition is an additional benefit of my methodology as students reflect on their work and the thinking behind it.

2/ The implications of my work can only be considered one angle into what is obviously now a huge area in education, i.e. technology in education.

I also read an interesting article about Philosophy being taught in Primary Schools. Metacognition again seems to be a recurring theme with many benefits for education.

Monday, 30th March 2009

Metacognition

The "Punctuation Police" allocated as animation topics: