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Sydney EduTech GAFE Summit 2015 - Day 1!

4/22/2015

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During the second week of the school holidays I was lucky enough to attend and present at the EduTech Sydney GAFE Summit held at Southern Cross Vocational College in Burwood.

The two days started with a great keynote by Juan De Luca. The theme of Juan’s keynote was ‘From Consumers to Creators’ and explored moving from classrooms where students simply take in information but rather get out there and create their own. He challenged teachers to provide their students with safe environments where they are willing to take risks without the fear of failure. He used the old adage that FAIL = First Attempt in Learning along with the popular Albert Einstein quote:
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Juan explored the idea of ‘makerspaces’ and ‘design thinking’ as possible ways to allow students to explore creation in knowledge formation. Makerspaces can involve simple equipment that is provided for students to allow them to ‘tinker’ with what they have a create anything they wish or they may be given a problem they need to solve by designing a product. Makerspaces can also incorporate ‘fancy’ electronic equipment such as 3D printers and electronics kits that allow the students to explore Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths (STEM) further. Design thinking simply allows the student’s to let their imagination run wild to design anything that they can deem possible (or impossible!) based around the criteria/problem given to them by the teacher.

For the first ‘regular session’ of the Summit, I attended Chris Betcher’s session titled ‘Show Don’t Tell: Screencasting 101’. This was a great hands-on session that allowed us to explore using web tools such as ‘Screencastify’ or ‘SnagitforChrome’ to create screencasts that can be distributed to students either prior to a lesson or afterwards. Both of these tools are free web apps available from the Chrome Store and are quite easy to use. Chris gave attendees some hints and tips for creating effective screencasts such as ensuring that you plan ahead to make sure you don’t have any background noise that is going to interrupt your video. I really look forward to using these tools to create videos for my Stage 6 Biology class as I hope to move towards ‘flipping’ the classroom.

Up next I attended Kimberley Sutton’s session ‘If you build it they will come’. This session discussed the effectiveness of allowing students to create and offered the exciting tool of ‘Build with Chrome’ to do that. When you open ‘Build with Chrome’ you are presented with an amazing virtual world of Lego. People, everywhere, have grabbed ‘plots’ of land that they have built their Lego creations on. You can explore lots of amazing things that others have built and even add your own creation. A great way to get your students to interact with the program that Kimberley suggested is to send your students on a scavenger hunt to find different ‘Builds’ around the world. This could be a fun way to get them to investigate where different places are located and could lead to further investigation about other cities, states and even countries.

After lunch I headed to a session by Juan on Smart Evaluations with Google Apps. Throughout the hour we explored a range of applications that can be used to gather data from your students. Juan gave attendees a number of uses of Google Forms in particular that are extremely easy to implement in their classrooms. Forms can be used for things from self-assessment and peer evaluation so feedback can be gathered after a process, whether it be the end of a unit or on completion of an assessment task. Google Forms are also really handy for distributing quick and easy pre- or post-assessment tasks. Team Forms with the ‘Add-on’ Flubaroo and you can even mark and return feedback to students quickly all at the push of a few buttons. You can see a walkthrough on how to create your own forms and mark them using Flubaroo in a previous presentation I did here - Google Forms & Flubaroo.

During Session 4 on the first day I ran my first workshop ‘Get In Kahoots!’ - introducing teachers to the amazing game-based, interactive tool, Kahoot. You can find my presentation by clicking on this link. I have used Kahoot in all my classes, ranging from Year 7 through to Year 12 and ALL of them love it. It’s a great tool to use as a fun pre- or post- assessment that introduces a little bit of a competitive vibe to your classroom. My students love competing against themselves and each other, so it does a great job of providing intrinsic and motivation for success! I even learnt a few things from Maggie, who came along to offer moral support during my session! You can preview your Kahoot quiz all in the same window - without having to ‘play against yourself’, which I had been doing up until now to make sure everything works the way it should!! The second thing I learnt is that Kahoot has now introduced a ‘Ghost Mode’ - this is where your students can complete the same quiz a second time and not only compete against everyone else, but also compete against ‘Ghost Self’ to see if they can better their score! I can see the great use in Ghost Mode if you were to do the quiz before teaching a concept, teach it and then re-quiz using Ghost Mode - you would hope that all your students beat their ‘ghosts’ when playing again!

The last session of the day included what is the highlight of the Summit - the Demo Slam! During the ‘slam’ a number of presenters volunteer to share their favourite Googley/techy tip in 3 minutes. The idea is to WOW the audience with something amazing that they may never seen before or something that may simply change their lives!! The Sydney Slam definitely didn’t disappoint. We were shown things from ‘OmniBox’ to using LucidChart to create your own fonts as well as ‘Boomerang for GMail’ and ‘SafeShare.tv’. Of all the slams, however, the one that introduced something to me that I’d never seen before and that I really loved was ‘Everyone is an author of my blog’ - using a ‘secret’ email in Blogger to allow students to directly post to a blog simply by emailing!! I have already used this in two of my classes since the Summit and it has worked a treat!! So my vote went to Dave Collins for this awesome tip!

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My 'Teach Science Like a Pirate' presentation

11/18/2014

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Our Google Hangout with Dave Burgess 

11/13/2014

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Immerse Yourself 

11/9/2014

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Most people that know me know that I am an extremely passionate Bon Jovi fan. I have seen the band live 24 times in three countries. I love when there are moments where I can use a quote from Jon Bon Jovi to help get my thoughts across and this one is perfect for this blog post.
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This quote would have gone quite nicely in my last blog post on passion, but I also believe that it fits perfectly with the second piece of the PIRATE philosophy puzzle 'Immersion'. 

In this section of his book, Dave Burgess talks about fully diving in to whatever it is you are doing, 'to completely give yourself up to the moment and fully "be" with your students.' There are so many times when we could just put on a video and let it run for half a period without taking the time to get into it yourself, stop at various times and ask questions, make sure the students are actually paying attention instead of falling asleep on the desk. Even though you are still showing a video, you are immersing yourself in the content of the video as well to show your students that the reason for watching it isn't just that you don't really feel like doing much else that lesson.

As Dave says, 'students can feel it when you are truly present' and I think we can all agree with this. I had a Biology student comment at parent-teacher night recently that I get 'so into it' in class and she said that she really enjoys that. She said that if I didn't show as much enthusiasm as I did, she probably wouldn't be so interested in the content. I'm not adding this to toot my own horn, but I do try to make sure that I throw myself all in when I can. 

This year has been a roller coaster ride for me. I have had two grandparents pass away and I got married, so my mind has been all over the place for most of the year. I will admit, being able to just throw myself into something crazy in the classroom has helped me get through some pretty tough days. Returning to school after missing time off for one thing or another also shows that you are doing the right thing in the classroom when your students email you to say they're missing having you in class or that, even though they have another science teacher covering the content with them - it's just not the same!

My Stage 6 classes are the ones that I find I immerse myself in more as I believe that my input is going to be what helps them get through two very full on years and keep them engaged and motivated in my classroom. I also enjoy being crazy with my Year 7 class as they are still at that cute, we don't think you're weird stage! I will admit that I have struggled this year to truly immerse myself with my Year 9 class - they're at that 'too cool for school' age and linking back to the previous post, the content isn't really my  'passion'... but I have tried and looking back over the last 3 and half terms I have thought of how I will do things differently next year!

Dave states that he is a firm believer in structure and having plans for what you wish to address in the classroom, but he also says that it's ok to 'let it go' and run with the 'teachable moment'. If you stick to the plan too often and don't let your students explore when they are truly engaged in a particular area of the curriculum you are going to miss that opportunity to delve into something valuable. Even if this means losing some 'precious' time preparing for standardised tests, etc we need to make these sacrifices to do our job - to teach our kids! Sometimes we need to just put the 'formalised' stuff aside and just 'be' with our students. 

My mission for myself (and for anyone reading this post!) is to try to think of how I (and you) can completely immerse myself into at least one lesson in the next week. For us Aussies, we are getting to that time of the year where we are being pushed by the demands of reports and faced with students who are already in holiday mode - but just think, by totally immersing yourself into one lesson you could see a completely different side of your students and engage them in a way that you might not have thought possible during Term 4! Hopefully this will give you some ideas of how you can immerse yourself into more areas of your teaching in 2015!!
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The Changing Face of Professional Development

9/1/2014

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Last week I had a look through my Professional Development log for 2014. After calculating the hours I have spent on a range of professional development experiences this year, I was surprised to see I have completed more hours of PD in just the 2 and a bit terms of this year than I have in years gone by (the number of hours is over 120 for those who are interested). The reason why I was surprised was that I have just moved into my 10th year of teaching, a time when people might usually think that they don't need anymore PD, that they know everything that they need to know and they just keep going on the way they've been going on.

The thing I love about looking at my PD Log is that the events that I have taken part in are so diverse and innovative. I have been fortunate enough to attend major events like the Google Apps for Education (aka GAFE) Summit and slide2learn as well as ICT workshops, HSC Biology collaboration days and the Sydney CEO eLearning Co-ordinators day. These big events have been amazing, but what I also love about my PD experiences this year is the smaller, slightly less formal forms of PD in the shape of Techie Brekkie, Lunch'n'Learn, TeachMeets, #pdinthepub and Twitter chats.

Earlier this year I presented at the DigTech TeachMeet at the Google Headquarters in Sydney. Afterwards, a group of presenters went out for dinner (a TeachEat) and I was lucky enough to meet an amazing group of primary teachers from the Sydney CEO. As of that night, we have been working together to build one of Australia's biggest educational chats - #aussieED. 

Every Sunday night at 8.30pm AEST, teachers from around Australia and the world come together over Twitter to share their ideas and resources around a common theme. Last night was my first opportunity to moderate a chat and the theme was 'Building Your PLN'. It was great to be able to help people to use Twitter to find like-minded people to connect with and help them 'be more dog'. 
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It was at the CEO eLearning Day that George Couros showed us this video that has inspired me to take more risks in my teaching and learning and it was great to be able to share it with the rest of the Twitter-verse. 

So my challenge for you for this week is... how can you be more dog?! :)

- Kelly
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Welcome to 'The Independent Variable'

8/27/2014

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Why 'The Independent Variable'? As a Science teacher, one thing we teach our students is that in an experiment, you should always have an independent variable - this is the thing that we change in an experiment. In coming up with a name for my blog, I wanted something that was going to tie in with my love of Science as well as my passion for instigating change within the Science curriculum... and from that the name was born!

We teach our students that there should only be one independent variable in an experiment for it to be a fair test. I believe that if we, as teachers, can try to change one thing about our teaching we are making the move towards overall change and creating a better education system for all.

This blog and the associated 'Resources' page will be a place for me to share the things that I am working towards 'changing' in my teaching. I look forward to having you join me in my journey of change. 

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    Kelly Hollis

    The Global Head of Science for Education Perfect located in Sydney, Australia. 
    Interested in the integration of ICT into the Science curriculum. 
    ​#aussieED co-founder.

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