Reinventing Project Based Learning pre-order from Amazon.com

Jane and Susie’s book will be out later this month in the US, the subtitle: “Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age” really explains what it is all about. It should be excellent, not that I’m biased :-). The Classroom Displays Group and Classroom Displays Blog feature in one of the chapters and there are lots of other interesting examples covered. I’m really looking forward to reading it.

To get a taster have a look at the Usefulwiki Project Based Learning pages which were created during the NECC in Atlanta and check out the blog and the Flickr group.

Reinventing Project Based Learning at Amazon.com

This podcast is a great introduction to Action Research in the school setting. (It made me quite nostalgic about my old learning community!).
Rachel has a great podcast on her blog all about her ICT cluster’s collaborative action research project:

Our ICT Cluster, Nelson City Schools, consists of nine city and rural schools; eight of which are primary and one which is an intermediate. We are in the first year of a three year professional development contract with the Ministry of Education.

Last week I interviewed our Cluster’s Director (and also my school Principal), Paul Potaka, and made a podcast on the action research process, reflection and development our ICT cluster has/is undergoing.

Paul’s contribution to the Time4Reflection Seminar is embedded below in podcast form… Sorry but I cannot locate the process diagrams that he references but it is still a very interesting interview in which you can see the journey our cluster has been on
…. oh, and you can also hear me struggling to produce my best “teacher voice” even though I have a cold!!!

Click here to get your own player.

I like the tools they’ve chosen to use to judge their success. Now I’d quite like them to start looking at children’s voice as well as student achievement. That feels like the riskiest thing to do but it’s also often the most powerful.

Via Musings of an old Welsh dragon

86%

I beat him by 2%!

Marcia McGowan’s first grade class used their self-portaits to create some online fun. She’s also involved in lots of internet exchange projects and I love her quote:

This is purposeful, authentic, engaging work that begins to prepare today’s learners for new literacies in the technological world of today and tomorrow.

Now I wonder if she blogs……and if she’s got any nice photos of classroom displays?

I’ve added a new tag line to the blog:

Informal learning, Internet technology and Action research

This is taken from my degree title, of course, but as ever with the degree adapted to my own context! These are the main topics I blog about here so it seemed logical. I am also slowly, slowly, writing an About page like Andy Roberts and John at Sandaig. I can’t believe how quickly they’ve done it. Still, I’ve been busy writing an article so I might let myself off!

I’m currently updating the blog’s design so things might be a bit lumpy for a few days. In return for some research work Andy upgraded the blog to Wordpress 2.2 for me. This is a huge improvement and means I can start to use some of the techniques I’m used to having over at Classroom Displays Blog.

Still in order to make full use of the update I’ve had to change my blog design. After much swithering I think I’ve settled on MooPoint. It is very plain and functional which is what I want at the moment. I’m kind of tired of fussy blog designs. I suppose it might be a reaction to all the dark colours I was considering in my last post!

Having said that I will try to get a few more visual elements into the design, but I’m not sure how yet. I’m just enjoying the purity of the clean lines (lol - there speaks the daughter of a modernist architect!)

It would be great if people let me know what they think of the new design and any suggestions for improvements.