So on Monday, Julia Gillard came to our school – a pretty exciting affair all around. She was there to talk about education and the Labor plan for it, so she made a speech, did a bit of a press release and mingled with some students. It was all a bit hush hush – her department wouldn’t confirm her arrival until Sunday night, saying only a senior minister was coming, but she rocked up, right on time, surrounded by a horde of federal police. Something that you don’t often see is the confronting nature of the life of a politician – as soon as Ms Gillard got out of the car, a media scrum formed in front of her, thrusting cameras and microphones into her face.

Anyway, once she’d navigated that and met the prinicipal, Ms Gillard went into on of the learning spaces and gave a speech to the students, teachers and assembled media people. I was fairly impressed, right away. She started off with a bit of a joke about the school website, and then spoke about her own schooling experiences. To give her credit, she got the kids attention, kept it, and didn’t speak down to them. I liked the fact that she also seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to the students, too – actually making time to stop and speak to them.

Anyway, of course I had to throw my weight around to get a chance to talk to her and also to Mr Crean, the education minister. There’s a picture below:

Oh, and as for the title of the blog post? One of our students was very excited at the fact that the President of Australia was coming to the school. Oh dear.

Found this fantastic infographic the other day. In actual fact, I think it was someone on twitter who directed me to it! Really shows the capacity of social media:

So, despite my best efforts at procrastination, I finally got around to actually doing my paving that I’ve been planning for about 6 months. Pretty pleased with the way it turned out, and now I’ve got a hard standing that I can put some solid bits and pieces of furniture on. Quite happy with the way it turned out, but I’m pleased I’ve not got any further plans for working on pavers for the moment – it was bloody hard work! I realised that I hadn’t posted any of my work up here, despite saying that I would in my blog, so I dug back and found photos of my workbench, the compost bin and the paving. Enjoy:

http://quiz.cosmicsoft.net/uvz

I found these on SLATE magazine, I think. I can’t remember fully. Anyway, I think they’re great images.

The first one is apparently a powerpoint slide from Afghanistan, trying to explain the situation to new visitors. Umm, death by powerpoint (literally), anyone?

100428-afghanistan

The second one shows the different cities in China with a population greater than 1 million. Kind of puts it in perspective:

Perhaps we should be talking about effective citizens, rather than active citizens?

I discovered this website while browsing the forums on Edutopia.

It allows you to not only play games based on quizzes or multiple choices but you can also create your own!

Here’s the link: Purpose Games

And best of all, it’s free!

Just thought I’d share some excellent websites that I’ve stumbled upon recently for educators.

These websites are mostly focused on areas that relate to the uses of technology within education, although the MirandaNet one also does some excellent things regarding global citizenship. Both are highly recommended, and membership in both is free!

MirandaNet
Classroom 2.0

I don’t know if you’ve seen this yet, but it just goes to show how sad the state of television journalism is in this country, if this kind of nonsense takes up prime-time viewing…
I auditioned for the stig and all I got was ACA lies