SMOOTHIES and Learnshifting

SMOOTHIES stands for Short Multimodal Online Opportunities To Help Interested Educators Succeed These Friday afternoon 15-minute informal online learning opportunities have been running since before the COVID pandemic and were the main reason I ended up running the upskilling training for teachers who potentially had to deliver classes online during the COVID dark days. To … Read more

Reading Parents – count words read to your kids

Reading Parents – an idea for adapting reading progress to have parents track the number of words they read to their children at home in the same way they might count their steps when they go walking. I don’t work for Microsoft but Reading Progress is a great free tool for use in schools and … Read more

FAIR – Fun, Aspirational, Inspirational, Respect

When I was reflecting on words I know are crucial to determining purpose, direction and achievement for students, I settled on these four. The fact they formed the word “fair” which in turn is part of the phrase that Australia is famous for, namely giving people a “fair go” made me want to share these four words and why I think they are important for students, teachers, parents, carers and anyone wanting to give the best fair go to someone, to anyone.

It is also obvious that the component words of this acronym are not new as ingredients to creating an opportunity for a child to live their best life, but I do like the fact I have bundled them into a four-letter “F” word that I like.

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December in Melbourne through a GoPro Lens

Well, I have created my second web page of GoPro photos taken in and around Melbourne. We strayed as far as the Grampians during this month. I had never been to the Grampians before and thoroughly recommend it. Below this month’s (December 2021) Photogrid story with accompanying haiku poems is a dedicated photo story with … Read more

New Year Creative Challenge

I like walking and taking photographs of things. This year I plan to create an Adobe Express Webpage for each month, simply containing a collection of photographs taken on walks, journeys or adventures. There will be three or four of these mini-albums or photo grids for each month. A kind of visual diary. A haiku … Read more