Look, I’m sure I’m leaving myself open to many, many comments about ‘purpose’ and ‘motivation’ BUT one of the hardest things I find to teach is respect and value for the draft process.

Above is my first conceptualisation sketch for my ‘pyro’ cartoon. I drew it on the lounge while my daughter was watching The Wiggles. There is crossing out… speeling mistakes… experimentation with words and a little help from Miss 2.5. IN many of my other drafts there are arrows, a couple of pointers where to find models for the characters, alternative text and notes on software to use.

So in a nutshell, my point is that writers ‘DRAFT’! and that it might be a worthwhile exercise to print this draft and place it next to my final product to show that writers go through a process in order to see, ‘Just how it is in their mind’s eye’.

cheers

Adrian

Oh… and the point of the post is that as teachers we should use the term ‘first draft’ implying that there may be many more drafts to come as opposed to ‘rough draft’ which implies lack of care and something that just has to be done.

Almost instantly Eric realised that the correct answer to, ‘Does my thorax look big in this?’ was not ‘Yes’.

I’ve been looking for Youtube downloaders and converter for a few days now as Mr 9 is not handling the ‘buffering’ very well. In fact it is distracting him to the point that he will not wait around for the content to be presented.

Anyway, most of the Youtube converters I’ve looked at over the last couple of days either had: spyware as a condition of the user agreement, wouldn’t work on Vista or wanted to email the files to me which leaves me open to spam.

So given that Mr nine is exploring the nature of black holes, string theory, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligence with a couple of his little friends in the playground, I thought it is time to expose him to Michio Kaku in order to introduce Cosmology

All that said, this Youtube to Quicktime converter is working very well for me and Mr 9 can watch the interviews in the car on the long drives we do here in Australia

cheers

Adrian

Dear All,

Please encourage the ‘powers that be’ in your school to send out a memo/email with all the trite that constitutes a ‘Staff Meeting’ in your part of the world and then play this http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66 with the time that has been created!

cheers

Adrian

PS then if you dare… take the toner cartridge out of the photocopier for a month or so

Hi All,

So glad I could drop by today and I trust you all have a little something to take back and implement at your school

Here are direct links to the resources I discussed today.

A bit about me - My bio

In the Beginning there was The Symmetry Project

The Starfish Web Design - Yr 3/4

Learning Centre Role Description Cards - A key to doing what I do with students.

The Science Wow Factory - Readers’ Theatre Scipts to Download - First Place in Global Virtual Classroom Project - Be sure to check out ‘The Floating Teabag’.

The Ace Kids Blog - 2007 - The joys of working with a really switched on teacher.

Puppet Poetry Movie - You have 3 minutes to demonstrate to the world how creative, intelligent and articulate you are. What will you do?

Scamper - The creative process I use to generate ideas. Substitute software for traditional tools. Combine software and different subjects.

Martian Postcards - SCAMPER in Action

Fractal Poetry Photostory - A place where Art, Poetry and Mathematics Collide

Ejay Software - Digital Music Software - try a demo

Photo Mosaic Freeware - We used it as a bit of a class fundraiser

Paint.Net - Great image manipulation program + Some of my printable tutorials

Artrage - Make sure you experiment with the ‘trace image’ feature.

3d animation - Anim8or - + I’ve added a Quick Start Guide here for you to download

Mind Maps Created in Cmap - + here is my Mindmap on How to Mindmap

The Original Ace Kids Podcasts - My Pod-o-matic Account that I use during consultancy days.

Stop Motion Animation made with Monkey Jam - A Few Tips and Tricks

adrianbruce.com - feel free to explore the site - download what you need and then hand it on to other teachers - Reading Games - Math Resources - Freeware - Lots of stuff.

The Teachers’ Toolbox = my blog - consider joing the other 15 000 people who are subscribed

Professional Learning Tools

Pageflakes - I have my Pageflakes account as one of my tabbed homepages.

Download Itunes and find some educational podcasters - Try David Warlick and Wesley Fryer to begin with.

Sign up for Twitter then head to my page to see who my Yodas are and then ‘follow’ a few to begin with. See who they ‘follow’ and pretty soon you will have instant access to many like minds. http://twitter.com/adrianbruce

Try out Edu ISland in SecondLife - The Discovery Education Network i a good place to attend workshops.

Try attending live workshops via Ustream TV - Here is Will Richardson’s ‘TV station’ - NB If you attend live you can take part in the chat session.

Have Fun With it All

Adrian Bruce

Tomorrow afternoon I’m giving a presentation/workshop entitled, ‘Creative and Productive Uses of ICTs in the Modern Classroom’ in Hong Kong via Skype. There will be a data projector with my talking head on one screen and another with my presentation and a plethora of work samples I’ve done with students on another… not to mention the work I do on my own

http://21clearninghk.ning.com/

In reality though, you’ve gotta love this technology as I can present in China after lunch here in Oz and then quickly rip off to my son’s school and pick him up once I’ve finished chatting to another continent

IT offers amazing opportunities!

cheers

Adrian

As one can imagine making all these 3d nets has not been the most creative of endeavours, so here is a little cartoon that has been bouncing around in my head in various forms for the last week or so.

Enjoy
Adrian

and now for the hexagonal prism net.

… and here is an octagonal pyramid net.

Adrian

Here is a pdf version of my ‘Mind Map on Mind Mapping’

I’ve found the quality of student mind maps improves greatly if they use this as a model.

cheers

Adrian