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.

Yesterday I killed my blog big time while trying to upgrade to the latest Wordpress version!

Let me assure you that there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as 170 posts disappeared into the abyss of Cyberspace.!

So once the terror subsided somewhat I got busy - emails traversed the globe between BlueHost and myself. Eventually Twitter came to my rescue when Clay in Seoul put me in touch via Skype with a 17 y/o system administrator in the US. Kevin was my saviour! He found my blog backup and restored it. Now all I have to do is to doctor the theme.

Don’t you love living in a connected world!

So…

Rule Number One - Backup Your Work!

Rule Number Two - Backup Your Work!

Rule Number Three - Backup Your Work!

& RTFM = Read The Manual!

Thanks Clay & Thanks Kevin

Ad

A couple of years ago I had the chance to attend a keynote by Marco Torres of Ican Film Festival fame. In amongst his many pearls of wisdom he said, ‘Know your Yodas’. For me these words meant to recognise the people who inspire, guide, extend, support and teach you.

Since my interests are so eclectic I was visualising an assembly of Yodas something like the Sergent Pepper’s album cover. My current album cover (or Ipod CoverArt hehehehe) would be a collection of: thinkers, cricket players, writers, musicians, photographers, friends, film makers, educators, poets, great leaders, scientists, artists, hackers and the picture would be constantly growing and changing.

Now with the advent of Twitter we can get to know many of our Yodas from the education world personally. We can have short (140 character) chats in real time with the people we ‘follow’ wherever they are in the world. We can: converse, challenge, argue, ask advice, organise get togethers, joke, lurk, direct people to readings or digital resources, call for Skype participants and even get to know a little about their personal lives.

As far as software goes for Twittering, I like the Firefox plugin Twitterfox. Using the Twitter homepage really doesn’t fit my work style. With Twitterfox each time a person adds a comment to Twitter it pops up in my web browser’s window. I can then glance down at it, give it a quick read and reply, go to recommended resource or continue working. Nice, convenient & relatively unobtrusive.

Twitter has become a nice add on for my professional development and it definitely has implications for the professional development of all educators.

So if… ‘ u rnt using twitter - itz where itz all at man :)’ - (MizMinh, 2008) it could be time to start checking it out.

cheers

Twittername = adrianbruce

PS Who are your Yodas and what would your cover art look like?

When using Learning Journals to get students reflecting at a metacognitive level I often find that the entries become ’similar’ in their style and content.

Tonight I’ve worked on changing the modality of some of my ‘tried and true’ question stems to ensure more ‘considered’ answers are given to student reflections.

eg

• Today I explored……………. and found………………..
• I think it is important to know about………..because…
• I believe (insert famous person) would say that… (insert issue/concept/learning) is …. because……

Visit my Question Stems webpage.

cheers

Adrian

PS If you found this resource useful consider signing up for my email newsletter.

Samuel (my son) is heading for 9 years old and blogging has been a fantastic way to get him to write about his experiences.
Do feel free to drop by his blog & leave him a comment on a job well done given that he did all the movie editing and music creation himself.

http://code-samuel.blogspot.com/

cheersAdrian

PS I’ve never felt the need to drive cars fast. I’m thinking it is a gene that scientists may one day find and eliminate

Over the years I’ve amassed a number of really nice free webpage backgrounds and I’ve had them sitting in a really basic format on my webpage. Recently this site has been getting considerable traffic so I thought I’d tidy the site up and make it easier to navigate.

If you need a background image for a presentation, ‘pimping’ your Myspace page or a Web 1 project, feel free to browse my selection

cheers

Adrian

The Teacher Toolbox recently picked up 3rd place in the Blogger’s Choice Awards for the ‘Best Educational Blog’ and I’m stoked

A big thanks goes out to all the people who took the time to cast a vote my way and I’m looking to continuing the blog in its new format throughout 2008.

Adrian

One of the quickest ways of getting an image ready for a blog is to do a screen dump. I’ve just put a step by step procedure on my site that outlines how to do this.

cheers

Adrian