Sydney Teachers, Send Your Colleagues to Me!

This is a quick post, mostly relevant to teachers in Sydney, Australia.

On Friday May 21st I will be running a full day of training at my school. The title is "Real Audience Project: Student Web Publishing". 

It is the first day ever of our new PD initiative. It is going to rock! "PD Like No Other"! 

 What this means, is helping teachers getting a website running where their students' work can be published for the world to see.

I am guessing that if you are the sort of teacher who reads blogs, i.e. is reading this right now, you probably know how to set up a blog already!

But I am also guessing you have colleagues who might just be willing to give it a go, if they had a whole day with a lovely person like me holding their hand!

 I am not reluctant to describe myself like that. I am a patient, gentle person, (ironic photo to your right) perfectly suited to assisting teachers get from:

 Point A (like the idea but sounds out of my depths) 

to 

Point B (oh, I can do this; this is going to work.)

I have enormous confidence in the concept. Once up and running it requires little effort but impacts very positively on students. 

You are an English teacher? Your students can publish short stories, poetry, essays, reflections, and so on. (see http://hmac56.wordpress.com/)

History teacher? Your students can publish 'point of view' pieces, their own interpretations with evidence, a day in the life stories, and so on. (see http://electinghistory.wordpress.com/)

Science teacher? Students publish their understandings, experiments, results, and provocative questions. (See http://stage3science.wordpress.com/) 

Language teacher? Maths teacher? We have teachers from Kindergarten to Year 12, across KLAs, who publish their students' work. The websites are easy to run, and invariably gain 1,000s of views with weeks or months, as well as comments from other students and teachers around the world.

Student web publishing remains for me among the easiest, most high-impact applications of the internet to revolutionising the experience of your students: their motivation, their perspective, their engagement, and the quality of the work they produce.

So whether you want to come along yourself, or can pass this blog post to a colleague and encourage them to come along: COME ONE, COME MANY!  

The workshop day is just the beginning - participants are invited to optional follow up conference sessions over to Elluminate to troubleshoot, vent, celebrate, and nourish the connections they make the people they meet on the day. On the day, participants will meet students and teachers implementing the ideas. In fact every PD day that I run will be a potential window into that 'whole new world' of online engagement that time and time again transforms teacher energy, perspective, purpose.

Click on this image for more information:

 Click here for the registration form: http://scil.nsw.edu.au/register