I have decided to plan a unit around the visit of Rick Hansen to China.25 years ago, Rick wheel chaired around the world to raise awareness and funds for spinal chord research. One of his stops on the tour was Beijing; he wheeled up the Great Wall. As part of the anniversary he is coming back [...]

Dr Fred Mednick was one of the Keynote speakers at the EARCOS Conference. He is the Founder of Teachers without Borders; an organisation that connects teachers to information and each other to create local change on a global scale. I started my international teaching career one wet Sunday afternoon back in 2001 when I was surfing [...]

My third session with Giselle Martin-Kneip! This lady is such a good presenter and facilitator. This session was looking at strategies to help students become critical thinkers. I was particularly interested in this workshop as I see this as something I could really work on. We began by trying to define what critical thinking is. There [...]

Kath Kummerow is an excellent Grade 1 teacher from my own school WAB. I was unable to attend when she presented this workshop at school so I took the opportunity to go to her presentation at EARCOS. Kath believes that her students are capable of doing all sorts of things with data and judging from the [...]

What is an Essential Question? That was the basis for Giselle Martin- Kniep’s EARCOS workshop this morning. It certainly challenged our ability to think and question at 8am this morning! Her theory is that the art of questioning is the art of increasing and managing dissonance and novelty. You have to keep the kids interested [...]

When I saw in the EARCOS schedule that Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling was leading some of the sessions I was very pleased as a few weeks ago our Learning Support Team had led a very interesting staff meeting on Working Memory and her name had been referred to several times. This morning [...]

We have just completed the first session of Coetail. We have had an interesting discussion about what will children born today not know about such as videos, cable phones, cds etc. There is also a lot of responsibility that comes with this new generation. What is our responsibility as teachers? There were concerns about how [...]