Al Upton's Page
Gifts Received
Al Upton has not received any gifts yet
Profile Information
- Hometown:
- Hallet Cove, Adelaide, South Australia
- About Me:
- I teach at Glenelg School (Adelaide, South Australia) with a passion for professional learning, computer games in education and exploring the role of emerging technologies in education. My focus is catering to busy teachers with time commitments, crowded curricula and often elusive lives of their own. My class, the miniLegends are Year 3 students - 8 and 9 year olds. I am also a District eTeacher with the Learning Technologies Group - promoting and creating online learning opportunities.
- Website:
- http://alupton.edublogs.org/
About
The Original 31 Day Challenge Members
The Building a Better Blog site started after a group of bloggers worked together to go through Darren Rowse's 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Project. They were:
Brent MacKinnon
Brent MacKinnon
miniLegends Class (group of 9-year olds from Australia is joining in the blogging fun!)
Nancy Riffer
© 2009 Created by Michele Martin on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
Comment Wall (6 comments)
You need to be a member of building a better BLOG to add comments!
Join this Ning Network
Compliment of the day,how is your health including work and business over there, guess fine.
My name is favour, in search of a man who understands love as trust and faith rather seeing it as a way of fun but a mature man with good sense of humor after reading your profile at (www.betterblog.ning.com) ,in fact,i derive interest on you so contact me directly with this email address and here is it(favour.david95@yahoo.com) i believe we can start from here, awaiting to hear from you to enable me send my pictures to you for further introduction.
kisses with love and cherish you.
you and your super mini team of MiniLegends did a fab Voicethread by the way - saw it on your blog!
my class is possibly an uncommon blog being student centred in two ways.
Firstly the minilegends determine much of how the blog is structured and what we dedicate our efforts to. An example of this is http://alupton.edublogs.org/voicethread-choose-your-own-adventure/ This was a spontaneous extension of "what will we decorate our door with for book week?" ... they just took control.
Secondly the blog is student directed through my own input and efforts as I explore how blogging and associated technologies can be used to enhance student learning. I also use the blog to share these explorations with other educators. An example of this is my trialling of voicethreads when the kids asked for a way we could share a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' story online. This example turned into an extended cross-curricula literacy activity 'owned' by the students. Equally their own blogs are more an opportunity to enable some awareness raising of the importance of creating a safe and savvy online presence. It is a great place for the kids to play as well as publish and share their learning. I can easily visit the minis blogs to see how they are going. I also often write up an activity on the class blog and the students leave comments to that post.
Establishing a basic blog is easy, handing over control to the kids (difficult for some) means a lot less 'work' for the facilitator/teacher ... unless like me they choose to put in extra time at home and that really is not a necessity - only a choice. For most class blogs, most of it happens at school with the occasional writing up of tasks/assignments (perhaps some uploading of images, mp3s, videos etc) in non-instruction or home time.
I hope this helps and you find it readily transferable to your own classes. I'm sure you will make it would work brilliantly. Cheers, Al