Biting off a chunk...

Image: DSP 142: Drowning in M&Ms2007-10-06, vernhart

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur and there have been times when it has felt like I'm drowning underneath the seemingly endless (growing) mountain of "To Do" in my life. At one stage my hubby did actually begin to wonder if I lived at home anymore... As usual I'm overloaded with different things, but just makes it worthwhile has been the opportunities for learning the busyness of my world has offered. Some of the stand outs have been:

• Firstly, I want to publicly thank cnapi5 for inviting me to participate in the "Master Geek" presentation at his local staff professional development day. He challenged me with content I would never have thought to expose myself to - Indigenous Australian astronomy - and put up with my highjacking the session when the participants started asking questions completely irrelevant to the intended content of the afternoon...my bad, sorry about that. Working with staff from a completely different context, with content completely out of my specialty, was mentally engaging and forced me to step out of my comfort zone a little - and let's face it, that's when fun things happen! I was then super lucky enough to join cnapi5, shanetechteach, Mrs_Banjer, Lyn02 and jenni_wren for coffee and cake - and I have to say, I did feel a little less geeky when I was part of the minority who didn't have their laptop out in the cafe. It was great to meet up with people I value so highly in my PLN and I hope we can get together another time soon.

• Imagine if you will a room full of education students, all bamboozled as I talked wikis, blogs and web2.0. There were frowns and there was a lot of confusion...and then my colleague and I pulled out the LiveScribe...well, didn't the eyes light up then! I was recently asked to speak with the group about how we embed ICTs into the senior English curriculum with a focus on the hypertext unit from earlier this year. It's fun to show off what we do, but the most exciting thing about the hour...seeing the next generation of teachers realise there's way more out there than they ever imagined.

• Later the same week (it was an intense four days...) one of the teachers from my Academy and I both ran different workshops at the English Teachers Association of Queensland seminar focusing on the hypertext unit and using GoogleLit Trips to enrich poetry and novel studies. I've got an email I need to reply to from a group of teachers who work nearby asking for some help getting their Google Earth sorted out so they can start using it in their classrooms - WIN!
  

Closer to home, I've started to see some movement on some projects too, which is keeping me quite insanely busy on top of my actual day job. We're starting to see staff move through the SC PD Framework and after six months of feeling like I've been talking into the void and feeling a tad unsupported (the eye-rolling, sighs and groans) while I talk Framework, it feels good! Now to keep the momentum up and power on through it all.

So, it's all happening here (including seeking clarification on an idea I have for another ICT embedded unit in senior English...but we'll see if I can sweet talk my way out of a frowning panel before I talk more about that one...) and all I can do to stay on top of everything - take a massive bite and just keep chewing!