What is a Virtual Professional Development Network? How do you build one and how do you make the most of it.

The ancient art of storytelling has become digital. While the content of the story remains the focus, multimedia tools add a new dimension to its presentation and take it to a wider audience that is relevant to 21st century teaching and learning.

Students are required to explore and create multimodal texts in the Australian Curriculum - it's easy with the digital tools available both online and at our fingertips.

Scratch is a great tool for creating fun interactive projects such as games, videos, and interactive stories. It's easy to learn, and great for using with students. In this hands-on workshop, participants will be led through the process of building a simple game of "pong" in Scratch, and how to use this activity as an introduction to Scratch, computer programming, and gaming in the classroom. Participants will also be introduced to the Scratch community website, and other Scratch resources available online. No programming experience necessary.

A workshop demonstrating how the new IPT Standards will be applied in the classroom and in assessment instruments. It will be a lively interactive session where participants work through the necessary steps to develop and implement the new criteria as per the 2010 Syllabus.

In this workshop participants will be guided to use a variety of Web2 tools (voki, wordle, voicethread, etherpad)Examples of student work and feedback about the use of these tools will be presented.

Over last few years there has been an explosion of new devices in the market. iPods, iPads, Tablets, eeePC’s, Audio Recorders. With this has come a wide range of uses and experiences as well as problems needing to be solved. This year Townsville Catholic Education has supported teachers to explore the possibilities to improve learning opportunities.

This year students at Southern Cross Catholic School have used iPods to create media rich content from learning activities and then shared them with the wider school community, family and friends through individual and group blogs. Students use a range of apps available on the iTunes store to record reflections and then email from the iPod to their blog. Through the use of the blogging site Posterous teachers have had the control to accept posts to blogs through email and then moderate posts
and reflections before going live to the web.

This has been used well to support students learning when they created a campaign to change social issue in and around the school. The year 6 students worked together to highlight the safety of the school round-a-bout to local government and then broke into smaller groups to persuade students at the school with a range of social issues.

Students have also had the opportunity to use new Honeycomb Tablet, ACER A500, similar to the iPad that include proxy support and Adobe Flash. This has also given teachers the ability to use the wide range of interactive websites available to teachers a real chance to use sites such as Scootle, Study Ladder, Sumdog and much more. With tablets ability to use flash based activities in less than minute compared to the PC’s ten minute it has become an important device to aide learning in a time poor classroom.

Visual representations of information, data or knowledge are abundant in our world. These graphics are used to explain complex information quickly and clearly. They are also used extensively as tools by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing and communicating conceptual information. Therefore they are key concepts for developing 21st Century Skills and Literacies.

The need to be visually literate in the 21st century is continuing to grow. “In an uncharted world of boundless data, information designers are our new navigators,” begins a recent Times article, “When the Data Struts Its Stuff.” There is also a strong emphasis in our new Australian Curriculum which require students to decode and create visual data.

This workshop will look at visual representations of data (infographics,visual data ...),why use these with students, connections to the Australian Curriculum and provide numerous resource to support consumption as well as creation.

Through a National Project titled Teaching Teachers for the Future, Digital resource packages have been developed which follow the TPACK framework linking technology, pedagogy and content knowledge. In this session you will be invited to review these Digital Resources Packages and provide feedback. The Digital Resources include links to the National Curriculum, The National Professional Standards, lesson plans, video footage of implementation, assessment frameworks, further ideas and resources. These Digital Resource Packages evidence the effective use of ICT as learning tools. Through a practical analytical task looking at how ICT is being embedded and presented in each of the packages, you will gain a better understanding of one way ICT has been used in preparation of pre-service teachers to deliver the Australian Curriculum.

Trying to teach students how to program php without actually using a web development stack is a bit pointless. However, trying to simulate a webserver environment in a secondary school is fraught with difficulties caused by over enthusiastic filtering software. This presentation will demonstrate how I have taught basic php development using open source portable USB based webserver applications over the past three years and some of the difficulties I encountered along the way. If you teach IPT, ITS or have an interest in how programming is taught using these technologies you will find this presentation of interest. I will cover, installation, general settings, directory structures, common student pitfalls and give a demonstration of a basic dynamic web template using MySQL and Php.

This workshop will demonstrate how Blogs and social media can be utilised to create professional learning networks to enhance professional learning for educators.

Participants will:
Create their own blog
Use RSS to subscribe to other educators' blogs
Create a Twitter account
Use #hashtags and Tweetdeck to search for education tweets and educators to follow