Region Challenge Unit  With more eLearning to come, our department has had to work out how to complete the academic year. If we were in school, we would be working on Olympic Day classes or Track and Field focus and much more direct instructional teaching as students start to tire and are not as interested in Inquiry or student-led long units – they need limited choices and more support to get them through May. eLearning is looking to be somewhat the same! What?  This unit is designed for us to focus on Student Engagement and Activity by offering them a different activity under week-long themes and then hosting ‘live’ Zoom Region Challenges…

Dr Ash Casey has shared a blog post on peprn.com about Games for Understanding which prompted some great conversation on twitter this week. [6 Minute Read] Bunker and Thorpe challenged teachers to think beyond the traditional notion of ‘how it is done’ (technique) and instead give serious and more sustained consideration to ‘what to do’ (decision making) and ‘when to do it’ (skill execution). https://t.co/ambK66JmyK pic.twitter.com/zPslHIl8AJ — Ash Casey (@DrAshCasey) May 1, 2020 Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) follows a specific model and steps and although I embrace fully the process of teaching decision making through tactical awareness and using the game rules, environment, equipment to make the game more…

For the last three years, I have been racing in Beijing in whatever races suited me on race days that worked with our family schedule. There seems to be peak times to race that avoid cold Winter and silly-hot and sticky summer. It is almost impossible to ride outside from mid-November to March-ish and then once June rolls around any outside training has to be started by 4:30am to be sure you are done by 7am as it starts to get hot. Our second year in Beijing, I found some WeChat groups that advertised for Foreigners in Chinese running events. I went along to a few of these and it…

I am not Catholic, but I can do guilt trips like a seasoned professional. Most days, this guilt sits like a devil on my shoulder, gently coaxing me up to train and reminds me that now that I am awake, I need to get up and make the most of the morning opportunity. Sleep is done. There are no obstacles to this except a fever, and then that devil sits with less fervour telling me I should be stretching, walking, crunching or mapping our potential training routes or fixing my bike up. There is no reprieve. Guilt is one of the main attributes of my training consistently. I like training…

Three years ago, as we were touring through Queensland with our children, I decided to take the Google Educator Level 1 and 2 courses and exams and this lead to me diving in and applying for a Google Innovator training and an amazing trip to Stockholm. I don’t feel that the work that I did post-conference was any good, my heart wasn’t quite in it but I did meet some amazing people and the vision that some of them had for their passion around technology and young people was and continues to be very inspiring and it has led to some life-time friends and colleagues. I have just completed the…

I heard you. But did you really? Being in quarantine with my family for 3 months has brought some interesting times. I have a great sense of guilt some days, we are safe, have food security and health. We have our jobs and are currently being paid. We have internet and eLearning to keep our minds engaged. We have amazing support but what we are missing are smaller but much more important things. Cuddles. Cuddles are not as frequent, we are being bombarded by messages of social distancing and we are in each other’s spaces all the time so we want to be alone but really what we need to…