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FYI about arrangement for day school

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Hi all,
I have gone through the reading part for week 5. 5 minute reading time was finished for me and i sent a request for accessing Chapter 2 online, but librarian rejected my request. don,t know why?
any suggestions?

Thanks, pushpinder

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Hi Amanda.

You have provided us a post regarding altered assessment dates on Collaborate. When I access my collab account, the dropbox only has access to AT1 & AT2 for submissions.

A couple of silly questions - will we be assessed on AT2b & AT3, and will that require a submission? As well, is there a rubric for AT2b?

Thanks, Mark.

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Are we writing two frame works, one for each spec? I'm super confused.

Side note: I've made a facebook group for both primary and secondary masters students called : VU Masters of Teaching (secondary or primary)

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There is a masters (Primary) FB group for VU students who would like to join
https://www.facebook.com/groups/572233303191289/?ref=share

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Literacy Fundamentals at Taylors Lakes Primary School

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Literacy Fundamentals at Taylors Lakes Primary School

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Literacy fundamentals I was able to source from my placement school

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My mentor at placement gave me this useful website that I thought I would share with you all :)

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Studyladder, an online learning resource for primary and elementary students and their teachers. Lessons, activities, games, worksheets and videos in English, Literacy, Mathematics and Science.

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Used by over 70,000 teachers & 1 million students at home and school. Studyladder is an online english literacy & mathematics learning tool. Kids activity games, worksheets and lesson plans for Primary and Junior High School students in Australia.

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Drama Victoria had some really great things for their online teaching, PST’s can join as members for free

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Hi everyone, just wondering if we need to attach a reference list on the framework for specialisation assessment 1. Thanks, Caroline

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Love when Tik Tok influencers jump on board #NoATAR2020. As Brooklyn@Sooklyn says to her 50K+ followers, "I cant believe that this hasn't been cancelled...

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This is a really nice way to stay connected!

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Hi Is anyone else having trouble concentrating? RN here and trying not to get to concerned re what is being said, contradicted etc.   I am trying to write the literacy assessment and the previous two and these now are taking taking much longer than it should re the distractions. TV is off but its the news etc causing issues. I have friends who are teachers and Drs didn't send their children to school. I didn't allow my Yr 9 son to go tues last week.

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Thoughts?

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For many of us who are self-quarantining or otherwise isolated due to the coronavirus pandemic, the health crisis is fundamentally changing our relationship to the world, each other, and even our own homes. Covid-19 is also affecting how people use the internet - transforming it overnight from a simple source of entertainment to a vital lifeline that allows those who are currently shut indoors to keep in touch with their family and friends.

From friends using browser extensions and conferencing apps to hang out together, to piano bars delivering virtual livestreams to their patrons, platforms like Zoom, Google Docs, and Netflix are no longer about work, organization, or entertainment. They've become tools for our reconfigured socialization.

If you're one of the many people who's thinking about how your existing apps and online services can be used to connect with loved ones during this uncertain quarantine period, you're not alone. Here's a look at some of the ways people and businesses are adapting to still connect with each other - and some tips for how to open up your own online experience while you're stuck in one place.

Virtual group hangouts have always been a thing ...

As a longtime member of online fandom, I've been participating in group movie nights online for nearly two decades. At first, we used basic instant messaging platforms like AIM and Yahoo Messenger, and often these attempts were chaotic, since typically everyone had a different version of the movie we were all trying to watch together. Over time, however, technology improved and streamlined our efforts; when I did a weekly group rewatch of Avatar: The Last Airbenderin the early 2010s, for example, we used the Basecamp-madegroup chat Campfire, and used the same streaming source to manually sync all our episodes.

Then the platform Rabb.it launched in 2014 and provided a reliable, if somewhat glitchy, way of syncing videos with a group chat. Its biggest attraction was that users could remain anonymous, without needing to log into a client. But that service, despite its popularity, was abruptly shut down in 2019 amid ongoing technical problems and an acquisition by the voice chat client Kast, leaving many people scrambling for alternatives.

Sophie, a longtime member of fandom who spent years organizing regular movie nights for fans in group chats for my fandom and numerous others, told Vox that she'd stopped hosting regular events once Rabb.it shut down. Organizing cross-platform streams became too complicated, she said. But this obstacle clearly hadn't stopped demand for this kind of virtual hangout - especially in the wake of Covid-19.

"I can't stress how much people have been wanting watch parties again. even those who didn't attend them in the past," she said. "People have been popping up to just ask me if we're having any events. There's clearly a need to be entertained, distracted, and connected."

That means familiarizing ourselves with a whole new coterie of online tools - or at least adapting them for new uses.

But now, they're more in demand than ever

Group virtual movie nights have always been a thing, but now they're vital forms of social activity. Among the wide array of apps being used to organize and assemble group movie nights, two tentpoles seem to have emerged: Discord and Netflix Party. (In an interesting bit of analog irony, drive-in movie theaters are also making a comeback.)

Sophie told Vox that many people in her fandom communities had been turning to Discord, a popular chat client which allows people to create semi-private, invite-only servers, for mimicking something closer to offline interaction. Discord is similar to Slack and many other chat clients, but Discord has a prominent voice chat feature that can be active all the time. Discord's voice channels allow users to talk to each other in real time while they multi-task. It also comes with a screen-sharing feature that allows groups of people to watch a movie if one of them is streaming it. While comparable clients like Zoom have features designed primarily for project management and work, Discord is primarily designed around socialization, and has a more informal aesthetic.

Launched in 2015, Discord was an immediate hit in the video gaming community, because it allowed players to easily chat while in-game. It then became massively popular as a way of privately and publicly organizing across fandoms and other geek communities. Many Discord servers contain tens of thousands of members, and function more as internet subcultures in their own right, while others are much smaller, but still integral parts of their larger niche communities.

With the spread of coronavirus, however, Discord has gone mainstream on a whole new level. Demand for access to Discord's services has exploded, and users have experienced intermittent outages due to the large influx of people using the platform. Discord servers are popular, so invites are easy to come by, and new servers are easy to create and join. Last week, the company responded to the demand by increasing its overall server capacity and temporarily increasing the cap on the number of people who could join a live screen-sharing channel from 10 to 50. (The app promptly, though briefly, crashed again due to the high traffic.)

We've increased capacity world-wide by more than 20% to ensure that you're able to text, video & voice chat smoothly.

Many of you are looking to Discord to communicate with loved ones and colleagues at this time, and we will continue to monitor and scale to keep that happening. https://t.co/Db1xiq1SwQ
- Discord (@discordapp) March 16, 2020

1. Download Discord

2. Create a server by clicking the green "plus" icon on your side menu:

Discord's increased screen-sharing means that now a high number of people could hypothetically join your group movie watch, if they had an invite to your server. But of course, not everyone wants to learn how to navigate a whole new intricate chat platform just to watch a movie.

Enter Netflix Party, a Google Chrome browser extension originally developed by Airbnb engineer Stephan Boyer in 2015. He told Vox in an email that he built the extension, which lets multiple Netflix users sync and watch movies on the platform together, "as a way to hang out and have fun with friends." Though he exited the project in 2017, he reported a massive surge in use in 2020. "Hundreds of thousands of people have installed Netflix Party since the beginning of the year," he said. "It now has over a million users."

Netflix Party's current development team corroborated the increased use, with a spokesperson telling Vox via email that it's "experiencing a huge surge in traffic and it's all hands on deck." According to them, "the earliest adopters were college students and military couples in long distance relationships, but the app has since expanded and now serves friends, parents and kids, extended families, online dating, as well as local and online communities."

As word of the extension spread, online communities turned # NetflixParty into a social hashtag, with many people organizing group chats and scheduling events around the feature:

HI I SAW SOMEONE ELSE DO THIS SO . . . IF YOU HAVE NETFLIX, REPLY TO BE IN A GROUPCHAT AND WE WILL ALL REWATCH STRANGER THINGS TOGETHER WITH NETFLIX PARTY pic.twitter.com/osLWgEZUqV
- ALEX IS BEST REDKY STAN ★*° (@80SREDKY) March 18, 2020

I want to host a Netflix party starting on FRIDAY 20th March, starting with Studio Ghibli films !! get your VPN's ready if you have to & let's do this! will be making a Twitter GC too to send the link you'd need to watch together, times & other films you'd like to watch etc
- (@mimithenerd_) March 19, 2020

The spokesperson called the extension an "excellent complement to the typical ways we socialize remotely - voice/video calls, social networks, and online/text messaging." Netflix Party is currently only available through Google Chrome, but the team is looking to expand to other browsers and devices as its popularity grows. Meanwhile, numerous other group streaming and chat clients have been publicizing ways to use their platforms in the time of Covid-19.

Of course, there are plenty of other forms of online socialization, from game-playing to group singalongs, for which you might need more than a simple screen-share and a chat window. Thank goodness that there are tools for those too.

Livestreaming and face-to-face apps are more important than ever

The uses of livestreaming apps in the current moment are too numerous to count. On Facebook Live, the pianists of beloved showtunes bar Marie's Crisis are maintaining their weekly schedule through an invite-only community where they stream musical sets to followers using Facebook Live. Popular NYC DJ hotspot Nowadays is also streaming sets - or at least, it was until its wifi crashed. As casualties of New York City's order shuttering all bars and restaurants on March 17, these and other bars are using the streams to help sustain employees during the indefinite closure by encouraging viewers to tip staff through Venmo.

Across the country, other shows that must go on have done so virtually: Popular punk band Dropkick Murphys streamed its annual St. Patrick's Day concert from an empty concert venue in Boston, via Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Metal band Code Orange streamed its album release party on Twitch. A popular Twitter thread by Broadway diva Laura Benanti encouraged high school theater departments around the country to share their canceled performances via video, generating a heartwarming series of responses.

But musical performances aren't the only events people have livestreamed. Birthday parties are moving to Google Hangouts, board game nights are moving to Zoom, and popular group party games like Jackbox are encouraging people to try playing them remotely.

On Eventbrite, an event discovery platform that's typically used for offline events, a recent surge in livestreamed classes and webinars prompted the company to create a new landing page just to feature upcoming virtual events. It's a slightly surreal tour through the landscape of classes and events that are usually chances for offline community-building - everything from yoga to bread-baking to a virtual ballet class are listed.

"While the bulk of events on Eventbrite have historically been in-person events like music shows and speed dating, we're now seeing a rise in online events being offered on our platform in response to increased efforts to ' flatten the curve,'" Eventbrite spokesperson Sara Putnam told Vox in an email.

Like many of the other events mentioned here, the Eventbrite listings are an example of websites and tools working in tandem: a video/streaming platform like Zoom or Vimeo joins with an organizational website like Eventbrite, a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, and/or a chat client like Discord or Kast to deliver a trifecta of community organization, engagement, and participation.

One of the most fundamental tools for group gatherings has proven to be the remote conferencing platform Zoom, now expanding far past its professional purpose, as families, schools, and groups of friends assemble for a wide range of unexpected encounters.

Had a friend say they couldn't make a zoom cocktail party because they have another one scheduled for that same time period so yes you can still feel unpopular during the apocalypse.
- Isaac Fitzgerald (@IsaacFitzgerald) March 19, 2020

The New York Times reported that over 600,000 people downloaded Zoom in a single day last week. A Facebook group for Zoom memes has ballooned, while Instagram is full of people screencapping their Zoom conferences with accompanying hashtags like #unity, #isolation, and #coronavirussucks.

I would love to see side-by-side graphs of recorded COVID-19 cases and Zoom's server costs.
- Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) March 18, 2020

And Zoom isn't the only popular organizational work tool being dramatically repurposed, as all types of groups and even entire countries collectively turn to online tools. The quarantine has highlighted the recent emergence of Google Docs group chats, previously popular among teens and now expanding to other forced shut-ins, where the chat occurs in the document comments section, and often directly within the document itself.

i only communicate via google docs chat now so if you need to get ahold of me you know where to find me
- erin (@ripley_erin) March 17, 2020

By the same token, group chats themselves are facilitating the use of Google Docs and spreadsheets on a whole new scale.

Not @ all 300 ppl in my class gc collaborating on a google doc of our midterm answers to help everyone get thru this midterm this shit is so beautiful it really proves that humanity still exists
- lu⁷ AGUST D 2 (@pjmluvmaze) March 12, 2020

Then there are the more unexpectedly creative uses - like organizing live dating roleplays through Google Sheets, and turning spreadsheets into artwork:

But whether you're organizing an outbreak response or just drawing farm animals, all of these apps in their varied uses are doing one very important job: bringing us together. As Putnam told Vox, the online apps and platforms are helping people "combat loneliness and stay connected and engaged during this very strange time." A strange time, indeed - but a great time to expand the way we use technology, and the way we think about what it means to connect.

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From Netflix Party to Zoom: The internet apps getting us through quarantine

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For many of us who are self-quarantining or otherwise isolated due to the coronavirus pandemic, the health crisis is fundamentally changing our relationship to the world, each other, and even our own homes.

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Will there be an online class today?

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Amanda you share resources more than any teacher I have had in my four years at Uni, which is very helpful as some of us have been away from school and the IT world on this level for a long time.  It is helpful your knowledge of ICT as others may not be aware. I can't remember how to add my name here sorry and a big thank you.

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Amanda you share resources more than any teacher I have had in my four years at Uni, which is very helpful as some of us have been away from school and the IT world on this level for a long time.  It is helpful your knowledge of ICT as others may not be aware. I can't remember how to add my name here sorry and a big thank you.

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Dee Jones

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Working remotely does have its positives... 

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Working remotely does have its positives... 

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Feel free to share.

Melbourne museum podcasts:

https://museumsvictoria.com.au/audio/the-fact-detectives-kinderling-kids-radio/?fbclid=IwAR1zq8UlcRvwOkTyvK1cGx81cnACayJB-uC8FsxscZmXQ-5ENLq8TTYu1YI

Khan Academy
https://www.khanacademy.org
Especially good for maths and computing for all ages but other subjects at Secondary level. Note this uses the U.S. grade system but it's mostly common material.

BBC Learning
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/coursesearch/
This site is old and no longer updated and yet there's so much still available, from language learning to BBC Bitesize for revision. No TV licence required except for content on BBC iPlayer.

Futurelearn
https://www.futurelearn.com
Free to access 100s of courses, only pay to upgrade if you need a certificate in your name (own account from age 14+ but younger learners can use a parent account).

Seneca
https://www.senecalearning.com
For those revising at GCSE or A level. Tons of free revision content. Paid access to higher level material.

Openlearn
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/
Free taster courses aimed at those considering Open University but everyone can access it. Adult level, but some e.g. nature and environment courses could well be of interest to young people.

Blockly
https://blockly.games
Learn computer programming skills - fun and free.

Scratch
https://scratch.mit.edu/explore/projects/games/
Creative computer programming

Ted Ed
https://ed.ted.com
All sorts of engaging educational videos

National Geographic Kids
https://www.natgeokids.com/uk/
Activities and quizzes for younger kids.

Duolingo
https://www.duolingo.com
Learn languages for free. Web or app.

Mystery Science
https://mysteryscience.com
Free science lessons

The Kids Should See This
https://thekidshouldseethis.com
Wide range of cool educational videos

Crash Course
https://thecrashcourse.com
You Tube videos on many subjects

Crash Course Kids
https://m.youtube.com/user/crashcoursekids
As above for a younger audience

Crest Awards
https://www.crestawards.org
Science awards you can complete from home.

iDEA Awards
https://idea.org.uk
Digital enterprise award scheme you can complete online.

Paw Print Badges
https://www.pawprintbadges.co.uk
Free challenge packs and other downloads. Many activities can be completed indoors. Badges cost but are optional.

Tinkercad
https://www.tinkercad.com
All kinds of making.

Prodigy Maths
https://www.prodigygame.com
Is in U.S. grades, but good for UK Primary age.

Cbeebies Radio
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/radio
Listening activities for the younger ones.

Nature Detectives
https://naturedetectives.woodlandtrust.org.uk/naturedetect…/
A lot of these can be done in a garden, or if you can get to a remote forest location!

British Council
https://www.britishcouncil.org/school-resources/find
Resources for English language learning

Oxford Owl for Home
https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/
Lots of free resources for Primary age

Big History Project
https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home
Aimed at Secondary age. Multi disciplinary activities.

Geography Games
https://world-geography-games.com/world.html
Geography gaming!

Blue Peter Badges
https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/joinin/about-blue-peter-badges
If you have a stamp and a nearby post box.

The Artful Parent
https://www.facebook.com/artfulparent/
Good, free art activities

Red Ted Art
https://www.redtedart.com
Easy arts and crafts for little ones

The Imagination Tree
https://theimaginationtree.com
Creative art and craft activities for the very youngest.

Toy Theater
https://toytheater.com/
Educational online games

DK Find Out
https://www.dkfindout.com/uk/…
Activities and quizzes

Twinkl
https://www.twinkl.co.uk
This is more for printouts, and usually at a fee, but they are offering a month of free access to parents in the event of school closures.

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Assessment enquiry
Hi Amanda
The AT 1 which is due on friday the 20th has been extended by a week is it? This enquiry is for Epistemologies..

Evelyn

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https://theconversation.com/schools-are-open-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak-but-should-i-voluntarily-keep-my-kids-home-anyway-if-i-can-we-asked-5-experts-134022

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Hi - having a youngster at home it’s been hard to explain why washing hands is so important I really found this worked quiet well in explaining the concept. Thought I’d share

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Teacher uses creativity and pepper to explain the importance of washing hands properly

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Hi all!
I hope you're all staying positive in this crazy time :) I was a but unclear as to what the due date for Assessment One is now? Will this still be Friday (tomorrow), or week 6? Thank you!
Rayna

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Social Distancing... What does it mean for us?

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Social Distancing... What does it mean for us?

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I'm wondering what social distancing means in regards to teaching f2f classes and facilitating group brainstorms and discussions? I felt reluctant today (when teaching) to request students sit together and converse/ brainstorm? Would love your thoughts...

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For those of us trying to work / study from home with children:

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For those of us trying to work / study from home with children:

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Share your study strategies...

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You know I love memes:
Try to use this time as an opportunity:
Be creative, explore new ideas, question.
I am trying to use this crisis as a moment to rethink some of my research findings - the world is changing / has changed so drastically, so quickly - what role (positive / negative) does technology play in this change?