C4T- Number 1

Primary Tech Blog- Kathleen Morris Response by Rachel Hinton Kathleen Morris is a teacher at Leopold Primary School near Geelong in Victoria, Australia. As of July 2013 she is on maternity leave. Mrs. Morris is an advocate of 21st century learning. This is very evident through her blog.
Blogging and the Literary Curriculum
In this post Mrs. Morris wrote about the ways that she has used blogging to educate her students since 2007. She talks about how when she first started she tried to squeeze the blogging into her everyday class schedule, but soon learned this was not enough to get the students interested. She has also, in these six years, been able to go from a 1:6 computer per student ratio to a 1:1 this year. With this availability she is able to incorporate blogging more in her classes.
She talks about how students need to learn to be transliterate(The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.)She says that,

"Blogging is an authentic way to teach both traditional reading, writing, speaking and listening, as well as multi-modal 21st century skills."

After reading her blog I informed Ms.Morris that I was a EDM 310 student learning about ways to incorporate 21st century learning into the classroom today. I told her how great her ideas were and how I would like to one day incorporate blogging into my classroom to make learning more entertaining.

Looking Back, Looking Forward
For the second post I had to go back one, because she has not posted in awhile. At first I thought this post was just "housekeeping," because she was talking about going on maternity leave and cleaning out her classroom. I soon realized she was talking about how much her classroom has changed so much in the last decade.
She had once relied so heavily on worksheets and had taken so much pride in this "busy work" where as now she uses technology to teach her students. She talked about how so many teachers, even now, rely on these things, but it is not only teachers, parents are the same way. She talks about how so often if her students are sick or going on vacations parents will ask her for the worksheets they need to do.
Ms. Morris then talks about all the great things she can use to create things for her classroom. She talks about twitter and how she can use it to get different ideas from other teachers. She also goes into how most all of the stuff she creates can be found and accessed in the cloud. She states how the classroom is much less teacher lead than it was when she started.
In this post she brings out so many great points that we all should heed to. After reading I left her a comment saying how great it was to be able to read a post from a teacher who has been teaching over ten years and to see how much things have changed. It is really an inspiration to see all the ways she has adapted her classroom to 21st century learning. I told her that I hoped, especially after taking EDM 310, to make my classroom very 21st century and not rely on things like busy work to entertain my students.