Trish+Dower+-+Pleasant+Street+Primary+School

Hi everyone, I'm Trish Dower

I have been teaching for 9 years, mostly in Junior Primary and have always endeavored to incorporate ICT in all aspects of my teaching. I live in Ballarat, Victoria with my two children. We are family who enjoys sport and are involved in basketball and aussie rules. I am currently the ICT Leader and an Ultranet Lead User at our school. You can find me here: my class blog at [] and on twitter.com/ptoosh as ptoosh my email: dower.patricia.c@edumail.vic.gov.au delicious.com/ptoosh

I am looking forward to working together to find new ways to learn and teach new literacies. I have been working with some colleagues of mine at school on a 'digital literacy framework project'. This project began as an 'Innovations and Best Practice' division research project back in 2007. We noticed that many of our students (P-6) did not have the literacy knowledge and skills to comprehend digital texts including film, audio, websites and images. We have been working on this project for the past four years and it is still something we hope to continue to build upon. When we started looking into 'digital literacy' there was no mention of it anywhere - we 'googled' digital literacy and found no defintion. Now though, digital literacy have become a 'catch word' that can be found everywhere.

I also worked on a project to develop a social network for gifted math students. Our project called 'Mathsbook' saw us develop a ning to engage and extend gifted math students across our school and to support classroom teachers in their ability to provide 'point of need instruction' with support from other teachers, including secondary teachers. It was a great success and is now available to join within the Ultranet. Teachers and students across Victoria can join mathsbook.

In 2009 I also took some time to set up a wiki for the Doxa Youth Foundation. This wiki was to be a resource for teachers, students, parents and professionals to access information, research and resources to support students who were at risk of leaving school early. The project was completed over 6 months and the wiki was launched at the State Library of Victoria. The Engaging Students Wiki was created in collaboration with DEECD, Catholic Education Office Melbourne, Berry Street School, DHS, The Foundation for Young Australians, Doxa schools in Melbourne and Bendigo and Mackillop family services. It was a wonderful experience working on this project and I am hopeful that this resource will be one that assists young people in the future.

I'm not sure what we will do in this project but I am very much looking forward to working with and learning with you all.