Open all night ...

Yesterday, we put on an open night at school. KB gives a good description.

For my part, I managed to bribe some Y10 students to come down and do some blogging (I offered them pizza - food and the young male's mind!) I was actually really surprised at the turnout - five! You may think this is fairly sad - but I was proud to sit in the computer lab and hang out with these five young guys and blog for a couple of hours. The great thing is that these young guys are not your traditional 'computer geeks' (if I can be so bold), they are 'rough', 'cool', normal average guys.

PO showed me some online games and tested my laptop capabilities. He is bringing some games for me to look at (Call of Duty, I think). Adam suggested we have a competition to find the weirdest item for sale on ebay (little chicken salt and pepper shakers, fake scratchy lottery tickets etc.) AJ and SL were happy to muck with their blog colours and flick b/w Duke Nukem 3D and their work when parent and vistors walked by. I reciprocated by showing then Bush Shoot Out.

On top of this I got to hang out with some colleaguesl; make funny (to me anyway) injokes when speaking to groups of parents (who mostly feign interest and ask really silly questions); and practice talking about technology and literacy learning.

I came away from this last one wondering how I can do this better. I probably sounded rather up myself as I talked about those now old and tired phrases 'digital literacies' and 'information and communication techologies'. I felt the need to be able to justify my use of technology in language arts based studies. But how? I need to do more on this ... especially as I am presenting at some dodgy teacher professional development day in June - for the 'HSC Cluster Schools'. Whadever!

Overall, not a bad way to spend an evening.