The Japan Foundation is again holding its Speech Contest for Australian students. This is the 40th year of the contest and is open to Year 11 and 12 students across the country. There are several different divisions covering all levels of competence.

Prizes include return airfares and accomodation packages to Japan. State winners in each section are expected to proceed to the National Final.

Guidelines and other Contest information is available from the Japan Foundation Website

The WA Final is on July 30th and the Western Australian contact for the contest is:

Chris Graham
Japanese Language Teachers’ Association WA
PH: (08) 9495 7439/ FAX: (08) 9390 4082
Email: chris.graham@det.wa.edu.au
WA State Final: Thursday 30 July
Please visit JLTAWA website
http://www.jltawa.org.au

Other information for Teachers of Japanese is available on the CMIS WACE Pages Japanese : Second Language

The latest edition of the Japan Foundation’s Omusubi newsletter is now available. It features Sensei’s Pages where teachers can learn about exciting programs for schools. These include a Speech Contest, a website contest, new resources and video production contest.

The newsletter includes information about the Prize Donation Program which was developed by the Japan Foundation, Sydney to support schools staging any kind of Japanese language-related event and can be primary or secondary schools in any part of Australia.

The CMIS Japanese Language for WACE studies page contains useful information for schools studying Japanese.

Teachers of Geography and Earth and Environmental Science can utilise this image and other information from the MODIS website to enhance their teaching.

The above map of Australia shows how the land surface temperature from January 25 to February 1 compared to the average mid-summer temperatures the continent experienced between 2000-2008. Information regarding the temperature anaomaly is explained on this website. Data collection for this map was from NASA’s Terra satellite and shows that whilst southern Australia was experiencing above average temperatures - northern parts of the country were on average, several degrees cooler.

Images from the MODIS site allow viewing of a myriad of images displaying all sorts of geographical, environmental and weather phenomena.

WestOne Services have recently released new resources for selected WACE Courses.  Information about three of these resources can be found on our CMIS database:

• Indonesian. Unit 1A

• Italian. Unit 2A

• Italian. Unit 3A

For a list of WestOne WACE products currently available see New Secondary Course Resources.

Products may be purchased online or on site at WestOne Services, 1 Prospect Place, West Perth.

Do you have information you would like to share with other teachers?

Let us know via the comments button at the bottom of this post.

I am working on my new Human Biology Course Of Study and was looking for resources.

Last night I got onto the iTunes store

(You need iTunes installed on your computer - download iTunes here)

• Quicklinks on the right

• Power Search

• Under “All Results” select “iTunes U”

• Then type a few words in the “Description” column eg Biotechnology or Fertility or Reproductive Technology etc.

• Then check out the resulting finds

Some will be university lectures, may be audio only, some will be full featured short movies. After checking through you will find some useful stuff.
It is all FREE!!!
It seems many US Universities (and now some Australian unis) have put heaps of their lectures/course material onto iTunes U for free.

As a Human Biol teacher struggling to find new stuff for my new Course of Study, in the short time I spent looking I found and downloaded the following very useful movies/podcasts (see below)

“DNA”
Cassiopeia Project, Biology
3:24 movie
keywords: DNA, Molecule, Blueprint, Chromosome, Strand, Helix, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine

“Genes Are Made Of DNA”
Biology 1A|Fall 2008|UC Berkeley
48 min movie
keywords: Crossing over, recombination, gene maps, sex linkage

“Cell To Embryo”
Cassiopeia Project, Biology
4:13 movie
keywords:  Cell, Embryo, Ovary, Egg, Fallopian, Fetus, Fetal, Blastocyst, Uterus, Placenta, Pregnant, Pregnancy, Fertilize

“Strategic Alliances in Biotech”
Texas A&M Faculty
41 min podcast audio file
Talks about the Biotechnology Industry

“Advances in Fertility”
Yale University audio podcast
9 min
Dr. Pasquale Patrizio, Director of the Yale Fertility Center discusses advances in egg freezing, male fertility and deciphering the genetic make-up of human eggs at various stages of maturity.

Remember – they are FREE!

iTunes is a free download for Mac and Windoze from Apple and runs on macs and PCs

Tunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more, that you can enjoy on your iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. Explore over 100,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world. With iTunes U, there’s no end to what or where you can learn Here is a short trailer explaining iTunes U:
http://www.apple.com/education/guidedtours/itunesu.html

Perhaps you may experience some bandwidth/ Internet quota issues when downloading from iTunes.
My ISP is iiNet. Their iTunes downloads are free. Also they have an Off-Peak time between midnight and 8am which creates additional quota.

Regards
Blitto

And of course teachers in other Learning Areas will also find valuable resources here.

THANKS ROD

Rod says it was a useful exercise in students constructing their own knowledge and he is happy for you to use the podcasts with your students. You need broadband and quicktime installed. Quicktime for Windows is a free download.

The Process
If you’d like to get your students to do the same thin with any area of work, check out Rod’s Human Biology 12 Podcast Assignment for full details.

Thanks to Rod for permission to share this example of a very positive use of ICT with upper secondary students.

The Practical Biology website allows teachers to download a wide range of experiments to illustrate concepts and processes that should work in any school laboratory.

Practical Physics also experiments for teachers to use in the Physics Laboratory. There are also videos of different experiments online.

The aim of the centre is to explore new approaches to teaching and learning by developing, managing and supporting curriculum projects.  Main areas of interest include Science, Mathematics, Design and Technology and Citizenship and exploring the creative use of ICT to support teaching and learning in these fields.

5.00pm Friday 26 September

and

7.00am Tuesday 30 September

2008

due to a planned Central Office power upgrade. During these periods, all centrally delivered online services including email, internet portal and web access will be unavailable. Services provided by the ICT Customer Service Centre will also not be available.

Readers of the CMIS blogs will be unable to access the CMIS website and Resource Bank. Blog links to resources hosted on the DET WA portal servers will not be available during the upgrade.

Times stated are for Perth, Western Australia (GMT+8). Use The World Clock - Time Converter to calculate your local time.