My Melbourne Writers’ Festival session

I am Anne Mirtschin, a teacher at Hawkes­dale P12 Col­lege, a rural remote school in coun­try West­ern Vic­to­ria. I am pas­sion­ate about blog­ging and started with my stu­dents 2 years ago. Since then we have been on an amaz­ing jour­ney.
Some of our stu­dents and two staff mem­bers went to Mel­bourne on Tues­day for the writ­ers’ fes­ti­val and really enjoyed the day. How­ever, yours was the last ses­sion that they attended and in fact, the one they most enjoyed. Despite our library hav­ing copies of your book, our Eng­lish teacher is now buy­ing a class set to use with the year 7s.
How­ever I am writ­ing to you to ask whether you would con­sider doing a skpye linkup with our school and talk to our stu­dents via video­con­fer­enc­ing. There are quite a num­ber of US authors who do this now, and I was look­ing through their list to see who we might get, but would much rather sup­port our own Aus­tr­lian authors.
Would you be inter­ested in doing this? Please let me know as I love to con­nect our stu­dents with oth­ers and above all, love using those online tools for improv­ing literacies.

heyy! i am Han­nah from Hawkes­dale Col­lege, and i was part of your audi­ence at the Mel­bourne writ­ers fes­ti­val. This day was really inspir­ing in a lot of ways. I have blogs, wiki’s, myspace, face­book, bebo,skype, twit­ter and a lot of other things. As a year 11 VCE class we work within these on the net, and there­fore learn a lot from them. We also par­tic­i­pate in flat class­room projects, where we work woth other stduents our age on all dif­fer­ent projects which we then add to wiki spaces. we can then add to and edit all things on them!
there have been com­pe­ti­tions through­out these projects , in which i have actu­ally been very suc­cess­full. Becom­ming a sec­ond place win­ner in my group of peo­ple through­out the world!
i have not read your book, but i thinik it would be a great read, and i will have to get around to it between all my VCE stud­ies.
I would like to say thenkyou on behalf of the sudents from Hawkes­dale P-12 Col­lege who par­tic­i­pated in the mel­bourne writ­ers fes­ti­val, it was great!
Thankyou!

Hey Andrew im Bai­ley from Hawkes­dale P/12 Col­lege and i attended your ses­sion at the Mel­bourne Writ­ers Fes­ti­val. Ive been blog­ging for 2 years now and i really enjoyed lis­ten­ing two you about your blogging.

Hi i am grace
I am from Hawkes­dale col­lege!!
I was at the writ­ers fes­ti­val i lis­tend to you talk about your book and blog!!
I really liked the idea of the take the skull to work day i found it really funny!!
In the pic­ture my school is sit­ting in the back behind the wood!!
I also have a blog it is http://www.x0xgracefullx0x.globalstudent.org.au
so yeh you can have a look at that if you like!!
Thanks for talk­ing to us!!

Thanks guys! Lovely of your to leave com­ments. And I’m glad you enjoyed the ses­sion. Sounds like your school is doing some pretty cool stuff. I espe­cially like the sound of shar­ing wiki spaces with other stu­dents. Nice!

Also, I put the blog addresses you left me on my blogroll. Which means we are offi­cially blog-friends now.

oh and sorry i for­got,… but my blog is mugz.globalstudent.org.au..
thanks once again.

Hey Andrew,
My name is emily. I attended the Writ­ers Fes­ti­val and was at your ses­sion. Your ses­sion was my favourite and my friends agreed too. Im also from Hawkes­dale Col­lege. I am actu­ally in the photo so that is pretty cool.
Thanks for a great ses­sion. I really enjoyed it.

Emily (Fluro­green — that’s my blog­ging name)

Oh yeah I am look­ing for your book as Im really inter­ested in read­ing it. Cant wait to read it!!

I thought it would be kool to tell you that I have done lots with blogs. I have par­tic­i­pated in ‘flat­class­room’ projects that help us learn more about blogs, wikis and how to use them bet­ter. I have also trav­elled over­seas to Qatar near the Arab Emrites for an Inter­na­tional Con­fer­ence where we came up with projects. Most were about Poverty. We used blogs, wikis, the olden day pow­er­point and lots of com­puter pro­grams to present our projects to some judges and the win­ning project would be fol­lowed on. it was such a great expe­ri­ence that I got because I blogged with great enthu­siam!! You should check my blog out at http://flurogreen.globalstudent.org.au/

Thanks again (sorry about all the com­ments but I kept for­get­ting to add everything!)

Thanks Fluro­green! Man, blog­ging names are so much bet­ter than real names.

flat­class­room does sound cool. I love that you called pow­er­point ‘olden day pow­er­point’. Too funny. I shall now check out your blog. Are you going to part of the Skype hookup next week? I’ve never done such a hookup with a school before. Muchos lookforwardtos!

A

Heyy! I’m Leecie, another from the small coun­try school of HAWKESDALE!!
I attended your small com­fort­ing ‘ses­sion’ at the writ­ers fes­ti­val and I LOVED IT!
As the day went on, the ses­sions got bet­ter. The first one I nearly fell asleep in, the third one I was a lit­tle more awake but your’s I was wide awake! (kinda had to be, we were only a few rows away from you! haha)
Neat lit­tle photo you have here haha I can see me and my friends sit­ting rigggh­htt up the back row (because we wanted to sleep… haha nahh it was good!)
any­way, you can check out my blog if you want.. it’s noth­ing spe­cial though! haha

catch