My name is Gail Casey. I have been teaching for many years in a range of places across Victoria, Australia. (Cohuna, Wedderburn, Rainbow, Bellarine Peninsula and Geelong). I love to teach and work with both students and teachers and I just can’t seem to help getting involved with or running global classroom projects. I always seem to have so many ideas and so much energy inside me that these things force their way out of my system and without thinking or even trying I find myself developing ideas and sharing my love of teaching.

I have been enormously lucky in my teaching career. I have worked with so many fabulous educators that a little bit of them continues to grown inside me – it is as if these people have planted their seeds inside me and I have become their means of continuing their passion for learning and teaching. I started out as a maths and IT teacher but have taught many things including English. These experiences have fed my interest in literacy and teaching empathy & understanding of others. I have completed a Certificate III in TESOL during 2006 and have been granted leave from my school in 2007 which will allow me to teach overseas hence pursue my interest in global learning and literacy through ESL.
 

I have been an eLearning/ICT/Computer Leader in four Victorian schools and have been involved in global classroom mentoring and project writing since1997 (when the internet was just an idea in many schools). My major interest has been in the middle years of schooling incorporating video conferencing, multimedia and communication projects between Primary and Secondary Colleges within Australia and overseas in all areas of the curriculum.

My work in 2005 as the full time Intel Senior Trainer opened up the global world for me far greater than any global classroom project had done.  My work as Senior Trainer took me to Penang (Malaysia) and Boston (USA) and I will never forget my experiences working with such talented educators world wide. This experience taught me to put structure into my ideas and how to connect my projects to real learning and literacy. I worked with Kindergarten through to year 12 teachers as my prime focus for the year and these teachers taught me more than I could ever teach them.

My energy, ideas and enthusiasm for using multimedia combined with a thinking curriculum, where students take responsibility for their learning using authentic content, has inspired me to run this global digital stories project which will continue throughout my ESL work and travel in 2007.

 A Successful digital story is not one that is fine tuned without error but one that simply tells a story perhaps of achievment, success, failure or pain and focuses on the individual needs.

This story below comes from a PD that I ran and shows glimses of successful teacher learning and achievement and the enjoyment of working together.
A teachers first movie256.wmv (1,073 KB)

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