About

My partner Kate and I live with our two young daughters – Lucy and Sarah – in sunny Kiama, NSW, Australia.

After teaching English for most of my career, I became  a deputy principal at Dapto High School in 2006.  

My focus at school is on teaching & learning using technology. I am particularly interested in the transformation of learning that must happen in high schools and how digital technologies can be employed to this end. I am attempting to show leadership on this issue in local, state, national and international contexts.

My coming exchange with Carsten Søndergaard, a Danish colleague, will allow my family to live in Denmark for several months in 2011. Please contact me if you have any ideas for how this exchange can benefit students and colleagues, in any context. Already, I hope to present at the 2011 Deputy Principals’ conference, streamed live from Denmark, about the online exam system and eLearning, as well as my experiences at the school, established in 1060.

I was recently awarded a fellowship by the NSW Deputy Principals’ Association to improve online communications in 2010 and have established a Deputy Principals Online blog , twitter account and 2010 conference ning to assist with this matter.

Collaborating with colleagues and sharing formally and informally is a high priority and I enjoy presenting at conferences. My articles and teaching units have been published in a number of DET curriculum publications, SCAN, mETAphor and increasingly, online at a range of sites. Recently EQ published my article on social media. I started using blogs with my classes in 2004 and started publishing articles about using (we)blogs with classes in 2005.

Helping teachers and educational leaders develop Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) is one of my current areas of interest. If educators are able to use blended learning concepts to facilitate their own professional development it is more likely students will benefit. During 2009, I presented at least a dozen conferences for principals, deputy principals, English teachers, counsellors, technology enthusiasts and administrators on practical ways to collaborate, co-operate and use digital technologies to connect.

Schools like mine now have wireless connectivity and laptops in a growing number of classrooms. This means that staff will need to facilitate students developing their own Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) to achieve course outcomes and maintain relevance. You can read a brief online article, about preparing for 1:1, that was adapted from my blog posts.

Assisting students to explore the benefits of participatory democracy, using Web 2.0 tools, to make the Student Representative Council (SRC) more influential, has been an important focus in 2009.  The project has been written about here.

I have been active for a number of years in the NSW English Teachers’ Association www.englishteacher.com.au, especially in my role as Manager of the Web & Technology Committee and was awarded a Professional Teachers’ Council Outstanding Professional Services Award in 2006.

Recently, the ETA Annual conference experimented with having a backchannel using twitter and a ning. This was very successful in alerting delegates to the potential of web 2.0 for enhancing collegiality and teacher professional learning.

Digital photography is my passion at the moment. I am a keen user of Flickr and attempting to engage my local community with this great tool which has been recognised in parliament by our federal member. Here are my thoughts about learning photography.

I established my first of many blogs in 2004. Increasingly, this blog and twitter are my main collaborative online tools, along with my iPhone, Skype, Google Reader, Google Docs and Delicious. I am interested in how the mainstream media is using Web 2.0 too.

Feel free to contact me by commenting at this page, via twitter, Skype (Darcy1968) or email: darcy.moore@det.nsw.edu.au