Welcome to my knowledge garden home page

This page contains information about me, my teaching experience and areas of interest.

I'm Carmel Mayer. I've been teaching for many years. I started my teaching career in Sydney.

I taught in Sydney for several years before we moved to Cairns, in Far North Qld. When we first moved to Cairns, I was a stay at home mum, looking after my four little kids. When my youngest was 18 months old I started teaching in Queensland. That was in 1984. I spent 8 years at Trinity Beach State School, then I was appointed to Cairns West State School, where I spent two years. In 1994 I was transferred to Cairns School of Distance Education.

Because I have been at Cairns SDE for a long time, I am lucky enough to have been involved in the transition from paper based, (and very isolated) learning, to students engaging in real world and collaborative learning experiences through eLearning.

Teaching students ‘from a distance’ is both enormously challenging, and rewarding. I feel very privileged to have such a fantastic job!

Teaching experience

Throughout my career I have taught across a variety of grade levels and subject areas. For the past couple of years I have taught in the English/History area. This year I teach Vocational Education subjects to Years 10,11 and 12 students.

My Personal Interests

• Family
• Reading
• Web design.
• Antiques and collectibles....especially collecting depression glass

Professional Interests

• Online curriculum development
• Instructional design
• Creating websites using Dreamweaver and WordPress
• Exploring ePortfolios using WordPress
• Web 2 for education.
• Digital Pedagogy

Websites I have created

• A Missing Person Investigation...an online English and History course for Year 8 students. (major assessment piece for FET5621) http://studentweb.usq.edu.au/home/W0099055/egypt?

• Journey to China....a webquest http://talknchalk.com/usq/china?

• Journey to China...the debate (a follow up to the webquest. Written by Joy Murgatroyd, website designed and created by me.) http://cairnssde.eq.edu.au/home/cmaye10/carmel/threegorges

• My Learning with ICT blog http://cairnssde.eq.edu.au/home/cmaye10/blog?

• My class website http://cairnssde.eq.edu.au/home/cmaye10?

• ePortfolio for my ICT Pedagogical Licence http://cairnssde.eq.edu.au/home/cmaye10/carmel/portfolio?

• ePortfolio for my ICT Pedagogical Licence Advanced http://cairnssde.eq.edu.au/home/cmaye10/carmel/advportfolio?

Anyone can reorganise and contribute to my facilitated pages. Please visit and contribute.

It is released under the default knowledgeGarden Copyright license which you can access by clicking COPYRIGHT on the left menu.

My Pages

• Exploring the educational value of Web 2 applications

Pages I am contributing to

Cathleen's page http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Online%20Pedagogy:%20Creating%20a%20Presence?

Jan's page http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/What+can+we+learn+from+video+games%3F?

Cathleen's page http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Breaking%20isolation%20for%20digital%20learners?

Luke's page http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/Blogs+in+the+Secondary+School?

Katayoun's page http://www.baker-evans.com/knowledgegarden/tiki-index.php?page_id=1376?

e.g. Intext citations and reference list, (2006). In KnowledgeGarden: Our Learning Community. Retrieved April 20 2006, from http://knowledgeGarden.usq.edu.au/tiki-index.php?page_id=323

has been posted to the one to one forum.