Sharing the Addiction

I had a very quiet first week back this term. I haven’t been working in many schools. Therefore, I took the opportunity to look around and experiment with some of the latest technology available at the moment. I thought I ‘d put a round-up here of some of my favourite finds.

ProfCast
This software is $30 US but gives you a 30 day trail. Basically, it allows you to record your voice during a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation and then it syncs your voice to the slides and has tools to help you easily share it as a podcast. I used the software to record a presentation on digital storytelling (click on podcast link in the left-side column). On listening back I realised my voice could be far more inspiring but I’ll work on that for next time This could be great for sharing presentations by children with parents or for the children to listen back to and assess their presentation. You could also use it to record your presentations on a topic that you have made to the class for them to listen back to in their own time. It is designed to work with Mac applications such as Garageband and iTunes. I found it very easy to use.

Google Apps
Basically, Google Apps gives you a suite of online applications that can almost do the same thing as School Zone. You can take your domain name with you and then have email addresses using that domain name. You can manage setting up users on your account. You can build webpages using their tools. You can have shared calendars and shared address books. And all of this is FREE. Imagine the savings to a school if you don’t have to pay anything for webhosting or account management.

Other Google Toys from the Lab
Google labs is where online Google applications are trialled (Beta). There are some great new tools in there such as Google Notebook, Google Page Creator and Google Maps.

With the notebook, you can download an extension for Firefox that puts a button to click on at the bottom of your webbrowser. This opens up a small window with your notebook contents. You can then clip the url or just a part of the site you are on and it is saved to your notebook. This notebook is great if you are working on more than one computer as you can have access to the same contents in the notebook. No more trying to copy and paste to a word document. Do it all in your notebook and then export into Word.

Page creator allow you to make websites using templates (not the same as a wiki). Very customisable and gives you the ability to edit the html if you know how. The websites are attractive and kids could easily make pages. I have a test page that you can visit by clicking here.

Google Maps allows you to search for one than one place on a local map. When places are found, you can attach pointers to each place which gives you more detail when you click on them. Great for showing people different locations that will be visited on a trip. See this map made for our trip to Palmerston North as an example.

Well, it has been a busy end to the term and I have been a little slack in adding to my blog. Still, I have a day out of schools today which gives me a chance to catch my breath and talk quickly to some of the things happening around schools. A couple of schools are venturing into Web 2.0. One school is using a wiki to make a webquest for their students on forces. Resources at an appropriate reading age have been difficult to come by so if you know of any, please email me and let me know. The address of this wiki is: http://wilfordmidsyn.wikispaces.com/

Other teachers are planning to get the children presenting their knowledge using Powerpoint. They really want to focus the children in on elements of good design and effective presentation skills so are using rubrics and examples of ‘bad’ powerpoints to get them thinking. Click here to go to a database of ready made rubrics that you can search called Rubistar.

Click here to go to my wikispaces page with resources for powerpoint (including a ‘bad’ example to download)

There has been some interesting discussions around the cluster about working with juniors and ICT and how much should be ICT to improve teaching or ICT the children do themselves. I think that there is nothing wrong in looking at ICT as a teaching tool where you use the ICT to make a lesson more motivating or exciting. Just because the children weren’t involved in creating the ICT content does not mean that it is not a valid exercise. In one school, we have been talking about using a powerpoint presentation to create a ‘hook’ at the beginning of the unit where children view the powerpoint slides containing images associated with certain jobs and then try to guess what the job is. I consider this a good use of ICT.