Sharing the Addiction

The Rise of the New Generation

I ran a couple of workshops at a teacher only day for the Wellington College cluster and I was impressed with the presentations by the students at the school. They were not only incredilby knowledgeable about ICT but they were also fantastic speakers. They commended individual teachers for the way they were using ICT in classes and spoke about what they would like to see in the future. A number of students brought up making greater use of text messaging by teachers to students. They also spoke about teachers making greater use of Web 2.0 tools and multimedia.

One student who really blew me away spoke about his classes decision to use a wiki as part of a study of “The Life of Pi”. None of the available wikis seemed exactly right for what they were looking for so the student decided to write his own. He didn’t have it up in time for the unit of study but he has now almost finished working on his Ed Wiki. He came to my wiki workshop in the name of ‘research’ and spent time asking all of the participant about what features they would like in a wiki. One feature he is currently working on is the ability for teachers to set assignments for specific individual or groups of students and the work students do on this assignment would not become visible to other students until after the completion date. The wiki has a greater number of editing features than most wikis and I think it looks very impressive. He hopes to launch the product in the next few weeks and is offering it for free to Wellington College staff so that they can give him feedback to improve the product. Then he is thinking of offering it to schools for a cost of around $2.50 a student (he has a company set up).

Did I mention that he still has three years of schooling left to go? (if his business doesn’t take him in other directions before then). I was actually really interesting seeing where things are going in a secondary school and the types of skills the kids have at this level. People there also didn’t really know what types of things we were up to at primary level so I had a number of interesting discussions.

I also found out the problems of trying to use web 2.0 tools on Internet Explorer. After getting used to working on Firefox, I forgot to check what internet browser was used by the College and I got caught out when a number of things didn’t work all that well in IE (such as picture resizing in Wikispaces). The workshop still worked OK but I am certainly going to check that Firefox is installed on the computers at ULearn!

Oh, and I seem to have got it wrong about Flash Player updates fixing problems with TeacherTube - it crashed on me again the other day! I hope they sort out this problem as I think it is a great service.

TeacherTube Crashing Issues

I have been experiencing problems with TeacherTube and I know that a number of other people have been as well. I was looking through their blog when I saw a comment posted by Paul Harrington asking about the issue and the response from the TeacherTube staff was that there have been some reported problems on Macs and to update Flash Player in order to fix it.

Having been lulled into a false sense of complacency due to my computer normally telling me when I need a software update, I kind of assumed I had the latest version. However, when I checked my version it was 9,0,28,0 but the latest version available is 9,0,47,0. That means that I have missed almost 20 updates!! TeacherTube now seems to be working fine and I wonder how many other sites I’ve cursed will run better now.

Click here to go to the Flash Player download page.

Random facts meme - tagged twice so here it is

First, the Rules:
* Post these rules before you give your facts
* List 8 random facts about yourself
* At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
* Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

1. I was into music in my younger years - I played trombone and sang in the NZ Secondary Schools Choir - we won an international singing competition in Hawaii.
2. I went to ballet classes for eight years as a child and was in two NZ Ballet productions in the children’s chorus - then puberty struck!!
3. I used to have an addiction to a chat network called IRC around 10 years ago. I could spend up to 4 hours a day chatting to people I’d never met (a bit like SL for some people these days
4. I spent four and a half years in London and travelled somewhere new every school holidays. I often went on my own meeting people along the way. I miss the travel!
5. In London, I worked as a specialist ESL teacher for two and a half years and wrote a booklet on software and internet sites to support ESL learners sold through an organisation called BLEN.
6. The silliest thing I have ever done as a teacher was when teaching about Native Americans. I decided, in order to give the kids more motivation to design totem masks for art, to perform a little ceremony on them to help them find ‘their inner totem spirit’. You can imagine the reactions of some of the parents!!!
7. I met my husband by moving into his flat.
8. We had an Art Deco wedding because I really love everything about that time. We went to the Art Deco festival in Napier to research it.

Now - I don’t know many people to tag that haven’t had this already but here goes.
Room 5 at Arakura School
Mrs Kelso’s Class in Auckland
Mr Frater’s Class In Wellington

And that’s going to have to do

Magic Studio

This is an interactive learning object that has been created by teachers very easily using a free Web 2.0 tool called Magic Studio These objects can then be embedded into blogs or wikis the way that I have done above. You can also make timelines using their templates. Here’s an example:

What a wonderful tool! I think it would be great to get some of our teachers using this. One problem is that there is no way that I can find to reduce to the size of the object. They don’t fit very well in a blog post! Still, they would be brilliant on a wiki.

Yesterday, our cluster visited Brooklyn School as a cluster. It was very interesting to see how the school had structured their curriculum model. They have a set of key competencies but the contexts that these are taught through are decided by the children in the school. At the beginning of every year, time is spent with the children to develop a set of questions that the children want to find out about, these are compiled as a class to find some common themes, and then these themes give the contexts for study for the year. I thought this was a very interesting model but it did raise a few questions for me.
1. The children ‘don’t know what they don’t know’. Would their set of questions be therefore rather narrow in focus at times?
2. Setting up themes at the beginning of the year to last over the rest of the year seems a little long sighted to me. Would these themes still be relevant to the kids by term four? (though the teachers are able to re-negociate these themes at any time)

The school believes that giving children this power over their own learning has benefits across all areas and that behaviour and attendance is improved so I will continue to touch base with the school to see how they are finding the process.

They also use tablets intensively as they have been lucky enough to be part of the digiOps scheme. It was fantastic seeing children using the computers as a tool as they all had enough access to computers to be able to use them seemlessly as part of their classroom programmes. Watching the Year 1/2 writing with the tablets was fantastic.

I also enjoyed my discussion with Dean about the schools use of Web 2.0 on their school’s website. They have used Word Press and integrated it into their existing site. I will be watching to see how they make use of this tool as well

Meeting Reflections

I have just been to Hastings this week for a two day meeting with other key staff in clusters. I enjoy these meetings as it is a great time to be around like minded people with a real passion for the use of ICT in education. There is so much expertise in the room at these meetings and it is wonderful to be able to swap ideas and information.

For instance, Sara is a facilitator for another cluster and she gave me a handy tip about a piece of software called Umajin that is great for layering images and video (some with the use of blue screening). This is so easy to use and much more affordable than Photoshop and easier than GIMP. They offer discounts for bulk buying and that includes buying through clusters of schools.

Tessa highlighted her great collection of resources on her area in Centre 4 - the managing change section is excellent.

Other than that, I have found a few new things on my own. I have now managed to sign up for Imbee (a safe social network for teachers, parents and children) as they now support New Zealand. I think it looks like a very interesting platform and may use some people in my cluster as ‘children’ guinea pigs (or anyone else that indicates being interested). It would be great if I could get a test group of children involved in a project around this tool. Watch this space…
I am also enjoying looking through the blog and wiki of Wes Fryer. He has a lot of interesting things to say and has fantastic collections of resources including a page on Digital Storytelling.

I also like the layout of Soople which shows you all of the advanced Google search options in a really user friendly format.

Well, that’s about enough from me for the moment To bed!