Sharing the Addiction

I have just spent most of the morning putting together a handout on the basics of how to use VoiceThread such as getting an account, uploading pictures, adding comments, creating extra identities and how to embed in a wiki or blog. This four page PDF handout is now available on my educationalsoftware wiki at http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Picture+Sharing

Here is an embedded example of a VoiceThread.

Here I am in Rotorua again. It has been a good conference so far despite some issues with the internet connection. Here is a pic with Rachel Boyd, Amanda Signal and I at the Blogger’s Cafe.

The keynotes this year have been quite theoretical. We started off with Jeremy Kedian as the opening keynote who focused on what learning is and what it might look like in 2020. He talked about form and function in a school. The function is to facilitate learning but often the form (organisation, timetables etc) dictates how this learning happens and can imped new innovations. He then looked ahead to a time when the domination of form over function might be reversed.

The next day we had Julia Atkin who took us on a journey into Eastern philosophy (which was slightly over all of our heads) before ending up with the main message that schools need to be more holistic and start with development with the whole self and self in society and then the learning areas and values are the vechicles you do this with. This is replacing having the learning areas at the centre and developing the child as a side issue. More to come.

I have been having yet more fun with the image manipulation web 2.0 tool FotoFlexor.

I used their brand new Smart Scissors tool to cut out a picture of me on a hammock and layer a beach scene behind it. Quite a bit of fun!
I have also been looking for video case studies of ICT in action to use in our year group meeting days and have found a number of great sites from the UK.
Teacher TV
I have been using this site for a while now and always find great content to watch. Not just for ICT - I watched a great maths video that will change the way I teach fractions!
Teaching and Learning with ICT
A site with a HUGE number of video case studies and accompanying lesson plans and resources.
Developing Teaching Using ICT
Again, more video case studies as well as a bank of ideas that you can use.

I have been working on creating a network of wiki to use for the various projects happening within our cluster. I have almost finished these off today and have created one wiki to rule them all which I have called the Teacher Portal and is accessed at http://teacherportal.wikispaces.com

The great thing for me about this network is that I have been able to bring together some of the tools that I have been dabbling with over the last year.

The booking wiki makes heavy use of the excellent Zoho Creator. Each school has a form embedded on their own page on the wiki that asks them to identify what they would like to work on in sessions with the facilitator and a few other details. This online form feeds into a spreadsheet that can be downloaded from the Zoho site. It is so easy to set up these forms - if anyone would like help with this, I could make an instructional video to show you how (using the great tool iShowU for Mac). I have asked that these are completed at least four days before school booking sessions. I can then download the results and clear the results off the online area ready for the next set of data to be entered. I have also asked that teachers complete an evaluation using a SurveyMonkey survey so that I can easily analyse the results.

I have also set up a series of year group wikis (see left links off teacher portal wiki) where each teacher in the cluster will have their own wiki page. With two full day year group meetings across the cluster this year, hopefully this will help build this online community.

The tools are proving to be just that - useful tools! It is great when you start to feel as if you are really finding effective uses for things after spending so many hours dabbling.

After a wonderfully regenerating holiday in South East Asia, I’m back at the computer. OK - I didn’t totally get away from screen time as I had a travel blog that I kept updated while we were away but it was really good to have some ‘real life’ experiences rather than all cyber. Should you want to check out some pics, they can be found on http://flickr.com/photos/suziea

Now it is back into work and there are a number of projects this year to keep me busy. It is also really exciting that a number of the schools that I work in are trying out some of the Web 2.0 tools that I found last year. Muritai School are having a go with 21classes for two of the classrooms. This is a blogging tool that allows a central blog page for the class with individual blogs for each child behind this. The great features of this tool are that there are monitoring tools for the teacher to check the appropriateness of the content and you can do things like have post a message that appears on all the blogs or specify which blog it appears on. The blogs also interconnected in some ways which is more like a social network. Finally, I think the fact that some of the writing on an individual blog can be made private would be great so that parents can share in it but not necessarily the entire class. If I had a class, I’d like to have a go with this tool so I am living through them vicariously.

Another school is looking into using Airset, a calendaring and organisation website that I had a little play with last year. Again, I think this is a great tool so I will be looking on with interest as to how well it works for them. We have also set up blogs for each class in a couple of the schools. One thing that will hopefully help this work really well in one of the schools is that we have used just one school gmail address (using the admin email address to sign up) and created 10 blogs from the same account. This means that if a teacher leaves, the blogs and the blog URLs will stay with the school rather than littering cyberspace when that teacher leaves and never uses that blog account again. It also means that there is only one username and password to remember for all 10 blogs. I’ll let you know how this works over the course of the year.

Anyway - glad to be back and I feel that we have a lot to cover this year. I look forward to the discussions in the blogsphere. To celebrate the New Year, I have even given my blog a spruce up and a new title. Hopefully, I’ll see a lot of you again at the Blogger’s Cafe at Learning@School.