I followed a link on Twitter which took me to a directory of free flash games and there was an educational category. I had a go at playing quite a few of them and here are some of my favourites. Clicking on the link will take you to the site to play the game.

Numeracy

Tower blaster - probably my favourite game I played. Very strategic - have to get the blocks in correct order before computer team.

Click here to play this game

Maths Power - have to choose numbers to make given answers. I’m not very good at this one! Can’t scan the numbers fast enough and get panicky with the countdown. I’m not going to share my score

Click here to play this game

Literacy

Could see the kids loving this one but I am hopeless at games involving mixed up letters. Still others will do better than me I expect.

Spiderman 2 - Web of Words

Click here to play this game

A very simple game to teach young children to match uppercase and lower case letters with Pooh Bear.

Pooh’s Match ‘n’ Munch

Click here to play this game

Other subjects

This one looks to have been designed for med students and involves cutting open a knee for surgery but I could see older kids being fasinated as they learn how to perform the knee surgery. High level comprehension exercise with a real life context.

Click here to play this game

Brain Safari - a variety of problem solving games

Click here to play this game

Music game - learn the notes and their position on the keyboard.

Click here to play this game

Treasure Dive typing game - type the words on the sharks before they reach you.

Click here to play this game

There are more on the site and I didn’t play them all so you could go and try some more out.

http://www.y8.com/tags/Educational/1

Working with special needs

There are two schools within my clusters that are involved in special needs; one focuses on behavioural issues with primary aged students and the other deals with visual impairment across all ages. Personally, I have learned a great deal from my involvement with these schools.

Behavioural issues and ICT

The school that caters for those with behavioural problems has found the use of ICT to be transformational within the school. This is a school where kids come to because they need a break from the mainstream and often have a strong dislike for school. The normal ‘chalk and talk’ does not work for these kids.

Use of interactive whiteboards

They have found that interactive whiteboards have been a valuable tool due to their visual and kinaesthetic nature which suits the learning styles of these kids. I saw these in use in every classroom in the school with both teachers and students using them. There were a range of activities being demonstrated on these boards and you could see that they did hook in many of the students. As someone who is never sure which side of the interactive whiteboard debate I am on, I could see that here was a purposeful use for them.

Websites to hook kids into learning

They have found a number of websites to be really useful for developing kids confidence as they can see proof of their improvement over time:
http://tutpup.com
Kids complete with other kids around the world and in their own classroom on maths and other drill type of questions. They can also see their own progress as they complete levels. (I’ve previously blogged about this site)
http://braingrade.com
Brain development exercises and games where kids can see graphs of their progress. My brain is the size of a grape after playing the first couple of games. Hmmmmm
http://readwritethink.org/student_mat/index.asp
This is another of my favourites and I saw kids using this site to build a scene and then write about it without any encouragement needed from the adult in the room. The link I have included above will talk you to all the digital learning objects available on the site. The teachers said this was a very motivating site for students.

Blogging

The school have set up blogs for each class in the school and have found this may make the difference between a student particpating or not participating in completing work. They often ask if their work will go on the blog and if the answer is yes, they show a far greater enthusiasm for their work and will perserve to get it completed.

Visual impairment and ICT

Making online content accessible for all

I have learned a great deal about accessibility issues for those with low vision when using websites that has changed the way I put content online. I have previously blogged about this with an entire post dedicated to making online content accessbile.

Digital library for assessment

What I have found really interesting is the recognition within the school of the power of capturing information in a digital form. The school are building a library of video footage of children exibiting certain behaviours so as to create an assessment bank that teachers can access to help diagnose children with visual impairments correctly. They have used Voicethread as part of this process with teachers, assessors and parents able to leave comments around the side of the video clip to help deepen the understanding of the context and diagnosis for that child.

Digital evidence of key competencies

All staff across the nationwide school are also being asked to use digital evidence to build a profile of what each key competency ‘looks like’ within their context. Staff collect video clips and photos to show different ways children with visual impairments demonstrate key competencies. The plan from here is to widen this out so that these examples give details on how the skills being demonstrated were developed and then what the next steps are from that point. They plan to turn this into a rich repository showing all stages of development for each key competency in their own context that teachers can use to measure progress of children against. I think this is an idea that could easily be replicated in any school setting.

These are just some great ideas that I came across. I will share some more useful observations in my next post.

Nelson ICT conference

I thought I would blog this time around about interesting discussions that I had at the Nelson ICT cluster day I attended on Friday. The great thing about these events is that I get to catch up with people from all over the place that get flown in to be part of the programme on the day. I had great chats with Derek Wenmoth (Christchurch), Dorothy Burt (Auckland), Allanah King (Nelson), and Rachel Boyd (Nelson).

Data collection and league tables

One of the biggest topics of conversation was around the National government’s implementation of national standards that they will then be collecting data against and the issue of whether the media will be able to get hold of this to create league tables. I have already expressed my views around league tables in my comment on Artichoke’s blog. Having seen them in action in the UK, I think they can be a very destructive force in education.

What came out of our conversation was that data is not something that schools should be scared of. Dorothy pointed out that she wants to know the outcomes for students in each class within her school and if one teacher is producing better results that another teacher, she wants to analyse the methods that teacher is employing to see what it is that makes them successful. I agree that the teaching profession can react negatively against collecting data; especially when asked to use that data to reflect on their teaching practice. I can see that there is a place for authentic and formative data collection (though there may need to be more time allocated for busy teachers to get these completed - I remember trying to tidy off my running records!)

My concern is the publishing of data to the public when not viewed within the context of that school. Just as I think comparing students against each other can be very counter-productive, I think schools shouldn’t be compared without knowing all the facts. We try to look at the gains a student has made rather than simply ranking them and I think that is how schools should also be judged. A school with low results nationally may have made huge gains but that would not be reflected in a league table.

Other things that Dorothy touched on, both in her keynote address and during our later conversation intrigued me and got me thinking. I’ll just put a summary of some of them here and invite you to comment.

Thoughts about place of e-learning

We are always being asked to show that using e-learning is improving outcomes for students. Why do we always have to show that it is better than the methods we are using now? Surely if we are getting the same levels of attainment while providing students with a 21st century learning environment then the value added has been that students will be equipped to work in a modern world.

Expanding our thinking in relation to cyber safety

Schools feel that they are meeting their requirements in relation to cyber safety if they have internet use agreements and get parent’s permission to put content online. What about what happens to that content when a teacher leaves a school and takes the passwords with them or the site just gets abandoned but left up online? How long should images and work of children remain up? Who is monitoring this? Imagine a scenario where a vindictive secondary student finds work of another student from when they were seven on an old blog or wiki and uses this to humiliate them in a networking site such as Bibo. We tend to focus on paedophile dangers but that is a very minor risk. We need to be thinking to the future about what will happen to all this stuff we are posting. You can see Dorothy’s blog post to explore this further. I think this is an area that should be considered when putting together policies. You only have to see the number of blogs and wikis that have been left up but are no longer active to realise that this is an issue!

To moderate or not to moderate blog comments

Dorothy does not moderate blog comments on any of their school blogs. This goes against the advice that I normally give to people getting started with blogging. I was interested to hear her reasoning. The children comment a lot on each other’s blog posts as well as having community comment. Dorothy believes that it creates a barrier for people to leave a comment if they don’t see the comment appear when they submit it. I have to say that I find it irritating as an adult when I leave a comment somewhere only to see that it will appear after being moderated (particularly on adult teacher blogs!). They have only had three problems with comments. One was because it used text language which the school has decided is not acceptable within school blogs. The other two were negative comments - in one a teacher sucked and in the other someone in one of the photos looked funny. They have been blogging for a long time and consider the risk of problems to be low enough that the need to encourage comments through showing them instantly is more important. That isn’t to say that they don’t have systems in place to make sure that anything negative is picked up very quickly. The teacher has to subscribe to the RSS for the comments and Dorothy is also subscribed. In this way, the comments are closely monitored and are taken down very quickly if necessary. This is a very interesting approach and I can see why they would do it that way. They are lucky to have a supportive community that accepts this. I know that for some schools, explaining that comments will be moderated is the only way to ’sell’ the use of blogs to the BOT and community. What are your thoughts?

Etoys - free educational download

I also dropped into an Etoys workshop during the day. When I heard the title I thought it sounded familiar and sure enough I had the application installed on my Mac already (free download for all platforms). I must have downloaded it, had a play and then instantly forgotten about it again Etoys allows you to build objects and programme them to behave in certain ways. Along the way you have to learn about maths and other subject areas. This programme reminds me of similar tools such as Alice and Scratch that also involve programming characters. It certainly got my grey matter buzzing trying to work my way through challenges and I think this could be great in the classroom.

My own resources

Suzielinks.com gets moved and updated

On a completely different topic, I have been working on changing my suzieslink.com site over to a free hosting provider while maintaining my domain name. I think this is going really well and I am tidying things up and improving as I go. While only half finished so far, you can see my efforts at http://www.suzieslinks.com  There are a huge number of useful links and resources for teachers. Check it out and be aware that the parts not yet hyperlinked will be updated in the very near future.

Well that turned into a bit of a long post!! Must be making up for over a month of silence.

ShareTabs

This is a service where you can enter the URL addresses of a number of websites and it will turn them into a set of tabs (these will apear as sub-tabs within one of your tabs/windows) which can be accessed from a single hyperlink. There is a visual preview of these sites on the landing page when people follow the link. I tried it out by making all of my website links into a single ShareTab link. I think this will certainly reduce the cluster in my email signatures!!

Postrank

This is an RSS tool that prioritises the top posts in any feed based on the number of comments, saves to Delicious and links to the post among other measures. This means that you can identify the most popular posts on the site very quickly and can get a widget that shows this. When I put in my blog feed, this is what it came up with:

I’m not sure if I would have called these my favourite posts but I found this a very interesting exercise.

Thanks to the guys at the Tek blog for the following:

Shape Collage

A simple application that will turn photos that you drag into the interface into a collage - you can choose from a variety of shapes. It is a simple programme that does exactly what it is supposed to. I did wonder if the excellent Google’s Picasa software (now available for Mac and PC) might be better to use to do this on many occassions as you can do things like reposition images within the collage and resize individual photos. Still, it won’t do some of the shapes easily that Shape Collage does so I guess it is just personal choice. Picasa also does a lot more than just collages and maybe it is useful to have a dedicated piece of software for this purpose. You let me know your thoughts.

Enough for this evening. I will keep playing and see if I can find anything else of interest!

At first I was frustrated with what I perceived to be limited options for the players that would contain the videos when they were embedded on another site. I used an older version of the player as I thought it was the only option where people wouldn’t be given a link to go back to Blip or the option of embedding the video themselves. It was only when I sent a message off to the help desk about removing the ‘More’ button at the end of the video that I found out just how customisable the newer player can be. I am able to choose which buttons to place underneath the video, what site I want to have the video link to in the bottom corner and a host of other things about how the video plays. I can also set the colour scheme for the player and can upload a thumbnail image of my choice that is visible before playing the video. They have a list of all the different ways the player can be customised on a wiki (need to log in to access it so I won’t link to it here).

I certainly found this very handy and thought others using Blip might want to know where to go to do the same. To make your own customised player in Blip which you can then save as a preset and use for future videos, get to the settings by going to your Dashboard and then clicking on ‘Manage Show Players’ under the Quick Tasks heading on the right.

Here is an example of a modified player - I just uploaded a brief clip of how the sliders in the EPS2.0 tool work. Note the branding on the player and the link back to the EPS website. The video quality isn’t that high as I cut it down in size to upload quickly but you can get the idea.

This could be an option for schools wanting to have videos hosted cheaply but without worrying about advertising or people being directed towards other sites or inappropriate videos after viewing any embedded video.

So instead of rewarding him with attention, I sent this message to the Wikispaces team:

I just wanted to report that a Wikispaces member has purposely deleted the content from one of my wiki pages. I have reverted it back to before it was deleted so no real damage done but still think that this isn’t an appropriate way to behave on the web. When I checked out the history, it was deleted by a user called spyguy4 who it appears is a 10 year old boy in Scotland. I was thinking of sending him a message myself but didn’t want to reward his behaviour with attention - I thought it might be better coming from the Wikispaces team :-) 

The page that was vandalised was http://learningweb2.wikispaces.com

Action following this message was swift - Wikispaces got back to me to say that they have suspended his account. And now I find myself feeling a little guilty! The kid had spent a bit of time setting up a wiki showcasing all of his interests (video games, cars etc) which I guess he can’t access anymore! I thought maybe a stern talking to would have done the trick. Still, I guess this is a very clear lesson for the youngster on what happens if you behave badly in virtual spaces. What would you have done in the same situation? Do you think the punishment matches the crime?

In February 2009 Christchurch City Libraries and the Crusaders are once again joining forces to recreate that exciting reading promotion, the Reading Crusade. Crusaders, librarians and teachers will be working in partnership to encourage reading throughout the first term of the 2009 year.

Any primary or intermediate child living in the Crusader Franchise catchment which includes Canterbury, the West Coast, Nelson and Marlborough is eligible to enter and be in to win a number of great prizes – the grand prize sees a ‘team’ of 15 children winning the chance to join the Crusaders squad at a special training session. All those entered in the Crusade will receive a participation certificate printed with the signatures of all the Crusaders team.

This year the Reading Crusade has a blog! Designed to help teachers get the most out of the reading crusade, it will feature:

• Teachers link of the week
• Weekly reading challenge
• Fun reading sites for students
• Fun book, library and Reading Crusade facts
• Insider news
• Find out about web only competitions
• Ask the ‘Coach’ (Librarian)
• Book Reviews

Check it out at http://readingcrusade.wordpress.com/

Add it to your RSS feed, be emailed site updates or just add it to your Bookmarks. You can also contact us via an email link to ask questions, get help with resources or ask detailed questions about the offside rule.

Have you registered your school for the 2009 Reading Crusade? Go to http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/ReadingCrusade/ ,download teacher resources and register online!

Good luck to anyone who registers!!

I have a new role this year in my job at CORE Education. I am now working on a brand new project to encourage teachers to make use of the tools available to them within the Taking It Global website. The main website is broken down into six different sections. I have been having a good play through the different areas and have been impressed at the sheer breadth of resources and tools that are within each one. I have written about one or two interesting things I found from within each area under the screengrabs below:

There has been really interesting discussion on the Community ‘Discussion Boards’ about the Gaza conflict with perspectives from all around the world including people from Palestine and Israel. This would be a wonderful resource to engage in if wanting to get a deeper understanding of the issues involved. I also enjoyed reading through a few ‘Member Stories’ which are the perspectives of individuals in relation to a few key questions. One question was on what makes a good leader and I thought that this was an excellent response from a 22 year old in Jamaica - A good leader is able to identify in himself his faults, accepts when he’s wrong and takes recommendations. A good leader is one who wants the best for himself and his group and not to be placed on a pedestal, but to carryout his given duty with great pride and humbleness. A good leader is uncommon. A good leader is charismatic yet at the same time democratic and possesses the ability to use all leadership styles where necessary.

The ‘Commitments’ area is a place where you can share with the TIG community what action you plan to take on an issue that you feel is important in your own context. You can either make a pledge or a commitment. You can browse through what other members of the TIG community have already said they will do and join in with that pledge or commitment. I joined in to ‘Share my knowledge with others’ along with 289 other people in TIG. Groups is a place to join in with others on areas of interest (a little like Facebook groups). I have downloaded the Climate Change resource in the ‘Action Guides’ section and I have to say that it was an incredibly complex and thorough resource that gives you background information and takes you step by step through planning to take action in this area. The ‘Projects’ section is a place where you can set up projects for others to join in with. I like the way you can have blogs associated with projects.

There are some excellent tools contained in this section. I think my favourite of these I have come across so far would be the Workshop Kit (a downloadable PDF) that was great tips for running different types of workshops. There are some excellent open meeting resources I plan to use this year as part of the work I am doing with ICT PD! It was linked to from the main events page.

Here you can read ‘Blogs’ from TIG members and groups (as long as they have been made public). The thing I really like about this function is that you can link an established blog to your TIG blog so that when you put up a post in your normal blog, it appears in both places. You can even customise the look of your blog within the TIG environment. When in the ‘Regions’ section, you can also browse blogs by region. The ‘Games’ you can play are based around environmental issues or help you learn more about other cultures. I went for the beginning level of the flag recognition game and I have to admit that I didn’t do very well at all. The ‘Global Gallery’ is a place for members to share art work to help explore ideas and issues or simply as a means for self-expression. There are competitions where you can submit work that fits that theme. The ‘Panroma Magazine’ takes submissions for articles from all members and looks to have very interesting articles. ‘TIG magazine’ pulls together art from the ‘Global Gallery and articles from Panorama on a particular theme and can be downloaded to your computer.

This is an incredibly meaty section where you can go explore current world issues in-depth. Each issue has links to where information on that topic can be found throughout TIG as well as links to outside information. There is enough here to keep people busy for a long time! There are themes profiled in each area such as the focus on the 60th anniversary in 2008 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was linked to within the ‘Human Rights’ area.

The ‘Regions’ section has information about those areas of the world. You can view information at continent level or drill down to individual countries. There are also links to content throughout the rest of TIG that relates to that area of the world eg blog entries or discussion points. If there are locally based projects, they can be profiled on the page for that country.

Education Specific Tools

OK - so those are the main areas of TIG and they are a huge resource on their own but where it gets really interesting in my opinion, is the range of tools specifically for educators in the education section (TIGed). You can use many of the tools completely for free such as the ‘Community’ area where you can search for partner classes to work together on a project. The ‘Resources’ area is a place for teachers to post useful resources they have made that they think would benefit other teachers.

The only thing that has any cost associated with it is setting up a virtual classroom for a year and that is a very small fee to cover the costs for hosting any content that is posted up into this space (around $30 US) Basically, a teacher can set up a classroom and then students can be signed up as members of this classroom. There is the choice of having the students sign up themselves through an internet link and using a registration code you create (in which case they would need an email address) or the teacher can add them in (and they wouldn’t have to have an email address). There are excellent tools available within the protected classroom environment. Members of the classroom can have their own blogs - a much cheaper and safer way to have a whole class individually blogging than with some other educational blogging tools.

There are also places to post assignments, discussions, art work, videos (imported from YouTube using your username), writing and you can build a number of maps with place pins (using Microsoft Virtual Earth). There is also a place to publish written work to so that students are able to share their work with the group.

Something else that you can enable within the classroom space is integration with the Google tools. You can enable this just for teachers to be able to access (as I have) or for all students as well so that they have their own TIG Google accounts. There would be issues around monitoring content if students have their own accounts but there would also be huge benefits as well. Students would be able to have documents uploaded that they then share with you and their fellow students. They could work collaboratively on a document with students both within your classroom or with students overseas (if you are collaborating with other classes). I think this is an incredibly exciting option and it only took a couple of clicks to set up my TIG Google account (I am suzievesper@tig.org). Basically, Google Aps is built into TIG and I think this is a huge advantage.

Overall, I think this is a brilliant set of tools! You have everything you need in here to have a classroom that is open all hours and allows for multiple forms of contribution. This is the area that I will be focusing on in my role of project co-ordinator for TIGed in New Zealand. The project I am involved in is specifically targeting secondary schools. For those that get involved, there will be training from myself on how to use the tools and support in using the site to investigate issues and take action

So - do you want to be involved? I have set up a test classroom space for teachers to play around in to learn how it all works. You are welcome to come in and join me in here even if you are not a New Zealand teacher and I welcome primary teachers to join as well. I have posted up an assignment in the class to come up with ideas how TIGed could be used to support different areas of secondary education. You can choose to be a student member of my classroom or to be an associate teacher that can set assignments etc.

Want to be a student and see what options they have? I have set it up so that students self-register (ie as if they have an email address) and you can join as a student by visiting this link:

http://collaboration.tiged.org/educators/register/ The registration code is joinsoc

Or join as an associate teacher by visiting this link:

http://collaboration.tiged.org/educators/assistant/ The registration code is teachsoc

Come in and explore with me. Make sure you mark where you live on the classroom map. Hopefully, together we can come up with many ideas on how to maximise this amazing resource.

For me, one of the most important aspects of my life is the ability to connect with other people.  While some argue that society has become more splintered with families and individuals being increasingly more isolated, I would counter that by focusing on the way that technology has begun to bridge the gaps between people.

I lead two lives; one involves interacting with friends and my husband at home or at social events and the other involves my online life with all the friends and acquaintances I have developed in this space. While nothing will ever replace face to face contact with people that I enjoy spending time with, my online life is almost as important to me.  The friends that I have developed through tools like Twitter and through being part of a blogging network may be virtual but I talk to them regularly and have found like-minded people that I can both learn from and share ideas with.

Facebook keeps me in touch with a number of friends now living in many places around the world and has helped me to reconnect to people I have not seen in many years. I could do without all the application invites but that is a small price to pay for having a network that allows me to stay in touch with so many people at once.

So I guess what I am trying to say is that all of us have a powerful desire to connect with people – it is the essence of what makes us human. As technology changes, people are finding new ways to adapt this technology to meet this basic human need.  The most important aspect of this for me is that some of the biggest shifts in technology we have seen in recent years have not been driven by advancing technology for its own sake; they have been driven by this desire for people to reach out to each other.  I find that reassuring and believe that this growth in networking ability may prove to be one of the defining positive forces for change in our increasingly global society.

The funny thing is that I had just published this blog post when I ended up following a link while on Twitter that lead me to a blog post containing this graphic that symbolises connectedness online. Couldn’t illustrate my point more clearly I think!

So - what angle would you take if given this topic. Would you focus on friends? family? that lovely new piece of technology you got for Xmas? Why not let me know in the comments.