This week I had the pleasure and privilege to visit with Greenwood Kindergarten in Motueka. Elaine Newton, the Early Childhood ICT facilitator invited me to lead a workshop on creating music with Garageband at the kindy. I was so impressed with their set-up. Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
Head Teacher, Shayne, has the place really humming. They have recently started blogging as a means of fostering links with the parent community. They only post video on their blog for security reasons but the effect is awesome. Their blog is only one month old but well worth a visit. I am sure they would appreciate a comment or two for encouragement.
The photo is of my good self at the front entrance beautiful poupou. The story of the poupou is described in a Google Doc linked from the blog. Now why didn’t I think of doing that with my classroom blog which I am happy to say is still ticking along nicely even though I am not there to motivate. The latest post is from Miriam- remember how incredible Miriam’s debut was on the world stage last year! She is going from strength to strength and is now singing for her peers. She sings the Norah Jones song, “I don’t know why he didn’t come“. Here is another rather nice You Tube Version.
Again through my Twitter network via @Murcha from Aussie and @MrKp from the UK I found a link to a fun website, Feedjournal.com, that makes your most recent blog posts via the RSS feed into a newspaper
To see what it looks like click on the above link or the graphic. Great if you’re not fond of reading on line. A thought ran through my mind as I re-read the newspaper- without this blog I would not have the motivation to write at all- and I have written and shared quite a bit over time!
And then to finish off I uploaded it to Issuu an on line publisher to give a cool little page turny look to the whole thing. To see it in a better size click on OPEN PUBLICATION.
It’s not like I don’t have plenty to do but I keep getting sidetracked by new finds and interesting conversations. The school holidays are great.
The writing of my first cluster milestone is starting to weigh heavily on my mind. I suppose its a bit like writing school reports- a necessary evil.
Good for Animoto for sharing their educational account so that teachers can now create longer than 30 second videos for free and download them for playing and keeping on your computer- great for playing and sharing if your internet is slow and spends a lot of time buffering.
As Ewan McIntosh says- it takes zero skill levels to create great videos. To access the educational side of Animoto use this link and ask Rebecca for an educational registration key. She does ask to be kept in the loop as to the kinds of things you are creating.
The quick example I made celebrates my first term as ICT facilitator for Discover IT Tasman.
Yesterday was a big day with a very early start to drive over the Whangamoa and Rai hills to the Marlbourough Colleges’ Cluster Day- it was a major undertaking- they had closed the colleges for the day and given the kids the day off- the day before Easter Friday. 160 or so teachers came along to hear Greg Gebhert speak followed by two two hour workshops. With lessons learnt from the previous Lead Teacher Day I heard little of Greg’s keynote as I was busy making my computer behave and connect to the network before feeling comfortable that everything was going to go smoothly. I was presenting sessions on blogging with newbies- two hours was a good length- long enough to spend some time showcasing what a blog can be used for then long enough to actually play and make one.
I used our Moturoa class blog and our Blogmeister blog as examples and my Bling4yrblog blog resource with pdf handout on how to get started and how to add a few extras. The sessions were really humming along and I got a good buzz from the groups which was superb.
Then it was off the Warren’s place for help with a migration of my 12inch Apple G4 iBook that I had won in a radio competition to my brand new nearly all paid for 15 inch Mac Book Pro with RAM to burn! Things did not start out well and there was a few nervous moments as disks failed to be recognised but it all came right in the end and after a drive home in the dark I spent till 2am playing! Not to worry- the long Easter weekend looms.
The sensible path was not to migrate the applications downloaded off the net but to re-download the latest versions with Leopard fixes and the like. Everything is going smoothly and I am re-populating my dock. Only a few little question marks- KidPix and Microsoft Apps to replace. Click on the photo if you want to find out what made it back to the dock and what missed out!
Skitch did give me a little grief until I remembered our slight change to the SYSTEM PREFERENCES- NETWORK- AIRPORT-DNS settings of the additions of these two numbers!
Kudos to here for help to do this and to the soon to be departing Chrissy who pointed me to it last year and to my Delicious who let me store my bookmarks on any computer which made it very easy to re-locate that much needed web reference.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch! Chrissy Hellyer tagged me for this Passion Quilt Meme through Miguel Guhlin- the idea is that you post a photo of something that you feel passionate about children’s learning. For me this is developing connections between children globally and sharing our learning with our global community.
This photo is a mash-up of our collaboration between Paul Harrington’s class in Wales and my own Moturoa class at Appleby. Over the year we had been building links between our classes- so much so that children felt a personal connection with Paul and his class. The children were familiar with each other via our blog posts, podcasts and Skype conversations. The connection became face to face when Dino and his family spent time in Paul’s class while on a family holiday in the UK. We came in to school late at night so we could talk to Dino and his Welsh buddies directly via Skype video. The virtual friendships become real.
The photo credit from the Welsh end of the conversation goes to the Times Educational Supplement that did an article on how classrooms use Skype to link up globally.
3 Simple Meme Rules:
Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter.
Today was my first day officially as ICT Facilitator to Discover IT Tasman. I loved it. I still don’t know quite what I’m doing but I am enjoying doing it.
I started by helping a secondary school history teacher to scan some of her OHP transparencies of the Irish Uprising. She had never used the scanner before and I managed to throw in a couple of useful extras for her like how to make and rename folders and how to organise her photos into folders. After that I quickly showed her how to do a Google image search for new and interesting photos on the topics she wants to illustrate.
Then a French teacher & I had a discussion on ways to record her students for NZCEA and another teacher asked if I could show her how to use Photoshop.
I had a go at sifting through papers in my ‘office’ to see what paperwork was left behind by the previous facilitator- never had an office before!
Then off to Upper Moutere School- only getting lost once!
Upper Moutere is a delightful rural school with a very creative principal. I couldn’t resist a photo of their recently completed WELCOME sign made by pupils. Isn’t it great. Together we planned a series of workshops on ways to introduce Kid Pix with Year 3/4 and how to encourage and enhance their already blogging classes with a sense of community.
What a great start- at this stage I have sense of freedom to go with my strengths and really make a difference- positive feedback was instant. A great beginning.
At the beginning of the school year (in the Southern Hemisphere that is) you might be keen have you students build themselves an avatar if you are not sure about putting individual photos on line or as a identity in Voicethread. Chris Betcher recently posted this find ‘Build Your Wild Self‘ from the New York Zoo. You can build your avatar and add animal features to it. Kids would love the opportunity to be wild and wacky.
This week’s highlight has been an impulse buy- Parallels for my TELA laptop. I was going to buy a new 17inch MacBook Pro but got the speed wobbles when I realised how much it was going to cost. This is my compromise. I may still buy a MacBook at a later date. The installation went smoothly and now I not only have a back-up of my PC on my TELA Apple laptop but I can access my books and other Publisher files from my Apple. I even got my new Polycom Communicator that only runs with Windows XP to work with a quick test Skype call to Lenva Shearing just to check. With the Communicator you can make Skype call with the speaker to a larger audience and not have to worry about feedback. Tino pai rawa!
I can’t wait till our next Skype collaboration- maybe with Lisa Parisi from New York as we learn together via our hemispheres wiki to find out about how things work in our different hemispheres.
After an all day Sunday session at school tidying up for move to another classroom and a new level of children. I felt in need of a little light relief as I had cleared my Bloglines and checked out the tweets and thought I would ‘Google‘ myself. I was amazed that this German blogger had found his/her way to my Teacher tube Video, One Woman’s Wanderings with Web2.o. These links are truly incredible.
They link to each other but until this evening I have had to convert the .m4a enhanced podcasts made in Garageband to .mp3 audio only files, upload to another Podomatic page that I made just for that purpose, use the Firefox add-on UNPLUG and through a tricky piece of code embed the .mp3 into Blogger. The ‘how to’ on this procedure is on my Bling4yrblog page if you still want to do this.
But tonight, just for fun, I tried to upload the .m4a file to Blogger movie and it worked! Now our enhanced podcasts play right inside our Blogger posts without having to click on an outside link. I didn’t think it would seeing it says they only process AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media. Yay!
I still prefer to view our podcasts within iTunes but I like the visual appeal of viewing as well as listening to our podcasts from within our blog. Click on the screen grab to view how it looks. Kieran will be ever so pleased now he can add another video to his blog.
Dean Shareski, Chris Harbeck, Darren Kuropatwa, and Clarence Fisher invited us for lunch via UStream this morning. I had an hour to spare over breakfast so thought I would join them. They were in Winnipeg and I am in Nelson, NZ but the geographical limits didn’t seem like something we couldn’t overcome!
The conversation was great- no-one was in lecture mode- just sharing our thoughts on blogging, networks and a sense of community.
About 20 of us from around the globe were able to join in the conversation, with good humour and a coffee.
While the conversation was happening I was thinking that my network is feeling more like a community to me- people who I have never met face-to-face but virtually through Twitter, Skype, Voicethread or blog make me feel welcome.
Chris, from Sydney, brought us all together via Skype for a bit of a chat about our practice. I encourage you to have a listen by clicking on Chris’ Virtual Staffroom logo. I hope you learn something from us and be entertained slightly as well.
Thanks Chris for bringing us together to discuss ULearn07, Twitter, blogging, podcasting, K12 OnLine, Second Life and more.
ULearn07 so far has been all new adventures, buzz and networking with friends old and new and meeting up with people who I have only got to know through their blogs. I think it is Will Richardson who says that F2F conferences let him meet the person that goes with the mind. Altogether too true. I know how some of these people think and some of the things that are going on in their lives without ever having met them before. A few people have come up to me and said that I have helped them in some way on their learning journey and that is very gratifying for me- I am honoured. Ewan hinted that F2F conferences aren’t as needed as they might be but I love it that you can engage with the movers and shakers of this exciting new world directly. Not withstanding that comment but I am still looking forward to the K12 on line conference next week.
I had great expectations of Ulearn and have been looking forward to it throughout my 14 weeks LWOP.
Now to put it all together while its still fresh. I have been frustrated with not being able to check my mail, Twitter or read through my Bloglines for two whole days. I was bereft so have paid extra for internet access to my hotel room so I can do what I need to do.
These days on of non-ibiquitous internet have brought to to a sharp realisation of mylove of being connected. I kept Twittering into the vacuum via cellphone but didn’t set it to receive tweets via phone as my American friends were keeping me awake at night and I needed to have my cellphone on at all times to allow myself to be reachable.
ULearn started with a powhiri welcome from local Maori.
We bloggers Jane, Chrissy, Simon and Rachel sat three rows from the front Twittering and Skype chatting our way through our Minister of Education, Steve Maharey’s opening address. We wanted to do a Mexican wave when Derek mentioned the Blogger’s Cafe but kiwi reserve held us back. Steve says some good things about NZ education and I think he is doing a good job- there you are- you now know my political allegiances!
Then came to the highlight of the day- Ewan McIntosh’s keynote. I had the privilege of meeting Ewan yesterday and he is a very decent bloke with an easy sense of humour, a wonderful Scottish accent and some new ideas to challenge us. That notion of our private space and public space was something I had only thought about briefly but brought home as we bloggers changed from open Twittering to Skype chat as we wanted to communicate more personal reflections on speakers as they spoke- we understood intuitively the limitations and nature of each tool! That is until people’s batteries started dying.
I totally agree with the reasons why we do what we do- that sense of audience, participation and engagement so obvious in even the youngest children- and adults!
Half way through Ewan’s presentation Jo McLeay from Australia Skyped me and was interested in having a listen so she was able to participate- I gave her access to my notes that I was jotting as I was listening- Ewan later hinted that he had read them also- I should have been more complete but they were only meant to be touchstones to my memory and I would like to listen to Chrissy’s audio replay at a later date.
After the presentation I had to race away across town to Sara Taylor’s workshop on Developing Visual Literacy and how to use Keynote’08 to bluescreen photos and KidPix. Awesome stuff and so simple- she had really prepared well and gave us all a resource CD to take away. What a great start to the conference workshop rounds.
Next was another cross town trek to Jane’s workshop- Thinking, Moving Collaborative classroom. What fun energisers to encourage us to move, to think and collaborate. Reminded me of Sir Ken Richardson’s TED talk- having to move to think. Hey now I can juggle with scarves- the kids in my class will be impressed. I want more of these sorts of activities- we do our energisers in the classroom but I need more ones that have that collaborative edge to them. Any more links to that sort of thing would be much appreciated if you know of any????? During afternoon tea Polycom sponsored the drinks and had a couple of giveaways to hand out. Rachel had been listening intently to the speech making and got a prize for paying attention and I talked my way to receiving a Polycom Communicator for Skype high fidelity, hands free Skype calls without an echo. They probably didn’t realise but they have given their rewards to a couple of people who will really be able to use them well and get the most out out of the tool! A bit like when I won my Apple laptop in a radio competition- when I was at Advanced Communications Royden said then that it had gone to a good home! Thanks Polycom. Who will be the first to try it out when I go on line??? PS- it doesn’t work on my Mac
I was able to introduce Ewan to the Waimea South ICT cluster which was an added bonus before we all headed out to the Viaduct Basin for a delicious meal and an evening of laughter and camaraderie.
I got a phone call at 6:45 this morning telling me that Dorothy had been knocked down with the flu and wasn’t going to be able to fly down from Auckland to facilitate our Waimea South ICT cluster’s Pedagogy and Podcasting day and could I possibly step into the breach! I have not taught for the last eleven weeks while I have helped my mother cope with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease so the prospect of paid employment was welcomed. Back to the chalkface next term though!
Filling Dorothy’s shoes was a daunting prospect but I had a good part of my ULearnpodcasting wiki already prepared and was intending to put the finishing touches on the presentation next week. I needed advice with a couple of points so I turned to my Twitter mates for answers.
Firstly- could multiple people edit a wiki page at the same time? Thanks Chris Betcher from Sydney for your advice on this one- the answer is basically no! So we used Webnotes instead to record or podcasting topics and I will collate them to one page later.
Then I wanted to Skype in an expert in podcasting- luckily Jane Nicholls, from Dunedin was available and Paul Harrington from Wales offered as well.
Lastly I had forgotten the keystrokes needed to zoom in on the cursor on my Mac- not having taught for a while I had forgotten what it was (OPTION+COMMAND+PLUS) BTW- thanks again Jane! And I also learnt a whole new way I had never heard of before from John Pedersen from Wisconsin and Chris again from Sydney. You hold the CTRL key and scroll in with your mouse wheel). I love it- thanks guys!
Anyway the day went well and the room was full of concentration and podcasts by the end- we even managed to embed some of the podcasts in our blogs using the Firefox Unplug plug-in and a clever bit of code that I had already given directions for in my Bling4yrblog blog!
Don’t tell anyone but I would have done it for free!
Sheryl is now safely back in Virginia from the Shanghai Learning 2.0 conference and has posted a link to the recorded archive of our Elluminate Session. I really do recommend that you listen to it as the other speakers were spot on with their contributions- well worth listening to again.
To listen to an Elluminate session click on the above link and you will need to give permission to open a Java application, it will check for the latest version and automatically load, wait a bit for it to open, it starts a little scratchy and then Clarence Fisher tells us about how he uses Web2.0 tools in his isolated school in Canada, followed by David Jakes, myself and Chris Betcher.
Uploaded with Skitch!
Clarence talks about how a class can be limited with just one teacher and the need to open the classroom doors so that children can learn from each other and other teachers/experts from around the globe.
This slide shows his representation of how a network of links has developed through blogging. Our class blog would be very similar I think. We learn things from friends and from friends of friends.
Do have a look/listen- you will not be disappointed.
OK- here is my latest find Jottit- a so simple way to gain yourself your own little quick web space for note taking. First of all you create a page- then you change the URL to one you like- customise the colour scheme and font- create another page that links to the first and away you go. It is a bit like Webotes but with this you can decide how you want to work- anyone can write to it, only selected people can add or just you!
Uploaded with Skitch!
I intend to use it to write my notes about my ULearn Workshops that I attend.
This afternoon NZ time I had the privilege to be invited to participate in a discussion at the Learning2.0 conference - Communication, Collaboration, Connection in Shanghai by my good friend Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.
I was accompanied by Clarence Fisher who is a full time teacher in a small school in the backblocks of Canada. I felt close to Clarence as his school is also small and a little isolated but he uses Web2.o tools to communicate and collaborate globally. Then we featured David Jakes who is a technology co-ordinator from the US and my new friend Chris Betcher from Sydney.
Chris and I had worked together the night before the presentation discussing what we might highlight and Chris tried to lend a hand while I struggled with converting a Jing video in swf format to something that would upload as a podcast. BTW I got there in the end by using a little cunning and a lot of persistence! (If you want to Download
This is a slide that I captured from Chris’ presentation as it graphically shows how a blog can be the hub of communication and networking with live updates embedded from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, comments, Clustrmap and other blog links. Uploaded with Skitch!
I will post a link to review the conversation when Sheryl publishes it.
As usual I learnt more from these connections than people learnt from my ramblings.
I got a phone call at 6:45 this morning telling me that Dorothy had been laid low with the flu and wasn’t going to be able to fly down from Auckland to facilitate our Waimea South ICT cluster’s Pedagogy and Podcasting day and could I possibly step into the breach! I have not taught for the last eleven weeks while I have helped my mother adjust to a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease so the prospect of paid employment was welcomed. Back to the chalkface next term though!
Filling Dorothy’s shoes was a daunting prospect but I had a good part of my ULearnpodcasting wiki already prepared and was intending to put the finishing touches on the presentation next week. I needed advice with a couple of points so I turned to my Twitter mates for answers.
Firstly- could multiple people edit a wiki page at the same time? Thanks Chris Betcher from Sydney for your advice on this one- the answer is basically no! So we used Webnotes instead to record our podcasting topics and I will collate them to one page later.
Then I wanted to Skype in an expert in podcasting- luckily Jane Nicholls, from Dunedin was available and Paul Harrington from Wales offered as well.
Lastly I had forgotten the keystrokes needed to zoom in on the cursor on my Mac- not having taught for a while I had forgotten what it was (OPTION+COMMAND+PLUS) BTW- thanks again Jane! And I also learnt a whole new way I had never heard of before from John Pedersen from Wisconsin and Chris again from Sydney. You hold the CTRL key and scroll in with your mouse wheel). I love it- thanks guys!
Anyway the day went well and the room was full of concentration and podcasts by the end- we even managed to embed some of the podcasts in our blogs using the Firefox Unplug plug-in and a clever bit of code that I had already given directions for in my Bling4yrblog blog!
Don’t tell anyone but I would have done it for free!
Today I was invited to trial my presentation for ULearn07 on adding Bling to your Blog with a group of teachers at Brightwater School. It was good to be able to give the blog a bit of an airing and see if it stood up to local scrutiny and decide how it might best work for the real thing. I have thought a few more ideas for how I might best share what I have learnt. I started off with a quick run down of the features that you could add to your blog and gave examples by showing the blog posts and then we settled down for an hour of intense concentration using the blog to add the things that individuals wanted and I wandered around lending a hand if people got stuck. People helped each other as well so I wasn’t too rushed so that was good.
Working wirelessly on the Loop with internet access as fast as the world has to offer was a real bonus and I downloaded a 14MB Firefox install in seven seconds- that was impressive!
Now I am looking forward to Dorothy Burt’s presentation tomorrow on Pedagogy and Podcasting- I think I will have a go at a little live blogging from the event so watch this space!
Also you may be interested in the Professional Development that I have had this year so far that I have added to this blog in the top menu bar.
We have been developing our Moturoa Class Blogmeister blog for three weeks now and the kids are loving it. David Warlick asked in the Blogmeister forum for some quotes about how blogging has affected our classroom dynamic, student attitudes, and, of course, student performance for an upcoming Tech Forum he is doing in Long Beach, CA. this week. I took the liberty of scalping some of the replies…
My response is that…
Blogging has given my class and myself a window out to the world from the South Island of New Zealand and our parent community an opportunity to participate in the classroom activities.We have an authentic global audience for the events that happen in our school. By blogging we know that people outside our classroom walls are interested and involved in what we do. We have a real purpose for writing to inform, to educate, to connect.
Through blogging we have built real friendships with children in different timezones, with different accents and beliefs. These links help bring the children across the globe closer together.
And here other people respond..
Blogging:
- celebrates thinking
- supports and reflects growth and thoughtfulness
- encourages self reflection and creativity
- invites a variety of perspectives
- widens understandings
- encourages decision making
- affirms and challenges viewpoints
- exposes our perceptions
- develops networks
- links people through thinking and learning Lorraine Watchorn
Blogs can engage students in a purposeful practice of writing that can promote deeper learning. Blogging can foster classroom conversations that matter. My having a weblog shows them that I make writing a priority. My having a blog lets me share my writing and learning with my students who have blogs. We’re in this together and we learn with
and from each other. I use it as a tool in the classroom to ensure that the students and I are talking, reading and writing about how and what we are learning and thinking. We interact through comments. We have others outside our classroom enter the conversations. We work at building a community who respect and encourage each other. We learn to disagree agreeably. We write to learn. We blog to learn. Anne Davis
Blogging has given my six and seven-year olds a window to the world. They see themselves as part of a global community–a community that shares things about their lives and feelings, reads what others have written and gives and recieves comments. This international audience gives my students a purpose and they are motivated to do their best writing on their blog. Kathy Cassidy Kathy is a keen follower of our podcasts as well. It is interesting that we link with other like minded Web2.0 enthusiasts around the world.
