myblogspot

These thoughts were posted in a June post on EdTech Solutions: teaching every student blog. They say it all!

Students learn from those who care

Originally uploaded by shareski

Another great quote (and image), from Shareski’s group, that I could use in a presentation to teachers

I have started to write a new blog. I created this one before starting this program but used it to play around with the mechanics and kept it private. When this program is finished, this will be the blog that I will try to keep up the habits I began to develop here. I have enjoyed reading many blogs and gained such a lot of information from them so I think I should start to also share the things I have discovered and my journeys into using technology.

An interesting little tool. It takes a batch of text and makes a word cloud out of it, the size of each word indicating its relative frequency. This is useful but what makes it really striking is that the font, colours and overall shape of the cloud can be varied, by quite a lot. Wordle is very easy to use and results can be striking. I put a simple one in the sidebar. I would like our English teachers to use it with some of their vocabulary exercises to give our students something visual, simulating and fun.

As I was search through blogs, I came across this challenge. It was on an interesting site as well (Put things Off) I usually manage to read more than this, because of the job I try to do in the library, and reading books for young adults is not onerous because they are usually quick reads. (I am not saying that many are not well written or that I do not enjoy them!) Continue Reading »

This was a great professional development program. I was encouraged to actually “roll up my sleeves” and work through things that I had skirted around or put off. I also gave myself permission to play around with various tools and simply explore more of the Web2.0 world.

 Play IS an important learning tool for our students but as adults I believe that we always feel a little guilty, that we should be doing something else (something dare I say “more important!”) We must give ourselves the time to learn in an explorative way in this sphere, or at least I must.

The other thing important benefit was that, by commenting in the blog, I spent more time gathering my thoughts and reflecting on things that I had tried during the day. This should always occur but sometimes it gets lost in the pace of school life. I have also found more wonderful things especially from the blogs of others. I have always been willing to share my ideas but it has been on a much smaller scale. The blog can be worldwide and so much richer for he comments and input of others.

The task I need to set myself now is to keep up a regular blog discussion and continue what I started here.

What do I know about Second Life? Well not a lot. I have heard about it and have a very rough idea but nothing much else. I did not really think I was all that interested but looking around I see just how many people are using it. I also see just how much you can choose and personalise when setting up, much more so than MySpace, Facebook etc.

The range of options for using Second Life for educational purposes was a surprise. The SLED (Second Life Education) community has lots of ideas. There is a SLED wiki and SLED blog look good too. The ‘SLEDevents in SL’ calendar anticipates events in Second Life of interest to educators. I was amazed loooking at the just the June page. So many different subjects can be explored using Second Life.

Second Life in Education. Sarah Robbins, doctoral candidate at the University of Indiana, aka Intelligirl, talks about her experiences using Second Life in her classrooms. Long video but good information

Continue Reading »

I had a great image in mind (by Ben Heine but more and more Flickr images are are copyrighted). This was for an article he read on MySpace and Facebook. The article was on SearchEngineWatch.com. I have subscirbed to regular emails from this since I got my laptop about 10 years ago, before RSS!. It has had some really interesting items although I must admit I didn’t really think much about this one until we started this program.

Never mind! Statistics show Facebook is getting to be much more popular, especially in Australia. The background of the two may be part of it. Facebook being set up for a small group (College students) to find other students they had lost contact with. It has now become a way to keep in touch with people on a world wide basis. MySpace is getting to be used by those who want to get in touch with new people, hence the more commercial uses discussed earlier. Both these two social networking sites have many young users, who use them regularly. Though many/most schools have banned Facebook and MySpace, there are ways to get around these, with a few tools and via mobile phones. Many young people can to stay logged on to Facebook for long periods of the day.  So again, what are we doing to educate young people to stay safe? Continue Reading »

Why are schools, and libraries, choosing to ignore this phenomenon? There are many reasons given but my belief is that the arguments come down to two main thrusts: it isn’t safe and the very nature of these is that they can’t be school or teacher-centered or controlled, they open to all on a much more equal basis.

Trends from Google:

Red=MySpace, Blue=Facebook Continue Reading »