Teacher Tube

I came across a post by Anne Bubnic who is a Tech consultant in California. She has a blog called Tech Savvy Teacher and writes about the way technology is changing teaching and learning. In this particular post she talks about the newly established Teacher Tube and how it was established by brothers Adam and Jason Smith. They have come up with a fantastic idea which I hope will establish a really positive environment for schools and teachers to share their videos. I haven't tried it yet but I hope that we will be able to embed these videos into our wikis and blogs just like we can with Youtube and Google Video.
But congratulations anyway to Adam and Jason for recognising that as we continue to recognise the power of Web 2.0 applications we need enterprising educators to lead the way.

Teacher Tube

While researching for a workshop for Intel Education in Brisbane this week, I came across this cool little video that Vicki A Davis has made and uploaded to Teacher Tube. I subscribe to Vicki's blog called CoolCatTeacher using Bloglines which has lots of great ideas and reflections about using technology in teaching.
My understanding is that Vicki is regarded as one of the leaders around the world who is using her blog to promote and share great thoughts and enthusiasm for the art of teaching. She was a finalist in the Teacher blog of the year and her class wiki won Edublogs Best Wiki in 2006
You may need to watch this a couple of times...I did...but it's message and design is very clever.

Digital Portfolios + Wikis

Last week I conducted a workshop for all staff and considered the question of how we are going to use wikis as the basis for student portfolios in Years 7, 8, & 9. The initial challenge for many teachers is to understand the concept of a wiki as an online website that can be created and edited by teachers and students, or anyone for that matter. And the second major concept is the potentially complicated notion of a digital portfolio as more than simply a repository for excellent work. Part of the workshop was to use the Intel Education Visual Ranking tool to rank different purposes for digital portfolios. The main purpose was to have staff discuss how they see portfolios being used with their classes and what learning, assessment and evaluation they might support.
The challenge is to create a shared understanding of what a portfolio is, how it is structured, how and what it demonstrates about student's learning and how it is used in parent/teacher/student conferences. The Victorian Education Department has some excellent online documents that support the understanding and development of portfolios through templates, documents and weblinks. For teachers in the department they access them through their department login although I believe that you can view some of the material as a guest. Try searching from this link for digital portfolios.