Cool things that make my life easier

I haven't posted much at all lately. Here in Australia we are coming rapidly to the end of the year and with reports and awards nights and end of year activities, I feel a little guilty even doing a post. But I don't want to lose the momentum either of regularly keeping a log of the things that are happening here at school.
I thought today I would add a little about a really cool little application called Page Flakes which I use as my home page.

I plan to teach my students about it next year because one of the requirements of our students in the Victorian Essential Learnings is they manage and maintain their files and links as well as use applications to create, visualise and communicate. I think that giving them ways to do this through the use of Web 2.0 applications might be a good add on to the more traditional ways that we save and manage work at schools.

Podcasts and Cool things on Firefox

I listen to a few podcasts driving to and from work and it's often where I get a few good ideas. Commonly it's where I often hear of ways to use the Web or Web 2.0 applications. They are not always about education although many are. I find it's a good use of time as I'm driving along the Calder Highway to and from work
Besides some of the great podcasts that are done by educators such as Chris Betcher who produces The Virtual Staffroom podcast and Dan Schmidt who produces the KidCast podcast, there are also other more general podcasts that inform about more general things.
The one I have found really useful for just finding out about new things coming out on the web is one called Inside the Net. These podcasts have introduced me to things like Delicious, Flickr, wikis, Bloglines and RSS. Each week they seem to come up with something new on the web to talk about. All of which have added a new dimension to my teaching practice.
Another great thing was the introduction to Firefox (which I use as my browser all the time now) and all the cool add ons that you can get from Mozilla.

One that I heard about the other day is a little add on called Googlepedia. When you search for something in Google, the add on will also search for the equivalent in Wikipedia and produce it in a split screen. You can click on links within the wikipedia article to create a new Google search as well.
Really cool.

VITTA Conference

Today I presented at the VITTA conference in Melbourne at the beautiful Flemington Racecourse. It's an amazing venue and certainly adds to the ambiance of the conference.
Over lunch, I had a lovely chat with Renee Hoareau, Executive Officer of VITTA. I have known Renee since her myinternet days (now Editure). She shared some visions that she has for VITTA and also mentioned that VITTA aims to continue to lead the way in Australia as a very active organisation for teachers of Information Technology. Renee is certainly one of the leaders of ICT in Australia and I think VITTA is in very good hands. If the conference is any guide this conference is certainly a leader in Australia and I venture to say the world.

I wonder though if we are hopefully seeing more and more of the 'ordinary' teacher who is interested in integrating ICT into their curriculum rather than the IT specialist at these sort of conferences. I hope that is the case but then I'm a little biased towards the all round teacher who has a passion for learning all sorts of things including using internet technology.

After my session Teaching Thinking with Technology, in which I addressed the Intel thinking with technology tools and cool and geeky things that teachers can use from the web, I also met with Jim from Editure who very excitedly mentioned that they are investigating the use of Web 2.0 applications and have received a government grant that will allow them to research across Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Asia.
I think it's great to hear that companies such a Editure and Intel are recognising that many of these Web 2.0 tools make teaching and learning via the internet much more accessible to the 'ordinary' teacher who is not necessarily skilled in all things to do with information technology.
By the way by 'ordinary', I mean extraordinary. I mean the teacher who is not necessarily a specialist but a generalist, who is a seeker of new learning, not one who stays in the same groove year after year; who recognises that the world of teaching and learning is changing. And that we better be there or be square. :)

Solving Problems of access

On Friday I got to school and went through the usual routine of setting up my laptop and logging on, connecting to my Pageflakes page and decided that I would quickly blog some thinking that I had done on my way to work that morning. But to my surprise I discovered that my login access to blogger was blocked.
After trying a few problem solving strategies and loath to spend too much time on it I resorted to phoning a couple of contacts at the Victorian Education Department to see if I could get to the bottom of the problem.
Long story short- I finally caught up with Sandy Phillips Manager of the Victorian Education Channel, Office of Learning & Teaching, Department of Education & Training. It seems that there are some concerns about blogger and it's suitability for use in schools and so it is going to be blocked at most Victorian Government schools. I am okay with that as I have had some concerns myself about the 'danger' of the Next Blog button which simply means that you never know what is going to turn up at the next click of a button.
With this in mind we switched to learner blogs very early in the year for our students. This is an environment set up by James Farmer, a Melbourne teacher and consultant who saw the need for an educational environment for teachers and students , in fact educators of all kinds to have an online space that would be suitable and protected , but also open and freely available to others on the web.
It 's a balance between recognising the importance and value of an online environment which is accessible to all and protecting to some extent the hearts and minds of our students as they learn to navigate their way around the web.
I had a really productive discussion with Sandy about some of the plans she has for developing just such an environment for Victorian teachers and schools where we could use the expertise and support of James and the Wordpress opensource software to create our own online collborative space.
With this in mind I have joined up with the Global teachers project which is a growing group of Victorian teachers interested in exploring the use of blogs and other Web 2.0 applications.
But while there is this 'cutting of teeth' so to speak I still intend to maintain this blog and will simply post the same material to my other blogs until I am brave enough to bite the bullet and go to just one again.

Maybe it is okay to show some emotion

My last post was partly a pondering about whether I am sometimes too enthusiastic about the things that are available on the web and the way it is changing the way we deliver, receive, interpret and think about education.
Comments to that post seemed to indicate that it's worth just showing a little bit of excitement and enthusiasm for what you do.
To top it all off I received a lovely email from Meron Drummond who is the Innovation and Excellence educator for the Cresswell Cluster in Victoria.

Hi Anne
My feet have just hit the ground for the first time since last Monday’s LiNum21.con event.
I wanted to take the first opportunity I could to let you know that I thought you did an absolutely FAB job last Monday.
Your session was short, sharp, informative and inspiring.
It also made it quite clear that there is heaps I don’t know!! But it pointed me in the right direction for some more ICT learning! I would just LOVE to know how you do what you do, but I intend to find out! At the moment, Podcasting, Skype, wikis, blogs - make my head spin, but in such a good way. I crave to know more.
Thanks
Now all I need is time! LOL

Meron Drummond

Gresswell Cluster Educator

Meron also has a lovely quote in the signature of her email credited to Jamie McKenzie

‘…the conscious personal commitment to building one's repertoire is central to the model of quality teaching…. Quality teaching amounts to a lifetime journey of exploration, practice and discovery.’

ã Jamie McKenzie, 2004

And I think that sums it up pretty well.

Enjoy your head spinning....it's lots of fun. :)

Is it all too much? The LINUM 21 Conference

Today I presented a session at the LINUM 21 Literacy and Numeracy conference for the Northern Metropolitan Region in Melbourne, Victoria. My session was entitled Teaching with Technology and was designed to showcase the Intel Education Teach Thinking with Technology Tools as well as tell a little of the story of the work we are doing at Wedderburn. In the second half of the hour long session I also planned to demonstrate the Teach with Technology wiki that I currently use to document my work at Wedderburn and the blogs and Wedderburn P12 wiki that I have been using with the students at Wedderburn College as well as mention and demonstrate some other tools such as Skype, podcasts, rss etc. I was hoping to excite and enthuse teachers to have a go at some of the thinking tools and the Web 2.0 applications that are freely available on the web.
As I began the session I simply said to people that if they wanted any information about any of the work that I was showing that they simply needed to write down the url of my blog (this blog) and they would be able to get all the information they needed and more.
I think that I probably demonstrated my personal enthusiasm for the potential of the internet and the power and engagement value of discovering ways that can create and relate the curriculum in a meaningful way to our students. But I'm not sure that was a good thing.
I fear that I may have lost a few people along the way by being too enthusiastic and assuming that participants were more aware of the Web 2.0 apps. There were people there who weren't familiar with blogs and wikis and although I tried to explain and demonstrate in the time that I had I'm not sure that I was too successful.
So if any of you have been brave enough to come visit this post, and check out this blog, tell me what you think.
Would it have been better to just look at one thing..I have this terrible tendency to get excited about things and want to share them with everyone else assuming that you will all love them and see the educational potential as much as I do.
Anyway if you do make it maybe just have a go at one thing...
try a blog, or try a wiki or download Skype

anyway post a comment. I'd love to hear from you.

Skypeing with Oz Teachers

Chris Betcher arranged for a Skypecast to be conducted at 10.00am Australian time for members of Ozteachers. Ozteachers is a mailing list that I understand from the comments of one of the members, Marg Lloyld is one of the oldest educational mailing lists in the world for teachers. Even if it isn't it's certainly one of the most active and one that I rely on very much for great ideas and friendly and helpful support for all manners of issues, problems and suggestions related to teaching. I don't believe that this is a list for teachers who are IT specialists. In fact there seem to be many in the group who are dabbling around the edges with eLearning and ICT. But that's great because most of the time the questions and discussions aren't too 'techie' and are often about great ideas that someone has come across or a problem that someone has. And there always seems to be somebody out there who has a suggestion or answer.
Anyway to get back to the Skypecast, at one stage I think there may have been about 70 online. Chris did a brilliant job managing all the chatting and comments and while there were a few technical hitches mainly to do with the number of people online and sometimes the occasional intruder, it worked really well.
A few of the highlights for me were
Hearing the voices and seeing pics of so many of the people who I read about online.
The discussion about how we might use Skype in the classroom was really valuable and one that I know that we will explore some more. I seemed that there is an opportunity for someone to try to gather a list of those teachers who are using skype to see if we could link up.
We also discussed some ideas for using copyright free music and sounds as well as reference to the K-12 conference that John Pearce presented at and many people listened to. We were reminded that the presentations including John's are still available to listen to.
After the skypecast I stayed online for a little while and chatted to Michael Cridland, a teacher in Brisbane who is also teaching Year 7&8 students. He is also 'playing' with blogs and wikis with his students and we had a good discussion about using wikis as a digital portfolio. Great to talk over some ideas and get someone else's opinion.
Hope we can do it all again.