Beautiful images in Tag galaxy

Today as I continue to work with the teachers in my Intel course, one of the participants came across this beautiful site. Called Tag Galaxy, it is visually stunning and beautifully dynamic. It is a way to search for images and then to narrow the search by choosing categories that appear on the screen. The more planets(tags) you click the more you narrow your search. You do have to have a flickr account to actually get the images and of course if that is the case then you need to at the very minimum ask permission. These screen grabs don't do it justice. You HAVE to go and look at it. It's stunning.

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Dvolver- another new toy.

On reading the blog of 'cyberspaced' called A teacher's adventures in Cyberspace I came across this interesting little tool. Called the Dvolver it allows the user to create a little animated movie. Hmm, not sure how I would use this but I see that cyberspaced is going to try it with his Year 9 science class. Can't wait to see the results. On the site it says Dvolver creates creativity widgets - software that enables people to creatively communicate using internet technologies.

Intel Education- it never ceases to amaze me

I should declare before I write this post that I am an Intel Teach Senior Trainer with the Dept of Ed, Victoria. I obviously teach in my school most of the year but every now and then (about 3 times a year) I train teachers in either the Intel Teach Thinking with Technology course or the Intel Teach Essentials course. Both courses focus on supporting the understanding of sound pedagogy, the use of Curriculum Framing Questions and higher order thinking and embedding ICT into the curriculum. Today I began another course, this time in Warragul with 17 teachers from the Catholic Education Office.
I always love to run these courses. What do I get from it? Well first and foremost it is such a pleasure to see the development and understanding that evolves over the 5 days. There is always a range of ages, experiences, schools, teaching specialties and interest with every group that I train. It never ceases to amaze me how much this course challenges fellow teachers in such a way that they are often feeling pretty uncomfortable and unsure by the end of day 1. I couldn't count how many times I said today, "Don't worry, everyone feels this way, it usually falls into place by Wednesday". But what also pleases me is that we teachers continue to challenge ourselves. We somehow cope with these feelings of inadequacy and unsuredness with a willingness to keep going. I know that by the end of the 5 days we will have 17 fantastic units of work to be shared with others as well as 17 Master Trainers who will go back to their school ready to train another 10 teachers in their school. Isn't life grand.

Working in Ancient Egypt

Every now and then when you get to the end of the day and you ask yourself, what did I achieve today, there is a feeling of quiet satisfaction that you might have actually made a difference. Today was one of those days when I feel like I actually might have made a difference to a fellow teacher's practice. I have been working in the classroom with her for the past two weeks. Her students are working on a Humanities unit and are studying Ancient Egypt. Her original plan was to have the students present their ideas in the traditional project format. You know the one, where they create slabs of text, find pictures on the internet or in a text book and paste it all prettily on a large sheet of cardboard. Not terribly inspiring and somewhat dangerous...I smell slabs of text pasted from the internet in the air.
But a couple of days ago I suggested that perhaps we could come up with another way for the students to gather and present their understandings. And so was born the discoveregypt wiki. Today I sat with her and we worked on developing this new wiki which will see the students work in cooperative groups to gather and present information and ideas around their understandings of Ancient Egypt. I am quietly hopeful that this new idea will ensure a higher level of thinking, of expectation and of collaboration. It's very early days and the students haven't really started working on it yet but over the next 6 weeks or so I hope we will create something that is engaging, valuable and interesting.

Blogging letter to parents

This week I have been spending quite a bit of time preparing a class blog and individual blogs for students in Grade 3/4. I have also been trying to get my head around Wordpress. I have avoided it up until now as in the past every time I tried to set something up I would run into problems. But this time I was determined to beat it as I expect that we will be using edublogs, learnerblog, globalteacher and globalstudent for blogging when all Victorian schools sign up for the Ultranet. I'm happy to say I think I'm getting there. But what was very helpful was a link that my colleague Anne Mirtschin sent to me as well as some very helpful twittering from ictguy.
Click on this link to get a very useful pdf tutorial on Edublogs which used Wordpress. The next step was to compose a letter to our parents to explain the process and ensure that they understand and are comfortable with their students entering the blogging world. Here are some examples that budtheteacher has posted to his wiki . Check out all the other samples and ideas that he has. Well worth a few hours exploration.

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Global teacher and global student

Over the weekend I have been creating a new blogging site for our students in Grade 3/4. The decision about which site to choose was tricky. I wanted a site that would be safe and educationally sound and easily managed as I would be encouraging young students to blog. I was thinking of 21 classes as it was recommended to me by an American colleague. I investigated it and while it was certainly educationally sound I felt that I was going to take quite a while to work out how to set it all up. Then an Aussie colleague suggested using Global students. This is a research site conducted by the The Victorian Education Channel (DE&T Victoria) and The School Library Association of Victoria. It offers lots of support and connections to other teachers and their students. It also offers a specific blog where teachers can add blog posts to showcase what they are doing with their students.

Talking with the EdtechCrew

A couple of nights ago I had the enormous pleasure of taking part in a podcast created by the EdTech Crew. The 'crew' is composed of an old friend whom I have known for probably the last 10 years. Darrel Branson, or ictguy as he is known in the Web2.0 world is a highly accomplished educator who works with a range of primary and secondary schools in Mildura, a thriving city in northern Victoria. Darrel is one of those quiet, unassuming, wonderful people who is always there to give a helping hand when you just can't work something out. His presence on the web is increasing at an exponential rate and lately I seem to see his name appearing in so many contexts in the online education community . Every week Darrel and his partner in crime Tony Richards from itmadesimple.com produce a very professional yet typically Aussie podcast called EdTechcrew . I say typically Aussie because the 'flavour' is relaxed and conversational which is the type of podcast I enjoy. And professional because there are always follow ups and lots of links and helpful information from each podcast that is produced. Anyway as a guest on their show, I talked about the way we are using wikis at Wedderburn. Although a little nerve wracking initially after a while, it felt like just any other conversation that Darrel and I have had over the years. If you have to make a choice about the number of podcasts you subscribe to then, IMHO, Edtechcrew should be up there in the top 3.