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.

Creating a Learning Wiki

I love wikis. Mainly because they provide an opportunity for anyone or everyone to create an online presence to share, to provoke, to describe, to collaborate. Wikis as we know simply enable anyone and everyone to create content online using easily understandable tools. Many of our P-12 schools are taking advantage of the opportunities for "collaborative construction" that wikis provide. But I love the fact that we can also use them for whatever we need to create online. At the moment I am working on my presentation wiki , Teaching-with-Technology, in preparation for a couple of conferences I am presenting at over the next couple of weeks. My aim is to have all the information that I need and much more on the wiki so that people who attend my workshop will have a type of one stop shop where they can get all of the information that they need. It will contain links for both teachers and students to sites that help them to be organised, collaborate with each other, learn from others, see examples of Web 2.0 being used in the classroom and much more.
Over the next couple of weeks I will continue to build on it and I would love some feedback or suggestions.

Recently I was in a Grade 3/4 classroom discussing the possibility of setting up some new blogs and adding them to the class wiki. As part of the activity we decided to explore the blogs of other students in other schools. My purpose was to have students consider why we blog and to hopefully see their value. One of the student blogs we looked at used an avatar that moved and spoke and looked pretty cool. Thinking I would be teaching something new I asked if the students knew what an avatar was and to my surprise some students not only knew what they were but had created them. A little further probing revealed that they had been taught how to create an avatar by older siblings. It made me wonder what else they knew how to do (many of them knew about myspace and youtube) and once again it forced me to consider the challenge we all have as teachers to keep up with the changes that are occurring in our students lives even as we read this article.

Talk about the Being green activity. Planning with skype

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.