Voki -creating a new you

Over the last few weeks I have been introducing our Grade 3/4 students to Vokis. What is a Voki you ask? Well if you ask the kids they would probably say something like, "It's this really cool site where you can make something that talks and moves. It can be a person or a cartoon or an animal. You can dress it and change the way it looks and then embed it into your wiki or blog by copying the code that is created.
The kids love it and I do too. One of the things that I do like about it is something really simple that looks a lot of fun. It also allows for students to create something that can go online without readily identifying them. But there is also the flexibility of the avatars to present the ideas of the students. One of the activities that I have asked the kids to do is to create a voki that talks about their passion. An activity that they already regularly do in class but here is a more powerful and exciting way to present it to others in their class and their parents.
Here's an example created by Maddy...


Get a Voki now!

K12 Online Conference 2007

I am going to do my best to check out a few of the prestentations on the K12Online Conference 2007 which is already underway. The main presentations are beginning this week and the following week with some Pre conference presentations already completed. There are some pretty cool presenters check them out here.
Follow the schedule here http://k12onlineconference.org/docs/k12online2007schedule.html
If you read this blog regularly, you would know that I am pretty passionate about the value of wikis and this K12Online conference wiki is a pretty great example of how wikis can be used extremely effectively.

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Happy Birthday James

james and danny
Originally uploaded by annieb3525

Happy 22nd birthday for Oct 3rd to my beautiful son James who is at trade school at the moment in Melbourne. This time last year we were preparing a 21st birthday party in the local footy sheds. This is James on the left with his good mate Danny only 12 months ago. My how time flies.

Blogging is worth it

I have been on holidays for the last two weeks and have taken a little break from blogging. But in that time I have received 4 or 5 comments on previous posts that I have made on this blog. Some comments were on posts made over a month or so ago. That is really heartening and encouraging as sometimes when you send these thoughts out into the blogosphere you don't really know if the only one reading it is YOU (as in me).  It made me wonder about the immediacy of the web and the feeling of moving on that I often get when I read or post something. I think it has to do with everything happening and changing so quickly on the web. It's like, once it's gone it's time to move on to the next thought. It's good though to every now and then go back and read and respond to previous thoughts. So thanks to Sarah, Jess and anonymous for waking me up again and getting me back on the blogging trail. Looking forward to another exciting term of fun !!

Blogged with Flock

Adding images on the web

A few weeks ago I was reading Darrel Branson's blog The ICT Guy and he mentioned that he uses pic resize to resize images that are to be uploaded to blogs and wikis. In the past I have (and still do) teach my students how to quickly optimise images in Fireworks or Paintshop Pro. But pic resize will now also become an additional option for our students to use when they quickly want to resize something to up load to the web. It's so easy. All you do is select the picture you want to resize, choose quick resize, go through the options, download the image (you have to download it within 20 minutes or you will lose it) and the upload to your blog or wiki. Cool !!

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

Ubiquitous technology

When I went to South Korea earlier this year to run a workshop in Intel Teach Thinking with Technology I remember talking with one of the participants about the notion of ubiquitous technology. At the time I really had no idea what he meant and he explained that it was the notion that technology will become such a part of our lives that it will sit in the background working for us; available to us at anytime, anywhere.
The reason I thought of this conversation is that I am presently travelling on a school bus with Year 8 students from Wedderburn College going down to the Pixar 20 Years of Animation display at ACMI in Federation Square. While travelling I've logged into the internet via a wireless connection which means that I can do a little bit of work (or blogging) as we head to Melbourne. Every second kid on the bus is texting friends and family and we are listening to music via an FM transmitter that one of the kids has brought on their Ipod.
Serendipidously (it seems to happen to me alot) I was reading John Pearce's blog and one of his posts was about m-learning called Today Two Years is Tout d'abord in which he discussed in part his progress along the continuum of ICT capabilities. He concluded that in some sense he wasn't as far along as he thought when comparing himself to Alex Hayes a senior Education Officer with TAFE NSW who writes about m-learning in a very interesting presentation that he is presenting at a conference in Canberra very shortly. According to WikiPedia as of August 22nd 2007, M-Learning is "learning that happens across locations or that takes advantage of learning opportunities offered by portable technologies"
Check it out here:


But Alex's point made me think again about the fact that ubiquitous technology, m-Learning or whatever you want to call it is changing the way we work, think, communicate, share, talk, learn, manage, reflect. But has it yet changed the way we teach???? I think in your case John, the answer is a resounding yes.