Virtual sanity online?

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

British children are spending more than 20 hours a week online, most of it at social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, and are in effect being “raised online”, according to research from the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Read the Guardian’s Warning to parents over children ‘being raised online’ for more information about the report and the recommendations for government intervention.

I stopped to think. What are global educators doing then? Uhmmm ….. spending rather a lot of time online as well. We have a lot of commentary about various online tools, and the pros and cons for teachers. The blogosphere is full of it.

In my case I can confess to spending a huge amount of time in Second Life this last Easter break catching up with Australian and international colleagues, talking about professional learning issues that are central to our daily work.

St Joseph’s College has a professional base on the island of Jokaydia, and our Convention centre is something of a conversation hub for newbies and experienced Second Life educators alike. This spills over to Heyjude Hall – a space created for the same purpose when I was working with the Catholic Education Office last year.

The collaboration takes the cake for ingenuity and flexibility in Second Life. The boundaries are unlimited, and don’t require special skype conferences, ustreamTV events or flashmeeting setups. Just drop in, and see who’s around! We’re very lucky to have such a creative space as Jokaydia to gather – not affiliated with any particular insitution, and therefore a gathering place for many organisations and individuals alike. You are welcome to visit the Island of jokaydia where you can engage in videos and podcasts, slideshows, virtual books, drums and balloon rides. Visit http://slurl.com/secondlife/jokaydia/113/150/23

During the weekend some of us gathered on Jokaydia I near Heyjude Hall (SLURL) and talked with Al Upton about the Mini Legends. Australians and international educators made up the group.Reports and blog posts have been running hot over the Department of Education Order for Closure of Al’s mini-Legends blogs – one of the best global grass-roots initiatives around. It is embarrassing to have such things happening in Australia. We must all lend our support to Al who is as dedicated and as energetic as any teacher I know.

Join us at TALO’s sypmposium online “Learning in the 21st century” on May 2nd, either physically or virtually, and listen to Al Upton, and discuss these issues in more depth.

Last evening saw me again talking with some colleagues at St Joseph’s Convention Centre on Jokaydia II (SLURL). We soon teleported to talk ‘conferences’ and content for presentations.

Here are the three muskateers – from the left, Tempest Nitely (Melanie Hughes, AIS); Slammed Aaybe (ICT co-ordinator, Marist High School) and Heyjude Jenns (me!) talking with Lernys Reino (Fernando Santamaria) Universidad de León, Spain, as Lernys prepared for his conference presentation on “Introduction to Second Life and possibilities for education”. Learnys asked us to line up for a photo shoot. Nice one.

I first met Learnys at the Edublog awards last year – on Jokaydia of course!

Virtual tips and tricks

Posted on March 26, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

The enormously wonderful thing about social networking and passionate Teacher Librarians is the ease with which they can source just the right information for your daily needs.

OK, I’m smiling as I write this 🙂 But I do want to bring another blog to your RSS reader – especially if you are looking for quick hits of useful bits and pieces related to learning and literacy in schools.

Joan joined me at St Joseph’s College just a couple of weeks ago in the role of Teacher Librarian – and is already a hit with her wonderful enthusiasm and depth of knowledge. She keeps us all on our toes!

Joan adds value to her daily work by writing JDS Blog – A Blog for professional learnings “Teaching without learning is just talking”.

Drop by; say hello; and collect some great snippets of information.

Photo: what lies within?

Digital media and learning

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

The MacArthur Foundation launched its five-year, $50 million digital media and learning initiative in 2006 to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life.

Just how does growing up with these tools affect young peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment and think systematically?

Since then we’ve seen a number of initiatives emerge from this funding.

I like to use the video threebillion fact’n’stats to teachers.

We all crave stats ‘n facts about what is happening; research and information about youth, digital media developments, gaming and more. A new series of publications from MIT Press provides quality content to keep our minds focussed on this field!

Thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, open access electronic versions of all the books in this series are available.

Civic Life Online
Digital Youth, Media and Credibility
Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected
The Ecology of Games
Learning Race and Ethnicity
Youth Identity and Digital Media

Photo: World connection in blue

Search secrets are out!

Posted on March 16, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

There’s no longer any excuse! The secret is out! We teachers must embrace ‘search’ for what it is – an effective and critical skill in finding and utilising sources available on the internet.

I’m a bit tired of teachers not knowing very much about search. Mind you, no-one needs to be an expert – but everyone needs to know where to go to get the latest information about ‘search’ and where to access a good tutorial to induct new staff into a quality search mentality.

I’m always keen to recommend the various resources available at Pandia Search Central.

You’ll find a host of resources there including Pandia Kids and Teens which provides search engines and search tools for kids and teens.

However for your staff, why not insist that they explore The Pandia Goalgetter – the short and easy internet search tutorial.

Pandia Powersearch is also a great page! Here is a monster all-in-one list of search engines and directories. Search the Web using the search form , or select one of the categories to find the best Internet search tools.

I also recommend subscribing to one or both of the Pandia free newsletters – Pandia Search World and Pandia Post – for some good updates and information about development in the search world.

For those keen to get the latest information about search developments, be sure to subscribe to Research Buzz. This is for the search geeks amongst you 🙂

Oh and there is Alt Search Engines – Alternative Search Engines covers the cutting-edge of alternative and niche search engines. Subscribing to their RSS just may give you more than you want to know about the industry of search! as well as some pretty good ‘breaking’ information.

I also included a recommendation in this post for primary schools – GoGoogligans.com as an alternative to Google. This is powered by Google.com SafeSearch & Google COOP.

Includes links on:

How to Protect Kids’ Privacy Online: A Guide for Teachers

What is cyberbullying

Delete Cyberbullying

However feeback in the comments indicates that GoGoolgligans may not be a safe site after all! If you have tried it or have some further experience, please let us know.

GoGoogligans does include a cool tool for making Google Style logos. Here’s one for us to use 🙂

Photo: Little secret

New literacies – new media – new networks

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Two questions from teachers this week set me on a new search for information – which of course included using the power of my professional learning community.

Question 1. Year 8 English is about to embark on an ICT unit where they will explore Youth Culture on the web? Could I help with theme, websites, ethics, nettiquette etc. Could I? I began to think about so many things, and so many ways to work on this that my mind began to spin like a top.

Question 2. Could I help them in Drama to work with Shakespeare in some new ways, using some of the tools I had mentioned at the Subject Co-ordinators meeting? Well, I didn’t actually mention many, but I did alert the group to new possibilities, trying to capture the interest of a few brave souls.

So I asked my professional network for more information. From Twitter came a reply from Laura Nicosia who teaches in these fields, being a professor of English and Director of English Education at Montclair State University in NJ.

Urrgh, I couldn’t believe it! (sounding like a kids story now!). Just that evening I had missed attending the launch of Angela’s book, and having dinner with her and a good group of friends passionate about these topics.

Never mind, let me promote Angela’s blog and her Youth Online book to you. Angela works at Sydney University English Education researching digital cultures, new media literacies, multimodal semiotics and digital narratives. Angela also teaches and conducts auto-ethnographic research in Second Life. Needless to say, Angela (Anya Ixchel) and I (Heyjude Jenns) sometimes get up to mischief in Second Life!

We are very fortunate indeed to have such expertise right here on our doorstep! I’m still waiting for my copy of the book, but I know it will be just what I need to help develop our work with the Year 8 English cohort.

Of course Laura went on to point out another excellent resource. The person launching Angela’s book was literacy expert Colin Lanksheer, who together with Michele Knobel co-authored a new release of New Literacies: Everyday practice and classroom learning. This book will also help us understand the real meaning of ‘new’ in ‘new literacies’. I’ll add this to my shopping list now!

Laura had dinner the night before with Michele – and I was supposed to have dinner with Angela! This six degrees of separation thing really is something!

From Colin and Michele’s blog, Everyday Literacies, I also learnt about the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a fantastic set of resources for enabling students to produce audio plays from Shakespeare’s work. These have been collated into a set of free, online resources titled: “Remixing Shakespeare.”

This set of resources includes an introductory video–and this is a must see! I have yet to observe a group of high school students more engaged in reading Shakespeare than the kids in this video. This introduction is accompanied by samples of students’ audio plays (brilliant!), a how-to set of tutorial guides, and a set of audio and audio editing resources. This is such a nice example of what can be done in schools within existing requirements and with digital technologies in ways that the students no doubt themselves find compelling and useful beyond school.

I grabbed the video and dropped it into my VodPod collection. It is vital that we teachers and teacher librarians take a lead role in showing students how to work effectively, legally and ethically to use materials in new mashups which allow for remix of original materials in creative and compelling ways to create wonderfully original works.

You know, I love my professional network 🙂 They give me so much knowledge and inspiration.

Oh, and Bec (from school) and myself are attending Angela’s Digital Literacy course. Can’t wait to have fun with machinima.

Virtual collaboration – with a little help from CISCO

Posted on March 14, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Recently I have spent a great deal of time exploring and building in virtual environments in preparation for taking a group of our boys into Teen Life in the world of Skoolaborate. We’re gearing up for this to begin in Term 2.

In case you don’t know, Skoolaborate is a global project that uses a blend of technolocies including, blogs, an LMS, wiki’s and ‘virtual worlds’ for collaborative learning of both teachers and students. By providing a common place to learn and share ideas, educators can leverage the power of new media to engage students and provide opportunities that might otherwise not exist. Using a group of islands in SecondLife, Skoolaborate helps students to collaborate on social action projects that benefit students who are less privileged than themselves. These projects integrate curriculum and digital technologies into collaborative global actions.

So it was with much pleasure that I attended a Cisco Live event this morning (6am Sydney time) at the Cisco Bandwidth Stage. It was Time for a (Tech) Chat!

My wise colleague and friend John presented his talk on Learning 2.0: The Power of Learning in a Networked World. John says that the slides he used in the Second Life presentation are very basic – text-only – slides (actually they were great in SL!). Full versions of the presentation are available for download- one in Keynote (17.5mb), and one in Powerpoint (15mb). Also Cisco Live: Networkers Online will also have something available. I highly recommend downloading them and absorbing the content, or listening to John’s presentation when it becomes available at Cicso Live.

John very kindly let me come up on stage for a photo shoot! 🙂

Creative Commons

Posted on March 5, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Thanks to Mark for this very nice presentation on Creative Commons. An excellent discussion starter with students and teachers alike!

Vegemite on toast

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

I learnt a few things today!

You can do stuff with vegemite and toast that I never dreamt of 🙂
If YouTube is blocked, you still might be able to check Youtube videos via another country. Here’s what I found at mx.youtube.com
Kids will always find a way around filters and blocks.

Visuwords – online graphical dictionary

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Judy O'Connell

Visuwords is a very pretty, very interesting dictionary and thesaurus!

Use the random button, or type in the word that you are searching for. Watch the swirl as the words and meanings emerge. A very nice tool to catch kids interest – and to show the connections and interlacing relationships of words in our English language.