Category Archives: Collaboration

PageFlakes – teacher edition!

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Another addition to the suit of Web 2.0 tools customized with advantages for K-12 educators. We’ve already got Wikispaces, VoiceThreads, WetPaint Wiki, and Ning.

pageflakes.jpg

Another tool I regularly promote is PageFlakes , which now has PageFlakes Teacher Edition – with a nice specialist education focus.

This is Cool! if it remains open for sharing – no strings attached.

I did a search amongst the repository and found some nice PageCasts, e.g. Middle School Literacy and Harry Potter Feeds, as example. There is a huge long list of Flakes (widgets) you can add to customise your PageCast..

The Pageflakes team explains:

You can customize this page by adding and deleting Flakes (Widgets). Click the yellow button at the top right corner to:

  • browse the Educational Gallery
  • change the layout
  • customize your theme
  • share and publish your page

By default, all your pages are private. To publish a page or to share it with your colleagues please click on “Make Pagecast”. Of course you can have as many pages (tabs) as you want.

Why not setup a private page to start with? And when you’re ready, you may create a public Pagecast (check out our Pagecast Gallery) or a group Pagecast (shared page) for you and your colleagues – great for sharing notes, news and documents.

  • Blogs in plain English

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    Here comes everybody!

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    The grand thing about Web 2.0 and social networking is the opportunities for both serendipity and synergy in the process of networking and collaboration.

    Today I read with interest Beth Kanter’s (from Cambodia) notes about building your network strategically. Beth is writing an article and threw some thinking up on her Facebook notes. She starts by saying that

    Doing “outreach” or adding new friends to your network is a critical part of the work flow. To reap the benefits a using a social networking, you need to build your network, although as some experts say it is a matter of quality, not quantity. You want to avoid random outreach, but remember since outreach can be open-ended and there are opportunities for distractions. Remember to know when to stop.

    While Beth is looking at marketing in the non-profit sector her comments were of interest to educators – Vicki Davis (Southern Georgia, our coolcatteacher!) added a note saying

    In school we tell everyone,”Never add a friend of a friend, only add people you know,” and many of us are building our network in this way. Aren’t kids who add friends of a friend learning valuable networking skills? It is important to remember this, but also that we are creating a vast disconnect between what we tell students and what is going to make them successful in the future!

    So here we had just one of our many dilemmas in education being effectively highlighted and discussed, right in a social networking space, accessible only amongst ‘friends’.

    It didn’t stop there. I also had a message from Ken Carroll (Shanghai & Dublin) about the launch of his new blog Ken Carroll on Learning. Here we have Ken, and astute businessman, doing exactly as Beth advises – using friends networks to reflect and share, manage and promote.

    I am pleased that Ken shared his new blog link with me, because he has some highly relevant issues for consideration by educators. (Consider adding Ken Carroll on Learning to your RSS reader.)

    His post Here Comes Everybody touches on so many issues related to learning – information sharing, communication, gathering, discussion, utilisation etc etc. Yes, Ken, we have all been learning more, faster than we could 5 years ago….that is, if we are immersed in Web 2.0 tools and communication opportunities. As he puts it

    every individual now has a voice in the Big Conversation…. the participative web goes way beyond just high-speed access to information. It also enables us to form learning networks that include people, conversations, and information. This is a crucial development that we need to understand.

    Like Ken, I also connect with people on my network through blogs, social networks, email, instant messaging and more.

    This is what I want to share with my teachers. This is what I want to empower in the learning opportunities for my students. This is what future learning is all about.

    Photo: Casa Batllo, My Social Network

    International Edublog Awards 2007 Finalists

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    This year we see another fabulous line-up in the annual Edublog Awards.

    I am genuinely amazed and proud to find this blog nominated for Best Librarian blog – special thanks to those who considered Heyjude worthwhile for the honour!!

    The wonderful thing about the annual Edublog Awards is the opportunity to share our finds, celebrate our work, and discover the wonderful new people who have joined us in the world of blogs and wikis.

    As my super online friend (and multiple nominee) Sue Waters said

    While it is really nice to be nominated we need to remember the best aspects of the awards is it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social software is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners; which means we are introduced to new sites that we might not have found if not for the awards process.

    Please take the time to visit the web sites of the Edublogs Award Finalists, explore the resources, do some voting, and perhaps add some excellent educational blogs to your feed reader.

    It’s great to see Best Library/Librarian listed amongst the award categories. In schools we work hard to promote the role that Teacher Librarians/Librarians/Media Specialists have to play in 21st century learning. Our work is vital (critical even!) yet not always acknowledged for being central in each of our student’s lives.

    I’m a teacher and I’m a librarian. That’s special – and what makes Heyjude special for me is that I know that the audience is strongly drawn from teachers and librarians alike – all interested in 21st century learning issues. Teacher Librarians are very special people 🙂 and we all have to work hard together to makes sure that we keep good school libraries in our Australian schools.

    If you are keen to help the promotion efforts, take a visit to The Hub – the campaign blog for quality school libraries in Australia!

    The best Award innovation this year?

    The winners will be announced at the Award ceremony which will be held in Second Life on Saturday December 8. Cool!

    Congratulations to all the nominees !!!!! It’s a stunning lineup of great people.

    Happy voting – and thanks to all the work by James Farmer and Josie Fraser behind the scenes. 🙂

    Photo: Special

  • Teacher as Learner

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    Konrad Glogowski (Konrad March) put together a short video of his virtual meet-up in Second Life with pre-service teachers from Brigham Young University. November 19, 2007. Amongst many ideas, Konrad shows us how we have to redefine our “teacherly voice”. He writes a great deal more about his Conversation with Pre-Service Teachers, and student-teacher relationships and technology.

    You will agree with his statement that –

    Needless to say, as the new technologies open up new vistas for exploration and personal engagement, educators struggle with how they can best meet these traditional expectations and adapt their practice to suit the new reality of a more conversational and participatory approach to learning brought about by the new tools of web 2.0.

    We can learn a great deal from the work that Konrad is doing. Though I haven’t had much time to exchange ideas with Konrad, he is a fellow resident on the island of Jokaydia, where Heyjude Jenns (me) and Slammed Aayeb ( Dean Groom ) from Parramatta Marist High School are testing the future possibilities.  Jo Kay and Sean Fitzgerald were involved in Konrad’s session too!  Learn more about there work at the Second Life in Education wiki.  (Good on you aussie educators!)

    It is our aim to investivate just how these future environments will shape (or is it re-shape?) our ‘teacherly voice’ and learning environments – a clear and exciting focus for 2008.

     

    This video was originally shared on blip.tv by K.Glogowski with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

    CNN enters Second Life

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    Just as CNN asks its real-life audience to submit I-Reports — user-generated content submitted from cell phones, computers, cameras and other equipment for broadcast and online reports — the network is encouraging residents of Second Life to share their own “SL I-Reports” about events occurring within the virtual world.

    CNN citizen journalism everywhere you turn! It is interesting to speculate how many teachers are abreast of citizen journalism trends, and the impact of these types of initiatives.

    Read the report or watch this introductory video from CNN.

  • 21st century literacy specialist!

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    I always love reading what Kim Cofino has to say at her blog Always Learning or in her Twitter posts as mscofino…which are regular, and packed with questions and ideas. But what I really love is the concept behind her role at the International School Bangkok in Thailand.

    Kim explains:

    I am the 21st Century Literacy Specialist at the International School Bangkok in Thailand. This position combines my past experiences as a technology facilitator with the wealth of resources available in the library. ISB is actively seeking to build a Learning Hub that successfully blends the traditional role of a library with the requirements of the 21st century global student. My role is to bridge that gap. As the 21st Century Literacy Specialist, my work is focused on helping core subject teachers utilize web 2.0 technologies in the classroom, to create a global and collaborative approach to learning. I enjoy working with my colleagues to design authentic and engaging international projects incorporating social networking, blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and whatever comes next!

    Kim’s been telling us all day on Twitter how she has been finishing off the long haul of working on her conference presentation wiki Developing the Global Student: Practical Ways to Infuse 21st Century Literacy Skills in Your Classroom.

    Naturally when she finally posted the link I had to take a look.

    I think you should take a look too! 🙂

    You should also take a look at Kim’s post The Slideshow must go on where she tells you a little about the conferences that these materials have been prepared for.

  • News or knowledge curator?

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    I’ve been reading a bit about how news organizations are having to define the role of editor in the 21st century, i.e. Editor 2.0.

    This is a significant shift – one that we in education need to take note of! It’s important because it goes beyond plugging in some web 2.0 tools, like blogging. If the world is awash with information, is being filled with blogs and other media that help keep people informed, and is being enveloped by online social networking as the community ‘glue’ that binds people together (admitedly we are now not talking about the average educator) then newspapers needed to do more than just go online (which all significant papers have done) , and then add some widgets and gadgets.

    Having worked as a ‘subbie’ for the Medical Journal of Australia many moons ago, I can only begin to gasp at the changes taking place in media reporting. Imagine being a ‘search’ or ‘tag’ editor!

    Scott Harp gives a good run-down of The Editor as Curator of ALL the news on the web. But one of the most radical shifts taking place is that editors are now being asked to curate OTHER news organization’s content in addition to their own.

    Scott explains further that Media is now about distributing the BEST content — and the New York Times has embraced this new reality with the launch of its new technology section, which incorporates third-party headlines surfaced by Blogrunner (which the Times acquired very quietly last year — and which uses a TechMeme-like algorithm based on link patterns) and then selected with input from Times editors.

    Now all of this is amazing, the more so when I think about how teachers in schools normally undertake ‘media studies‘ with students. The idea of blended aggregation sitting beside what is now ‘traditional’ reporting is (I’m tipping) a very new concept and not included in mainstream/core curriculum.

    So really, we teachers need to pick up the pace somewhat – so that we can operate rather like the Times editors, if we are to be knowledge AND news curators for our students.

    We need to read, gather, create, and deliver news and information far more creatively, as well as to teach the students to recognize what changes are happening in media reporting.

    To help you think about it, drop on over to Will Richardson’s nice example of what a teacher (or student) can do, in his nice example of  news delivery for Darfur via Pageflakes.

     

    Photo: Wall Street beauty

    Wepaint wiki – will change the way you collaborate

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    Wetpaint wikis have now added fully integrated discussion forums into their wikis – which is already a wonderful wiki product!

    Michael Arrington in a post at Techcrunch explains that they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Amazingly, any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.

    While the debate continues as to which wiki will now have the share of the Web 2.0 market, when it comes to education use of wikis – this has to put Wetpaint at the front of the pack.

    Read the next post to make sure you grab the wiki loaded with benefits for education, or retro-engineer your current wiki to take advantage of the new offer.

    From iLibrarian.

  • Big juicy Twitter Guide

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    Thanks to Caroline Middlebrook  for compiling this great guide.

    She’s included heaps of information and ideas – no excuse now for not understanding Twitter. Even if you don’t use Twitter, you have to stop and take notice of Twitter – because it’s where lots of good educators are sharing – ripping through the global information repository and picking the best just for you and me!

    Big Juicy Twitter Guide