This video is an update to the original “Shift Happens”.
I’m posting it here as a way of testing one of the many new features of WordPress.com, which allows me to post videos to my blog by the click of a button using my vodpod/wordpress toolbar button.
WordPress.com has a whole new Dashboard design with plenty of slick new features thanks to WordPress 2.5.
I’m pretty excited to see new things happening at WordPress.
Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod
Some excellent research and commentary is available from BECTA in the UK in the recent publication
The various chapters explore the ‘net generation’ who can seamlessly move between their real and digital lives; examine the implications for education of the convergence of mobile devices, pervasive wireless connectivity, and internet applications and services; discuss the development of virtual worlds and ‘serious games’ and how we can make best use of these technologies to support better learning; analyse the problem of finding and searching digital content on the web and the limitations of current systems; and considers the potential of some emerging display and interface technologies to improve interaction with computers and facilitate collaborative activities in more natural and intuitive ways.
These are excellently presented too, and make good professional reading handouts for staff discussion.
The problem is that some people are offended when I explain that good powerpoint presentations are….well good! and represent a completely different presentation design to 20th century versions. Our understanding of how to promote thinking, engage audiences, and use powerpoint as a visual communication medium has matured. So also has our understanding of how we can teach kids to engage with knowledge, and provide a visual synthesis of their ‘take on a topic’ via a powerpoint and an actual talk about a topic, rather than read of a topic! has ‘come of age’.
The presentation Dodging Bullets in Presentations explains the design and function developments beautifully. Now I urge you to apply that reasoning to the next ‘powerpoint project’ that you give your students. They may be a little surprised at how much work and how much understanding is required to produce an assessment without all those bullet points. Their supporting ‘talk’ just may need them to know and understand their topic for their talk – especially if no notes are allowed 🙂
I’ve been collecting lots of posts about Twitter in my Del.ici.ous collection, all of them good reads providing information, ideas, or reflections on the ‘whys and wherefores’ of Twitter use.
No surprise then that I was alerted to Tom Barrett’s post Twitter – A Teacher and Learning Tool via Twitter.
In my experience, and in the short time that I have used it, Twitter has grown quickly to play a major part in the way that I interact with fellow colleagues and professionals from around the world. In my classroom and with the children I teach it has been an exciting tool to utilise and support learning.
Tom has written a brilliant post, that explains and elaborates on the function and scope of Twitter – and rather fantastically extends our horizons with ideas for integrating this micro-blogging tool into our teaching and learning activities.
GO and read the post! Go on! 🙂
I caught an interesting commentary from Clay Burrell on RSS in education – and got quite interested in the read for a while. I agree with Clay’s comments – to an extent. The thing is, there is more to RSS than mentioned here – but I’m thinking that it is outside the domain of teachers that we find the true power of RSS.
How about setting up an RSS feed on info topics, based on good selection of key terms, which are delivered directly from comprehensive journal databases, or scholarly internet resource collections, or searches that your have “rolled” yourself?? That’s ‘serious’ information gathering! RSS is not just for web info collection – that’s basic – and eventually pretty boring! Any wonder kids (and teachers for that matter) are not much interested. RSS also drives the work of students participating in the Horizon Project. Perhaps it’s the purpose for which the RSS is being used that makes it work. Check out Sue’s post on How I use RSS to Make My Life Easier – that’s an important message for teachers too!
I’m lucky – I can preach a different gospel of RSS coming from my library side, than I could coming just from my teacher side. There’s just more to learn about RSS – that’s all!
The good thing was that Clay told us about Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop service. As a fan of popurls my interest picked up again. What a great writing task set up by Clay. OK, time for me to dig deaper into the potential of Alltop.
Nah – no good! Well not for some of us anyway. Seemed to be a pretty slim representation of important education blogs. Even worse, I couldn’t find anything for education and library – either academic or school.
Good librarians are great Web 2.0 information professionals – and they are the ones who can show teachers like Clay how else to effectively use RSS and a host of other Web 2.0 tools. Plus the information flow from librarian bloggers is fantastic too. Check out the Lib Bloggers in my blogroll, and you’ll get the idea 🙂
In a Web 2.0 world collaboration is essential. It’s time that librarians, teacher librarians, media specialists and teachers learnt more from each other – and collaborated more. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.
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.
Here’s another of the very good Commoncraft videos – this time about Twitter.
Doesn’t in any way tell the story of the value of Twitter for educators – the simplicity of sharing and caring 24 hours a day!
A good way to introduce twitter nonetheless.
Oh, I like this one!I use Gmail, for lots of reasons – all related to my online professional work, and as an alternative to my work email. Integrates so well with lots of things – in my case, especially well with Google Calendar, Talk and Docs.
Here’s an extensive and very useful list of Gmail Tips, Tricks and Hacks. There are many for your to explore. Lots are new to me …… and my favourite for its simplicity and value in managing my subscriptions is the one below. Sweet!
11. Mute a conversation
Ever found yourself subscribed to a mailing list and the current conversation has nothing to do with you? If you don’t want to unsubscribe, you can easily stop the friendly spam with the Gmail mute function. Select a message in the thread and hit the m key to auto-archive all incoming messages in the conversation. The thread will stay muted until you unmute it; it will also un-mute itself if your address appears in the To or CC box.
New job, new challenges! Yikes!
My post Core knowledge and creativity for learning 2.0 has generated a bit of discussion – amongst my old friends with whom it is easy to have robust pedagogical conversations about learning in a Web 2.0 world. Read those conversations and you can see how we changed in a couple of years in our own thinking and our own classroom practice. Our students have been the winners.
Michael suggests that I am ‘biting my tongue’. 🙂 You might be right about that! Michael, like all my professional friends and colleagues in the Parramatta Diocese, knows how passionate I am about changing the learning opportunities for our students – bringing our classroom practice in alignment with their Web 2.0 world.
So now I miss my teaching friends a lot – because I have no-one with me yet with whom I can have
these challenging pedagogical discussions. You know how it is – back to base one, only it’s worse when you have learnt so much with your friends, and you KNOW that things have to change, and change significantly.
At the end of the day, though, it’s deep knowledge and deep thinking that drives learning – Web 2.0 or otherwise. Engagement, even the engagement of Web 2.0, is only relevant where it promotes and commits our students to being reflective, critical thinkers, able to find and use information effectively and ethically, and able to absorb common and core knowledge in order to build and contribute to human knowledge and understanding. You engage learners in a Web 2.0 world by recognizing their multimodal way of thinking and being – not for the sake of the Web 2.0 gimmick but for the sake of attracting and absorbing the interest of our young learners. Deep thinking has always been around – from Socrates to the 21st century. It’s how we get to encourage deep thinking that has radically changed in our multimedia/multimodal world
Stay with me my old friends, as we continue our fantastic transformation as teachers in a 2.0 world. Come with me my new friends, join me on a glorious journey of rediscovery – because I think that’s what it is…rediscovering deep learning, connected learning, reflective learning, and much more – so much more!
It’s not just about the HSC any more. It’s about powering our students into their global futures in ways that none of us teachers ever experienced as learners. These kids, they’re so lucky – if only we’ll let them fly!
Let’s not forget – we talk about Web 2.0 as if its still something new. These kids – they ARE Web 2.0.
I like to point out obvious tools to teachers to discover – and challenge their thinking about Web platform tools. So here’s a little reminder to keep an eye out for good Google tools.
Too many teachers know about ‘googling‘, but don’t know enough about what else is worth using for Google tools.
So remember, when you go to do a Google search, look up at the top left-hand corner and discover a few other tools – the magic one to follow is the little word “more“.
Most teachers are already know about images, maps, Gmal…but more?
Yes, there are a few other very useful goodies. But then what about “even more“?
That’s a page that all smart 21C teachers should visit and come to grips with! Not necessarily to use them…but to be aware of what these represent..the required pervasiveness of Web 2.0 tools in our daily educational practice.
Check out Google Notebook, and Google Scholar – if you haven’t already done so. There are many Google tools that deserve attention and discussion. How could we use them? What other ‘brand’ tools might be a better choice? What are the tips for good pedagogical integration?
What you’ll also notice on the full listing page is that sometimes a new tool appears with the label New! right next to it. Google Notebook has that right now.
Did you know that this doesn’t really mean ‘totally new‘ but rather that the tool is no longer in beta phase?
Indeed!
Google Labs are the place where the up-and-coming tools can be found. Checking out Google Labs is a great way for teachers to find out about some of the future trends.
I wanted to highlight this information about Google because Google is everywhere – especially where teachers haven’t moved beyond the “go and do some research on the internet” phase of online instruction.
Google is more than a search tool or email facility. Know what else Google actually is, and then develop a good sense of discernment – so that you can determine whether a Google tool or another tool is the best for your particular learning and teaching need!
That’s a fun series of PD sessions for you to try out?
Hmmm, might do that myself later in the year too 🙂
judyoconnell.com 
