Another year, another CEC Forum 😉 How time flies!
Nevertheless many educators gathered together on the first day of the school holidays to attend the ICT Forum organised by the Catholic Education Commission NSW.
As promised my presentation for the session, introducing the concept of social bookmarking, is provided below.
A detailed list of links are provided for you at my ‘social bookmarking’ TAG at Del.icio.us Heyjude.
You may like to use this delicious_setup.pdf from David Warlick to help yourself or your colleagues set up a Del.icio.us account.
For a detailed presentation that covers all the key aspects of managing and using your Del.icio.us account I highly recommend the one below put together by Michael Sauers.
Just start your viewing after the TechSupport page.
Working with a group of teachers the other day, I was inspired to reflect upon just how much things have changed in just 6 months!
Of course the workshop was about Web 2.0, and we had some attendees who were at the ‘big toe in the water’ stage, as well as Bob, Martin and super enthusiastic Deputy Principal John. What a great school to have such a passion to move on through Web 2.0. Bob at McAuley runs a blog to support their ‘Focus on Learning’ project (which is about Web 2.0) and which will represent money well invested by the State in this school! Bob has joined me on FaceBook, and we had some interesting discussions after the workshop about the value (or otherwise) of Facebook for teachers. The answer? Not much value right now, but we will keep our eye on it 🙂
Bob & Martin, along with some teachers from a number of our other schools, are also involved in a Learnscope project – once again around the use of Web 2.0. My young geek friend Melinda says:
The focus in this project is to acquire sound evidence on which to base future organisational decisions about communication and networking processes.
This will be done through investigating the use of web 2.0 tools:
- to support VET teachers and students as learners
- to facilitate workplace communication about VET teaching and learning issues
- in supporting industry and TAFE networking opportunities.
What’s different then you ask? Well, not just the fact that it has become ‘mainstream’ to undertake specific projects to investigate and integrate the best possible use of Web 2.0, but that through Web 2.0 we can reclaima teachers prime role of mentoring, nurturing, modelling or even teaching! students with technology that is online, intuitive, and embedded into the framework of learning and teaching.
The difference now is the existence of Web 2.0 as a framework for social networking and social communication; and Web 2.0 as a state-of-the art technology that is more and more intuitive rather being an ‘add-on’ to the core business of learning.
I’ve hear someone at work say a few weeks ago: “Web 2.0 is out there – we don’t need to do anything special to incorporate it into learning.”
Oh dear! – of course those of us ‘on the road’ and working with teachers know that the story is very different. . and that we are lucky to have so many projects to help people make the transition to Web 2.0 learning and teaching!!!!
So what WAS so different yesterday?
Not the workshop, but what happened afterwards. The staff attending the workshop didn’t all just pack their bags and run. A bunch of us gathered around and watched some videos that Bob has collected in his EventHorizon VodPod!! Were you doing that 6 months ago? A year ago?
We watched the amazing TED talk about Photosynth. We topped it off with some comedy! before driving home on a cold winter’s afternoon.
Thanks to Media Cafe Polska for alerting me to a neat New Widget Its My News – that thinking laterally, could be an interesting addition to various school blogs, media studies units, literacy units etc.
You can easily select from among 50,000 media sources – newspapers, magazines, blogs, TV and radio, and more – and build your ItsMyNews page, which updates automatically for you, all day, every day. We’ve collected news from all the popular topics in every format: text, photo, sound, and video.
Krzysztof has a good set from ItsMyNews on display at his post on the topic, and has inserted some in the sidebar of his blog. He was also online in Twitter as I was writing this post – BUT I can’t read polish. What a pity!
You’ll find me as heyjudeonline in Twitter or Judy O’Connell
in Facebook.
Bloglines Image Wall is considered by some to be pretty interesting.
Here’s the deal. Bloglines indexes zillions of pages every hour — and just as many images. The Bloglines Image Wall picks up these images as they come in and places them into a constantly updated grid.
You’ll never see the Wall the same way twice – in fact, it changes right before your eyes. Curious, funny, challenging, good, bad, and ugly – it’s all there. The variety alone is fascinating.
Much has been written about this since the release, and adjustments have been made by Bloglines in response to concerns from educators and librarians. Yes, we can now block the image wall URL.
But here’s the rub – that’s not all there is to worry about!
One of the factors in social networking is being able to share! Somehow this was touted as a fair reason to have an Image Wall. There are some things I never want to share – and the complaints to Bloglines makes it clear that I am not alone in this.
Bloglines, as you know, allows you to have a public profile – others can see what you have in your RSS feeds. As an educator I thought this yet another good example of professional collaboration. In fact, at times I have checked other’s feeds to see what I have missed and what I should subscribe too – a function that Bloglines allows you to do easily.
Here I was happily checking out everything in a subscriber’s folders – his school, his lovel family, concerts, professional readings etc – and then I struck the smut – big time! Should an educator have this stuff in a public place where teachers and students can access it. NEVER. (Fortunately I have been able to block this subscriber from view in my public bloglines account).
What concerned me was that I had a subscriber with that sort of content – porn is considered inappropriate to be housed in the folders of a teacher’s computer – shouldn’t the same guidelines apply online?
So in relation to management strategies in school with Image Wall, Barry Schwartz said is already:
To be fair, you have to agree before entering to “The Image Wall is comprised of dynamically generated images from user feeds and may contain material of an explicit sexual nature or other adult content.” And you must say you are over 18. OK, now what elementary or high school student using bloglines won’t click the agree button?
Like everyone else, I will have to think of moving soon.
In the meantime, please, if you are an educator who’s also into porn, DO NOT make your bloglines subscription public.
I’ve just read an excellent post at Library Clips about Blogs: the many ways “many” come together. It’s just the sort of post that makes terrific sense to a blogger – and which is well beyond the usual “why we blog and what we can do with blogging” kind of conversation.
For a relative newbie (just one year of blogging) it is fascinating to see how things are shaping up. There are so many options involvement and networking within and beyond groups. Like the kids, who have migrated from Friendster to Myspace to Beebo to….. we adults are also migrating.
Facebook is shaping up to be a pretty interesting tool – that’s my current focus for experimentation – and lots of good Australian bloggers are joining in. There are lots of great groups to join (just like Ning), but I like the clean interface, and the lack of blogging! I am so glad that I can join or leave a group as I want – has Ning solved this problem?
One particular FaceBook App had me grinning 🙂
Thanks to David Ward (at FaceBook), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has a a handy widget that searches the UIUC Library catalogue, as well as some of their journal article databases, right from Facebook. It’s convenient! and cool!
I’m ‘Judy O’Connell’ at FaceBook – add me as a friend!
Now, if you are thinking of getting serious about blogging, and using related tools, then this resource list might be ‘just the ticket’. Any suggestions? Just add a comment, and it will get added to the list. Posted by Blogtrepreneur.
One of the things that keeps being said is that social networking improves communication, and facilitates ‘being comfortable’ for the millenials. Kids use social networking to help them settle into their teen world. Because of Myspace or Beebo, teenagers can walk into a party, or walk around school and know people beyond their immediate ‘sphere of influence’. Better than vertical streaming of pastoral care groups in schools (used to help students associate with each other by putting kids of different ages together) online social networking can broaden and enable friends and conversation seamlessly and effectively. Those who are reluctant to talk, or who rarely contribute in a classroom setting, find themselves more able to communicate in a digital environment.
Isn’t it interesting that these same effects are observed when learning takes place within a virtual setting, such as Second Life. Students at Suffern Middle School in Second Life are learning how to manage their avatars and how to use this environment as their classroom.
You have to read the discussion to see just how to focus learning in Second Life, and how millenials can successfully communicate in Second Life.
This is an unedited, unabridged log of the discussion held today by the student group who are reading Snow Crash: (Please remember these are 8th grade students!) The remarkable thing is that in a typical classroom setting these kids would never be able to get to the level of thought and focus as they do in SL!
From Twitter this afternoon, via Stephen Cohen, from Jeff Scott, and on Library2.0. at Ning:::: too amazing for words!
I did it! I was able to take all of the library’s notifications and put them into twitter.
I set up our twitter account at http://twitter.com/cglibrary
Then I dumped all of the library’s rss feeds into http://www.rss2twitter.com
Now everytime the library has an update, a library event, a new book or video, or new newsletter, it goes automatically to twitter. If the content is too long for the message, it automatically creates a tiny url.
Technorati Tags: hz07, twitter, RSS, communication
I can’t begin to keep up with the range of social networking options that are available to me – and you! There is no doubt that the scenario put forward by those two canny journalists, Robin and Matt, back in 2005 with EPIC 2014, and EPIC 2015 is just happening and happening…….
I’ve been catching up on Twitter (should you or shouldn’t you?), playing around with Ning! (which needs a good focus to make it work well …. gosh, I belong to too many networks, and so for my money Ning is now too cumbersome for quick networking. However, I believe that a focused activity in Ning is very good for professional networking and project work).
But to go back to EPIC 2015 for a moment…..then take a look at NingVisualisation, and at Twittervision.
This morning Twitter gave me this; showed me Tumblr in action; and got me to explore Picnik. I got a peep into the lives of my professional colleagues who so readily shared their moments of insight with their friends. I am wondering where this is fitting into the learning needs of our students. The Horizon Project might help us work some of this out.
This cartoon catches bit of what is happening now in social networking 🙂
Technorati Tags: hz07, twitter, socialnetworking, IM
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