I must admit, this caught my attention. Seems to work quickly?
FileURLS is a nifty online tool that quickly lets you share a file – no need to set up an account. It lets you set an expiry day up to 9 days.
You may email the url created, or place it in your blog or wiki.
Here’s a Factsheet on dietary sources of Omega 3 that I used to this tool – it quickly generated this URL – http://fileurls.com/carado
This is too simple to be true! How did you go downloading the file?
Recently Kerry Lorette Johnson from EducationAU.limited sent me an alert via Facebook about a big birthday event! My avatar, Heyjude Jenns will be dropping by!
Education Network Australia (Edna) has been providing free online resource collections and collaborative networks for the education and training community in Australia for 10 years! This is worth celebrating – and the celebration includes holding an event in Second Life on Tuesday 27 November — and they’d love for us all to be there!
Here are the details:
“Official” start time is 2:45pm Adelaide, South Australia time – or check this time for your time zone in World clock time.
The birthday event will be on the island of Terra Icognita: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Terra%20incognita/157/107/33
They’ll have free tedna -shirts, virtual cake and champagne and, after a live broadcast of speeches including the launch of myedna. Afterwards your avatar can rock out to popular Second Life band Space Junky.
When you teleport over, there will be a glowing poster on the floor of the gazebo with the
edna logo and an arrow, and there will be helpers to guide you on your way. Kerry’s avatar is Pandora Kurrajong, but she’ll be busy channeling the audio from the presentations so you might not get too chat with her.
So look for Spotters Square – the name of the island quadrant they’ll be using. They’re promising a decent size stage!
Kerry has created a Twitter channel for the edna 10th birthday celebrations. The address is: http://twitter.com/edna10
The RSS feed subscription link is:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/10456232.rss
For educators, the most visible products of edna are the web site and the services available through edna Groups, edna Sandpit Groups and edna Lists as well as the workshops delivered by the staff of education.au, the ministerially owned company that manages the edna web sites.
As part of the 10 year celebration you can catch up with a talk with current education.au CEO Greg Black, former CEO Gerry White, General Manager of Business Development Garry Putland and edna Communications Officer Kerrie Smith about the past, present and future of edna and e-learning.
Good stuff aussies!
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.
Amazon’s new wireless reading device lets you read books, magazines, newspapers and blogs anywhere, anytime. Small as a paperback, Kindle will hold lots of goodies for book aficiandos. The screen technology seems to be impressive – but wait till someone tells us more.
You really must watch the small video about Kindle. I wonder when we will have access to free download?
A wonderful marketing strategy from Amazon – as well as a clear indication of future directions for teachers and librarians alike. This gadget is a ‘future’ must-have for me!
View the video here. Get full product descriptions, reviews, and more information here.
Nice one! I think! Maybe this is still not the ‘ultimate’ device – but with it’s link to Amazon, it sure is a peek into the future.
However, according to the Sydney Morning Herald (20/7) it is unlikely Kindle will ever see the light of day in Australia.
But the local book industry has jumped headlong into the digital age with Dymocks chain launch of Dymocks Digital Books online stocking about 120,000 ebooks that can be downloaded and read on a computer, mobile phone or other handheld device. They say that these digital formats are quick and easy to download so there will be no more waiting for shipping – read or listen within minutes. And with a growing list of over 135,000 titles to choose from, you’ll be spoilt for choice.
A while ago I had the opportunity to speak to the P&F at our largest high school. The topic was Myspace or Yours: Possibilities and Pitfalls.
Parents wanted to spend time talking about online safety, games, and hacking! Yes, it is true that for some of our students it is hard to provide them with the online and computer challenges that they crave.
I took with me a copy of Real Wired Child by Dr Michael Carr-Gregg. This is a wonderful guide for parents (unfamiliar with the online world) who want to know what their children are doing online, and what they can do to ensure their children’s wellbeing when they venture into cyberspace. Real Wired Child gives practical advice to parents on how they might manage their children’s online communications, social networking, web surfing, downloading and gaming. The truth is that we need to start teaching our students from a young age exactly how to learn, collaborate and share using blogs, wikis and more as part of everyday learning. I love the work of Al Upton and his young ‘mini-legends’ – proving that students are never to young to work in a global online world.
Michael Carr-Gregg urges parents to venture into the online world inhabited by their children and get in touch with their day-to-day lives. He explains what kids get up to, provides guidelines for family internet safety and advises how to minimise the risks without limiting your children’s freedom to learn, explore and communicate online. At $19.95 I consider this a bargain. Better still, buy some copies for the library, so parents can borrow a copy. More information available from Penguin.
I prepared a presentation for the evening, to stimulate discussion and thinking about the issues. Thanks to my (online) colleagues Graham Wegner and Sue Waters, whose earlier work provided a basis for this presentation.
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.
This is one that I have been meaning to post about for absolutely ages….thank goodness I was not quick and efficient this time 🙂
Thanks to Paul Reid who took the trouble to email me the link to Hack Attack: 13 Book Hacks for the Library Crowd.
Covers all the obvious things like integrating your public library catalogue into your own computer; online booksellers; notifications for overdue books; building bibliographies; book downloads etc; as well as cheeky things like an ‘invisible bookshelf’!
So my delay in writing gives you the benefit of the additional information included in the comments. Perhaps you have other recommendations to add to the Book Hacks collation to keep this useful compilation alive.
This is a really nice thought-provoking presentation from Kim Cofino called The 21st Century Educator: Embracing Web 2.0 in your Professional Practice.
I think this presentation is worth highlighting on it’s own.
I won’t be at the conference – but I can almost hear what Kim will be saying about personal learning networks 🙂 Thanks for sharing Kim!
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.
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
judyoconnell.com 