Archive for category online tools

The Twitter Experiment

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, social media, technology on May 12, 2009

This five-minute video gives an impression of what it is like using Twitter as a backchannel in a large classroom.

I am already a HUGE fan of Twitter as a tool for extending my PLN. Logistically, I’m unsure how tweet-ing would work in a NSW high school context at the moment (leaving aside the fact that it is blocked by the web filter) – can anyone out there share a success story?

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “The Twitter Experiment“, posted with vodpod

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Twitter #TED

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, school, social media, technology on April 2, 2009

Recently for some reason unknown to me I have found myself often amongst students and colleagues hating on Twitter.  The thing is…they haven’t tried it.

Of course, people are allowed to have opinions, even when they are not based on any real knowledge or experience.  But I have been a bit surprised by how quickly, and with what venom, people are ready to leap into attack mode when someone mentions Twitter.

Wow, some people must really think they are important – as if anyone cares about your sad life.

Don’t people have anything better to do?

Who could be bothered checking to see if someone posted some random note.

As if I want to hear about the boring details of someone else’s life!

It’s a place where sad-cases can find out what P. Diddy is doing every minute of everyday.

Narcissists!

Yesterday a penny dropped for me, and I realised a big reason why I find these comments so unsettling: Why are people so determined to express how much they DON’T care about anyone else’s world?  Sure, meeting in person is a ‘nicer’ way to be closer to people you know, but these comments don’t smack of pro-embodied-socialising; they just reek of tall poppy syndrome and a bunch of I-don’t-care.

I’m hoping some teachers on our school technology committee will start dabbling in Twitter soon, so I can start making the rich professional connections in school that I currently need to seek out of school.  I found this TED Talk on Twitter very interesting, and I’ll pass it on to my colleagues soon:

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New Technologies, New Stories

Posted by kmcg2375 in english, online tools, technology on March 24, 2009

I am feeling very invigorated after today’s briefing meeting for the New Technologies, New Stories project that is being run by the English folks over at the DET Curriculum Directorate.

And why wouldn’t I?  The focus of the project is the development of teaching resources and lesson sequences to support the integration of ICT into English curriculum – right down my alley 🙂  What I love most about this is that the emphasis is on using ICT as a tool to enrich the curriculum that we are already familiar with, rather than treating technology as an ‘add-on’.

The other thing I love about this project is that we won’t be building resources for applying ICT generally, but instead we are targeting NARRATIVE, and exploring how ICT can be used to enrich the teaching of narrative.  I believe English teachers are going to love this.  I have run many a workshop now, intorducing general ICT and Web 2.0 tools, and teachers always leave feeling like they have learned someinteresting new things, but not neccessarily with a clear direction for applying their new skills.  By placing the teaching of narrative first in this approach teachers will see a strong connection between the technology and the teaching that they already do.

I’ll post again soon with some notes about the sequence of lessons that I am planning for this project.  In the meantime, does anyone want to add a comment about how they are using (or would like to use) technology in the teaching of narrative?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Facebook continues to grow

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, random, social media on February 16, 2009

An article on the Inside Facebook blog reports that Facebook has grown to 175,000,000 active users with a growth rate of about 600,000 users a day in the past few weeks.

If Facebook were a country, it would now be the 6th most populous in the world.

Frankly I am not surprised.  The pace at which people live their lives has dramatically increased, in the past decade especially.  With many people living in a dual income household, or working second jobs, it’s hard to find time to ‘catch up’ with friends and family.  For teachers the amount of time spent at home preparing lessons, marking work and maintaining their professional development can be a severe drain on your ‘home time’.  Old ways of keeping in touch – hour long phone conversations, weekend visits, a night at the pub (eek – you mean I lose time tomorrow too!?) – are becoming rarer, and as a result there is so much pressure to make the most of time when you do see people IRL that the fun can be sucked right out of the experience.

When talking on the phone recently to a friend in the States (we normally use video call but the net was acting up) we found it very awkward at first trying to have a conversation without the benefit of the usual visual cues.  There wasn’t even an avatar!  And although we got used to it soon enough, it was easy to see why many people don’t relish using such cumbersome modes of communication anymore.  Does this make us inherently selfish? Overly insular?  I don’t know my own answer to that…yet.

What I must concede is that, for now, unless we want to miss out on ‘quality time’ with loved ones altogether, we will have to embrace (not reject!) these new modes of maintaining social connections.  As we move towards re-defining our notion of what it means to have a ‘personal connection’, online communitcation will take on a more personal tone.  And if this makes people feel more connected, isn’t this a good thing?

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Edublogs blocked by DET

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, school, technology on February 11, 2009

Well, the NSW DET has finally gotten up to blocking the last place we had left to blog, edublogs.  Along with everything else.

Any site that can be classified as a blog or wiki is blocked to students from years 6-10 at best – most are blocked for senior students too.  The constant fear that we all now must live with of our students having any interaction *whatsoever* with the outside world lives on.  Forget using edublogs, pbwiki, twitter, edmodo, wordpress…the list goes on.

Add to this the continued blocking of two of the most used/useful sites on the whole internet – Google apps and YouTube – and what is there left on the internet to use??

The DET released a new version of guidelines for creating blog sites in December 2008.  Though it is hard to understand the point of this, when the sites are blocked anyway.  Am I missing something here?  And, while I understand the importance of ensuring student privacy, consider the following requirements included in the guidelines:

  • All users must be registered and password protected to prevent anonymous contributions.
  • All contributions are moderated by the Teacher Administrator before publication.

I can see where they are coming from.  Honestly.  But guidelines like this make it either untenable or just plain uncomfortable to use a blog with a class.  Students who have problems signing up, logging on, or remembering a password will be disengaged with the blog and class management becomes a joke in blogging lessons where kids can’t get onto their blog.  And moderating comments before they are published is just too much.  This is like asking kids to run their classroom answers past you before they say them out loud!

Using online learning spaces provide students with opportunities to learn about cyberbullying and ‘netiquette’ – shielding students from online environments will not adequately prepare them for the world of work into which they will enter post-school.  School rules, student welfare, and sound pedagogical practices are not abandoned in these online spaces – if anything, the transparency of these sites (your Principal, or your student’s parents, could decide to take a look at any time!) is more likely to promote professional practice.

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Shakespeare Searched

Posted by kmcg2375 in english, online tools on December 30, 2008

Thanks to @heyjudeonline for the link to a site called Shakespeare Searched.   The database is helped by the Folger Shakespeare Library, and you can use it to search for words or themes by play or by character.  You can search within plays, or search through all of the Bards works.

Here is an image from my screen after searching for Macbeth, then browsing through quotes containing the word traitor:

shakespeare-searched-macbeth

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Blog Wordle

Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, random on December 14, 2008

Wordle is so cool!
I have seen these before, but never knew how people made them. Cheers Darcy 🙂

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AGQTP Action Research

Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, online tools, research, school on December 2, 2008

Today was the final day of our participation in this year’s AGQTP project – the end of year presentations in Sydney.  The project focussed on linking our collegial support program to school-based action research in the area of Element 5 of the NSW Institute of Teachers Professional Standards.

Element 5: Teachers create and maintain safe and challenging learning environments through the use of classroom management skills.

I’ve uploaded my workshop slides on slideshare.  If you were at my presentation, or have any questions about the project, please leave me a comment!

AGQTP: Element 5 Action Research

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: school education)

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Podcasting

Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, online tools on November 30, 2008

One of the tools I didn’t get up to in the Online Pedagogy workshop at ETA conference was podcasting.

For those after some information:

  • A podcast is an audio (sometimes also video) recording that can be downloaded, ‘streamed’ and subscribed to by users.
  • The word originally was a blend of the words ‘iPod’ and ‘Broadcast’, but they can actually be used anywhere (not just iPods!), so now the word stands for ‘Personal On Demand broadCAST’
  • I use Audacity to record my podcasts.  It is free, and very easy to use – you just need a microphone plugged into your computer.
  • And I use PodBean (www.podbean.com) to put my podcasts up on the web.  It is like a blog, but for your podcasts.

I also heard that podOmatic is a good site for podcasting.  It looks like you can record straight on to the podOmatic website, cutting out the need to use Audacity.  Persoanlly, I like to use Audacity first, so that I have the sounds file saved on my own computer.  This means it is backed up, I can use it without being online, and if you wanted to you could even get the files put up on your school website or intranet (one day I plan to actually do this!)

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Online Pedagogy

Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, online tools on November 28, 2008

In today’s conference workshop I will be exploring four important issues relating to learning and teaching strategies for using online tools:

  1. How the purpose of your site relates to its form
  2. The intended teacher-student dynamic online
  3. Students and internet safety
  4. Getting students involved and monitoring contributions

Please respond with comments to this post if you have any questions, information or anecdotes from your own teaching context.

(DET Interim Guidelines for using blogs and wikis)

(from the ETA Annual Conference @ UNSW )

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