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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Twitter – CollegeHumor video

Posted by kmcg2375 in random on December 28, 2008

Jake and Amir are at it again…I didn’t realise that Twitter could keep my secrets!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Twitter – CollegeHumor video“, posted with vodpod

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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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Technology Leadership Team

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on December 14, 2008

Last week I went to my first meeting for my school’s new ‘Technology Leadership Team’.  I am so excited about working with other teachers, especially because they are mostly from other faculties, who are also excited about using technology to enhance learning.

The focus of our group is to plan and/or provide collegial professional development for other staff members in areas of technology.  We all agree that an important aspect of this will be PD in using online tools, such as blogs, wikis and podcasts.

Another exciting thing about the group is that we are planning to trial Moodle with some of our classes this year, and depending on our success, introduce Moodle as a tool across the entire school in 2010.  I can’t wait!  I’m interested to hear from anyone who is Moodling already, about how their school introduced it, and what kind/level of PD was needed.  Are majority of teachers in Moodle-schools using the system effectively?

I’m going to send my blog URL to other members of the team now – I hope they drop by and leave me a comment!

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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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Getting students involved in blogging

Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on November 29, 2008

Barriers to getting involved:

  • Access issues – power in rural and remote areas
  • Equity issues – not all students are digitally literate
  • Equipment access – access to computer labs, laptops, broadband
  • Home access – students with no computers or internet access at home
  • Behaviour management – ICT TOO EXCITING!

Please add any ideas you have for overcoming these barriers…

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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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Connectivism

Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, online tools on November 26, 2008

Thanks to Darcy for tweeting this link to the Connectivism Wiki.

There are some great ideas here – I especially like the entry on Externalising Ourselves.  I am going to use a quote from this in my ETA Conference presentation on Saturday about Online Learning and Pedagogy:

The ability to connect concepts and ideas and to understand and be understood by others requires that we render our thoughts in some type of format that permits communication. The development of symbols, language, and writing permits externalization of thought and thereby the capacity to create and network concepts and ideas.

The same wiki page also has a link to a very interesting document about Connectivism as a Learning Theory.  I had to laugh at the title, as it sums up so many arguments discussions I have had with people about using online tools, for teaching or otherwise: ‘Connectivism: Learning Theory, or Pastime of the Self-Amused’!

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STOP WORK

Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, school on November 19, 2008

I’ve just come home from this morning’s stopwork meeting organised by the NSW Teachers Federation.

Read more about the Teachers Federation Staffing, Standards and Salaries campaign here.

The meeting finished half an hour ago, but I am resisting the urge to use the time to finish off some school work…not just because I think it is important for teachers to ‘stay true’ to the stopwork by, well, stopping work, but also because I am so burned out with school work right now that an imposed 2 hour break is a welcome relief.

Over the past couple of weeks my blog has been neglected, emails have gone unread, and I haven’t even been opening Twitter.  No comment from me about Barack Obama’s historic win in the US election.  No comment (still) about the proposed National Curriculum, and (perhaps worst) no reflection on my teaching or engagement in professional learning.

So, while filling up on petrol that had nearly run dry because I’ve had no time to fill the car, and after picking up some take away breakfast because I had run out of time and skipped mine earlier in the morning, I decided to use the rest of my stopwork time to write this post.

A little bit of a cheat of course, because as far as I’m concerned blogging = professional learning, which = work!  But the school workload atm is so depressingly huge that I’m prepared to cheat on this…until reports are finished at the end of this week, I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to blog again…

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