No Posts for 3 months

It's nice to have a break, and get some real life in between posts. Not that I've been having much of a break. The NSW DET blogging tool, of which my classes and I were beta testers is a real winner. Safe, simple blogging for students, classes staff, public or private or groups.

The trick now, once they gloss has faded from the "shiny new toy" is to get some procedures and policies as to what constitutes effective pedagogical use.

So what on the horizon for this edublogger?

• I launched into twitter with gusto. Fun, and very useful, just like "they" say. Has helped me numerous times.
• Google docs has finally (yay) been unblocked for staff use at least. Next to push for the unblock for students.
• I'm running another Intel TEO (Teaching Essentials Online) course beginning the end of this month.
• More "play" with the blogging tool. Let's see if we can get our scratch creations published and shared huh?
• All this as well as an active "real life".

Speaking of real life......do you all have multiple twitter accounts (and other social network tools) which separate proffessional from home life, or do you (as does gen y) just mix it all in together.

I'm inclined to mix it all up so far. Maybe its just the old boomers who see the need to separate life into work/play/home. The kids dont seem to care.

All for now. Be back later with more thought, tools, tips, and trick.

intel webinar

An online version of this doc can be viewed and downloaded from Here

The word version of this doc can be downloaded from here. 

Using Google Earth and Google Maps with Blogs/Wikis

Mark Collinson

Mullumbimby Public School

NSW DET

 

 

 

What did students do? This is a small activity which formed part of a broader multicultural day. Other activities on the day included researching and making traditional costumes, mask making, cooking traditional foods, locating and retelling traditional stories, and learning traditional dance. Guest speakers were invited to cook, tell stories, play music, and dance. In the library, children were invited to put a pin on the map to show where there “ancestors” originated. The following activity is an extension of that. One that can be shared with a wider audience(e.g. relatives in ancestral home) than those people that walked through the library and saw the wall display.   How does this activity enhance student learning? By enhancing the “wall map” activity, and being able to share it with a global audience, the children were much more enthusiastic about the activity. The “immersive” nature of Google Earth and the ability to zoom in and fly from place to place makes it fun.   Why Use Google Earth in the Classroom? To provide a sense of reality and purpose for learning within the K-12 classroom To engage and excite learners To help learners conceptualize, visualize, share, and communicate information about the world To provide cross-curricular learning options To add a new dimension to learning environments not previously possible To leverage ubiquitous tools for learning  To create active, exploratory, and empowering learning environments To give students opportunities: to exhibit their learning to others to use emerging technologies and digital tools to communicate their research in a personally meaningful way (using Web 2.0 tools) to view their world from a more connected, global perspective to enhance map reading and navigation skills to engage more complex dimensions of human perception from: http://www.alicechristie.org/gearth/index.html   What syllabus outcomes does the activity address?   From the NSW HSIE change and continuity strand…   The activity meets the aims of HSIE by enhancing the student’s sense of personal, community, national and global identity;   It meets the objectives of HSIE syllabus by: providing knowledge and understanding  ofcultures in Australia and other places, their diversity and similarities and how they influence people’s identities and behaviors. by developing skills in acquiring information, and social and civicparticipation   By studying change and continuity, students should develop historical knowledge and understandings about their heritages and the past, and how these have influenced the present and may influence the future.   The activity fulfils the HSIE foundation Statement Outcome: Students explain how different cultures and traditions contribute to Australian and community identity. They examine a variety of local and othercommunities, investigating similarities and differences including ways of living, languages and belief systems.   Outcomes and Indicators CCS2.2 Explains changes in the community andfamily life andevaluates the effects of these on differentindividuals, groupsand environments. Indicators: listens to life stories of people from different culturalbackgrounds distinguishes between primary and secondary source material when acquiring information uses historical language when referring to source material, e.g. primary source, secondary source, oralhistory, life story identifies the contributions of some significant peopleand events to community heritage.   CUS2.3 Explains how shared customs, practices,symbols, languagesand traditions incommunitiescontribute toAustralian andcommunity identities.   Indicators • identifies diverse customs, practices and symbols sharedby their local community and all communities withinAustralia • listens to and retells traditional, religious and ethicalstories that relate to some groups in the Australiancommunity.   Here is an example of what we did. The students were asked to find their country of origin. Speak to grandpa or grandma. Record a story of why they came to Australia, or what life was like in hometown or even how life is different here. Then for this session. 1/ Find place on Google Earth. 2/Putplace mark on Google Earth and name it. 3/ Give a quick story 1-2 mins about the place or why ancestors left to come to Australia 4/ (Extension) Email friend or relative the link to the map we publish, and invite comment http://mullumwriters.blogspot.com/2009/02/where-are-we-from_18.html   . How is it Done?   A simple (one hopes) 3 stage process. (Oh yeah, you will also need a google account.)   Add place marks on Google Earth.   Import place marks to Google Maps.   Link the map’s code to your wiki or blog.
1a) Open Google Earth. Right click on my places and add a folder. Name it (for example) origins.
b) Find your place of origin and click the add place mark. Drag the place mark to your point of interest and name it. Repeat and add more points of origin
c) Make sure all placemarks are in your “origins” folder. If they are not in there, just drag them in.
d) Right click the “origins” folder and Save Place As a kmz file (keyhole markup language…it harkens back to the days of the cold war….read about it on Wikipedia).
2 a)Open Google maps (maps.google.com) and login to your Google account. Click my maps.
b) Create new map, name itorigins, make sure it is a public map, and then save.
c) With the new “origins” map selected, click Edit,
d) Then click import,
e) Choose the KML file that you saved in Google Earth, and then choose “upload from file”.
f) Your Place marks are now on the map.
g) All that is left to do is to get the code and paste it into your blog or wiki. Click “link” and copy the html code ready to paste.   That’s it for the maps part.   Next to embed into your wiki/blog.
3. a) Open your blog, go to new post, and use your blogs specific, “insert html” feature. All blog platforms are slightly different, so you may have to look for the feature.   This e.g. is WordPress (of which Edublogs is a variant).   Paste it in., and update or save your page.
b) That’s it!View your blog/wiki.
Review   Add placemarks on Google Earth.   Import placemarks to Google Maps.   Link the map’s code to your wiki or blog.

As a follow up activity, I would get those children who put a place mark on the map, to email the blog link to a relative or friend and invite them to view and comment.

 

Further resources

http://www.google.com/educators/p_earth.htmlGoogleearth site for educators

http://www.juicygeography.co.uk/googlecoursework.html 10 ways you can use Google earth with your students

 

Questions?

Feel free to email me

mark.collinson@det.nsw.edu.au

http://c21skills.blogspot.com

 

 

 

Scratch - Visual Programming Environment - Australian Lesson Exchange

The Australian Lesson Exchange (ALE) is a relatively new wiki for all Australian Educators from all states and territories. Its a place to share your stuff! Fellow Aussie edubloggers may like to check it out!

Richard Wiktorowicz from Moorefield Girls High has kindly shared, via ALE, a fantastic set of activity cards in PDF that he has developed for scratch. Thanks Richard.
Scratch - Visual Programming Environment - Australian Lesson Exchange

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create
your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and
share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up)
develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects,
young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas,
while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

For those who are yet to discover the joys of scratch take a look at one of my year 5 student's movies here. Cody did the storyboard, the sprites and backgrounds himself, (as well as the scripting of course).

Blogged with Flock

Yet another Poll

Thats right, another poll. This time from Vizu.
Hopefully blogger will work more smoothly with this one than the zoho poll, which had a strange cookie problem, anyway....give it a shot and let me know if you have any problems please.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Polls in Classroom..part 2

Well, it would appear that zoho polls is having issues with cookies on some browsers. (Mozilla and Explorer to name just 2). Then again, maybe its a blogger thing?

A lot of the free online poll creators give me rather bad code to play with , so I gave up and tried bloggers' own widget. It works for me, so how about giving it a shot. Its in the bar to the right.

Pity about the cookie issue on the zoho poll. The fantastic thing about zoho is that I can save the results, and create multiple polls, tag them, search them, and post them (kind of).

Use of Polls in classroom

Hi All

Its been a while since I posted. This is just a quick one to test a feature of online polling. Have a go and let me know what you think. There is a lot of interesting pedagogical discussion around the use of polls. I'm just playing at the moment, but can see a use for them in the near future.

Farewell Mr Benham

Our principal of the past ten years retires in 2 days time after 40 years of service to Public Education.
Here is a small tribute that some of the students, staff and I put together.

The show was created in PowerPoint and was embedded using zoho. With zoho it's as easy as uploading and embedding. Podcasts were recorded using audacity, and are hosted at OurMedia

Nothing quite like a retirement to bring a team together.

Cool New T Shirt

When Darren Draper said that he'd left a box of t-shirts at the doorway of the main building on ISTE island, I just had to go inworld as soon as I returned from work and grab one "before someone stole the box". (Daren's words)

Whilst I was expecting to get a t-shirt, I wasn't expecting to meet such a range of friendly folk attending the NECC conference in Atlanta though. Had a wonderful time listening to conference highlights from the participants. sounds exciting, though a bit overwhelming...and there are still 2 more days to go.

I made some great new friends. I'll certainly be visiting more regularly.

I live in a relatively remote part of NSW Australia and Second Life provides me with a real, and achievable way to connect with others.

Thanks Darren.

Netvibes trumps Pageflakes!!

In reponse to last nights post on the race to be voted the best reader/aggregator in the webware 100 awards, I learned today that netvibes beat the others in the category. Firefox won best browser, followed by Opera, then IE7, followed by netvibes (not a browser but an aggregator).

If you havent checked out netvibes, then now is probably a great time to do so. If you have ditched netvibes in preference for another reader/aggregator, then I'd love to know why. Let me know why you dont use netvibes.

(Oh and by the way...Google Reader came in at fifth place).

What's your Favourite Web App? Webware100 Awards

Tonight's the night folks!

Webware.com announces the winners of the top 100 webware awards.
What are the best 100 Web 2.0 sites and services?

The categories are:
Browsing, Communications , Community, Data, Entertainment , Media, Mobile, Productivity, Publishing, and Reference.

Of particular interest to me (but by no means the only interest) is the "Browsing" category. Here we have a contest between google reader, bloglines, netvibes, pageflakes and yahoo pipes. It will be interesting to see what the community chooses as their number one. I use netvibes as my homepage, have tried bloglines and google reader, (then went back to netvibes). Have not tried pageflakes though. Netvibes suits me, so why change?

As I type, the winners have not been announced, but it's only moments away. So check out the list, browse through the winners, and let me know what you (or your students) think.

Podcast is Go

Enough testing.
The first podcast on Mullum Writers is published (cast?)

Check out Zac's podcast here.

I thought that my initial post was satisfactory, but I wasnt happy with the visitor having to click a link and then have a new page open with a player, (eg firefox/flock opens a new page and you get to watch the quicktime bar as you listen.) My students and I want visitors to enjoy the artwork and read along as they listen.

When I'm not satisified, then I usually don't rest until I am, so rather than lose sleep tonight wondering how to fix it, I spent some time digging up and applying a great hack that lets you use the word press player within blogger.

Basically you'll need some webspace to store the java code and the flash script. As a blogger user I had a googlepages account. I find that googlepages is great for storing widgets, pics and stuff that I need to reference later.

Paste a script to reference your java and swf files into the head of your blogger template.

Then you paste a script into the post and add the url of your hosted audio file.
The result, I feel, is worth the effort. If anyone has a better solution then I'm all ears.

My next challenge is to setup a "recording studio" in the school that can be utilised during quiet moments. Quentin posted a fantastic site in response to my last post, so I'll be studying up on ways to make the 'casts more enjoyable.

Stay tuned!

Podcast Test No 1

Inspired by Jane Nicholls, and helped by a wonderful tutorial on podcasting for beginners, I present you with my first podcast. Enjoy :-)

Click here to listen to podcast test number 1

Next task, a podcast feed, and of course, some real content.

Update: The player below works so much better than my first attempt at clicking on a link. Has anyone else done this in blogger?

Daughter2.0 (What good are libraries?)

Was reading a post today by George Siemans at elearnspace regarding the future of libraries.

....this presentation doesn't say anything new for those familiar with the changes in technology and the context of knowledge. It does, however, present those changes from the perspective of libraries. In the process it provides some interesting statistics and observations (89% of college students begin their research with a search engine vs 2% in libraries,......

elearnspace

Thanks George...Interesting but not surprising.

Being a rather cool and damp Sunday afternoon here, I have my 10 yr old daughter beside me, spread out on the carpet, tapping away on our our old Toshiba laptop and buying some clothes for her penguin at clubpenguin.

"Hey Daughter!" I ask. "If you needed to know something that you didn't already know, where would you go to find out?"

Without pause or hesitation she turned her head and looked at me (one hand still on the keyboard) and replied "Google! Why?"

"Oh just interested" I answer."What is the library useful for?"

"What? The club penguin library?"

"No the town library."

"Nothing!"

"What do you use the library for in club penguin? "

"Well you can read other members' writing, and you can play mancala against other players."

So through the eyes of a ten yr old Aussie girl, our town library is irrelevant, yet an online multi player library contains stories, games and fellowship.

I'd imagine that the cleverer libraries in our culture would have to look at fostering a sense of online community as an addition to their local community if they were to survive.

On a side note: I read out to my wife the figures on how only 2% of college students use libraries to begin research. She had just interrupted her guitar rendition of Cavatina in order to make us all a pot of tea. (Don't you just love cool damp Sundays?)

Her response? "Do people still use libraries?"

ClustrMaps... (be careful)

Do you archive your ClustrMap(s) monthly, yearly, or even daily?

Alot of blogs you read these days have that wonderful little map in the sidebar that provides an interesting count of the visitors to your site. Its called a ClustrMap, and it's a great way to promote interest in a site.

We use a ClustrMap at Mullumwriters. When the children are published they go home and email a link to a relative or friend somewhere in the world, and then watch the ClustrMap update a day or two later. Its fun, interactive, engaging, and might even be "educational" (But I'd never tell them that.)

There are some things you'll need to watch though. Here at 21st Century Skills, I decided to set the map to archive every month. I had hoped to gather a monthly snapshot of the map and then turn it into a gif animation (or flash, or widget of choice), and watch the map slowly turn red.

Great idea huh? Well, yes and no!

Yes the map did archive, you can see the last month in the top right of this post. What I wasn't aware of though, was that once archived, the counter resets, and your map goes back to a blank slate (so to say). Here on the right is an image of my new map after 1 night.

What a suprise! I lost my running totals. My map is back to square one. Of course, I can always click through the map and look at the archive at anytime to reassure myself that "once upon a time" people read my blog, but it's kinda nice to see the map slowly turning red.

So here is the question.

Do I keep archiving each month and generate a nice morphing animation over the next few months, or do I wait until the forced reset that ClustrMaps impose each year?

Love to hear your thoughts.

Quentin D'Souza at Toondoo

Congratulations Quentin!

Not only do we have proof that administrators can blog, (if one can call Quentin an administrator), but now we know they can "toon" as well.

Quentin blogs at "teaching hacks". Always a good read.

Quentin D'Souza - Featured Dooer!

ToonPress - The Blog at ToonDoo - The Cartoon Strip Creator - Create, Publish, Share, Discuss!

My Toondoo won pick of the Day!

The toondoo I created to illustrate my "Sound Familiar" post has won the editors pick award at toondoo.

Imagine my suprise when I cleared my mailbox to find this:

Hi mark! Congratulations! We're happy to! inform you that your ToonDoo Ban and Block culture made quite an impression on the editors at ToonDoo. Therefore, your creative expression has found a place as Featured ToonDoo of the Day!

Toondoo is a fantastic resource. Here is the toon again.

Toys before Tools.

This thought comes from a great post at http://www.edustatblog.com/?p=4

Kids exchanging videos are the proverbial tip of the ice berg. As longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer pointed out more than fifty years ago – when he was mulling over the fact that the wheel was a toy before it was a tool – serious work has its origins in play. And almost alone in the animal kingdom, humans retain the capacity for play well into adulthood.

The concept that Serious work has its origins in play, is new to me, and is one that I'd like to explore further.

The youth today using (playing) with myspace, runescape, second life and clubpenguin are forging new ways of seeing, thinking, doing, solving, relating and creating.

In the words of Flintoff, rip mix burn has become grip fix turn!
From What is teacher 2.0 again

What is true of Web 2.0 will be true of Teacher 2.0 – dynamic, outward facing, community building, radically democratic, initiatory, active and interventionist; how the Web is changing is how teaching will change.

How does your classroom measure up today? Is it outward facing, community building, initiatory etc? What can a classroom teacher do today to ensure that it becomes so?
Heres a toon that sums it up.