The Big Question

Sometimes in a classroom or even in a staffroom the easiest way is the best. Posterous has to be one of the easiest ways to publish online, if you can send an email you can create a Posterous blog!!

Email movies, documents, presentations, photos - Basically anything and Posterous will create a blog post out of them and publish it to your blog. A simple and effective way to open your classroom to the world.

The movie below guides you through the process of creating and using Posterous. Why not give it a try?

It seems that TeacherTube is very slow processing at the moment. You can download the movie by clicking here

There have always been issues in schools surounding YouTube, both concerned with students accessing inappropriate YouTube movies and less often concerns with publishing student work to YouTube. I have typically recommended TeacherTube as an alternative and often that works well.

Having said that YouTube offers a much larger audience for student work, can be better quality, quicker and has some other interesting features. Some of our schools now have a YouTube Channel where parents, teachers and students can visit to view the movies created by students of the school. Other teachers are creating playlists for the students to view and are finding the massive variety of resources from around the world an excellent way to expand student thinking.

If you are frustrated by some of the limitations of TeacherTube or just interested in creating a YouTube account and channel the movie below will guide you through the process. If you have a google account you are already halfway there.

In many of our schools are publishing staff and student photos, photos of student products and artwork along with sporting photos. It can be a wonderful way to “open” your school to the community. Unfortionatly many schools find it difficult to maintain a current website and the photos are often the first thing to suffer.

A couple of our schools are now using Picasa web albums as a solution to this problem, creating a user acount in the school name and publishing straight to that account. The school webpage link then points to the Picasa web album.

The movie below will guide you through the process of creating an account in picasa and using the web albums uploader to publish your photos. Picasa can be found here

Holy Spirit College are having a Staff Development Day today and are looking at collaboration tools that would be useful for their year 11 students. My session is looking at wikis as a simple and powerful collaboration tool for staff and students.

We will look at some wikis created across the Diocese such as MatheManiac and a PDHPE revision wiki to discover how others are using these wonderful tools and then create our own wikis. This is suitable for any teacher who would like a web presence that is easy to create and edit.

We will use wikispaces today to create our wikis but there are many alternatives available, currently wikispaces seems to offer the best functionality within our schools. Dont forget to request a free education upgrade to remove those advertisements.

A recording of the quick revision of some of the things they were doing within the wiki is below. Click on the image below to view the movie. Unfortionately the sound is very low.

This post supports a presentation to the Catholic Primary Teacher Librarians’ Association Annual Conference for Teacher Librarians and Library Assistants.

Our current use of Digital resources presents a real challenge to our catholic values of integrity, justice and dignity.

Creative commons provides an opportunity for us and our students to use rich digital resources in an ethical way. It allows us to fairly and legally copy, modify and reuse digital resources. By encouraging the use of creative commons resources you can assist your students and teachers to develop a moral and ethically sound approach to the use of digital resources

The presentation similar to that used on the day can be found below however if you would like a copy of the full presentation with the movies included for use with your staff or students please contact Mark Woolley at the Wollongong CEO.

The creative commons sites mentioned during the presentation are listed below

flickrcc A great photo sharing site for creative commons photos. You can also edit photos from within the site.

Creative Commons Search - A search engine for creative commons resources

archive.org The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Freely download images, movies, music

Freesound The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs.

Slideshare is a publishing space for all your presentations. As the vast majority of presentations are creative commons licenced it is a great creative commons resource.

Recently we have been experiencing some issues with uploading to YouTube from school, both via the YouTube uploader and directly from imovie. Fortionately there is a workaround available. The multi-video uploader works, its a little hard to find but clicking on the image below will take you straight there.

You may need to install something but once that is done you can upload multiple files quickly.

Our diocese has an excellent collection of blogs and wikis being used in powerful ways to improve student learning and teacher capacity. Below are a collection of blogs and wikis from the Wollongong Diocese along with a brief description of their intended purpose.

A Professional Reflection Blog

This blog captures a teachers ideas and thoughts around ICT in the classroom at http://smallsteps.edublogs.org.

Secondary Blogs

Publishing and Assessement

A blog to assess the students through the use of technology. This blog is only in the very early stages and will be added to over the coming weeks.
Survivor North Era

Resource Sharing and Organisation

http://scomagdalene.wordpress.com - sportcoaching webpage which is used to share materials with other teachers and to organise the resources used in the course.

Student Course Content Wiki
http://pdhpe12.pbwiki.com - Wiki to support the PDHPE HSC Course. It has a range of student created materials on there as well as other course material and resources that are useful in teaching the course.

Blogging - year 11 and year 12 economics (http://11economics.edublogs.org, http://12economics.edublogs.org

A wiki that will help students and parents discuss and review math topics from school for years 7 - 10 http://mathemaniac.wikispaces.com/

Welcome Year 7 to your online classroom. This site has been set up for you to access set class work and additional material that may not be covered during class sessions. http://7history.edublogs.org/

A photography blog posting content for students and inviting their reflections on artwork. http://stage5wetphotography.edublogs.org/

Primary Blogs and Wikis

http://ithink.edublogs.org /….. the purpose of this blog is to explore the text types ‘exposition’ and ‘discussion’ . The students are presented with two points of view and asked to develop their arguments in an online environment

http://puzzlingprimaryproblems.edublogs.org /….. the purpose of this blog was to trial differentiation via blogs in the area of Mathematics

http://mshearman.edublogs.org /….. the purpose of this blog was to enable students to showcase their artwork in an online environment and also participate in art appreciation type conversation using a thinking framework

http://neverendingstory.pbwiki.com /…. the purpose of this wiki was to encourage my students to build a collaborative story
*
http://creation1.pbwiki.com /…… the purpose of this wiki was to showcase the RE LITERACY PRODUCTS. It was created as a wiki with the view of other schools also adding their products, thus creating a diocesan wiki

http://rainforestrescue.pbworks.com/ a student rainforest wiki - a wiki book of sorts

The purpose of this blog is to explore the power and potency of IMAGES and other forms of MULTI MEDIA . By participating in this blog you will be asked to INTERPRET and COMMENT on a variety of different images http://picturetalk.edublogs.org/

The presentation below was a part of a presentation to the parents and friends of St Therese Catholic Primary School.

Kerrie’s presentation

The Australian Government has relaunched its NetAlert site with a range of great resources for teachers and students

The subsites listed below are a great resources for teaching students about internet safety.

Netty’s World

http://www.nettysworld.com.au/

Netty’s World is designed for young children (2-7 years of age) starting out on the Internet. It provides an interactive and safe learning environment for children and emphasises important messages about Internet safety.

CyberQuoll

http://www.cyberquoll.com.au/hub.htm
Internet Safety Education for Primary Schools

CyberSmart Detectives

http://www.cybersmartkids.com.au/
This site will help you and your family to find out how to be cybersmart and use the internet safely. It’s a young person’s guide to smart ‘net surfing, chatting and emailing.

CyberNetrix

http://www.cybernetrix.com.au/
Internet Safety Education for Secondary Schools

WiseuptoIT

http://www.wiseuptoit.com.au/
Wise Up to IT explores the lives of four young people
and their experiences on the Internet.
Four situations. Four victims. Four stories. Many strategies.

Teacher Planning and PD
A number of materials have been developed to help teachers learn about Internet safety and create teaching programs for their schools.

Finally for those from secondary schools you will find a number of quality resources related to cyberbullying and internet safety on St Josephs website.

Toondoo is a great online comic creator with many great tools, Students can create cartoon characters, cartoons and books, all automatically published. Even better its free.

A new initative from Toondoo is the school domain, a chance to have a space just for your students work. More from Toondoo below.

‘Thanks to concerns (related to inappropriate content) from many educators, we will soon be offering exclusive school domains (such as schoolname.toondoo.com) Many schools have already signed up with us for this service. Here’s how it will work:

• We will provide a separate domain for each school (for example: http://www.schoolname.toondoo.com/).
• ONLY students of that school will be able to create toons at this domain but any one will be able to view them on the internet, embed them in blogs,wikis etc.
• We will let the teachers completely own the editorial rights in this case. That would mean they can monitor the content, block inappropriate toons and also do the editor picks.
• The domain will be free of charge during the beta testing phase of six months, post which there would be nominal annual charges for it.’

If you are interested, please contact Meera Sapra:meerasapra@toondoo.com.