The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has created a list of the Top Tools for Learning, compiled by learning professionals, for the last 3 years.
Having regularly been caught up in the conversation with peers and eventually getting to the writing stage I thought it fair that I share them here. They are almost in order and many are about my professional learning but all are powerful learning tools.
Diigo – Social bookmarking and collaboration at its best. Its a jump to move from Delicious however well worth the effort for the collaboration and annotation capabilities.
Google reader - My staple for professional learning. Via RSS I am connected to the best educators from around the world.
You Tube – The worlds second biggest search engine, what cant you learn here?
Slideshare – A powerful way to extend students audience and a great way to learn from others.
iPhone/iPod/ Touch and apps – An amazing learning tool for all ages. The quality of the apps make it so powerful and I am continually amazed at how essential my iphone is.
Google search – Old school but still quick and effective
Wordpress – This could just as easily be edublogs, powerful blogging for students and teachers
Evernote – I need this. Organisation and retrieval of ideas and learnings made easy
Google Docs – Collaborative editing and sharing. Keeping things open and accessible
OpenSim – Virtual worlds are so powerful. Just working with and watching the students involved in creating Virtual Corpus Christi convinces of the power of developing creativity and opensim is a great place to do it.
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.
The Diocesan Public Speaking Competition was held last week. Once again the quality of the speakers was exceptional and they should all be very proud of their efforts. Stay tuned for the podcasts of the finals, recorded, edited, produced and published by year 6 at St Francis Xavier.
The children of Wollongong Diocese have recently completed a diocesan assessment task which required them to create a product to show their knowledge and understanding of
Selected stage 2 students from the southern cluster primary schools came together today to explore and extend their creativity at the Visual Arts extension day. One of the sessions engaged students in the design and creation of magazine covers using photoboth, Simpsons avatars created here and the web 2.0 tool magmypic
On the first day of term I was fortionate to visit Bishop Druit College at Coffs Harbour. Through a university contact of mine (who is now the Director of IT) I was able to get a tour of the college and talk with a number of teachers.
Bishop Druitt is a K-12 college based in the Coffs Harbour hinterland. the school has similar student:technology ratios to Wollongong Diocese schools however little use of laptops
.
The primary school are using interactive whiteboards and seemed happy with their role in the classroom.
Probably the thing that really stood out was the outstanding physical environment and the pride that the students had in that environment.
Today I was lucky enough to attend a “Kids Congress” hosted by the Diocese of Broken Bay
From their introduction
‘The Diocese will be facilitating an inaugural ‘Kids Congress 2006’ for Year 5 students to
come together, to consider and debate real world issues and to present their learnings, all within a 21st
century learning environment.
‘Kids Congress 2006’ will be a unique event for approximately one hundred (100) of our Year 5 students (two students per Year 5 class).
This learning event will be “designed for kids and organised by kids”. “
Sounds simple right?? Imagine 116 year 5 students from 50 odd schools coming together to learn from each other. Almost 12 months in the planning, both by adult and student organising committees.
Kids Congress clearly demonstrates the potential of ICLT’s and myclasses to enable and encourage collaboration across schools. At one point there were 15000 planning emails from year 5 students, multiple forums and discussion rooms.
At the links below you can find student blogs, podcasts, Kids Congress information and photos.
From talking to the students it was clear that this was a valuable experience, students learning from each other about issues that are of concern to them. Time well invested in creating the leaders of the future.
I interviewed a number of students about their experiences, unfortunately the wind made the audio quite ordinary. However Andrew, one of the great technical support students shared this with me. audio
Personally I am sold on the idea, but what do you think? Would it be valuable for the students of Wollogong Diocese??
As I mentioned last post one of our year 5 classrooms decided to use the podcasts of the public speaking. To quote the teacher
“We are focusing on text type ‘review’ in English at the moment ..so it fitted in naturally….plus I wanted to expose the the students to podcasts”
This was the first time the class had listened to podcasts and the student response was really interesting. Below is one boys quick review of the morning session
“I enjoyed listening to the podcasts during this morning’s session of learning. We listened to the public speaking finals and we were able to hear most of the speeches. One of the speeches was on ‘School is important’. That one claimed the winning prize. The next speech we heard was a speech about ‘My worst nightmare’. That one captured the second prize. The last one out of the three speeches was on ‘Creating Peace’. As we were listening to the speeches, we created a mind map to summarise the speech that was our favourite. After that was done, we were able to hear Lance Lagaspi’s speech. Everyone in the room thought that Lance should of come first, not third. His speech was on ‘Creating Peace’ and we thought that it was the best out of the speeches that we heard.
Listening to the podcasts was a great experience for us. I think it is much easier to listen to podcasts, instead of paying money to go to the actual venue….even though the public speaking comp was free …but we were all stuck back at school. Podcasts can be listened to when you’re walking, jogging, biking, working out in the gym, meditating, listening to it in the car and during many other times. They can even be downloaded onto an ‘Ipod’. Having the chance to listen to podcasts is an incredible experience and I’m sure that I will be listening to many podcasts later on in the future. “
Last Friday I was lucky enough to attend the Diocesan Public Speaking Competition. I was particularly taken by the quality of the speakers, their presentation and the way they connected with their audience.
One of our schools has already started using the podcasts, “At the moment both Year 5 classes are listening to the podcasts and creating mind maps. These mind maps will be used as planning for a written review of the podcast speeches.”
I have been working with a couple of schools this year where students are engaged in year long independent learning projects. These schools have engaged students in learning more about areas that they are passionate about but the two experiences offer me an opportunity to compare and contrast their approaches.
Having just visited one schools final presentations last night I became intensely aware of the importance of questions, rich open ended questions that challenge and extend the students. Without fail, the students who extended themselves and really engaged deeply with their subject area were the students with the rich questions leading to significant learning experiences.
Michelle Shearman presented a superb short session at the Apple Schools Technology Day about her experiences with a year long research project. One of the key features of her implementation of the project was her focus on “Rich Questions”
I guess the best way to summarise the importance of questioning is to quote Michelle
“Rich Questioning = Rich Thinking =Rich Understandings”
You can view Michelle’s abbreviated interactive presentation from the ASTD below. Just click on the “screen” to progress the show. You may need a little patience while it loads. Michelle can be contacted at mshearman@maryimmac.woll.catholic.edu.au .
There are a number of comments about questioning and its importance at the end of this post. If you can’t see the comments please click “here” or on the comments link to the right of the presentation below and continue the dialogue.
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