Creating and enhancing your personal learning network to empower your profession learning.

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.

The presentation below was delivered at the Navcon 2K7
workshop by Michelle Shearman and Mark Woolley. This workshop focused on real, relevant, right-now technologies which have the
potential to transform your teaching . You can find the support blog here

Blogged with Flock

The Macarthur Schools Joint 1:1 Staff Professional Learning Day is an initiative to support teachers in their move to a 1 child-1 laptop(1:1) learning environment in 2008. This posting supports a session on Web 2.0 tools delivered on the day.

This session will look at a selection of web 2.0 tools that can be integrated into your classroom practice immediately.

The presentation can be found below, hosted on slideshare and the examples displayed can be found at http://del.icio.us/MarkWoolley/MacPDDay

[slideshare id=50739&doc=web-20-tools-for-your-classroom-right-now-10302&w=425]

The Web 2.0 tools in our grab bag can be found at the links below

For each of these tools it is simply a matter of signing up and start exploring. You can probably find a class expert for each of these tools

You can find additional information about blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and RSS on the pages of this blog.

Technorati Tags: Web2.0, Education, Learning

Attendence is free and would benifit any teacher interested in how the web, technology, and social trends have changed the way learning takes place.

Technorati Tags: Connectivism, Conference, OCC2007

Anita and Trish presented a very engaging presentation on their schools approach to learning, based around a commitment to collaboration, innovation and engaged learning.

St Clares used 21st century pedagogies, collaborative learning and peer observation to drive new classroom design which would empower their students.

You can hear Vince Campbell’s introduction to the presentation here. Unfortunately in an effort to capture all the audio the quality has suffered.

The audio from Trish and Anita’s presentation has had the “interactive” portions edited out but will make sense, especially when listened to in combination with the keynote presentation below. (Please be patient it may take a moment to load.)

Presentation Part 1

Download

Presentation Part 2

Download

Technorati Tags: StClares Education Learning

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.

Kids Congress DBB 2006

Kids Congress Podcasts

Kids Congress Blogs

Kids Congress Flickr 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??

Technorati Tags: Kids Congress, Education, Learning

Gary started his Keynote with a history of apple and how they have innovated over the past 25 years. After a Top 10 hits of Apple presentation he moved into talking about apples in education and then “Connecting, publishing sharing communicating using Web 2.0 to engage the natives.”

Gary focused on why it is important to engage students with their technology, the technology that drives their world.

Gary finished with a great movie about the new ipod. Ask him to share it some time or view it here

You can listen to this part of Gary’s presentation podcasted here. I recorded this from the crowd so the audio quality isn’t great.

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.

Download

Paul posted all his links on del.ious.us If you have a del.ious.us account it would be well worth while adding Paul to your network.
http://del.icio.us/paulmeldrum

Paul is encouraging teachers an schools to use social bookmarking tools like del.ious.us to share resources. He shared many innovative uses of technology including a very powerful use of podcasts for professional learning and the creation of podcasts to enhance student learning.

You can listen to a recording of the first half of Pauls keynote keynote here, again it was recorded from the audience so the audio quality isn’t spectacular.