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.  (Warning the audio levels are low and Teachertube didnt process the start well, hence the grey at the start). Why not give it a try?

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.

A Celebration Of God’s Creation

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

• GOD AS CREATOR
• CREATION
• THEIR PLACE IN CREATION

Find out more and explore the Religious Literacy Blog here

This post is designed to support a professional learning day with a group of Teachers from Holy Spirit College. We will be looking at a range of ways that they might use Web 2.0 applications to enhance learning or to make the students learning more authentic.

The presentation is based around a presentation developed for a similar professional learning day with the Religious Education Staff and can be found below

Examples of Web 2.0 applications that may be of use your stage 4 classes are listed below.

This voicethread is quite interesting. A teacher has posted a series of pictures and left voice comments on each. Viewers can then have their say via audio recording and text. Its like an easy two way podcast.

Godtube is a video sharing site. This link is the results of a search for parable. You can post movies, view others movies and leave feedback.

This animoto movie is a song written and performed by a year 4 students from Mary Immaculate Eaglevale. The student recorded her song, gathered the images and animoto created the movie.

Teachertube is another video sharing site this time for teachers and students. The link is the results of a search for hinduism

Blabberize is an application that will allow you to upload an image, record your voice and make the image look like it is talking. Gimmicky but would be a way to allow historical figures to “speak”

http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/427374/?nextnav=recent
Tabblo is a photo site that enables simple desktop publishing. Visually interesting with the ability to add text. This example is on a sculpture but you can see how it could work with a visually rich task

The Catholic Wiki Project is an experiment to see if Roman Catholics around the web can come together to create an accurate, valuable resource on the Roman Catholic church. Students could evaluate and contribute to pages related to issues currently being studied.

Flickrcc is a great creative commons resource for finding and using images. This link is the results of a search for virgin mary

Podcasting is an interesting way for students to sharing their learnings. There are a number of teachers using podcasts within the Diocese. This link is an example from a Year 11 class.
Religious Podcasts - Easily find religious podcasts by searching or navigating our directory. You might find something of interest here or add student created podcasts.

For those occassions that students create powerpoint or slideshare presentations you may choose to publish them to slideshare. Alternatively you might have students search for presentations on slideshare.
This link is the results of a search for parable

Regardless of how students create their work I believe there is great value in publishing and sharing this work in a common area.
To achive this you may choose from a range of tools including blogs and wikis. This blog is where one of our teachers shares student work and encourages students to leave constructive feedback on their work.
This wiki was designed to share student work created as a part of the Religious Literacy Assessment.

Digital technologies have revolutionised how creative works are made, distributed, and used. The challenge facing our schools is to ensure that we are teaching our students to treat others creative works in a fair and just way – with integrity.

Creative commons allows us to use and build on the many great resources on the web. It enables students to build on others creations and learning in a legal and ethical way.

The presentation below explains a little more about creative commons

Some of my favourite creative commons sites are

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.

ITSC looks at web 2.0
Interstingly apple or at least ITSC is embracing web 2.0 tools. After feedback from last years conference that ITSC lacked a relevance to what was really happening.
This year around half of the sessions are web 2.0 based or related, of course with a bent towards apple linked or dependent tools.

Beyond Podcasting – Mogopop in the classroom
I was lucky to attend the Beyond Podcasting – Mogopop in the classroom

Mogopop is a program that allows you to create a lesson, sequesnce or learning event
This is then uploaded to an ipod and students can follow a series of pages with tasks, links to photos, movies and music.
We created an “Amazing Race” discovery based journey around Sydney, published this to Mogopop which fellow participants downloaded and transfered to their ipod.

They then completed the excursion guided by their ipod and gathered photographic, video and “real” resources to complete the journey.
When the group had completed the excursion they then completed a quiz on the ipod to reinforce the learning from the excursion. This was created in either iwriter or iquiz maker.
Sound cool?? It was. Would it work in the classroom? Not sure, read on!!

Mogopop
What was good?
Mogopop is free and quite easy to use.
Your mogopops are published and easy to get to the students

What wasnt so good?
The images, movies and music are links not usable in place
It will not work on a ipod touch, some nanos and older ipods.
The resources can be hard to read due to the screen size

iwriter
Pros
Capable of quite detailed resource creation
Cons
Costs money
No one in the group including instructors could get it to upload to the ipod to use!!

iquiz maker
Pros
Completed quizes look quite professional
Cons
The students must buy iquiz to complete the quiz
Will not work on the new nanos, touch, shuffle or older ipods

The round table discussion at lunch after the final session probably summed up the group feeling on these tools. At a table of 10 educators who had just devoted 3 days to learning about this use of technology, no one felt they would implement the tools outlined within their schools or classrooms.

However more importantly each teacher had developed ideas about ipods, education and learning. As with any of these technologies we need to use the most appriopriate tools for the job, the tool that will enhance student learning.

Blogged with Flock

Podcasting provides students with the purpose and motivation to create spectacular products, like presentations, advertisements, jingles, news reports based on current affairs, interviews and radio programs.

Today we will go through the process of creating an enhanced podcast that will demonstrate our understanding of the following science outcome.

Outcome 4.6: A student identifies and describes energy changes and the action of forces in common situations.

The outcome, learn to and learn abouts and a possible script for your podcast can be found here.

Some images that you may like use can be found here on Picasa

This simple presentation outlines how we will use the interwrite interactive whiteboards in our session today

You can find the Interwrite getting started guide here

Download free Interwrite™ lessons and activity plans developed by teachers for teachers at the interwrite site. Make sure you click on the Content Unit Search

technorati tags:interwrite, whiteboard

Blogged with Flock

iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store featuring free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT.

Its been active for a few months now and is a great professional learning resource. You can check it out at the iTunes store.