Test your digital literacy …

As these fine people say

“This resource is not intended to be a complete course on Digital Media Literacy but serves as an introduction to encourage the learner to reflect on their current practices and stimulate discussion and questioning..”

The teacher’s notes are well worth a read, but the main and attractive interface where your student’s would start covers such things as Defining the task,  Accessing the information, Understanding and evaluating, Creating  and Communicating.

I did OK, what about you?

 

Smart Stuff for Tablets

Thanks to the Smart IWB people for a great website with oodles of resources that us Tablet people can make use of too! 

Resources are arranged by subject and consist of PowerPoint style presentations and questions…… but you can also search by Australian State Standards and Grade level, making it very easy for teachers to choose appropriate materials.

This is currently a beta site….. let’s hope it stays available, but I’d get there are download some of the available resources as quick as you can. Here is an example for NSW, Grade 9, Science ….

 

How do we measure up?

This is a useful resource from ISTE who have,

“developed this free online course to help school administrators, peer coaches, professional development providers, and other education leaders enhance their skills in identifying and supporting effective use of technology as a tool for teaching and learning.”

There is some interesting stuff in the free moodle course, such as student profiles and videos but I was particularly interested in the Essential Considerations. I’m mentally assessing my own school in terms of the 13 criteria.

How does your school measure up?

 

Oh what a feeling …….

I was taken by surprise yesterday when I came across a Year 8 Religion class who were completing a task in a computer lab. I was asked to assist because they were having trouble uploading their videos to YouTube. Hmmmm ….I thought, wonder what this is all about.

Turns out they have been using Xtranormal to write scripts and create short videos about relationships, and then having created a class, YouTube sign in, they were uploading them so that all videos were available on the same page. Xtranormal makes it dead easy to upload the completed videos and the results are great. I’m so impressed at this recognition by the teachers of the way that technology could facilitate the teaching and learning processes, and just how engaged the students were with this task. Such a cool way of discovering how the girls feel about a variety of relationship issues.

Here is an example of one of the videos, which speaks for itself

 

The DER….or on second thoughts the durrr….

Now that the shiny new ad for the digital education revolution has hit YouTube it’s got to make a difference ……. But let’s face it, everything said here has been said over and over by anyone even remotely connected to ICT in schools during the last 10 years. We have struggled on, spending large proportions of our annual budgets because we believed everything said in the video. I just hope that the $500 netbook is as robust as the hype proposes, and that the mainenance contracts will be able to keep up with the breakages. I’ve seen, first hand what school kids do to specially toughened and purpose-designed laptops, and not until the Tablet PC have we managed to get a machine that is strong enough to withstand the continual hammer they are exposed to.

 If the netbooks fail, will the “revolution” falter ? If so, what then?

Will these students look after their free gifts better than countless private school students managed to do with their more expensive machines? If so, why? If not, then what?

I’m still waiting to hear about the PD and the learning materials that will encourage creativity and stimulate change. What should it look like? What will happen if such support is non-existent?

 

7 Things I Should Remember About ……

I came across the Educause  Learning Initiative (ELI) site some time ago and forgot about it. In responding to a colleagues post this evening I have rediscovered it, and it’s so good I’m going to publish here, some of their “7 Things You Should Know About” series that particularly resonate with me. Please go to their site full the full list. Click on the links below to go to a summary page and download the pdf for keepers.

7 Things You Should Know About VoiceThread (Jun 2009)

VoiceThread is a media aggregator that allows people to post media artifacts—which might be a document, a slide presentation, a video, or a collection of photos—for community feedback. Commentators can add remarks by means of microphone, webcam, keyboard, or telephone. The resulting Flash-based animation contains the original artifact and the commentary on it. VoiceThread…

7 Things You Should Know About Google Apps (Mar 2008)

Google Apps is a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser. The applications include communication tools (Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar), productivity tools (Google Docs: text files, spreadsheets, and presentations), a customizable start page (iGoogle), and Google Sites (to develop web pages). Google stores all of the files and content…

7 Things You Should Know About Twitter (Jul 2007)

Twitter is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, and part cell phone/IM tool. It is designed to let users describe what they are doing or thinking at a given moment in 140 characters or less. As a tool for students and faculty to compare thoughts on a topic, Twitter could be used academically to foster interaction and support metacognition.

7 Things You Should Know About RSS (Apr 2007)

RSS is a protocol that lets users subscribe to online content using a "reader" or "aggregator." Internet users tend to settle on preferred information sources. RSS allows users to create a list of those sources in an application that automatically retrieves updates, saving users considerable time and effort.

7 Things You Should Know About Blogs (Sep 2005)

A blog—shorthand for "Web log"—is an online collection of personal commentary and links. Blogs can be viewed as online journals to which others can respond that are as simple to use as e-mail. The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means they can rapidly lead to open discussions. Faculty are using blogs to express their opinions, promote dialogue in…

7 Things You Should Know About Wikis (Jul 2005)

Update: An earlier version of this document contained an error that has been addressed. If you accessed this file prior to February 17, 2006, please download the corrected PDF.

7 Things You Should Know About Podcasting (Jun 2005)

"Podcasting" refers to any software and hardware combination that permits automatic downloading of audio files to an MP3 player for listening at the user’s convenience. Part of the appeal of podcasting is the ease with which audio content can be created, distributed, and downloaded from the Web. Barriers to adoption and costs are minimal, and the tools to implement…

7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking (May 2005)

"7 Things You Should Know About… Social Bookmarking" addresses a community—or social—approach to identifying and organizing information on the Web. Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks one would normally make in a Web browser to a public Web site and "tagging" them with keywords. The community-driven, keyword-based classifications, known as…

That’s just a few of the many “overviews of emerging technologies and related practices that have demonstrated or may demonstrate positive learning impacts” that I happen to be living with at the moment.

 

Dear Principals ………

VisionMapper (http://www.visionmapper.org.uk/) is a site developed by the FutureLab organisation, UK

They have proposed six scenarios (http://www.visionmapper.org.uk/ideas/ideas.php) that “have been developed using research from leading social scientists to provide an informed and inspirational insight into the different futures potentially facing education and learning”.

 

The associated workshop materials and facilitator advice and the activities (http://www.visionmapper.org.uk/activities/activities.php) make these materials perfect for staff professional learning and ongoing discussions. As they say “to help you develop your vision, challenge your assumptions and create realistic, achievable action plans”.

 

There is lots more on this website that you might find interesting and even if you couldn’t devote a whole heap of time to this, wouldn’t it be fun to divide up the scenarios amongst the various faculties and ask them to report on their discussions?

 

This could be a way of starting the conversations that are being avoided, but which are so important.

 

Who knows what’s around the corner?

Thanks to Derek’s Blog I am now aware of VisionMapper. This is a great resource that I wish my own school would embrace as a means of moving forwards.

“Who knows what’s around the corner? These scenarios have been developed using research from leading social scientists to provide an informed and inspirational insight into the different futures potentially facing education and learning. Use them to develop sustainable plans and strategies that can cope with a wide range of future possibilities”.

The 6 scenarios are presented as ideas that come with case studies and workshop activities that assist teachers and school leaders make decisions about future directions.

I am going to send this information to my school executive in the hope of focusing our current floundering efforts.

 

Assessing 21st Century Skills

Interested to read Maralyn Parker’s column in the Daily Telegraph this morning. Despite the many efforts, in numerous parts of the world to list, discuss and evaluate the need for schools to recognise that the goalposts have shifted, it seems we have now caught on. Hooray, we agree. Kids need different skill sets these days than they used to. And our methods of assessing need to be looked at. Um …..yeah!  OK ……better late than never, and if this project helps the change process along that can’t be a bad thing.

However, this column suggests that NSW is “on track to becoming a world leader in using technology”.  

The evidence for this seems to be that NSW state teachers are to be given laptops – and they will be “trained how to use it to teach”. Furthermore all 9-12 public school students will be given laptops over the next four years.

Having worked in two private schools over the last 30 odd years and having had lots of access to technology in the last 10 years, I know that access to the hardware is only a small part of the battle. Changing teacher attitudes is crucial and perhaps the ATC project will at least hammer the point home. We really do have to get our act together. And all the more so in the conservative State of NSW where the HSC has been holding us back for decades.

 

Veni, Vedi, Wiki …..

Not only is the latest Horizon Report available now from the NMC website but you can get all of the previous reports from the Horizon Project Wiki

What a great example of the use of a wiki as a collaboration and publishing tool, and I wonder why schools are resistant to following suit by having all documentation, programs, procedures and the like freely available in a living document.

At this time of the year admin staff are busily retyping, rewording and rewriting endless Word documents to be printed off and posted into teacher’s pigeon holes and sent out to parents. And of course, most are way behind with this and struggling to get it all done before the students return next week.

Wouldn’t life be simpler, and wouldn’t it be more efficient to do as NMC have done? Perhaps this is my project for 2009.

As soon as I come across sites such as the Horizon wiki, I bookmark them straight into the Research in Ed Tech Diigo site set up by Miguel. There are currently 71 sites bookmarked there ……

If you look at the Horizon Wiki, of particular interest is the link to the 2009 Shortlist and the 6 Critical Challenges ……. for example

“Some faculty have sophisticated skills working with information technology, but many (particularly in the humanities) feel overwhelmed by the shift to digital”

and

“Schools are still using materials developed to teach the students of decades ago, but today’s students are actually very different…”

Anyway, it’s worth a read or bookmark it and read it later ………