There’s a new link to the class wiki I’ve set up for 2007. 

I’d originally set up one linked to Teaching Sagittarian but I’ve decided that I wanted a separate one that my students can edit, complete tasks and discuss our learning. 

Here’s a wonderful animated review for teachers to get started with wikis (if you’re keen) from TeachersFirst -  but beware! This wiki bug is very addictive and highly contagious!!  I’m just following the ideas suggested in this wiki review until I get my head around how I’m going to make wiki’s work for us. 

You might also like to check out  the TeachersFirst wikispace – there are loads of ideas and links to other teacher wikispaces!

Wikispaces wants to give away 100,000 yes 100,000 spaces for education purposes.  It’s Free!!  Now is the best time to create a Wikispace.  Go on take the plunge!  Click here.  It only takes 30 seconds to create your very own space!  It’s that easy. 


If you want to know more, don’t forget to check out CoolCatTeacher’s blog on How I use Wikis – Vicki has shared some amazing tips to get you started on a Classroom Wiki.
And then there’s this site that I just found (and I really must go to bed when I’m done!!)
This site aims to answer one question: How can I use wikis in education?  A must read! 
Right – I really am off to bed now!

Just a quick note to say ……

Have a joyful break with family and friends …. Merry Christmas to those that celebrate in this way …… and Happy Holidays to my fellow teaching colleagues all over Australia and New Zealand as we begin our well deserved end of the school year break.

Over the next 6 weeks I’ll be catching up on my reading …. some for pleasure … some for technology, reading those blogs like Cool Cat Teacher and 2 Cents worth more in depth than the skimming I’ve been doing lately.  I’ve got heaps of ideas buzzing around in my head ….. and looking forward to starting next year with a new class of Year 7’s and new projects involving Web2.0.  I may even do some scrapbooking which has been seriously neglected as of late!   

Check out my colleague Simon’s new blog - I think I’ve passed on the blogging bug to him – yep he’s really been bitten by the bug now!  Way to go Simon!  We’re still waiting to hear if our application to present at the Learning @ School 07 Conference in Rotorua in February has been accepted.  Will keep you posted!  Dave Warlick of 2cents worth fame (one of my idol gurus!)  is a keynote speaker at this conference!   

To those that have been reading my blog ….. thank you …… I’ll be a bit dormant now for a while ….. but come February I’ll be keeping you posted on Room 18’s Web2.0 journey.

I’ve just read that Vicki Davis’ Flat Classroom Project won Best Classroom Wiki in the 2007 Edublog Awards – that’s fantastic!  I certainly voted for it.  Congratulations Vicki – well deserved and so inspiring to read your journey.  Keep up the sharing!  I especially enjoyed reading her share on 5 Things You May Not Know about me.

I’ve just read a comment posted by Jaanus Kase  (see here - scroll down) assuring us all that Skype-to-Skype and video calls will remain FREE – the charging relates only to Skypeout!

I’d just like to say a HUGE thank you to Skype for keeping such an awesome product free!  Let’s keep supporting these people and keep Skype at the forefront of Web2.0.

It’s amazing what you come across, late at night, (when you’re actually looking for something else!!).  I’ve just finished listening to a presentation by an Australian teacher called John Pearce. (His other blog here) 

He’s recorded a 30minute presentation entitled

“It’s Elementary“  discussing the success of his journey regarding Web2.0 technologies.  This is a definite must listen to if you are wanting to start out with blogs, wikis and/or podcasts.  Why oh why couldn’t I have discovered this stuff about 6 months ago!?!  There’s only 8 days of our school year left and I have to wait 6 weeks before I can hit the ground running with next year’s class and get absolutely knee deep and roll around in this Web2.0 technology. 

If there’s anybody out there reading this ……. and you’re interested in doing some sort of collaborative project using blogs, wikis and/or podcasts, whether you be a newbie (like me) or an old hand willing to share the bumpy learning journey of one slightly “mad” teacher and a class full of newbie students …….. please, please, please, leave a comment here!

Technorati Profile

This is me having a go at claiming my blog on Technorati.com and it worked!  Thanks Vicki! (aka Cool Cat Teacher).

I’ve just finished reading a fantastic post on Chris Craft’s blog about Skyping Peru and listened to a podcast about it (I was originally listening to Vicki Davis’s 5 min podcast on her Flat Classroom Project) anyhow ……… Skyping!  I’ve heard that Skype might not remain free after January 2007.  We seriously need to do something about this!  This is such an innovative tool that links us globally to one another that does not differentiate us depending on how big our tech budget is.  The possibilities of this FREE tool are endless and already there are some fantastic, awesome and totally out of this world things going on in classrooms thanks to Skype. 

If it’s going to happen – that is – if Skype starts to cost – there’s got to be someone out there that can make something to take it’s place – Please, please, please. 

There’s a heap of people my students and I would still like to talk to ….

If you haven’t already ….. you need to take at look at this guy! Quentin D’Souza aka Teaching Hacks.com.  Download his Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators - it’s become my bible – and it’s a little tatty too through over-reading.  Add to that CoolCatTeacher’s handy tips that she’s giving out all the time and I’ve got myself one powerful little book of tips and tricks! 

(Check out Teaching Hack’s delicious links – they are exactly what it says – delicious! 

It’s late, I’m a wee bit tired, but I’m buzzing!  I’ve just got home from a Sitech Conference for Champion Schools -( a contract that my school is on ).  Wow – we have some very talented people out there in good old New Zealand!  Guests included Frank Augustino, Vice President of Business Development and International Sales GTCO (Interwrite software) whom I am forever indebted to because he donated an extra Interactive Whiteboard (which I won for my school !!!!) and a man by the name of Peter Kent.  Now I’m sorry I can’t hyperlink anything to Peter because he doesn’t have a website or a blog.  He’s Deputy Principal of Richardson Primary School, Canberra Australia – and he lectures in his spare time.  Man was he inspiring and did he get you to think about how you use your Interactive Whiteboard.

His message is about Teachers and more specifically e-teaching.  He demonstrated lots of practical ways to ensure interactivity.  And that’s what his company’s name is called Practical Interactivity.   He states that the school environment needs to possess certain traits to ensure that IWBs can enhance teaching and learning within the school and advocates that “e-teaching” involves harnessing the potential of digital technology in presenting a concept, exploring the implications, placing the concept in various contexts, creating links with existing knowledge and leading discussions that probe student understanding and allow students to take their learning in personally relevant directions.  WOW!  If you ever get a chance to hear this man speak – it’s simple DO IT!  The examples he showed us were so simple that you found yourself going, yeah, I could go home and do that, or that is such a simple idea – my students would love to do that. 

One of the very simple ideas he showed us, that I’m going to start doing is, record students explaining how they think.  He had spelling and maths ideas.  3 x 30, how’d you work that out? Recorded was the student’s thinking in their own words!  How powerful is that?!  Hyperactive – how do you remember to spell that?  Another idea was for the teacher to record a quick self-reflection on the last page of the IWB – how did this go? what would you do differently next time? etc – 30secs max.  So simple, yet so effective! 

We are so lucky, well I feel I’m so lucky to go to these kinds of things and be inspired, be refreshed, and be motivated to go back to class and action one or two neat ideas I saw.  Thanks Peter, thanks Frank, thanks Jenny, Garry and team at Sitech and thanks to all those brillant teachers in New Zealand that came to Hamilton and shared their ideas so willingly.  Fantastic, fantastic fantastic! 

We were introduced to Skype about a week ago and since then I’ve seen various weblogs on it.  Working with another school about 20 minutes away from ours we’ve been using the add on Talk and Write with Skype to help mentor young writers.
WOW!  What a powerful tool!  My class are 11-12 year olds and our buddy skype class has 8 year olds.  My colleague Simon got his students to write their stories on the Interwrite pad and saved them.  He then sent the file through Talk and Write to us so that my student mentor for the day could read through the story.  At a prearranged time, we called each other and got Talk and Write up and running as well.  As the two students talked via Skype they were also able to work on the writing collaboratively, adding words, deleting words, adding new sentences etc as they went.

I’d have to say you definitely need to teach your students how to “mentor write”.  They need to encourage and support the younger writer, gently teasing out new ideas.  One of the strategies I taught my mentors was to offer their writer a selection of words to choose from.  We will definitely continue this process and can see the difference to the writing immediately.  It will be interesting to see the difference to the independent writing of the 8 year olds after several mentoring sessions.  I’ll keep you posted on that one!

I’m taking a well deserved break from report writing to mention our current classroom project.  My students and I have been lucky enough to work with a Digital Weather Station (thanks Sitech).  We’re putting together a digital story of our learning journey using Photoshop3 to demonstrate to other teachers what we’ve been doing with this technology.  Well I must say, I’ve been blown away by the varying directions our learning has taken.  What started out as teacher-directed learning fast turned into student-directed learning!  After just a few days the data collected from around New Zealand plus our very own data collected by the weather station meant graphs and comparisons  could be made.  That’s what sparked the students to start asking why questions!  Exciting stuff!  I might challenge myself to uploading the Digital Story for viewing ….. maybe …… and I’ll definitely post the learning encountered in a later post!   I’m just off to have a go at “pinging” my blog update!  Vicki Davis gives some very useful hints & tips in her post entitled “10 habits of bloggers that win!”