Over the past few weeks my Year 7 (middle school 11 year olds) Students have been taking part in a peer review process as part of the SoundingBoard team for the Horizon Project.  For those of you who aren’t sure what the Horizon Project is – it’s a global collaborative project run by Julie Lindsay (Bangladesh) & Vicki Davis (US) in conjunction with 3 other schools in Shanghai, Melbourne and Vienna.  The project was based on the 6 immerging trends from the Horizon Report and the impact these trends will have in the future.

This was an amazing undertaking and the results are stunning!   It was an absolutely privilege to be part of this project and the students in my class who did some of the reviewing were blown-away at times with the information they were reading and watching and learning!  These students got to review multimedia presentations and wikis completed by students that they themselves will one day be.  I have no doubt that being involved in this process will seriously raise the level of multimedia and wikispace presentation in my class.

I am very proud of the work that my students completed.  There was an awful lot of imformation for them to look at and make their way through.  They did a lot a reading, asked a lot of questions and then watched a number of multimedia presentations.  When they were finished, each group completed a page of questions on our specially created wikispace, then they completed a 321 graphic organiser summarizing their review of each of the six trends from the report and their impact.  You can read those reviews here.

This was a very satisfying project to complete and I know that the students who took part in this process will benefit greatly from it.  A huge thanks to Julie and Vicki for organising such a worthwhile and meaningful project yet again, and a huge thanks to the students taking part in such a project and allowing some “smaller” students to review and comment on your work!

I’ve just had 3 hours with Ian Jukes.  No notes taken, just recorded his presentation “Understanding Digital Kids” on my SONY mic recorder – much to the delight of my ever- grateful hands and brain   Guess what I’m listening to as I collapse wearily into my bed!

He made some very interesting points, he shared some very interesting facts about the teenage brain.  When I’ve had a chance to fully process all the information I gained tonight – I’ll blog about it properly. 

What I’ll be thinking about the most is ……..“they’re not thinking like we think they’re thinking”.

Do you ever have one of those days when ………..

1. It seems like you’re chasing your tail – all day?
2. You’re running around doing stuff for everyone else, except for you?
3. Every time you open your email, there’s one more job in there for you to do?
4. Everyone wants something from you – nobody wants to give you anything?
5. There’s so much left to do ….. that you don’t even know where to start anymore?
6. You think you’ve bitten off more that you can chew?

Yep?  Well, I’m having one of those days weeks!  Nuff said.

Now you’re really going to think I’m nuts ……. BUT ……… it’s 3.26am in the morning (Sunday that is, so no school today) and I’ve just had the most amazing time in Elluminate (an interactive, real time collaboration venue) with Julie Lindsay and her daughter.

Julie was hosting a Sandbox session in Elluminate for those that hadn’t used it before. (And I knew this because of the Airset Calendar – and it’s fabulous way of telling me these things in my own timezone times!) The Horizon Project Students and their teachers are planning to use Elluminate over the coming week to host Student Summits where they will present a brief review of their work to a pre-determined agenda. I hope to make it to at least one of these summits!

I’d heard of Elluminate before, but not seen it in action so I waited up to go check it out. I’m really pleased I did. I was very impressed with the ease of getting into Elluminate, very impressed with the simply set out and easy to follow tools, the unclutteredness of the layout and of course, very impressed with my very clever two tutors! After an hour of having a great chat with Julie and a very good play around with the features of Elluminate with Julie’s daughter showing me how some really cool stuff in there works – I said goodbye to Bangladesh and immediately signed up for a free version of Elluminate. In a matter of minutes my very own vRoom was set up and ready to go. Amazing and exciting! Thanks Julie!

WHAT YOU GET…

Enjoy real-time collaboration with up to three participants using interactive features such as:

• Two-way audio
• Interactive whiteboard
• Direct messaging
• Application sharing
• File transfer
• Synchronized web tour
• Live webcam
• Breakout rooms
  

WHAT YOU CAN DO…

• Meet one-on-one
• Meet online with up to three people
• Work in small teams
• Hold virtual office hours
• Collaborate on a global level
• Add more seats for larger sessions

I think that’s very good value for $nothing! It was very easy to get the hang of and I’m sure that even our young students would manage a session in the vRoom.

If you’d like to have a go with Elluminate in my vRoom please leave a comment on this post! I’d love to show you want I learnt this morning whilst sitting in bed, laptop on lap and a lovely coffee to keep me awake!

If you’ve been reading here for a while, you will know that we have been experimenting with YackPack (Beta) and VoiceThread (Beta) – two very exciting Web2.0 tools for the classroom. Our collaborative partners in Malaysia have been having an absolute ball with YackPack – recording and sending messages to our class – making voice connections as we get to know one another. Unfortunately we have been unable to return the messages. After using the very clear and easy to follow trouble-shooting tips listed on YackPack’s support pages, with no luck, I decided to email Tanna, from YackPack’s Product Management Team – I couldn’t believe how fast I got a reply along with some more very helpful suggestions on what to try next and an assurance that if those things didn’t work, to email back and more help would be given. Again, no luck with the suggestions so more emailing occurred back and forth between myself and Tanna. Not once did I ever feel like I was being a nusiance – even when I started passing on technical questions and the IT Supervisor was home with a sick child! Tanna and the YackPack Team were incredibly helpful, patient and quick to respond to any questions I had. When the problem was eventually diagnosed (our end of course!) the followup from YackPack was outstanding once more.

As it turned out the Ports that both YackPack and VoiceThread used were shut our end. And so began emails back and forth with Tim from SchoolZone Help (Telecom in Schools). Once more, the service was incredibly helpful and even though at times I had no idea what Tim was talking about (he was very patient also) and explained things to a stressed-out teacher that just wanted to use these really cool tools in her classroom! The upshot of it all is pretty awesome too! SchoolZone / Telecom has very generously agreed that these two tools are extremely beneficial in the classroom and have opened the ports for everyone in schools in NZ to use. Fantastic! And I now know much more about Ports and IP addresses and Firewalls and proxy addresses than I did 3 weeks ago!

So thanks Tanna & the team at YackPack for everything, thanks Steve & VoiceThread for providing that much needed info to SchoolZone, thanks Telecom for coming to the party over the Ports and thanks ever so much Tim at SchoolZone Help for sorting everything out. We’re yacking, we’re voicethreading, and we’re having a ball!

Confused? Not sure how those two fit together? Me neither …… until now! The other day early morning, I just thought I’d do a final check of my Google Reader before switching off my trusty laptop and going to bed. There was 1 new blog post. I’m so glad I read it. Brian from Learning is Messy must have just posted this to his blog about doing a presentation to some K-12 teachers about Skype and was wanting to know if their were any educators out there that would be willing to skype in to his presentation to show just how easy it was to skype! I used that awesome meeting planning tool over at WorldClockMeetingPlanner to see if the timezones “aligned” somewhat and they did! We were going to be in class (doing Math and willing to be distracted!!). So I posted a comment on his blog and said a little about how we’ve been using skype in the classroom and we would be available to help out. Less than 24 hours later we were skyping! It was so cool and it went so well and it was so easy – check out what Brian said about it from his end.
Ok, so we were a little sad for a while when the man took away our video conferencing gear BUT we really did know all along that we don’t really have to have it! We can still make awesome connections, have great conversations, encourage each other and share our thoughts and ideas. What more could you want?

We had another really great connection with our wonderful collaborative partners and their equally very clever teacher in ProjectFeelGood today using skype too.  Although the connection was little bit “bumpy” today (must have been some atmospheric technogoblins around) we got to find out a little bit more about our new friends and what they like. Food was a very popular topic this afternoon! We’re keeping some really good records of how our ProjectFeelGood is going and the things that we are doing over at wikispaces so if you have the time to take a look and leave us a comment on the discussion tabs – that would be fantastic!

We’re looking forward to making another connection with some written conversation soon as we get ready to take part in the SoundingBoard peer review process for the Horizon Project on Monday 7th May. It will be so motivating for my students to see a wikispace built by students that are where they will be in a few more years time. It’s going to give them an insight into where technology may be when they get to high school/university but I’m also sure that it will be a very good model for them of what building a wikispace collaboratively can look like. Vicki Davis (US) and Julie Lindsay (Bangladesh) have undertaken such a huge project along with 3 other schools in Austria, China and Australia, plus some very generous educators/specialists and of course the very talented students! If you haven’t seen it yet – go check it out! It’s amazing and a real credit to all those taking part.

Phew! I am glad it’s nearly the weekend.