Fantastic news – two NZ schools have made it into the final of the Interwrite/Teacher Tube Makeover Video Contest!

Congratulations and well done to Illiminster Intermediate with their entry Digital child and to Pt. England School with their entry Kiwi Kids Use ICT.

Can you please help them out with a vote of support?

I thought that I would use VoiceThread to document my spanish language learning journey. In case you weren’t aware, I recently won an AFS month-long language immersion award to a spanish speaking country as I teach Level 1 (very, very basic) Spanish. After each lesson my tutor asks me to prepare a conversation that practices all that we covered in our hour long lesson. VoiceThread lends itself so well to documenting a journey that I thought that it would be interesting to hear my spanish improve (hopefully) over time. It would also give me a record of each lesson.

If you are a speaker of spanish and would like to leave a comment on my learning journey voicethread, please do so. (Follow the hyperlink).

Just a post in response to a twitter from Cathyjo. I hope this helps her out.

Create/Find your VoiceThread you want to embed in your edublog and click on embed

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Write new post and click on the flash button (shown in the image below) Add the part of the code from VoiceThread shown in the above image, click on ok. (The part of the code you want should look a little bit like this: http://voicethread.com/book.swf?b=13421). I use TextEdit (Mac) or NotePad (PC) to paste the whole code from VoiceThread so that I can find and copy the part that I want.

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You will now be prompted to add width and height pixels.

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Click on preview post to see if the voicethread is the right size for your blog post. It will take a few minutes to load.
Hopefully you will be looking at your embedded voicethread!

If you click on the images you will be taken to a larger version of the image.

I just had to post before slinking off to bed. I’ve just spent the last hour and twenty minutes in the end of Week 1 Fireside Chat of the K12 Online Conference in Elluminate. 64 participants at one stage and the conversation was RICH. Clarence Fisher is so easy to listen to and his message is so simple. It’s the way we do business here. The photos of his classroom are simple, straight forward and so logical. It is no wonder that blogging is sustained so easily in his class. It’s no wonder that the contexts his students are learning in are real, rich, relevant and authentic. We broke up into groups later in the chat and it was great to talk with other educators about how we got started using Web2.0 in the classroom and what projects we’d recommend getting involved in for teachers that were just starting out. I wish that the chat from the little rooms was archived!

Clarence used a graphic to demonstrate his network attached to his blog. Many of us were wondering how he did that, but I think he missed that question in the fast-scrolling chat. After the Fireside Chat was finished I googled “visual tool for showing networks” and got this blog when sent me to this link: Websites As Graphs: http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph

Here’s the pretty little graph of my blog network.

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So now I’m off to bed. Don’t tell anyone I stayed up til 4am again!

My friend and fellow educator Chris Craft,  left me with these challenging questions. I love the way he provokes my thoughts and ideas and so has given me direction to my documented learning journey on pedagogy as he so rightly referred to it.

“I’d love to hear what this is all based on. You have some great thoughts here, but what’s the basis?”

It started with a conversation with Simon during a break at ULearn07. We were walking downtown in Auckland discussing the reasons why we do the “technology thing” in our classrooms and whether we were past the “doing it for fun” factor and was it really making a difference with our students. I replied that I didn’t actually know why I was doing IT, it just felt right to be doing IT. That’s when it suddenly occurred to me that I really needed to find out why this way of learning and teaching felt so right and it felt necessary, almost urgent for me to redefine my own personal pedagogy to ensure that I wasn’t just bombarding my students with the “bells, and whizzy stuff” available on the “net” simply because it felt right or because I liked it. I’m also feeling an increasing need to be able to justify why “that’s what we do ’round here”. At first I wasn’t sure if that was a parental expectation need or a school administration need or just my own personal verification need. Actually, it’s a combination of all of those, bought about by my own perception of a year that hasn’t been as “successful” as I would have liked.

Is there research that backs up what you want to do and why?

I’m looking at this very carefully, hence the slowness in the posts regarding my learning journey on pedagogy. At the moment, there is an awful lot being said about Pedagogy. How important it is, why sound pedagogy is necessary for this way of teaching, with these kinds of web2.0 tools available. The value of Cooperative Learning is well documented, as is Authentic Tasks within Rich and Relevant Contexts and The Sharing of Learning Intentions and Success Criteria (Assessment For Learning) by Shirley Clarke.

If you implement all of this, will it work? How do you determine whether it’s effective or not?

Jeff Utecht’s presentation on Sustained Blogging in the classroom raised a very important point, not just in relation to blogging, but for the use of web2.0 tools and online educational practises. We need new assessment tools, we need new ways of assessing. We need to change the way we do things. I need to think very seriously about how to measure it’s effectiveness. There are targets to meet in our school and there are curriculum areas to be covered in our school but I need to look at these as contexts if I am to successfully implement the ways I want to work in the classroom and the ways I would like students to work, learn, teach, explore, grow and reflect. I also need to be prepared for the possibility that not all of my original list of 10 things will be successful in the classroom at the same time.

Thanks Chris.  Your questions gave me some much needed focus and encouraged me to look at some research that I quite possibly would have missed.   I will blog more about that research in a later post.

Another web2.0 tool shared by the clever people over at Simple Spark Catalogue Daily Update. I’ve just taken a quick peek at it and at first glance it looks as though it could be pretty useful in the classroom.

Exploratree is a free web resource where you can download, use and make your own interactive thinking guides. Thinking guides can support independent and group research projects with frameworks for thinking, planning and enquiry. We’ve provided a set of ready-made guides which you can print out or use online. All of the guides are completely customizable or you can start from scratch and make your own! You can share them and work on them in groups too.

The Exploratree web resource has been developed by Futurelab and emerged out of our work on the Enquiring Minds project. It provides a series of ready-made interactive ‘thinking guides’ or ‘frameworks’ which can support students’ projects and research. Thinking guides support the thinking or working through of an issue, topic or question and help to shape, define and focus an idea and also support the planning required to investigate it further. Exploratree guides can be used as a basis for whole class discussion, or emailed to individuals or groups to complete. They can also be used as a presentation tool to share your findings and thinking with others. As well as providing a set of ready to use thinking guides, which are completely customisable and shareable, Exploratree also enables teachers and students to create their own simply and easily.

With Exploratree you can:

• Use our ready-made thinking guides
• Make a new thinking guide from scratch
• Use it to set class projects
• Print them out (they can go as big as A0)
• Change and customise thinking guides, you can add or change text, shapes, images etc.
• As a teacher, you can set up the sequence that you want the thinking guide to be revealed, so that you can stage the thinking activity
• You can fill in a thinking guide and complete your project on the website
• You can present your project
• You can send your thinking guide to a whole group of people
• You can submit a thinking guide for comments, so it can’t be edited but just reviewed
• Work in groups on the same thinking guide

Exploratree is in beta-form and they are asking for suggestions to make the next version better before the full launch in early 2008.

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What the PMI chart looks like online …….

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Earlier today, I managed to listen to the audio file of Jeff Utecht’s K12Online Presentation, Sustained Blogging in the Classroom.   (I gave up trying to get the video file – for some reason my downloading time is excruciatingly slow at the moment).

I was particularly interested in this presentation as our classroom blog is up and running – since earlier in the year – and apart from the occassional post from a couple of students, it’s yet to really take off.  I thought that it was a good idea to start with a class blog, then introduce individual blogs.  Apart from one or two students posting of their own accord, the others post because I remind them to, or ask them to.  I rate the value of blogging in the classroom simply because I see the value of students writing for an audience that comprises of not just me, the teacher.  Good blogging models are out there and I truly believe that sometimes kids learn way more from each other than they do from teachers.  I’d like my students to realise that there is a purpose to writing,  it can be a rewarding experience and it is validating to know that others are reading your writing and are interested in what you have to say.  So why isn’t it working?

Jeff Utecht’s presentation gave me some insight into why blogging isn’t yet sustained in our classroom. This is a practical presentation, full of sensible ideas, simple techniques and some really good “takeaways” thrown in as well.  So, what did I learn?

1. Blogging is a conversation – 2 way communication and you need to take it to this level.
2. Allow the conversation to take place.  Change the way your classroom is arranged if you have to – rearrange it so that the conversation can take place.
3. Make time.  If it’s an add-on, it won’t work.  Simple.  Make it the way we do things ’round here.
4. Guide the conversation, persuade the conversation, give suggestions, model to your students.  Find good blogs to read.

Jeff’s got a great wikispace set up too with all the links to some pretty clever teachers (Mark Ahlness, Scott Hossack, Clarence Fisher) out there who have sustained blogging going on in their classrooms.  I’ve realised that I have all the ingredients to achieve sustained blogging in the classroom, I just have to tweak things a little.  I’m glad that I’m on the right track and I now know what to do to allow sustained blogging to happen.

There’s so much more in this presentation but rather than regurgitate the whole of Jeff’s presentation – please go take a look/listen at it yourself.  I highly recommend it!

If you’ve not gotten into the K12 Online Conference yet, then you must.  The beauty of this conference is you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your own home!  And it’s free! Costs nothing more than your time!  And if you’re like me, and the kid’s need you, you can just pause and go back to it later. Or, if you think you missed something, you can go back and view it again.  Wicked!

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So there it is. My first entry into Second Life.

I’m sitting (fully clothed and not in the fire – that’s another story) in the Blogger’s Cafe. People are very helpful in SL and it was hilarious at times as you try to “act normal”, well as normal as an avatar can.  At one stage there were three NZ bloggers in the cafe (kinda like a ULearn Blogger’s Cafe reunion!)  I would like to be in SL when there’s a lecture going on, or conference etc, just to see the full potential of SL. I became quite frustrated with the frozen screen after a while, wondering what was wrong with my internet connection, considering I am paying top dollar for an unlimited broadband connection. I tried to go back into SL a number of times, met a very helpful man at help island and met up with Manda Morales a few times and even managed to learn a couple of new tricks too. I can see how easy it would be to lose track of RL time in this place. Many, many thanks to Jen Wagner for encouraging me and helping me to come into the Blogger’s Cafe and to have a go at Second Life for the first time. Thanks to Manda Morales for teaching me how to caramel dance. I was laughing so hard my kids told me to be quiet!

If you are wanting to give it a try, my advice?  Make sure someone is in there to meet you or otherwise take the orientation tour at the start.  You’ll get a lot of clues as to what to do and how to do it and it’s a laugh.  Not sure if I’d be wanting to do it all the time but I’d go in there every now and again for a purpose.

 First 10 thoughts on personal teaching philosophy.
In particular, How do I want to teach? Where do I want to teach? Why do I want to teach? What do I want to teach?

1.  Rich, authentic, real world, learning tasks
2.  Skills embedded – learning journey documented
3.  Student-driven /initiated (not withstanding some teacher manipulation if necessary)
4.  Cooperative Learning Environment
5.  Environment where students and teacher feels safe, heard, validated
6.  Learning Intentions and Success Criteria shared with students (criteria often written together)
7.  Students teaching students teaching teacher teaching students.
8.  Independence encouraged, fostered
9.  Life long learner (all of us, together)
10.  Respect

Jennifer Carrier Dorman (Cliotech) blogged about Educon 2.0 and this snippet caught my eye and gave me an “a-ha” moment!

_{Pedagogy Sessions}

_{Here’s what I want to see more of… specific conversations around pedagogy. Could we have some sessions where folks had agreed to read an article beforehand around constructivist teaching and then had a conversation where we looked at Web 2.0 tools with the specific agenda of looking at how to take the best of progressive pedagogy and apply it to the new word in which we live? Maybe even looking at old language and looking at its limits and where we do and don’t need new language? Again… skypecast it, chat it and give time for reflection at the end.}

_{It would also be nice to see these discussions of pedagogy lead to more specific suggestions about how to incorporate these ideas into practice; ie, how will I apply this idea to the lesson/unit I’m starting tomorrow. How do I introduce this to students; what does it look like onscreen, and what does my “classroom” (in quotes because you can define it however you want) look like as a result? Perhaps these sessions could be followed by a series of posts/wiki pages where people brainstorm and archive ideas on using these tools in specific lessons.}

One of the things that I really want to take a closer look at, then reflect, refine and redefine is the pedagogy that drives my teaching.
I don’t quite “know” why I teach the way I do – I just do it because it feels right.   This was an area that didn’t seem to have much on offer at ULearn07 – I may have overlooked it as there were many, many fantastic and awe-inspiring workshops/presentations to choose from!

And so begins an in-depth look at my personal teaching philosopy and the pedagogy that supports it.  Bear with me while I do it and let me know when I start to rave incoherently……….