Monthly Archives: April 2010

Polleverywhere

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This is a fantastic tool for feedback. For quickly gauging what your students know, how your audience is feeling or which topic you should address next, Polleverywhere is ideal for the classroom or conferences and has free and premium options.

Polleverywhere 1

Participants can respond to your poll via SMS, Twitter or the web. Many schools may not have access to the SMS option due to school policy, however students can still respond by being given a URL.

polleverywhere 3

Polleverywhere is ideal for conferences as almost all delegates would have a mobile phone or iPod touch and speakers can modify or customise their session depending on the mood of the audience.

Report from the Melbourne hearing of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training for the Inquiry into School Libraries and Teacher-librarians

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This information comes from Mary Manning, the Executive Officer of the School Library Association of Victoria:

The School Library Association of Victoria was pleased to be able to appear before the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training Public Hearing for the Inquiry into School Libraries and Teacher-librarians in Australian schools today. The committee indicated that they found the SLAV submission to be most informative and questioned the SLAV representatives, Mary Manning and Susan La Marca in relation to aspects of the submission as well as areas of interest to them. Click here for the introductory statement that we made. We were also able to provide committee members with copies of , What a teacher-librarian can do for you, Open the door to inquiry: A planning tool for teacher-librarians and teachers in primary schools, and Rethink: Ideas for inspiring school library design. The hearing was webcast (audio only) and the transcript will be available in the near future along with the submissions that the Committee received, at: http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/edt/schoollibraries/index.htm

Also appearing today to support the valuable role of school libraries and teacher-librarians were representatives from the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Monash University, VALA – Libraries/Technology and the Future, and the Victorian Catholic Teacher-Librarian Network.

Following the hearing, SLAV representatives were pleased to speak further with the Chair of the Committee, Sharon Bird, MP and with Karen Bonanno, Executive Officer, Australian School Library Association.

Parliamentary Inquiry into school libraries and teacher-librarians

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An update on The Parliamentary Inquiry into school libraries and teacher-librarians.

The School Library Association of Victoria have also been invited to provide further oral evidence at the hearing of the committee which takes place on Thursday 29 April (today) at Parliament House, Melbourne.

It is a public hearing – however if you are unable to attend, the hearing will be webcast live (audio only) on: http://webcast.aph.gov.au/livebroadcasting/

If you are unable to catch the webcast, the hearing proof transcript will be on the Committee’s website approximately a week after the hearing.  Submissions will also be published on the Committee’s website at some stage in the future.

iBoard player

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The iBoard player is a terrific interactive teaching resource. With resources for Prep to 2, there is lots of fun and learning to be had.

Resources include:

  • Numeracy
  • Literacy
  • New Literacy (Texts)
  • Science
  • History
  • Geography
  • ICT
  • Religion

A day in the country
A day in the country

This year 1 example above comes with the following information from the website:

Ask pupils to position the characters and construct sentences about their position or movement.
Using the whole scene, you could challenge pupils to make a wider range of statements than those given… “the bird is flying above the girl”, “the owl is on top of the big bear’s head.”
Ask pupils to position the characters and construct sentences about their position or movement. Using the whole scene, you could challenge pupils to make a wider range of statements than those given… “the bird is flying above the girl”, “the owl is on top of the big bear’s head.”
The iBoard player looks like a useful tool for learning for younger students.

Virtual Tour of the Sistine Chapel

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How about a virtual excursion (field trip) to the Sistine Chapel? With 360 degree views of the Chapel that includes ceilings and floors, this is a tremendous site for art, history or religious instruction.

Sistine Chapel 1

The Vatican hosts the site and lets the magnificence of the Chapel speak for itself. There are no words or links on the site, only the ability to rotate the view of the Chapel via your mouse.

Sistine Chapel 2

Thanks to the very excellent Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers for passing on this link.

Songsmith: create your own songs

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This free new trial Microsoft download is attempting to take on Apple’s excellent Garageband, and is a great way for students to create copyright free music quickly and easily. This download is a trial and enables users a total of six hours use, plenty of time to create lots of songs and identify if it is worth purchasing.

Microsoft explains:

Get your first taste of songwriting.

 Songsmith Note Character

Ever sing in the car? Maybe in the shower? You know who you are. Admit it, you like to sing, and you like music. Ever thought of writing your own music? Most people never get a chance to try… but we want to give everyone a piece of the songwriting experience, so we’ve developed Songsmith, an application that lets you create a complete song just by singing! Are we going to turn you into an award-winning songwriter overnight? Of course not. But Songsmith will give you a way to create something authentically musical and authentically yours, even if you don’t know the first thing about chords or music theory.

It’s as simple as clicking “record”.

 Songsmith Note Character

Just open up Songsmith, choose from one of thirty different musical styles, and press record. Sing whatever you like – a birthday song for Mom, a love song for that special someone (they’ll be impressed that you wrote a song for them!), or maybe just try playing with your favorite pop songs. As soon as you press “stop”, Songsmith will generate musical accompaniment to match your voice, and play back your song for you. It’s that simple.

Songsmith is for musicians too.

 Songsmith Note Character

For songwriters, is Songsmith going to replace the craft of songwriting? Never. Could it be a super-useful “intelligent scratchpad” for exploring new melodies and ideas? Definitely. If you’re a songwriter, you’ve probably had the experience of coming up with a melody and finding the nearest object with a “record” button on it just to get your idea down. Imagine that first quick experience also letting you explore chord progressions, styles, even basic arrangement ideas. Then of course you’d work with other tools, other people, your instruments, and your own musical intuition to really develop a song. But Songsmith can be a great tool that lets you quickly explore new ideas in places where you couldn’t before (on the go, on the bus, in the airport, etc.). And Songsmith works great with instrumental input too!

Make it your song.

 Songsmith Note Character

Of course, Songsmith’s ideas might not be exactly what you want for your song. It’s music after all, and there’s no single right answer. So Songsmith not only comes up with music for your song, but puts you in the driver’s seat by letting you customize the chords and arrangement for your song, even if you’ve never heard of “chords” before. Move the “happy” and “jazzy” sliders around to get the chords you want. Lock the chords you like and let Songsmith change the ones you don’t. Set up your own custom band. Make it your song!

What can I do with the songs I make?

 Songsmith Note Character

Save your songs as audio files to send to your friends and family or post online at social networking sites. Share your Songsmith files with your friends so they can put their ideas into your songs. Even create music videos!

Rich instrument sounds make all the difference.

 Songsmith Note Character

We’ve partnered with one of the industry’s finest digital instrument producers –Garritan – and one of the leading developers of computer synthesizers – Plogue– to provide rich instrumentation for your song. These instruments are the real deal, and you can judge for yourself over at our music page. Change the instruments as much as you like, and if you want even more professional sounds, Songsmith will help you buy additional instruments from Garritan.

A tool really worth investigating as creating copyright free music for presentations is a big issue for schools to address. Songsmith can help you. A nice way to teach digital citizenship as well.

A Backyard Beginning – Hawkesdale P-12

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By Tadfish

By Tadfish

The absolutely amazing and multi award winning teacher Anne Mirtschin from Hawkesdale P-12 College has kindly shared information about how her blogging journey with her students began:

Three years ago, a rich picture studies case grant from DEECD required us to use web2.0 tools. A quick request to my computer technician found some information on web2.0 tools including blogging. The article was produced by Heather Blakey of Soul Food Cafe blogging fame. By a strange coincidence, I also received an email to say that a globalteacher and global student campus was being set up, so I immediately enrolled.  As I had no idea what to do with these blogs, I,  in usual form procrastinated.

As luck would have it, our librarian Faye Matters had attended a SLAV PD in Melbourne, heard a lady called Heather Blakey speak and immediately booked her up for a cluster PD session and art workshop at our school, Hawkesdale P12 College.

Heather squeezed in some time to come to my IT class and discuss the possibility of a backyard blog. We were researching volcanic evidence in our area, and backyards seemed a logical beginning as students had lots of interesting things to talk about – and they all love their backyard. The backyard blog began as a class blog. Students wrote about their backyards. I would grab their file out of their folders and post it onto the blog. Imagine our amazement and delight, when after one of the first posts we received several comments!

Hawkesdale

Your “backyard” is beautiful! Thank you for sharing it with the world.

Lori, California

Thank you so much for sharing your backyard. When we all share like this, it makes our world just a little smaller and better.

She Wolf

These comments acted like magic to my class and me. Somebody was reading our work, we seemed to have a global voice. Later we found out, it was Heather’s wonderful blogisphere who were reading and commenting. However, we were up and blogging. Soon students from years 5 to 10 had individual student blogs. It was hard work, as there was so much to learn  and much of our work was by trial and error– posts, dashboards, tags, categories, widgets, pages etc all had to be learnt. However, Heather created the wonderful  “25 steps to web2.0”. Each day for the 25 days to Christmas, Heather and her blogging friends would add a post each day, illustrating some aspect of blogging.

From humble and unknown beginnings, my globalteacher blog became my class blog, and now features the following:-

Posts

Pages include the following

  • About Me – a vital and important page where most visitors will go to seek out validity and nature of the blogger.
  • Current timetable and list of current classes
  • Code of conduct
  • E-safety
  • Past students
  • Resources
  • Global projects

Widgets and sidebar features include the following:-

  • A flikr widget that shows photos added to my online photo album.
  • Time clock
  • Categories etc
  • Various world maps to visualize where virtual visitors are from eg clustrmaps
  • Flagcounter
  • My slideshows (ppt presentations) uploaded to slideshare
  • List of classes taught with student blog links
  • Student blog of the week in 2009 as the school received a box of usb drives as part of a campaign. The usb drives were the weekly prize.
  • Links to resources and global projects

Posts contain hyperlinks where possible. This is an efficient means of directing students to further online pages and adjusts them to appropriate 21st century literacy.

Postscript: Unfortunately, busy time commitments have prevented me from working on the backyard blog so it rests peacefully at the moment, knowing that it has taken us to the globe!

Thanks Anne. What a brilliant start to what has become an amazing Web 2.0 presence at Hawkesdale P-12 College.

Mathtrain.TV

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Mr Marcos and his students at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California have developed a lovely set of screencasts to help teach maths. There is a choice of student or teacher created screencasts as well as videos with captions.

Teachers can use Mathtrain.TV in two ways. By using it in the classroom to help reinforce concepts taught (and for students to be able to revisit these topics at home) but by also having your own students create similar screencasts.

By creating these screencasts, students are not only demonstrating that they have learned the concepts behind the particular branch of mathematics, they are showing how they got to the answers. But perhaps more importantly, they are creating a product to share with others.

When creating their screencasts, they need to address:

  • Audience. What age level? For students good at maths or those who need extra help?
  • Script. They will need to write a script so that students viewing the screencasts find them easy to follow.
  • Visibility of sums. Will the audience be able to view the sums easily?
  • Layout. Will the audience be able to follow the working out?

They also need to learn how to use a tool such as the free JingProject to record their screencasts.

So students are learning lots of Web 2.0 skills, helping others  as well as reinforcing their own learning. What an excellent idea!

Interactive Web Search Tutorials

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Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers recently posted an excellent article on free animated web tutorials to help students with web research strategies.

The tutorials include:

  • Credible Sources Count
  • Research It Right
  • Searching With Success
  • You Quote It, You Note It

Although a university site, these tutorials are ideal for secondary students. Please see Richard’s post for more information and links to the tutorials.

K-12 2010 Horizon Report

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The 2010 Horizon Report for schools K-12 has recently been released. Predicting the technologies that will be influential in teaching and learning over the next 5 years, the K-12 Horizon Report is a must read for all educators.

The top trends to watch are:

  • One year or less – Cloud Computing
  • One year or less – Collaborative Environments
  • Two to three years – Game-based learning
  • Two to three years – Mobiles
  • Four to five years – Augmented Reality
  • Four to five years – Flexible Displays

CLOUD COMPUTING

The Horizon Report explains:

The “cloud” refers to surplus computing resources available from specialized data centers, each often hosting thousands of servers, that power the world’s largest websites and web services.

Examples of this include:

  • Flickr
  • Google Docs
  • Wikis
  • Blogs
  • Twitter

Virtually anywhere were information is not stored on your own computer and accessing to it is via the internet.

COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Collaborative Environments are defined by the Horizon Report:

Collaborative environments are online spaces where the focus is on making it easy to collaborate and work in groups, no matter where the participants may be. As the typical educator’s network of contacts has grown to include colleagues who might live and work across the country, or indeed anywhere on the globe, it has become common for people who are not physically located near each other to collaborate on projects. In classrooms as well, joint projects with students at other schools or in other countries are more and more commonplace as strategies to expose learners to a variety of perspectives.

Examples include:

  • Ning (but for how much longer as it seems they will be charging for use in the near future)
  • Wikis
  • GoogleDocs
  • DropBox
  • Drop.io
  • Voicethread
  • Netvibes
  • Wikipedia

GAME-BASED LEARNING

The Horizon Report explains more:

The interest in game-based learning has accelerated considerably in recent years, driven by clear successes in military and industrial training as well as by emerging research into the cognitive benefits of game play. Developers and researchers are working in every area of game-based learning, including games that are goal-oriented; social game environments; non-digital games that are easy to construct and play; games developed expressly for education; and commercial games that lend themselves to refining team and group skills. At the low end of game technology, there are literally thousands of ways games can be — and are already being — applied in learning contexts. More complex approaches like role-playing, collaborative problem solving, and other forms of simulated experiences have broad applicability across a wide range of disciplines, and are beginning to be explored in more classrooms

Examples that use consoles include:

  • Little Big Planet
  • Guitar Hero
  • My Word Coach

Examples that use PCs include:

  • Arcademic Skill Builders
  • National Geographic Kids

MOBILES

The Horizon Report gives more information:

The mobile market today has more than 4 billion subscribers, more than two-thirds of whom live in developing countries. The global network supporting mobile devices of all kinds now covers more territory than the electrical grid. A massive and increasing number of people all over the world own and use computers that fit in their hand and are able to connect to the network wirelessly from virtually anywhere. Tens of thousands of applications designed to support a wide variety of tasks on a host of mobile devices and platforms are readily available, with more entering the market all the time. These mobile computing tools have become accepted aids in daily life for everything from business to personal productivity to social networking. The range and number of educational applications for mobiles are growing at a rapid pace, yet their use in schools is limited — more often constrained by policy than by the capabilities of the devices they run on.

Examples include:

  • Smart phones such as iPhone and Android
  • iPod touch
  • iPad

AUGMENTED REALITY

The Horizon Report explains:

While the capability to deliver augmented reality experiences has been around for decades, it is only very recently that those experiences have become easy and portable. Advances in mobile devices as well as in the different technologies that combine the real world with virtual information have led to augmented reality applications that are as near to hand as any other application on a laptop or a smart phone. New uses for augmented reality are being explored and new experiments undertaken now that it is easy to do so. Emerging augmented reality tools to date have been mainly designed for marketing, social purposes, amusement, or location-based information, but new ones continue to appear as the technology becomes more popular. Augmented reality has become simple, and is now poised to enter the mainstream in the consumer sector.

Examples include:

  • Second Life
  • ARIS Mobile Media Learning Games
  • eTreasure

It is vital that we all start considering and using these tools to keep pace with the use of technology across all aspects of society so that our students are not disadvantaged or left behind.