SLAV Connects is a blog by the School Libraries Association of Victoria (SLAV), formerly named Bright Ideas when a collaboration between SLAV and the State Library of Victoria (SLV). Its aim is to share news from the Association and to encourage teacher librarians, librarians, school library staff, educators and all interested persons to actively engage with the school libraries, to share tools and experiences; to network on a global scale; and to embrace dynamic teaching and learning opportunities.
Victorian (Loddon Mallee Region) Ultranet Teaching and Learning Coach Maryna Badenhorst has written a useful blog post on virtual excursions (or virtual field trips).
If for whatever reason, classes are unable to leave the school, Maryna has developed some engaging tasks for students to complete. As Maryna says, “A virtual field trip ‘takes students on a tour of a location using a series of web sites that have been linked together, creating a guided experience.”
Ideal for remote or regional schools, as well as those who find it difficult to get away from school for a whole day.
Primary Games Arena – School Curriculum Games bills itself as “The largest collection of curriculum games in the universe.” Games are arranged by subjects, year and game types.
Homepage
All games are curriculum-based and are fun and easy to play. Worth a look.
Viddix is a freakily great site that lets you put documents, web content, powerpoints, photos, surveys (and more) next to video content. You can even trigger the accompanying documents to appear at the correct place within the video. Have a look at this example:
Created by a Dutch group, Viddix has free and business accounts. Viddix could be extremely useful for conference presentations, whether they be virtual or face-to-face. And as you can see, Viddix presentations can be embedded quickly and easily as there is only one embed code.
Getting Tricky with Wikis is a resource that gives you tips and tricks to customise your wiki. From changing your wiki name, adding a background image to a page to embedding any webpage to your wiki, this site gives you the instructions and html codes to easily make the changes you want.
Google reported this week that the number of students using its Google Apps for Education Edition productivity and collaboration tools on campus has just about quadrupled over this time last year.
According to a blog entry posted this week by Miriam Schneider and Jason Cook of the Google Apps Education Edition team, more than 5 million K-12 and higher education students are actively using Google Apps on campus. They said the number has increased by 400 percent since the beginning of the fall semester in 2008. The number represents “thousands of schools in more than 145 countries,” according to the blog post.
To commemorate the milestone, Google has launched a new site that provides information, resources, and video and text case studies on higher education campuses and K-12 schools, districts, and collectives that have adopted Apps for Education. (Case studies range from Northwestern University, Arizona State University, and University of Southern California to New York City Intermediate School 339, Maine Township High School District, and Prince George County Public Schools.)
As a Google Certified Educator I am often asked by innovative educators how they can get started using Google Apps. As many teachers know, Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication & collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. (See the top 10 reasons to switch your school to Google Apps.)
Though I know Google is a valuable tool, when faced with this question, I first ask, “Why Google Apps?” This is important to consider as the goals and objectives must come before the tool. Here is a recent response I received to that question:
“We’re looking for a school web site that is enhanced by the tools that Google seems to offer.As a school, we’d like to be able to communicate with students and parents about assignment deadlines and events, on a general school-wide level as well as for individual classes. We’d like email accounts for students and teachers, calendars, class web pages. We are also interested in using Google docs as a means of encouraging collaboration among students during group projects, lab activities, etc. I think there are a lot of applications to our school.
We are on paid site right now, but I have heard a lot of good things about Google Apps for Education. It seems more user-friendly/intuitive since Google is something the kids (and staff) are used to working with. Not to mention that it’s free.”
This school seems to have some great reasons for using Google Apps. Now that the stage is set, here is how I recommend getting started.
GET READY
Read the Quick Start Guide The Education Edition is engineered to help schools organize the wealth of knowledge that lives inside schools. This guide will assist a full-scale deployment of Google Apps.
View Tutorials & Tips
View videos and tutorials on how you can use Google Apps at your school and in the classroom.
Sign Up for Free Email with Message Security in Google Apps Education Edition for K-12s
Keep your students safe with Google Message Security, offered free to current and new K12 Google Apps schools that sign up before July of 2010. Customizable inbound and outbound filtering based on content or senders – you make the rules.
Set Up Sites for Teachers
Check out the new Sites for Teachers page to see how teachers, students and administrators are using Google Sites to create their class sites, organize school trips, and run school projects.
Help Students Search Effectively Educators often say that they could use some help to teach better web search skills in the classroom and make sure Google is used well and to its full potential. Google Certified Teachers have develop a set of nine modular and practical lessons to help educators do just that.
Take a look at Classroom Activities and Tips Posters
Be sure to check out some examples of teacher work in the new classroom activities section and check out the handy tips posters, which you can print out and hang in your classrooms, computer labs and libraries.
GET SET
Once you’ve done your homework, it’s time to start connecting with others doing the same work. These will be your best resources to becoming successful using Google Apps for Educators. Here is how you do this.
Get on themap
Find other Google Apps educators & students around the world. When you visit the Mapyou will find schools, along with their url, that are using Google. Figure out the key people at that school. Connect and visit…
Become a Part of the Google Teacher Community Here you will find the Google for Educators Discussion Groupdesigned to keep you updated on Google’s K-12 Education initiatives. The group has become the home of a vibrant community of educators. In this space educators start discussions with fellow teachers; share ideas about innovation in education; ask questions about where to find teaching resources; tell colleagues about curricula you’ve created that have worked really well and more. You will also find examples of classroom activities using Google products.
GO! You are now ready to begin using Google Apps at your school. You will want to introduce this to your colleagues through a meeting or email. When doing this be sure to include your school goals and objects around why you are doing this. Have some simple ways they can get started now. Share some ways you plan to measure success.
Celebrate Your Success and Get on The Map Once you launch this work in your school, add yourself to the Google Community Map publicly with your colleagues. Share your success by commenting here. Invite others to your school (physically or virtually) to see the great work you are doing.
Lots of things to investigate here. Whatever you think of Google, you have to admit that they have a great suite of tools.
Here are two recent presentations by US educator Brad Flicklinger on 21st Century learning that you should find inspiring (you’ll need QuickTime to view them):
The “Spot the skills” slide is especially relevant – six skills that demonstrate 21st Century learning:
Creativity and innovation
Research and information fluency
Communication and collaboration
Critical thinking, problem solving and decision making
Digital citizenship
Technology operations and concepts
Also “spot the skills” for teachers:
Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity
Design and develop digital -age learning experiences and assessments
Model digital-age work and learning
Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility
Engage in professional growth and leadership
Watch the video to find the answer to the question “How do we know when someone has 21st century skills?”
Brad goes on to discuss how we can embed such skills into the curriculum and how can we ensure all teachers are skilled up. He also addresses the issues many teachers have with technology:
In this video, Brad suggests that teachers complete an online, self-paced Web 2.0 course such as the SLAV Web 2.0 Learning with the Web or the Syba Signs Web 2.0 course. However, Brad suggests that teachers could take up to a year to complete the course so that the course is truly self-paced and there is less pressure on the teacher.
In the course that Brad uses as an example, teachers are then challenged by their school Principals to produce a curriculum unit (or artefact) that embeds Web 2.0 into it, therefore using, refining and sharing their newly acquired skills. This is an excellent idea as it promotes sharing and learning as well as getting teachers comfortable with their skills and seeing how they can be used directly in the curriculum. So steps to doing this are:
Pick an ‘artefact’ such as a podcast that shows 21st Century skills.
Embed these skills into the curriculum using rubrics so students and teachers know what to expect.
Use online support such as Atomic learning (be aware that they are sponsors of Brad).
Reward teachers who support 21st Century learning (for example, Principals give teachers digital cameras etc. to use in curriculum development. Brad suggests that funds could be sourced from Regions/Districts.)
Principals should be leading the way. If teachers are expected to have blogs, then the Principal should have a blog and be reading the teachers’ blogs.
So if we want 21st Century students, we need to start with the teacher. Or if you listened to Brad’s presentations, start with the Principal. Or if you really listened, start with the Region/District. The question is, can we do this? Can we get our Regions to make this happen? Maybe it is already happening?
iWise (wisdom search engine) is a useful site. It is a repository for all number of quotes (some useful, others not). Users can search for quotes by entering name of person, partial quote or by using the categories section.
iWise homepage
Categories such as
books – reading
writers and writing
education
children
and many more will be useful to us as educators.
iWise quotes can be downloaded directly into Powerpoint or embedded in to Facebook, retweeted by Twitter users etc. iWise is also available as an iPhone app.
