Edubeacon

Posted on December 7, 2009 by slav

Camilla Elliott is a real learning leader. Her blog, Edubeacon has been informing readers for six years now, which is an amazingly long time in the relatively new world of Web 2.0. Camilla explains more about Edubeacon:

Why do we blog? I’ve been blogging at Edubeacon.com since January 2004. The site has gone through a name change and a platform change (starting on Blogger, then migrating to WordPress) but the purpose remains the same. It is a place for reflection; for storing resources with explanatory notes and for sharing with others. Most bloggers will give you the same answer.

‘Edubeacon’ is an extension of my website ‘Linking for Learning’ (L4L), which began life in about 1997 as ‘Staying Connected’ – an accessible place to store study resources. L4L needs some therapy but is a patient companion. I use it to link to my conference presentations and professional writing, thereby saving the odd tree or two and the photocopying budget. It is also an accessible site for beginners seeking resources of relevance to Australian educators.

Blogs, wikis, personal websites and collaborative spaces, reflect the open and sharing nature of the Internet and Web 2.0 resources in particular. Edubeacon serves as one of the cogs in my Personal Learning Network. It provides opportunities for the occasional conversation and has had various changes of pace over the years depending on life’s pressures.

Building a Personal Learning Network is an essential professional activity in this time of constant change. It’s a journey on which we build knowledge, collegiality and understanding with a variety of companions. Blogging on Edubeacon is part of my meandering learning journey.

Thank you Camilla for sharing your learning journey with the readers of Bright Ideas. Edubeacon really is a beacon of blogs; a shining light on technology and education that is thoughtfully researched and written.

Networked Schools – Classrooms Using New Technologies to Connect and Collaborate

Posted on August 7, 2009 by slav

Hear how two teachers use a variety of online environments to connect students in rural and remote schools with experienced educators.

Where: Online in Elluminate. You don’t need to leave your desk – the program comes to you.
Sign up at: http://eventactions.com/ea.aspx?ea=Rsvp&guid=2a3a72ee67194e03b3c1138c9645e2a9

When: Thursday 20 August at 4pm

Who:
Gary Schultz is a teacher of 25 years. With a career path through Physical Education, Science, Information Technology and Work Education, to developing Dimboola Memorial Secondary College teachers integration of ICT into classroom practice. Gary was awarded the 2008 Most Outstanding Secondary Teacher of the year for his work in changing the ICT culture of the college. He is currently working at the Horsham Regional Office in the position of Wimmera Virtual School Project Officer.

The Wimmera Virtual School project is a pilot project that encompasses eleven secondary colleges around the Wimmera area in the North West of Victoria. The project is attempting to address disadvantage in rural and remote schools by developing a Blended Learning model of provision. Currently there are eight VCE subjects being provided that include the use of video conferencing, online content, digital recorded content and also face-to-face teaching.

and

Adrian Camm is the Head of Mathematics at McGuire College and has responsibility for senior Mathematics and Physics. He is now taking a leadership role in promoting effective use of emerging technologies across all faculty areas. Adrian is also a member of the Powerful Learning Practice International Cohort where he engages with international educators on 21st century learning.

Adrian has created a VCE Physics Unit 3&4 Virtual Learning Community that links students across the state of Victoria to experienced educators and textbook authors. Come and learn how the initiative created opportunities for students to interact with each other, educators and knowledgeable adults in authentic learning experiences.

For more information see: http://knowledgebank.global2.vic.edu.au/2009/08/03/networked-schools-two-great-stories-from-classrooms-using-new-technologies-to-connect-collaborate/

Thanks to Tamara Carpenter from KnowledgeBank for the above text.

Archivd

Posted on July 6, 2009 by slav

Archivd is a collaborative research tool that enables users to “automatically extract images, videos, phone numbers, emails, mailing addresses, prices. Group pages by project and subject. Search the full text of every page and custom field. Research with and get feedback from your coworkers.”

: Homepage

It provides a central space for people with common interests, be they colleagues or not, to save, comment on and extract information from web pages, quickly and easily. Students working in groups on research projects could use this tool and as Archivd is available in English, French and Spanish, it could be useful for LOTE teachers and classes.

FAQs explain more and here is a video demonstration of how Archivd can be used:

The people from Archivd have also provided an example of a saved search:

: Example page

There is a trial version of Archivd for anyone who wants to test it out without signing up. Archivd is free, but also has premium services that do cost.

Webspiration

Posted on June 5, 2009 by slav

Do you remember Inspiration? The mind mapping tool on CD that was available for purchase in the late 1990s has now been replaced by Webspiration. A mind mapping tool on steroids, Webspiration is a free online collaborative tool that can lead students to plan and share ideas.

: Introducing Webspiration

The Webspiration website provides more information:

Create Diagrams and Think Visually

Use Webspiration’s diagramming environment to create bubble diagrams, flow charts, concept maps, process flows and other visual representations that stimulate and reflect your thinking. With Webspiration, you focus on developing and connecting ideas, not the drawing.

Outline and Structure Ideas and Information

With Webspiration’s powerful outlining capabilities, you can take notes, organize work and expand ideas fluidly to develop your writing into plans, study guides, papers, reports, and other more comprehensive documents.

Collaborate and Share

Webspiration makes it easy to collaborate and share documents by simply sending an invite. Everyone works on the same document, contributing, posting comments, and viewing changes. Webspiration is ideal for team projects, study groups, reviewing and commenting on documents and co-authoring materials.

Anytime and Anywhere

Store and access documents online without discs, drives or email. Work at home, a friend’s house, the library, your office, or the local coffee shop. Webspiration and your documents are available anywhere you have access to the internet.

Educators and administrators should also find Webspiration useful for project management. We can all learn more about how we think and how we plan as well as seeking feedback from our peers. Webspiration is a tool that enables all of these.

Thanks to the amazing Marco Torres for sharing this excellent tool.

Dimdim

Posted on April 22, 2009 by slav

Dimdim is a free web conferencing service where users can communicate quckly and effectively.

: Dimdim home

The Dimdim website says that its features are:

It’s Easy, Open & Affordable
No Install to Host/Join meetings
Easy Share Screens & Webpages
Audio & Video Conferencing
Present PowerPoint and PDFs
Private & Public Chat
Whiteboard & Annotations
Record and Playback Meetings
Open Source and open APIs

As with many of the Web 2.0 tools now available, there is the option to upgrade membership from free, basic account to a premium paid account. The fee structure is as follows:

Anyone wanting to set up a web conference either for professional development or for schools to communicate and work collaboratively, the Dimdim free account gives users the opportunity to do this.

GiggleIT Project

Posted on February 14, 2009 by slav

The International Association of School Librarianship has created an innovative and exciting project, GiggleIT.

GiggleIT home

From the IASL’s media release:

The GiggleIT Project is a global collaborative publishing project hosted by the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL), working in partnership with the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL).
Designed to help children around the world improve their English language literacy skills, the GiggleIT Project encourages students ages 10-14 to contribute their writings to an online book (eBook) celebrating stories and humour from their culture. Humour, just like tragedy, is a vehicle that can be used to promote cross-cultural understandings and collaboration for children and young adults around the world. Children’s work will be published internationally and will identify their culture through literature.
Written by children for children, the eBook will contain children’s stories, jokes and poetry. The project will inspire children to be creative and make cross-cultural connections with other children from around the world as they learn about humour from other countries, while improving their literacy skills.
A range of competitions, and teaching and learning packages, will motivate and stimulate reading and writing skills whilst supporting the teaching and learning with examples and worksheets which can be downloaded into handouts for the class.

Registration is free. GiggleIT sounds like a fantastic way for students to improve their literacy, have fun and collaborate with other students.

Elluminate

Posted on January 8, 2009 by slav

Elluminate is an online ‘lecture capture’ application that is currently available free of charge to all Victorian educators (State, Independent and Catholic schools are all included) through the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development’s Knowledge Bank.

Elluminate lets people communicate in real time via their Internet connection. People who schedule an Elluminate session meet in a ‘room’. They are able to speak to each other via a headset with microphone, use the chat function, raise their hand to ask a question, draw on a whiteboard amongst other things. The moderator or person running the session is able to upload powerpoint style slides to give the session a focus. At the end, sessions can be saved and archived for access at a later time.

Once Elluminate is installed via the Knowledge Bank page, users are able to access demonstrations, archived sessions and participate in online training sessions. There are two sessions on how to use Elluminate coming up in the next few weeks; Tuesday 13th January at 3.30pm and Tuesday 27th January at 3.30pm. To participate in these very useful sessions, click on the date/s above to register. (Please be aware that you will need a headset with microphone and have downloaded Elluminate prior to the session.) Once users are confident using Elluminate, rooms can be booked to run your own online sessions.

A view of an Elluminate room

Elluminate has so many possibilities in regard to educational applications; staff can capture professional development sessions or staff meetings for part-timers or those who are absent. Those schools who find attending professional development sessions difficult due to distance or funding can access Elluminate sessions easily and for free. And archived sessions mean that you can revisit a session at anytime. Elluminate also has uses to work with students in a virtual enviroment. Once you become confident using Elluminate, the rest is up to your imagination.

For examples of previous Elluminate sessions, click here. A previous Bright Ideas post on Professor Stephen Heppell linked to his Knowledge Bank visit. To access it, click here.

For more information on Elluminate, see the Knowledge Bank Elluminate site or contact:

Tamara Carpenter
Senior Project Officer
Knowledge Bank Online Events
Innovation and Next Practice Division
Office for Policy, Research and Innovation
Department of Education and Early Childhood Development

Ph. 03 9637 3010
carpenter.tamara.c@edumail.vic.gov.au

If you do use Elluminate, please leave a comment to let everyone know what you think of it and how you used it in your school.

Thanks to Tamara for her assistance.

Scribd

Posted on January 3, 2009 by slav

Sribd is an interesting resource for would-be authors; indeed anyone who is interested in seeking an audience for their work should consider signing up to Scribd.

Scribd is a site where all kinds of documents can be uploaded and shared with either the general public or selected people through assigning them to groups (ideal for schools as these documents are accessible only to those invited to the group). Writers can receive feedback from readers and threaded discussions are available to both readers and writers, so Scribd makes it is easy for students to collaborate with others.

Documents uploaded to Scribd can be converted to a file called ‘ipaper’. ipaper files can then be easily embedded into blogs or websites; rather like the way YouTube videos can be embedded.

Scribd supports a number of document types such as

Adobe PDF (.pdf)
Adobe PostScript (.ps)
Microsoft Word (.doc/ .docx)
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt/.pps/.pptx)
Microsoft Excel (.xls/.xlsx)
OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
All OpenDocument formats
Plain text (.txt)
Rich text format (.rtf)

so any or all of these document types can be uploaded. Tags and categories can be assigned to uploaded documents, and folders can be used to keep documents organised.

Scribd has an extensive FAQ sheet, which is sure to answer any questions that you have and several that you haven’t thought of!

As well as providing an instant audience for writers, there is a vast library of documents for members to read and review if they wish. Once any documents that are deemed to be open or available to the general public, they become searchable in Google and other search engines. Scribd also supports numerous languages, so LOTE classes are well catered for.

Just a note of caution, there may be some documents on Scribd that are inappropriate for school age students. As with any Web 2.0 site that the general public has access to, there are items that as educators, we would rather our students not see. You can flag any documents as inappropriate if you are concerned.

Scribd is an excellent resource for English classes, especially where students wish to seek feedback from an audience other than their teacher.

Seesmic

Posted on December 5, 2008 by slav

Seesmic is a video blogging site that is currently in the developmental stage. Users are able to start their own conversation by posting their own videos from their desktop, webcam, mobile phone or social networking URL. Or you can reply to a conversation that is already in progress.

: Seesmic homepage

Although all videos are public at the moment, the creation of groups, where only invited users can see and post replies to videos, should be coming soon. That would revolutionise the use of Seesmic for school use. Imagine the possibilities. Online video conversations with sister schools overseas could lead to collaborative international projects. Students would feel more connected to those from other schools if they could see and hear them. If you would like to know when this feature will be available, you can:

sign up to Seesmic
go to the questions page
type in the word ‘private’
click on the question mark
click on ‘I have this problem too’
enter your login details

When the ability to use groups/private videos becomes available, you will be emailed by Seesmic. Seesmic is being developed by Loic Le Meur, who has been the Internet advisory to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

School Library Association of Victoria

Tag Archives: Collaboration