edna.edu.au

LAMS Advanced Training Notes

• Best to use Firefox
• If you put in a stop point before the end then you can go into live edit and add activities
• You can drag your students forward
• Use the sequence settings to turn on IM
• Time graph can be useful but also doesn't take into account if
• You can export the whole file into a zip file you can read offline in your browser
• You can group students in random groups, by answers or results or by learner choice
• The forums are useful for a short smaller discussion.  What is the value over a chat? Time?
• Use the 'arrange activities' option to get students back on the task of designing and off trying to rearrange the icons
• To ensure you have a final product for assessment purposes make sure you tick 'lock when finished''
• Conditional branching - you can do all kind of tricky things to assess what is happening in the learning and then leading students down different paths depending on needs
• Optional sequences - allow you to give you students choice - you can do any one of these
• You can also put branches within optional sequences - but you'll need to drag them to the canvas first
• You can add up to 2 layers of branching
• Optional activities are great to give students more control over their learning
• Tip: repeat questions either as an extra noticeboard

Questions:

• Can you make a class/group that has more than one class?

Things to test out:

• Competency editor
• Support activities

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Tags: macict tips ideas technology notes lams
Posted at 12:04PM Jun 18, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[2]

Teaching Professional Learning LAMs sequence

Ideas from the workshop:

• How can you have a resource and chat about it?  Perhaps you have to manually put the resource in the chat.
• Gates can be unclear - teaching goes quickly and unless you really need it a gate can confuse people.  Make sure you need them to stop and all start the next activity together.
  
• Should you be expecting to edit the sequence on the fly - sometimes discussions go longer - shorter etc
• It would be good to spend more time on the creation and reflection tasks.
• Probably think about pre and post face to face session tasks.  This would tie the learning experience into the concrete/real world experience.
• It would be good to have time to reflect on our own digital literacy.  For example individuals used the chat area pretty extensively during the expert sessions.  How did they use it?  What did they read?  When did they decide not to chat?
  
• How would you organise virtual conference attendees into the session?
  

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Tags: technology macict tools lams
Posted at 04:03PM Apr 30, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Climate Change Enquiry Based Wiki

Step 1

Discuss the value of technology in the classroom, in pairs and then share with the group.  Instructor to add these ideas to the Participate Now! wikipage.  Discuss which aspect is most important?

Step 2

Half the participants watch this video on Web2.0 and this one on creativity.

Step 3

Discuss the a model for developing an Enquiry Based model of collaboration using a wiki.  This is where students collaborate with other students from schools to answer the same question.  In our case classrooms from all over the world.

Step 4

Join the wiki.  Learn how to edit a page, participate in a discussion and upload an image.

Step 5

Participants answer the question 'What is my role in affecting climate change?  Participants comment on each others answers.  Discuss the impact of this peer feedback.  Did it get you thinking?

Step 6

Participants look at the 'Expert Advice' resources.  Consider the source.  How does this affect the reliability of the information?  Can you upload your own material to these sites?  What are the terms and conditions?  Would you allow students to do it themselves or would you upload it for them?  Is there an alternative?

Step 7

Has your opinion changed through this little bit of research?  What did you learn?  How do you want to use your learning? You will now be creating a multimedia response.  We will look at examples of media and programs you use to create them and upload them.

Step 8

Participants choose one web 2.0 tool to communicate their ideas - this can be a blog post, upload an image to Flickr or upload a video to Vimeo, depending on your level of ICT experience you can simply upload a document to wikispaces.  You'll then link this final reflection to your the 'Looking To Our Future' page of the wiki.

Step 9

Discuss the value of collaborative technology in the classroom, in pairs and then share with the group.  Instructor to add these ideas to the Participate Now! wikipage.  Discuss which aspect is most important?

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Tags: technology technologyintegration teacherworkshops
Posted at 05:16PM Mar 23, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Video Uploading for Educational Purposes

With video you need to think about the type of community you are uploading your video to eg will your content be sitting next to inappropriate content and also privacy settings eg can you control who sees your video.

Vimeo - Allows you to mark a video as private but then share it via embedding or a link with anyone you choose - this is the best because it gives you the most control.  The community includes lots of video artists and cinemetographers.

Teachertube - has ads, can be slow.  Obviously the positive is that your video is sitting beside other educational content.

Blip.tv - you have to pay $9 a month to get more flexible privacy settings.  It has a very strong publishing system so users are checking out new content regularly.  This means the privacy setting is pretty important for us teachers.

I've only recently discovered these so I haven't investigated re: privacy settings etc.

KidsTube.com -  They say they are No.1 kids video sharing site.  They also have a 'Save The Planet' theme this weel.  The privacy setting is only on or off.

Ekidtv.com - seems interesting upload lots of different content.  However it's not specifically designed with educational purposes in mind.
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Tags: technologytools video technology
Posted at 11:31AM Mar 21, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[1]

Staff Training Week 6: Sportsmanship video in iMovie

Student Activity

This week will be learning to use iMovie in more detail.  The students will take two weeks to take digital images of each other on the sports field.  Select appropriate music for a sports movie.

1. Adding digital images of sporting moves to iMovie (we will use Boot Camp pictures)
   
2. Adding music to iMovie (sporting theme eg Eye of The Tiger :) & sound effects)
   
3. Add title slides to iMovie (actions & themes)
   
4. If we have time - taking a video of yourself explaining what sportsmanship is

If we cover most of the activities in Week 7 we can use some of the time in Week 8 to watch video of sports people.

Staff Workshop Activities

1. Watch iMovie overview movie
2. Open iMovie
3. Import images to iPhoto & edit as required
   
4. Add images to slide show
5. Add sound to slide show
6. Add title slides to show

Remember you can use the iMovie Help as required.

Lastly the final training session will be conducted in week 9 on the 25/26th March.  We will discuss the final project which will run week 9/10/11.  These weeks we will basically continue to review the iLife suite and include a few little tips on making the most of all the applications as we go.

Please let me know ASAP what you would like your topic to be.  Communicating something they have already learnt in images would be great.  This could be something like getting pictures of machines and labelling them.  Making a movie of a class excursion.  Making a movie of fun jokes could be a good way of getting students engaged.  Creating a digital story based on accelerated literacy would also be an option.

If you would like you can write your answer as a comment at the end of this post.

Thanks
Chet

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Tags: lesson plans technology iphoto activities imovie ict
Posted at 11:12PM Mar 02, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Collecting Resources in Diigo

I really prefer Diigo over Delicious as a place to save my bookmarks.  Because:

• You can right click to tag something
• You can search for a tag and then preview that website to see if it's suitable
• You can join and get regular updates from others that are tagging stuff eg Interactive Whiteboard Group
• You can then create an email or blog post of a collection of links
• You can annotate (I haven't yet)
• Lots of educators seem to use it
  

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Tags: diigo technology tools ideas
Posted at 11:25AM Feb 28, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

Macquarie ICT Innovation Centre

Today I went to a course at Macquarie ICT Innovation Centre.  They have lots of good resources on their wiki including links to useful tools and examples of student works.

Sketch Up

Classroom uses:

• Infants teachers could create manipulatives and environments for the kids to look at.  Eg 3D shapes.  Yr 2 and up could probably start using the mouse to move the objects around.
• Older students would probably learn the software themselves and build 3D objects and environments really easily.
• Integration with Google Earth means that you can walk around models of famous landmarks such as the Harbour Bridge, Twin Towers etc
• Student can imagine and build new products.

Challenges:

• Because I'm not used to looking at things in 3D and working with a 3D space on the computer I found this software much more challenging to learn than other software.  This was good - I put myself in the position of my students for a little bit.
  

Hot Potatoes & Moodle

Classroom uses

• I think the classroom uses for this kind of software are limitless.  You can add text, video, audio and pictures files.  Quizzes can be created for anything - fun, music, learning preferences, internet use, assessments etc etc
  
• For me part of the value of creating these quizzes is that you can create lots of fun activities but you can also capture and report on student responses. For this you'll need something like Moodle.
  

Challenges

• In order to capture student reponses you'll need to install/host Moodle.  This is a bit more technical than just installing a bit of software or using Flickr.  Macquaire ICT Innovation Centre can set you up with a test area or you can use the Moodleman Playpen.  This is good because you can start collecting data and then when you're convinced that Moodle is for your school and your confident with using it you can just transfer the data onto a school server installation.

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Tags: macquarie sketchup technology quiz innovation moodle tools google
Posted at 09:52PM Jan 21, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  | 

OLPC Orientation

Today was my first day trying out the One Laptop Per Child laptops.  Those little green and white ones with the airals that twist up.

• It opens from the bottom
• The applications are simple and very useful
• I still can't work out how to insert a picture into a document
• You connect to the internet via the Neighbourhood page - one of the first row of keys on the keyboard.  It can take multiple tries to connect to the internet.
  
• It can surf the internet like a regular computer.
• Video is ok.  The sound is pretty good but the actual video capture is not great.  Like skype but a little bit worse.
  

I think the best thing about them so far is that you can see this is the kind of computer that will get kids to work or to games they enjoy learning from rather than just playing with menus and trying to work out how to use the computer.

Activities we might start with:

• Tux Maths
• Tux Typing
• Video/audio/images/text diary

At this stage it looks like we will be doing a very small trial of one class (our classes are 8 including teacher).  The first phase we really be getting into routines and and observing how the students interact.  We'll also be getting familarised ourselves.  More updates to come.  Thanks Pia for allowing me to have this opportunity.

 

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Tags: ict technology olpc laptops
Posted at 08:52PM Jan 21, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[1]

Open Education Conference 2008

Even though I'm still learning about the technical aspects of the area of free and open source software I do know that the price is right.  And now it seems lots of the free and open source alternatives are also very competitive in terms of features.  At our school we are having an ongoing problem with Word and we are thinking of changing to Open Office to resolve the problem, it's free and very similar to word.  I learnt about this at the Aussie Chix conference.  The 'open' doesn't just apply to the software use but the also the flow of ideas, the variety of perspectives and the friendly faces.  It was a great time.

I'm now looking forward to the Open Education Conference due to be held in Nov.  It sounds like a great opportunity to hear how other teachers are using free and open source software in the classroom.  

It's up to everyone administrators, techheads and teachers to all look out for software our kids will love and attending a conference like this is a great way to get teaching ideas and talk to people about the things they are doing in their classrooms and professions.  More information about free and open source software is available on the Open Education Aus wiki including links to some open source software available for schools.

So sign-up to come along on to the conference day and if you've had any experience using free or open source software you might also want to give a short talk about those experiences.

You can also add links to open source software you've used successfully in the Open Source community of interest in me.edu.au or check out the plethora of information available by searching the resources on Edna.

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Tags: technology software open source conferences foss free software
Posted at 05:46PM Nov 04, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[2]

Christmas Carnival of Learning

I've been inspired by different online festivals such as the Student Blogging Challenge, the Comment Challenge, the Digital Storytelling Carnival and other educational community building activities to use an event to inspire sharing and communication.  Christmas is a great time for having fun, sharing and finding cool resources. Let's help each other and our students use Web2.0 tools and our online communities to really connect with each other this Christmas.

You can upload or share your links using your existing blog or you can create a teaching blog here at me.edu.au or a student blog using edublogs.  Then add your links to the Christmas Resources community.  By adding the Christmas community to your profile you'll be able to see whenever new things are adding just by looking at your profile.  You can also tag your Christmas stuff in delicious or Diigo with Christmas and add your feed to your me.edu.au profile.

Activity ideas:

• Create a Christmas animation that other students can use or copy from using GoAnimate Post links to any cool animations on your blog or in the Christmas community.
  
• Get students to create a Christmas game in Scratch
  
• Send a school in a different state a Christmas message using email
  
• Get your students to create an end of year video message about what they've learnt this year.  Upload it to Blip.tv or Teachertube and share it on your blog or in the Christmas community.
  
• Get your students to create a video to send overseas at Christmas telling them about Australia.  Upload it to Blip.tv or Teachertube and share it on your blog or in the Christmas community.
• Look at Christmas in other cultures using ...
• Participate in a Christmas web-quest
  
• Share songs you like to play at Christmas on your blog or make a playlist to embed in yoru blog
  
• Christmas craft ideas - upload your pictures to Flickr when completed.  You can also use flickr.com groups to get ideas.  Check out this Christmas Gift Project group.
  
• Helping other people at Christmas time.  Improve your vocabularly and give people rice at Christmas by playing this game.
  
• Write a Blog posts for Santa.  I might even set up a Santa blog to reply if there is some interest.
  
• Find favourite Christmas foods and recipe videos or post recipes on your blog.
• Find blogs or information about other things that are going on in the world at this time of the year.
  
• I'll be adding more to the Christmas community as I find things.
  

There are lots of other ways of sharing, posting ideas on Twitter, Edublogs or any of the other Educational communities around.  Or you can just add a comment on this blog.

Christmas is an awesome time for using technology that helps us communicate with each other let's really make the most of it.

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Tags: video blogs coi community christmas carnival ict integration showme sharing ideas technology learning resources collaboration edublogs
Posted at 01:05PM Oct 26, 2008 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[1]