Online professional learning services
“It’s a fabulous course… [but] not all kids are psychologically equipped to do the IB.” So says Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Adolescent psychologist and author of Surviving Adolescents: The must-have manual for all parents.
Hear what Carr-Gregg, and our own Greg Valentine (IB Australasian representative), have to say further about the Diploma Programme’s success in Australia, via this audio link on ABC National Radio’s Edpod site.
(Thanks, Sandy)
Just a reminder re. the K-12 online conference starting in just over a couple of weeks time.
From their about page:
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone.
There are, no doubt, many people reading this blog who still save their bookmarks (or links to their favourite websites) inside their browser. If you’re one of them, then this series of posts is for you.
Social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us and mag.nolia, are designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. This has several advantages:
If this appeals, then your first step is to set up an account on one of the social bookmarking sites mentioned above. Most people I know, and work with, use del.icio.us (soon to be renamed delicious without the stops - see an earlier post), so start there if you like. It’s by far the most popular and you can add me and other IB colleagues to your network (just type in sivadeel at the appropriate prompt) and see what we have to share.
Make sure you set up the Tag browser button - you’ll be prompted to do this - and away you go.
Good luck and watch for Part 2 coming soon. Your journey has just begun.
It’s probably time for a few How-Tos on some key Web 2.0 tools for education.
The first is Really Simple Syndication or RSS.
As many education bloggers have already written about this extraordinarily powerful tool, it’s probably best if I just link to some of the better explanations.
Here’s the first from Infinite Thinking Machine. It’s a great place to start before attempting to set up an aggregator (don’t worry, this term will become clearer as you read the post).
When you’re ready, try this audio/visual how-to from Whereisab? It’s an explanation of how to set up RSS feeds using Netvibes - an aggregator a few of us use in OPLS. Others are using Google Reader, so have a look at this one too.
Let us know how you get on via the comments facility.
Good luck, L.
“Technology is not about productivity”
“Technology is about motivation”
“Don’t consider your own curriculum without first looking at what others are doing around the world”
Three messages from Stephen Heppell to help us frame our understanding of educational technology and curriculum design.
Here he talks to Connected Magazine’s Nicola More about bringing his unique vision of learning to Scotland:
We knew it would only be a matter of time before the IB learning community began to inhabit media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Here are two examples we’ve come across recently - both from YouTube.
The first is a PYP exhibition sample, contributed by students and teachers at the International School of Tianjin, China.
The second example is from a TOK student in the Diploma Programme. We don’t know who he is or where he’s from, as there are no end credits, but we think you’ll enjoy it nevertheless:
With either video, we make no claims as to their adherence to programme requirements. What we do want to do, though, is use them to highlight a number of important issues.
The first is that they’re two examples of students using new technologies to get a message across and show evidence of learning. This is something we will need to come to terms with as a curriculum and assessment authority, and particularly as an awarding body, in the future. Recognising student learning, when evidence of it is so dispersed on the web, will be a real challenge for us in the years ahead.
The second is that they’re both examples of resources which can help teachers in furthering their understanding of the programmes. Discussions around what’s good, and not so good, about them are invaluable for teachers as they attempt to come to terms with programme requirements and continuously improve their practice.
Thirdly, and as a corollary of the above two points, where these examples are located will increasingly be irrelevant. What is important is how we describe them (ie what metadata will we need to establish and use in order to tag these resources?) and how we link to them (ie how can we make use of the semantic web to go beyond a closed teacher resource exchange, such as that on the OCC?)
Something to think about anyway.
Earlier this year, Paul Fairbrother and I presented at a couple of IB conferences on the use of emerging social media tools in education.
In preparing for these presentations we constructed a wiki using wikispaces. There are many other platforms, including mediawiki (the software originally written for wikipedia) and wetpaint, but this one appealed because of its simplicity and the fact that at the time they were giving away a number of free wikispaces to schools.
Initially, the intention was to keep the wiki to ourselves, but it soon became clear that others would benefit from having access, in order to find more examples of what we were talking about in the presentations themselves. So we decided to release it; first to conference participants, and now to readers of this blog.
Wherever possible, we have tried to give examples from IB schools, but occasionally we’ve had to go beyond this community in order to illustrate certain tools or concepts that aren’t yet fully established. As you can imagine, so much of what we refer to changes so quickly.
So, here it is: Web 2.0 on wikispaces.
Please feel to contribute your own examples and add further topics where appropriate - there is so much more to discuss.
Over the past couple of years I’ve come across some really interesting uses of Flickr (an online photo-sharing site that’s been going since Feb 2004) in the classroom. What I thought I’d do is share some of them with you in the hope that these examples will be shared with your own learning communities.
Let’s start with some favourites:
Hope you find them useful.
PS I found this through a search on trigonometry…
I’ve just seen some screen grabs of the new version of del.icio.us. Techcrunch are blogging about it here and the official preview site is here (invite only).
Upon first glance it looks good. Much cleaner interface and some interesting new features:
It’s surprising just how many people I’ve met recently who still haven’t seen the Machine is Us and Did you know? videos. So here they are. Enjoy!
Please feel free to comment.
