OPLS blog

Clare recently alerted me to this screen sharing application: Yuuguu.

Great for collaboration and demonstration - although it does involve a download.

Just when we thought we wouldn’t need to download anything ever again.

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:

• First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere in the world, no matter whether you’re at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend’s computer.
• Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, colleagues, and even people you don’t know (more on this later) can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark them as private - only viewable by you - if you like.)
• Third, you can describe them with any words (tags) that make sense to you.  For example, you might want to save your bookmark to the Amazon online bookstore with words such as books, CDs, DVDs, wishlist, reviews etc, in fact anything, as long as they have a meaning for you.  Metaphorically, it’s like having a pair of socks in more than one drawer.

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.

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:

• Great overview - using Flickr to describe Flickr
• Art history - using the notes facility on Flickr
• Language teaching using six-picture story sets - you’ll see the first photo in a series of six. View the full stream on the right of the page and read the descriptions underneath to help the story unfold. Great way to teach kids planning (in this case, story-boarding) and playing with language. Note how peer-review can be encouraged through use of the comments facility.
• Literature studies - using artefacts to help understanding of themes, plot etc in novels.
• Creating a museum - using Flickr as a navigational tool for classroom displays that demonstrate learning outcomes.
• Project-based learning group on Flickr
• Classroom International on Flickr
• Classroom displays group - well worth viewing as a photo-stream, just for ideas and inspiration.

Hope you find them useful.

PS I found this through a search on trigonometry…