OPLS blog

In case you don’t know, wikispaces are giving away an additional 250,000 wikis to teachers and schools (no ads, greater administrative rights etc).

Grab yours from here now.

A colleague (thanks Tim) recently alerted me to an interesting wiki Mike Shaw has created for the IB’s Learner Profile. Mike has linked the profile’s attributes with a series of ICT challenges for teacher professional development, eg risk-takers and the use of mobile phones in the classroom.

I particularly liked the links Mike has made with online translators and the attribute: Communicators. Not as straight forward as it sounds.

Take a look here when you have time and try some of the challenges for yourself.

Good work, Mike. Well done.

Barbara Stefanics, an ITGS teacher at Vienna International School, recently alerted me to a project her students are involved in with a number of their peers from Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia (US) and the Qatar Academy.

It’s called Digiteen and is a collaborative wiki project looking at Digital citizenship, which they define as “knowing how to behave appropriately and responsibly with regard to technology use”.

It involves approximately 50 students, who have contributed new media resources and their own thoughts around 9 topics identified by Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey in their book, Digital Citizenship in Schools.

The students have collected together some great material and I encourage you to have a look some time and let them know what you think. I particularly like the Guidelines for Teens section at the bottom of each page.

If you’re reading this, Barbara, please pass on my congratulations to the students and colleagues for such an excellent initiative.  I have a couple of related questions for you though. I was looking to see what the students thought of the Creative Commons movement, but couldn’t find any reference to it (unless I overlooked it, for which I apologise). But, what do you all think about Creative Commons and its tools for licensing intellectual property and their derivatives? Do you think the tools help digital citizens become more responsible in their use/sharing/remixing of content published by others? Is it something you would consider using yourselves in a blog or wiki for example? I’d love to know what you think.

Not sure if this is a trend that has caught on in other countries, but there has been a spate of television programmes over the past few years in the UK devoted to lists. Top 100 films, Top 100 Britons, Top 100 children’s programmes, etc, ad infinitum.

I blame Nick Hornby, of course, and his first novel, High Fidelity (1995), in which the owner of a record shop, Robert, and his two employees, Dick and Barry, create all manner of lists to help them get through the day. Memorable examples include “Top 5 musical crimes committed by Stevie Wonder in the 70s and 80s”, or “Top 5 songs about death”.

Well, I don’t blame him really, since it was a novel idea at the time and, as Heppell says, one of the true measures of creativity and ingenuity is the extent to which it is copied by others.

I doubt, though, if the compilers of this latest list I’ve come across were thinking of Nick Hornby when they created the Top 100 tools for learning - a list generated from 158 learning professionals (from education and workplace learning) who shared their top 10 tools for both their own personal learning/productivity and for creating learning.

I think the list is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly it has a browser, Firefox, in the top 2. I’m assuming, here, it is more to do with the plethora of add-ons and extensions available and the fact that it is making significant advances in terms of discoverability.

Secondly, Microsoft Word has fallen from 10th position last year to joint 22nd in 2008. With the growth of Google Docs, Zoho and wikis etc, I wouldn’t mind betting Word falls out of the top 50 completely this time next year.

Thirdly, I was struck by the number of wikis in the top 50 (wikispaces, PBwiki and WetPaint) and certainly from my own experience, I would see these moving up the list next year, with Google Sites (formerly know as JotSpot) perhaps making an appearance too.

I encourage you to look at the list when you have time. There are some good pointers and it was good to see an IB teacher as one of the contributors, namely Richard Allaway, head of Geography at the International School of Toulouse in France.  Richard has been a leading light in terms of using Web 2.0 technologies to support teaching and learning, and collaborated with Natasha Lardner and Geography Jim on this wiki development in Wikispaces (something we blogged about here).  He’s worth following.

Oh, and for those who don’t have time to look but are curious as to what came out at No.1…

…it was del.icio.us.

Recently, I was alerted to an initiative by some of our diploma geography teachers - a subject-based wiki designed to support the teaching and learning of the current syllabus (guide or specification).

It’s another great example of how tools like wikis can harness the collective intelligence of the IB teaching community and an important pointer for future OCC development.

They’ve used wikispaces but it could easily have been set up on any other wiki platform.

Have a look for yourselves here: IBgeog Wiki.  Great stuff!