Edutopia is produced by the George Lucas Education Foundation. Subscribing to the magazine puts it into your email each month. The site itself includes video clips, professional development and technology integration ideas which make it a great place to just wander around for a while.
As the staff and students of north American schools say goodbye to their long summer break, here is one young student who has been doing more than just hanging around the skateboard park over the hols. Keynote speaker, Dallas Sherman from the Charles Rice Learning Centre, held the attention of 20,000 delegates at the Dallas Convention for the start of the school year, speaking inspiringly about teachers, students and all staff working in schools. Take a few minutes to listen to this inspirational message from one so young and realise the importance of your role as an educator.
When you speak in terms of days, even as 5000 days, you realise how quickly the Web has changed our lives. This TED Talk video by philosopher and publisher, Kevin Kelly is a concise evaluation of the Web’s past and future entitled - Predicting the next 5,000 days of the Web.
He attempts to put a framework on its progress, explaining that in fact WE are the Web. He offers his definition of the Semantic Web and takes it further to suggest that the Web of 10 years+ will be a Web of Things; a smarter, personalised and ubiquitous ‘unified organism’. Take 15 minutes and watch the video.
Ideas building on ideas. This is a simple idea but so powerful and adaptable.
Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. This video is one of the examples of how it has has been adapted in various ways. Lauren O’Grady has taken the idea set up a project at http://6words.wikispaces.com where educators can collaborate to produce something about themselves and their role.
The project is to match six words to a picture you take yourself. She would like to see students have a go at this project and upload their work so that we can begin to gain insights to us as educators and more importantly insights into the students we teach. Some driving questions she suggests could be:
I am passionate about …
I think teachers should be
What excites you about teaching?
What excites you about learning?
A teaching moment I loved was?
My lightbulb moment came when…..
I get up in the morning because….
It has loads of possibilities for adaptation as a writing and personal development prompt.
Wired magazine article of November 2006 published Very short stories which is a sci fi bent on the idea. Great extended thinking idea.
Next Monday Linda Angeloni from State Library of Victoria is coming to Mildura to do a workshop on their wonderful Ergo resource. This is a great site to support individual students and teachers and I’m looking forward to going through it with her (Chaffey Secondary College - 4.00 pm) - just in case anyone does read this and has the opportunity to attend. To quote their site, features include:
comprehensive, easy-to-follow guides to research, writing and study skills
curriculum-focused primary and secondary source material, based on the Library’s collections (over 500 digitised resources)
section themes including crime, rights, landscape and colonial Melbourne
drop-down notes that help students to assess resources by highlighting issues such as bias, language use and historical context
video interviews with prominent authors, historians and artists
education resources focused on critical literacy and image or document study
tips on using the State Library.
Actually SLV is a fabulous source of primary documents that is often underutilised.
For Book Week - We’ll be promoting some of their support material for student reading enjoyment namely: Read Alert, and Inside a Dog. Or show you class the video of Ned Kelly’s armour. This site is a bit of a devil to get around but has a wealth of material. Check it out.
I’m finally getting around to posting one of the teacher library (library media specialist) sessions attended at NECC.
The NECC Remixing: Library 2.5 wiki has a UStream video link presentation of the live audio which is worth listening to. Joyce Valenza was particularly interesting as she is passionate about the need for school libraries to move with the new media and presents the message well. US schools are hampered, as many are here, with the lack of access to new media, blogging etc but she also speaks of the need to motivate library personnel to embrace the changing environment and really move forward.
Two presentations that impressed me as practical were those of Cathy Nelson who, like myself is passionate about RSS, and Anista Beaman who had some fantastic ideas for promoting and getting some excitement into the fiction collection. Simple ideas such as placing a list of website on the inside back cover of a novel, through to developing Photostory movies and lists of songs she listens to when reading a particular book. Fun stuff that works.
This image is from the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book Week ideas site. This year’s date is 16-22 August. Although the primary schools make a big deal of this week, and we’re secondary, I like to use it as an opportunity to focus on quality Australian fiction and the English teachers are very supportive.
As we incorporate a writing activity as well as introduce the novels, I’ve been wracking my brain to come up with something that would also be a technology integration activity. With only one lesson per class this is a bit of a challenge. Finally came up with the idea of using a wiki to host a series of continuing stories.
I’ve used the ideas from the Thinkquest site, Story Starters - thanks to Bernie Trilling of Oracle who gave us an insight into this resouce during our recent ACCE study tour.
Students from each class will have the option of working individually or in pairs and will add to one of the twenty optional stories. At the end of Book Week they’ll be promoted to the school community for voting. After this initial intro, I’d like to consider putting it out into the ‘real world’ for general access - we’ll see how we go with this one. Some people are going with an Olympic theme this year which is a good idea, might incorporate some starters that will enable that direction also. I enjoy Book Week.
The social bookmarking site Del.icio.us has had an overhaul to become a whole lot sleeker and easier to operate, plus the URL has lost the extra full stopsto become - http://delicious.com. As one of my most useful tools, it’s good to see this revamp. Changes are detailed on the site and include clearer navigation and easier linking to other people’s tags. See the Educause leaflet 7 things you should know about social bookmarking if you need to be convinced about the value of this tool. This is also a handy leaflet to use for staff training.
The RSS option on Delicious is also exceptionally useful, especially as a tool for librarians and students. In subscribing to the bookmarks of people who share your interests through the Google Reader aggregator or similar, it’s possible to keep track of what others are bookmarking. Not sure about RSS? Have a look at the recent article 100 cool things you can do with RSS by Alisa Miller for ideas and Linking for Learning for further details.
Judging by the interested discussions at NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) recently, many teachers will be embarking on collaborative projects as a dimension of authentic learning that’s both relevant and engaging.
It’s time then to get prepared for the 2008 OZ-Teachernet Land Yachts Project. This is a project ‘where students collaboratively build small wheeled vehicles from recycled materials. These are powered by an electric fan and are measured by how far they travel and the time it takes.’ Available to all students, both Australian and international, it’s also an opportunity for pre-service teachers to gain experience of collaborative learning.
The ePals Conference held 15 July is also worth a check. Information from this event held in conjunction with Alan November’s Building Learning Communities conference is accessible from the site but also, most conveniently via Kevin Honeycutt’s podcast interviews - download via iTunes.
A stack of other collaborative projects available in our own Australian backyard are also listed on the Victorian Education Channel - Global Projects page. These projects range from the simple to the more complex and all achieve the purpose of providing students a global perspective to their learning. They provide opportunities for blogging and the effective use of email for communication as well as understanding one’s place in the world. Meaningful learning opportunities.
minds, fast times: the 21st century digital learner good reading by Marc Prensky who is famous for his promotion of ‘games as devices for learning’ and was published in the June 2008 edition of Edutopia magazine.
While you’re at it - check out Sydney’s 
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