Tag Archives: Web2.0

Education, play, Web 2.0

Back to Wordle

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Further to my previous posts about Wordle (here, here, and here), I discovered in Box of Tricks excellent uses of Wordle by different teachers. One teacher used Wordle for a pre-reading strategy, and made two wordles from two different newspaper articles on the theme they were studying. Each student, armed with dictionaries, had to guess the gist of one of the two, then explain to the other student what they thought the article was about. The teacher supplemented this with further vocabulary discussion, displaying the Wordle on the interactive whiteboard. Finally, students looked at the full-text articles. The teacher saw the value of Wordle, ‘not only as a text analysis tool, but also as a tool to elicit speaking and creative writing’.

A class of 5-7 year olds used Wordle as a visual voting tool. They brainstormed a list of words following an excursion, then voted on the ones they felt were most significant. The size of the most popular words was very obvious in the Wordle.

Wordle has been discovered to be useful in different areas of the curriculum, eg. Visual art, Maths (representing data), English (vocabulary and spelling), brainstorming a topic or theme as an introduction or reflection tool, and eLearning/ICT (presenting information).

Some excellent pedagogical reasons for using Wordle were raised:
– Wordle’s visual attractiveness can make a dull text analysis task more attractive, motivating students to complete the task;
– By capturing the gist of a text, it helps pupils focus on the vocabulary, register and grammar in a simple and engaging way;
– its electronic form enables it to be adapted to different media, eg. paper, blogs, interactive whiteboards, etc.

Nick Peachey, on his blog, outlined how Wordle is useful for language teachers:
Revision of texts: students could look at the Wordle and try to remember and reconstruct the text;
Students can make predictions based on the Wordle of the text they are about to study; they could check the meaning of vocabulary before reading the text;
a Wordle could be a prompt for reconstruction of a dialogue;
Students could examine a Wordle made from a short poem, and write a poem of their own from the Wordle, then compare their poem with the original;
A Wordle could be made from different text genres, and students could guess the genre and give reasons for their decision;
Wordles could be made from different poems, and students could guess the poet from the Wordle;
Students could make Wordles from a text they write introducing themselves to the class; these could be displayed, and students could try to guess the person from the Wordle; or they could exchange Wordles and use them to introduce each other;
A research topic could be introduced by a Wordle, and students’ pre-knowledge could be tested by asking how they think the word is related to the topic; after further research is carried out, the Wordle could be used as a prompt for an oral presentation;
Wordles based on topics to be studied could be displayed at home for revision of vocabulary;

Above all, most teachers really appreciated the simplicity and versatility of Wordle. I’m amazed at the number of pedagogical uses people have discovered for this simple, attractive tool.

Education, flickr, Web 2.0

Blogging about blogging; and before you know it, I’m thinking about PLP

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What do young people think about blogging? Let’s have a look; here’s what one 18 year old has to say. This one happens to be my son, but I don’t think that prevents him from representing his generation:

‘People no longer are just able to blog, but blogging is increasingly becoming accepted as a legitimate medium of information; albeit quite different to others. At the cost of the credibility associated with major news services and other more traditional ways of getting our information, a whole new world is opened up- of personal opinion, a perspective into the lives and experiences of others and original creativity. When subjective experience and opinion is sought over objective fact, blogging becomes a medium very difficult to beat.’

Here’s the recognition of the value of the input, not of academics or editors, but of people like any other people, all contributing to whatever kind of information is important to them. Here’s a preference for what people have to say about something, for collective advice by people who care about their interests.

Technical applications are seen as enabling more direct ways of communicating, showing, connecting.

‘Photographers can take photos of their home city or holidays and post them on Flickr, along with geotags (so that people may see exactly where the photos were taken); performing artists can upload audio or video recordings of themselves on services such as Youtube to increase their exposure; political commentators can by series of hyperlinks to other blogs and news services critically analyse current affairs and provide explanations, arguments and challenges to what is reported in traditional established media. All of these forms of expression can be directly embedded into blogs, providing an individual with a space in which to express themselves- in the case of writers, musicians, etc…, to publish their work for free (or close to it)!’

All in all, there’s a noticeable excitement about the possibilities and the connectedness; about the possibilities for the individual’s self-expression. But could you imagine a similar passion from a young person if asked to talk about the possibilities in school education? What do you think? Are students encouraged to become involved in socialnetworking for learning? Are they encouraged to use Web2.0 applications to present their ideas and opinions? What do you think?

With this in mind, I’m thinking ahead to my school’s involvement with the Powerful Learning Practice program, and looking forward to making a difference to the mindset and teaching habits of teachers (including my own). Jenny Luca posts about PLP from the Learning 2.008 Edubloggercon conference in Shanghai:

‘Why do I feel alright about where we are? Because we are at least being proactive and have ourselves involved in Powerful Learning Practice . We are going to be immersing our staff in a learning community, and community is going to be what drives change. It’s not a discussion about the latest Macbook Pro that is important. It is a discussion about the connective relationships our students can form and learn from that is going to be the tipping point for many of our schools.’

‘Connective relationships’ – this is what it’s about. Information becomes meaningful through our relationships with people. Learning becomes meaningful through connective relationships.

If you’d like to read more of the authentic, passionate literacy that springs from real interest and involvement, read the rest of this new blog.

Web 2.0

Deletionpedia

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Paul Stewart (thanks Paul) put me onto Deletionpedia, a wonderfully annihilistic-sounding encyclopedia. Rhonda Powling has blogged about Veropedia, a verified Wikipedia, so I thought it would be interesting to check out Deletionpedia, an archive of more than 63,000 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia. As with histories within any wikis, it’s interesting to see changes made, and you can browse through different deletions, such as pages deleted after more than 1000 days on Wikipedia; pages deleted more than 200 times; pages deleted this month, etc. The process of editing becomes transparent. Deletionpedia also provides ‘page of the month’, ‘list of the month’, and ‘category of the month’.

Did you know that Wikipedia allowed reuse of its content, including pages it has deleted, using the GNU Free Documentation License? To comply with this license, Wikipedia rescues the full edit history of its pages. Wikipedia splits up the archive into ‘we don’t like’ and ‘we do like’. And so, ‘we don’t like’ copyright violations, serious libel problems or offensive material; and ‘we do like’ interesting or quirky pages, including creative writing, opinions and original research (which do not belong in a wiki).’

All of this works by automated script following a Wikipedia user tagging something as appropriate for deletion. The tagged pages are uploaded to a temporary store; the deletion log is checked and the deleted pages are uploaded from the temporary store to Deletionpedia. A forthcoming feature is the addition of a rating system for easy identification of interesting pages.

What wonderful -Pedias await us in the future?

Education, Teacher librarians, technology, Web 2.0

ePals – connecting globally

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I was talking to one of our Indonesian teachers, and he asked about the possibility of connecting his class to one in Indonesia. At a recent SLAV PD, Camilla Elliott suggested ePals. It’s a secure place for teachers to connect their students to classrooms around the world, taking advantage of a cultural exchange far beyond the limits of the textbook. You can connect with classrooms either through the forum on the project index page or the search box on ePals’ home page. Through ‘classroom match’ I typed in ‘Indonesia’ and the age range of the students. There were many results such as this one:

I’m an English teacher at one of the middle school in Padang West Sumatra Indonesia. Our first language is Indonesia and Minangkabau but we learn English as our foreign language. My students are very interested in English and want to…

ePals is supported by project ideas and forums, eg. The way we are:

What makes me who I am? In this project, students will engage in a collaborative learning experience. Through email exchanges, students learn about the daily lives, cultures, climates and geography of children who live in other regions of the world.

The project structure includes essential questions, objectives and culminating activity. The 4-part project elements include pre-activity prior knowledge and context-building questions, an exchange of 4 emails with ePals, a presentation of information about ePals’ countries, and a reflection/assessment activity. Each of these steps is well supported for teachers with detailed suggestions, estimated time taken and links to resources. In the culminating activity, students create digital presentations about themselves and their ePals which reflect their newly found cultural knowledge.

There’s a project index
including topics such as The way we were; global warming; habitats; maps; natural disasters; water. Links to information are supported by National Geographic. The home page also includes featured teacher, video and forum, and top 10 ePals activities. There’s a running list of new classrooms that have joined, showing their flag for easy identification.

It’s a great way to use blogging for authentic communication and global connection, be involved in collaborative projects, use technology and build literacies. And it’s safe and protected by blocking spam, pornography and offensive language, and managed by teachers and administrators.

Education, Teacher librarians, Web 2.0

21st century learning

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‘Our students are changing … but schools are not.’
This is a leitmotif of a professional development program, Powerful Learning Practice (PLP) run by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson, which will run in Australia soon, and in which our school has the privilege of participating.

As stated on the PLP website, ‘Powerful Learning Practice offers a unique opportunity for educators to participate in a long-term, job-embedded professional development program that immerses them in 21st Century learning environments. The PLP model is currently enabling hundreds of educators around the country to experience the transformative potential of social Web tools to build global learning communities and re-envision their own personal learning practice’.

As a result of our participation in the Web2.0 program through School Library Association of Victoria, we were invited by Jenny Luca, who is organising the Australian contingent of the 100 educator-strong global cohort , to join the 7 or 8 Australian teams of 5 educators per school. We almost jumped for joy, but remembered our respectable standing and did some mental leaps instead. After all, how long had we been passionate about transformative learning environments, recognising the potential of emerging web technologies in engaging students and creating global learning communities? And how difficult it is to create a voice that is heard above the clatter of the old school machine? How helpless and ineffective we often feel, like door-to-door evangelists in our own schools, with the door being slammed in our faces, people telling us they have their own god, or that they have no time to listen. At best, we’ve ‘converted’ small, isolate pockets of educators but not had any significant effect on the school community.

Now we have the opportunity to take part in a program based on a highly successful pilot carried out in Alabama and supported by internationally recognised practitioners of 21st century learning technologies. Not only has this given us the opportunity to formulate our thoughts in a proposal to the principal class, but it has also created interest from staff, led to conversations where we have had to explain and justify the cause, and opened up planning for a collaborative team. Suddenly we had something that was worth doing across the school, that was supported both from the top and the bottom. We weren’t isolated any more!

Two of us were able to attend the initial talk by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at Toorak College this afternoon. I was excited to meet Jenny and Sheryl, and they were as passionate and inspiring as I had expected. Sheryl was amazing – stepping off the plane and straight into the talk, her body clock still at 3am, and engaging the audience with her passion and ideas. I asked her how she managed to deliver an hour-long talk after travelling halfway across the world, and she said that her tiredness was evident in her slower than usual speech, which, for us in Australia, was a comfortable speed to follow.

I thought I’d mention some of the things that stood out for me as I listened to Sheryl’s presentation. Firstly, she emphasised that 21st century learning, although based on technologies, was primarily a human network. These technologies enable global connections and wisdom of the crowd. Sheryl gave the example of Twitter as a means of finding the best information about buying a new car. I suppose it’s an extension of the network of friends and colleagues people turn to when looking for a good car, or finding a good plumber, only the global aspect facilitates expert knowledge more effectively. In a fast-changing world, where the information today will be outdated tomorrow, rather than teach memorisation of content from a single text, we need to teach students how to work collaboratively. As Sheryl said, ‘don’t think computers, think innovation’. Our students need to be able to be productive, self-directed and effective communicators, understanding digital communications, and not be overwhelmed by the fast pace of change in their lives. It’s not about the tools, the technology, but about learning.

Sheryl challenged us about the relevance of school education, and spoke about the low percentage of students who thought that what they had learned at school would be relevant to their future lives. She spoke about the learning that takes place outside of school within the networking communities of young people. We saw Darren Draper’s film that asked educators if they had been paying attention to students in their classes, if they had been watching them or listening to them, and challenged educators to use the technologies that these students loved in order to teach and engage them.

What inspired me, towards the end of the talk, was Sheryl’s prediction that members of the PLP cohort would eventually have the courage to be bold and challenge the status quo. How true, that, in order to inspire change, we have to model it. As Sheryl said, ‘you can’t give away what you do not own’. I’m ready to share what I’ve learned. I’m not learning to keep. It isn’t much, and so I’m also ready to keep learning. We need to keep up with the pace of change. We hope to help diminish the digital divide – between those who know how to collaborate digitally, as the world shrinks through global connections, and those who don’t. Our job is to prepare students to be responsible, global citizens. We need a change in pedagogy, playing to students’ strengths instead of their weaknesses (ie. what they don’t know, what they’re not good at). We need to cater for different learning styles. We must become 21st century educators. These are the main ideas from Sheryl’s deep-reaching talk today.

What I’d like to say to teachers is what I read on Darren Draper’s excellent blog, when he talked about Kevin Honeycutt and one of his ‘favorite quotes regarding teachers and our relationship to our students: “We’ve got to be willing to play where they play… even if we don’t feel comfortable.” ‘

I’m looking forward to an enriching, collaborative, global PLP experience.

Education, Teacher librarians, Web 2.0

Is school bad for kids?

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Further to my recent post about open assessment tasks and true learning, you may want to have a look at Clay Burell’s posts on his blog Beyond School. I suppose I’m late to discover Clay but I figure others will be able to share my new discovery. Here’s what he says in his post entitled ‘Beyond school’ : on the death of genius for the sake of college’ (he’s talking about young people’s time being taken over by ‘education’:
‘I mean the ones who are so over-scheduled with schoolwork, homework, SAT test-prep cram schools, and all the other madness that keeps them focused on memorizing the data and pounding out the grunt-work, one assignment and one GPA-increment at a time, year in and year out – from what, grade 9? Or is that too late to begin worrying these days? – that they rarely have time to pull back and reflect on anything at all’.

I can’t help thinking back to my primary school years; for some reason memories of those days keep coming back as a kind of lost paradise, and what stands out is the time spent in idleness. And during that idleness, whether it be walking home from school in the slowest way possible, or sitting in a tree, creating a cubby house – a long-lost sense of freedom full of possibilities, ideas and dreams is evoked. So much time to reflect, time that is taken up now as an adult with adult responsibilities, and sadly, for many young children, this is also the case. By the time they’re in secondary school, the freedom is gone, the dreams taken over by instruction, the self-initiated learning through curiosity replaced by delivery of prescribed content during the school day, and fulfilment of prescribed homework tasks at home.

We would do well to remember that our students were awake to the wonders of the world as very young children – not knowledgeable wondering, but eager to experience, keen to ask questions. But do we, as teachers, ask young people what they’re interested in, or do we make their learning relevant to their world? Do we give them time to reflect? Is reflection valued?

Clay Burell, some time ago (not sure when), set up Students 2.0 to give young people a voice. In the ‘About’ section of the blog, he talks about the past paradigm of schools being effective for the times, but not so any more:

‘For decades, students have been stuck in classrooms, behind desks, being told how and what to learn… However, we have now entered a new age: an age where thinking is more important than knowing, where thoughts out-do the facts. Borders are melting away; project teams collaborate across the globe and intelligence is being continually redefined. The world’s information is at our fingertips and anybody can publish their thoughts for virtually no cost… Everywhere, we see changes: with how business operates, how people interact and how success is accomplished. There is unfortunately one place that remains unchanged, the place that could benefit most from the changes we see today… the classroom.’ He then explains the purpose of the blog: ‘This blog is an attempt to give students a voice in where the future of education is headed.’

I looked up some of the individual blogs of the students involved; it’s great to read what they have to say, their ideas, etc. Here are some of them:
Two penguins and a typewriter
Love and logic
The bass player’s blog
Betaphor

Newly ancient (archived)

Another thing I’d like to get off my chest:
if we as educators are working towards integrating Web 2.0 tools in order to engage students and create authentic learning, then we drop all that at year 11 because we have to focus on preparing students to regurgitate prescribed curriculum content so that they can get the highest scores and get into university, etc. then it’s crazy. Surely we need a bigger change. Surely this is a mindset change. Otherwise, we’re doing a little Web 2.0 here and there, then we say, hang on, we just have to go back for a bit; this is really important. Just doesn’t make sense.
Does anybody see a bigger change to the whole system in the near future? Is this really going to happen unless we change our assessment criteria?

Education, SOSE, Teacher librarians, Web 2.0

Geography2.0

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0SnaK4T7qU&color1=11645361&color2=13619151&fs=1]

About.com:Geography is a site worth checking out to support learning about current events in SOSE. Make learning relevant by focussing on what’s in the media now. You’ll find information about countries that are in the news, for example, the war in Georgia, countries in the Olympic Games, Olympic Games cities 1896-2014, geography and maps of China, photo gallery of Beijing. It might be worth signing up for a geography newsletter, or bookmarking Matt’s geography blog (which has an impressive geography blogroll).

The Google Earth blog has an interesting selection of post. Have a look at how Google Earth and Google Maps bring events and geography to life; watch Arctic ice melting on YouTube in Google Earth. So many Web2.0 geography opportunties!

Here is a video fly-through of the 3D Olympic Games site in Beijing that Google has released:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p2cEQCsBuY&color1=11645361&color2=13619151&hl=en&fs=1]

Education, Teacher librarians, Web 2.0

George Orwell’s blog

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tombstone of Eric Arthur Blair

What would you say if I told you that you could read a 70 year-old blog? Anachronistic, perhaps? Well, you can. George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, has risen from the dead to blog – so to speak. His diaries between 1938 and 1942, beginning August 9 this year and continuing into 2012, will be posted day by day, exactly 70 years after Orwell penned the original entries. This definitely adds a new dimension to the posthumous diary. And what a brilliant fusion of original ‘log’ of the past and the modern-day, Web2.0 version of the ever-popular diary.

The Orwell Prize outlines the project

Orwell’s ‘domestic’ diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his ‘political’ diaries (which are further categorised as ‘Morocco’, ‘Pre-war’ and ‘Wartime’) begin on 7th September 1938/2008.
 Continue reading George Orwell’s blog →

photos, Web 2.0

Web 2.0 in magazine format

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Here’s a Web 2.0 application with stylish presentation. Issuu allows for viewing and publishing online within categories: academia / architecture / art / comics / culture / design / fashion / fun / gadgets / games / illustration / magazine / motor / nature / portfolio / photography / shopping / sport / sketchbook / street / technology / travel. It’s marketed as a living library where users can upload their own documents to share ‘in cool magazine’ format. It’s like Flickr in magazine format, giving the authors a place to store and share work; allowing viewers to bookmark favourites; share links or embed in an aggregating service, such as Facebook; share comments. Continue reading Web 2.0 in magazine format →