Category Archives: Education

Education, flickr, photos, Teacher librarians, Web 2.0

#080808 Olympic Games

Leave a comment

Beijing 2008

Connecting with the Beijing Olympic Games is more interesting and dynamic with technology. Think of what the moon landing would have been like if we’d had the same possibilities. I remember being spontaneously sent home from school so that we could all watch the landing on TV. (Grade 5, in case you’re wondering. Linda Fewings came home with me and we ate crumpets.) What we have now is almost instant visual information (videos, slideshows, pictures), dynamic news through RSS (Twitter; Very Recent search engine) and interactive tools (trackers and maps). A great way to introduce students to Web 2.0 technologies when they’re already engaged in the Olympics.

I’ve been fishing for links to the Beijing Olympic Games and here’s what I’ve caught:

Summer Games on Youtube

Interactive map of Beijing Games on New York Times

Teacher Planet (lots of resources on the Olympic Games) Continue reading #080808 Olympic Games →

Education, Teacher librarians

Who am I being

Leave a comment

benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html

This inspirational talk is by Benjamin Zander, a leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, known for his charisma and unyielding energy, and once conductor of the Boston Philharmonic.
Benjamin Zander has ‘two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections. He uses music to help people open their minds and create joyful harmonies that bring out the best in themselves and their colleagues’ (TED). Continue reading Who am I being →

Education, flickr, Teacher librarians, Web 2.0

Teaching up a storm

Leave a comment



Pomme de Granada

Originally uploaded by The Department

Wes Fryer compares good teaching to good cooking. He talks about ‘recipes’ being modified in a Web 2.0 context to suit specific needs and situations. His six main ingredients for powerful teaching and learning are del.icio.us social bookmarks, Flickr photo sharing, VoiceThread digital storytelling, collaborative writing tools, websites for phone recording as well as SMS polling, and videoconferencing. How do these tools and applications differ from traditional 19th century teaching and learning? Replacing a one-way direction from teacher to student, where the teacher is the expert and the student a passive receptacle, these ingredients enable active and interactive learning.

I’m interested to find out more about the websites for phone recording and SMS polling. Are Australian teachers doing this?

Children's books, Education, humour, Teacher librarians

Censorship

4 Comments



Banned Books Week Banner

Originally uploaded by DML East Branch

If you click on the photo of the banned books banner, you’ll be directed to its Flickr home, and you’ll be able to hover over each book to discover what it is. An interesting theme – banned books.

Censorship. It takes me back to when, as an Australian of Russian descent, I attended a Saturday Russian language school (RS, we used to call it), during the time when our parents’ fear of Russian communism was raw. My own grandfather witnessed his father being shot at the age of six. The censorship that ensued at Russian School (RS), through the eyes of young people, took on a comical aspect. The more paranoid members of our community (am I being unkind?) decided to protect us from ‘evil’ by eliminating our exposure to all things Soviet (which means ‘council’, by the way). We spent our Saturdays drawn like moths to the flame, peering through thick black texta-covered chunks of text through the light, or trying to unstick glued pages. In most cases, our discoveries left us disappointed or confused when the forbidden words revealed themselves as ‘pioneers’ (soviet scouts) or the date of a celebration we weren’t supposed to know about. Continue reading Censorship →

Education, Web 2.0

Bravo Hawkesdale

Leave a comment

isn't he cute

I realise that many people would have discovered ages ago what Hawkesdale College has been doing with blogging, but since I’ve only just looked through properly, I have to do my little rave because otherwise I’ll burst. It’s so fantastic!

The Hawkesdale K-12 blog : Techno7 (Our first year 7-12)
is about students and teachers blogging through the 7-12 school journey.
What’s on the blog?
• There’s a page for each subject, plus extras, eg. study skills, etc.
• Each student has a blog for each subject
• Each teacher has a blog following their Web 2.0 journey, posting stuff for students, or just ideas, findings, etc. Continue reading Bravo Hawkesdale →

Education, flickr, Web 2.0

Green Pageflakes

Leave a comment

Pageflakes on environmental issues

Here’s a useful way of using Pageflakes in the classroom. A not so recent but still very exciting and relevant blog post by Will Richardson in Weblogg-ed (dated 21 November 2006) discusses Pageflakes as a dynamic student portal. Will talks about creating a topic-specific page on Darfur/Sudan built on tag feeds from YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos, the New York Times and the Sudan Tribune for news, del.icio.us for what people are bookmarking, and Google Blogsearch blogs.

I like this on so many levels. Firstly, Continue reading Green Pageflakes →

Education, Web 2.0

A vast and diffuse cocktail party

Leave a comment

Clay Shirky raises an interesting discussion about weblogs and the mass amateurization of publishing. Personally, I think it’s about time people were able to express themselves so publicly and globally without having to publish in the traditional sense. Discussing the problem of making money from blogs, Shirky says, ‘we want a world where global publishing is effortless … However, when we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price’.
He then goes on to talk about Continue reading A vast and diffuse cocktail party →

Education, flickr

SPLONK

2 Comments
Originally uploaded by el estratografico

 

 I really enjoyed looking at scans of old comic book sound effects mentioned in the illustration and cartooning blog, Drawn! . I’ve been researching information about comics and manga for desktop author booklets to go into my art wiki. My wiki is growing but nobody is using it as far as I can see. No matter; I’ve scheduled a show-and-tell session at the next art faculty meeting. Meanwhile, the list of blogs about comics/manga is growing. Eventually these will be added to the wiki. You can have a peek at the wiki if you like; there’s still a lot to do, and the navigation bar needs fixing.

Education, Web 2.0

#20 Casting the net

Leave a comment
Originally uploaded by tsheko
 
 
 

 

 Camilla Elliott provides many useful links for podcasting on her Linking for Learning site. I took up her recommendation to subscribe to the ABC’s EdPod RSS feed. Now the latest EdPod audio files are automatically sent to my iTunes every fortnight. Love the idea of getting stuff automatically. It’s like someone working for me while I sleep.

I listened to ‘One long yawn? History in the classroom’ and pondered the podcast. What’s not to like? Continue reading #20 Casting the net →