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Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create and Assess

February 25th, 2009 by mrstetupu

http://handouts.wesfryer.com/powerfulblending

It’s hard to teach outside of our own learning.  We can have a much more accute sense of our students voices when they are sharing online.  It’s empowering to allow students to express themselves not just in front of the class, but also online.

www.chatzy.com (a site for creating chat rooms so students can share their voice)

There is a fear that when we allow our students to chat online they are prone to “predators”.  In actual fact there are choices that are made which lead to the that point.  In fact the same students that are at risk of these predators online are the same students that would be at risk face to face.

http://tinyurl.com (a site for making urls smaller)

Using Chatzy means that you can save and keep a record of all the conversations that take place.  Then you can get more insight into what your students are really wanting to know about and what kinds of things they are thinking about.

We need to stop blaming the tool for what is done with it.  You wouldn’t ban a kid from using a pencil if they did something inappropriate with it.  It’s the same with a computer.  You shouldn’t “ban” a student from using a computer because they do something inappropriate with it.  We need to teach our students about being responsible citizens online.

Hyperlinked writing is a powerful thing.  We have the opportunity to link to all sorts of media files and help to clarify meaning.

“The internet is a global stage”

We have all these different tools and choices that can cause us to become so overwhelmed, so where do we begin???  We need to recognise that people are in different places and at different stages in technology.

Social bookmarking is a very important ingredient to learning.  Rather than saving websites in “my favourites” or “bookmarks” on your machine you can save it online using social bookmarking sites such as “del.icio.us” or http://diigo.com.  (Notes on setting up delicious can be found at http://rachelboyd.wikispaces.com/delicious).  It allows you to link to the ideas of others.

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Exciting Learning Centres

February 25th, 2009 by mrstetupu

Okay so I’m at “Learning at Schools” (an eLearning conference down in Rotorua) and my brain is swimming with lingering comments from different speakers.  I’ve just finished a hands on session called “Exciting Learning Centres” which was really cool.  It was supposed to be for PC users, but Nigel was very kind and let me bring my mac in…

Basically you create it using powerpoint or keynote.  You can link the pages to each other and put in hyperlinks that lead to webpages.  It’s cool because you can have it sitting on your classroom computers, or on your class knowledge net page, or school server.  Then when students are sent to the computers as part of their Maths or Reading rotation they can just navigate through the powerpoint/keynote and click on the appropriate icon to take them directly to the website they are working on.  No writing websites on the board or saving things on the “favourites” toolbar.

I’ve just finished making one about Ancient Egypt to use with my class for inquiry.  It means I know they aren’t wasting time sifting through a tonne of sites looking for appropriate information.  They can just sift through pre-approved wesites that I know will be able to answer their questions :-)

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