January Blog Club

Well the January blog club is over and it was a great success. I have to admit it also was a bit of a trial to get it up and going.

Jeanne couldn't get back into her skypecast so I quickly created my own but on my mac which led me to use different tools that I hadn't seen before. Anyone wanting to lead a skypecast I recommend 3.0 for the PC. It has a better user interface and you have better control over the proceedings.

Graham suggested creating a private skypecast. I had never heard of this before but it is interesting. I think that leaving a password behind at tapped in and then seeing hearing friendly voices in the skypecast would be a good thing. I have to admit I did not do anything other than try to get people unmuted in the skypecast. This was difficult enough since there were between 35 and 50 people at a time in it. Only 25 of them were k12online related.

Speaking of Graham he has a summary of his experience at the blog club. He also wrote an excellent post about "online presence."

At this point as I always do I have to tip my hat to Cheryl Oakes who runs the skypecast for WOW2.0 on Tuesdays. After deleting the 40+ chats that were sent to me and dealing with all of the extraneous hangers on I really appreciate all that you do. And you type so much in the World bridges chat room as well. You truly are a master of your craft.
So how did the Blog Club go? Since Jeanne is cleaning up the wiki I guess it went really well. there is a great set of show notes and I even recorded the skypecast and posted it to the wiki. There is a ton of information about podcasting in the classroom and we touched upon the topic of Graham's k12online presentation. All of this is available on the wiki.

This leads me to the next point. Will some one take on the next Blog Club. It should be held on the 3rd or 10th of February. You can choose the topic but Clarence Fischer's Global Literacy Presentation was mentioned as a possible topic.

It has been a great experience to take part in this Blog Club". I think that one step we can take in making this a larger and better community of learners is to tell our colleagues about these opportunities. We never stop learning with k12online. It just keeps going. As we digest it month by month we learn more and more.(It must be morning and I must be hungry!!)

Thanks everyone for making this a success. Let's keep it going in February!.

My first Solo Skypecast

Flickr Link

I had the pleasure of hosting my first solo skypecast where people came to talk about the 21st Century School. I called it the When Night Free Fall Blog club. The hour and a bit skypecast was hosted using skype and tappedin. I had a great time even though my recorder did not work. Note to future hosts and hostesses of these chats..... do not upgrade to a beta until you know what you are doing.

Speaking of beta. I was using Skype 3.0. It has some nice features like a built in recorder (found that out too late) and an interactive whiteboard much like elluminate. The feature I liked most about 3.0 was that it helped control the skypecast better. The user interface was clear to read and it grouped people in to open mic, wanting the mic and no mic. The mixup with my powergramo was that I downloaded skype 3.0 and then did not reboot my machine.

I would like to thank all the people who attended the skypecast. Glenn, Jeanne, Sharron, Cheryl, Darren, Joyce V, Paul, BJB, SusanR and anyone else I am forgetting. Since my recorder did not work I am asking everyone to post comments behind here on on the wiki. I know we all live busy lives but if you spent 10 minutes reflecting on our conversation. I would appreciate it.

The questions were...

Question 1

What obstacles are you encountering using 2.0 tools in your classroom?

Question 2

In the movie about the SLA, Chris talks about the aim of School 2.0 as being 'student-centered, constructivist, to teach kids to be critical consumers and producers of information'. What professional development approaches and methods are being used to raise teacher awareness and use of information and digital literacy tools?

Question 3

Has anyone defined "best practices" for different content areas using 2.0 tools? If so, where can this be found? If not, would this be an idea worth exploring?

I had read Clarence's students comments earlier in the day. One of his students comments hit home when this question was being talked about.

I used Elaine's reflective comment to start the conversation

1) Indeed I think that blogging is different from writing on paper. Why I think this is because that you know that you will be sharing your knowledge and what you have to say, with the rest of the world on your blog making you want to do the best you can and put as much information as you can on your post.Also to find this information to make this blog , while surfing the net you learn to tell the difference between false and true information.


The advasntage of having a pln learning network is that you have the chance to explore sitwes and other blogs from all over the world and to leanr about there culture, recent weather, there nation weather and issues and the list goes on and on. the part i like baest are the photography on the blogs of other places from all over the world and get the chance to see the way there cities, towns live and opperate. this can make learning differnet and defintly no tin a bad way. it makes learning different and funner this way.giving you the oppertunitie to share our thoughts, opinions with one another. letting us leave the classroom and across the world to share our ideas and learning experiences. i personaly think this is totally ok that we arnet learning that exact same thing but actuallly when you think about it we are almosrt learning the same thing. we read our pln networks write anout what we learnedon a post. the rest of the class goes and reads it and learns from it. so no not all classrooms are about learning the same thing at once you can say. i would say that reading and writing blogs from all over the world and sharing our learning experiences is a heck of a lot better than reading a text book…what do yuo think?

Question 4

The idea of collaboration to me is the biggest benefit for the 21st Century. Does anyone have a progressive introduction of Web 2.0 Tools for the resisters amongst us?


Thank you for reading. Comments appreciated.

Chris


We also played with some flickr tools. Here are some of the results.

What A Conference

I am still sitting in front of the computer screen waiting for the next set of presentations to roll out of K12online. But all has grown quiet. Or has it. As part of When Night Falls I stepped up and volunteered to keep the grass movement alive. I will create a Skype cast and have the tapped in room going at the same time just like When Night Falls.

When Night Freefalls was born.

I can hear you asking now when will this take place. I ask that you wait until my marks are in and the reports go out at the end of the week. Then I will sit down, chat with some people and put up the date. It will happen on a Saturday or Friday in December.

I am excited to try some of the new tools I learned to use during K12Online. In our school we have had electronic portfolio's to showcase the students work. I am attempting to have my 120 Grade 8 students create a wikipage each to be their electronic portfolio. This I hope will be a change from the powerpoint presentations they have done in the past. I can teach the students how to embed video, add pictures from flickr and a variety of other things to make this format more appealing.

Here is the problem. I am the math teacher. I will have to teach the other teachers how to do this in a short period of time. They need to be willing to have this change. I think I can sell these ideas to them. If not then there isPublish always my math wiki and math blogs to keep me warm.

Ah the beat goes on...

The Wiki World

For the past week I have had the pleasure of working on a wiki with Jeanne Simpson from Alabama. I have had a blast.

Part of the K12online conference was a presentation by Vicki Davis, The Cool Cat Teacher. She is the queen of the wiki. In her presentation she walked participants through her use of wiki's in her classroom.

Part of her presentation was an invitation to create a wiki. I had dabbled in wikis at PBWiki and needed a refresher on how to create these powerful publishing and educational tools. Her online presentation was the catalyst for a revolution in my 2.0 thinking. Here is a platform that has not (yet) been blocked by the filter police.

Our topic was using Google Video and YouTube Videos in the classroom. Where to start. It took a day or two to figure out the nuances of publishing the wiki. Where the buttons were for creating links, embedding video and adding horizontal rules. All through this procedure Vicky was giving advice and mentoring us. Jeanne and I even Skyped on a regular basis as we were editing the wiki.

A small world story. Darren Kuropatwa first introduced me to the work of Jeanne Simpson a year ago during one of his workshops. Since then she has been a regular in my bloglines account and she ended up being my wiki partner for this project. Luck, fate or happenstance? It doesn't really matter. She was the best partner I could of hoped for and a new internet buddy.

For the week of work that we put on the wiki I seemed to have this constant set of goosebumps all over me. This is fun. Why was it so much fun. My answer is the collaboration with someone (luckily in the same timezone) and the synergy that we were creating. Would this work the same with students? We already are planning some work between our students in the future. Wow K12 rocks!!!!!!!!!

Now that I have finished one topic from K12online now there are a plethora of new presenters waiting for my participation. It is like a new box of chocolates. Which one to eat first the caramel in the corner or the cream filled ones in the middle. Who cares there all chocolates and will taste good. All of K12online is tasty. I'll just have to eat it all up.