Glogster and Capzle - two really top tools!!

Jo McLeay sent out a plurk saying she was looking at Glogster for Education. I have a look at Glogster before and felt it wasn't really something I could make use of, but on the main page was a link to these glogs about Schindler's List from a New Zealand school's wiki. Thanks to the great teachers at Katikati College. Can I make use of these? You bet !! What a sensational way of engaging students for ways of reading text!! Lenva Shearing is using them with her kids at Bucklands Beach and I will definitely be doing the same!

The second really fascinating and highly useable site that I have found through my PLN lately is Capzle It is an absolute treasure trove of ideas for presentation- reminds me a bit of Searchme and some of the time line creating products that have been around lately. Capzle is terrific- combines all sorts of media and provides a medium to link a wide range of forms of information into a very smooth whole. Thanks Tanya Sheko for the blog post!

So How do I.... ? Podcasting on the go!

It's funny how things converge at a moment when you just happen to find the need- does this sound too zen? Well as a result of our recent OZ/NZ Educators group meeting, with Joe Dale and Mark Pendleton leading the group, I have decided to try and tackle the idea of actually podcasting. I know that Jo Mcleay and I have discussed an Australian version of the EDtech Podcast with an emphasis on women, but the technical skills were something I just found a bit too daunting. Joe and Mark did a great job, but I got lost in the huge torrent of information, thinking that I would have to come back and listen to the recording later to make sense of it.

Later this week my husband gave me his old 20G Ipod - it seemed huge when we first bought it - as he now is totally absorbed by his new ITouch. The Ipod has a voice recorder and an ITrip transmitter. So ... I decided to get some raw files to play around with and then follow the information trail that my personal learning network- aka the twitter gang- had left for beginning podcasters.I also listened to Andrew Douch's podcast on Knowledge Bank about his award winning website and this was very encouraging-the guy is a legend and so committed and talented!!

So armed with my 'new' Ipod and mike I went to my year 8 class of bloggers and decided to do some research. I chatted to the class in groups of three- luckily I had a small office off the main room so we could talk; and I tried to think like Tony Richards of the EDTech Crew- a fantastic and very focussed interviewer.I asked them lots of questions about blogging this year and what they thought of it. The whole process was wonderful and I have nearly an hour of recording and I am so proud of my kids - they said such thoughtful and interesting things and it was surprisingly easy to do. In fact one group got out their mp3 players and began to interview each other on the other side of the room after they had spoken to me.An Assistant Principal came into the computer room while we were in there and the kids proudly showed him their blogs and explained what we have been doing.

That night I came home and tried to work out Audacity- still a bit confused there. Frank helped - and complained as always that it wasn't a Mac. Then I got online and got help. We downloaded the file- or is that up? and the collected the 'Lame ' encoder that converts files into mp3s and that is where I am at the moment. i have been sent files and tutorials and videos from several lovely people- Allanah King is so generous and so are John Pearce and Tony Richards. I have been to podomatic and made an account, checked out the ITunes store for Podcasts to subscribe to and also found royalty free music to use. Now if someone would write my 100+ reports and do my exam marking I could get on with the fun stuff!!

My next job is to get a name for my podcasts and then to put it together with music and even edit some noisy bits. Cos I am a newb at this it will take time but I have help just 140 characters away and I will learn before I go to NECC.
Watch this space- a podcast will arrive soon!!

The First Bloggers Feast

After much talking and planning and tweeting we had our first Bloggers Feast in Melbourne on May 14th.Those present were Helen Otway, Howard Errey,Lauren O'Grady,Jo McLeay, John Pearce,Jenny Luca, Tony Richards, Al Upton, Pam Arvanitakis and myself.It was like a meeting of old friends as we finally got to meet those who are part of our networks and chat about issues which were surprisingly (or not) very common in our experiences as bloggers in schools. John is about to publish his book, written with Gary Bass- 'The Technology Toolkit, Helen was discussing being an Ultranet coach, Lauren changing work to keep growing her passion for it, Tony was interviewing all present, Jenny recovering from the highs of her SLAV presentation and new twitter follower, Al was talking about the 'Learning by Design'Conference he was attending,Pam and Jo and Howard were chatting with lots of new friends and me- I was playing with my new gadgets and just enjoying the fact that it was all actually happening.
The waiting staff were very amused by this group of strangers with lots of technology and were asking questions about what we were doing. It flew by, and we made plans for a bigger meeting on May 24th after the ICTEV conference at Melb. Grammar.

A Diigo Flavoured Month

As fast as I learn about one particular app- a new one moves across the blogosphere and is the flavour of the month. Diigo is the new killer app in terms of what it can do and twitter is running hot with conversations about the pros and cons and lots of tips and hints to make it more effective. It seems to combine the best parts of Del.icio.us as a bookmarking and tagging and sharing tool, the social capabilities for connecting and chatting as Facebook and Twitter, as well as some other new capabilities which appear to make it a very powerful app. Kristin Hokansen has written a really detailed post examining the potential of the program and Liz Davis has made a great screencast which takes you through the basics. I have had a play and I am excited by the idea of the group which will be like a ning I imagine but a bit different. Feeling very forthright, I created a group for Australian Educators and NZ ones too and called it Oz Educators in the hope that the rapidly increasing number of teachers in the Southern Hemisphere can start making some connections and finding resources appropriate to our schools and teaching experience. The voice from the Northern Hemisphere is a very strong one and we also need to develop our own one. Jo Mcleay has had the idea of some kind of show like WOW 2.0 but for the southern Hemisphere, and this is a start at building this. We already have 24 members and there are lots of familiar and also several unfamiliar names, evidence of how these tools of twitter and Diigo are expanding and contracting the network of teachers by bringing them closer.There are a number of other areas of Diigo I have yet to explore like some of the highlighting and notetaking functions, but it will happen.
On a sadder note Nikki -one of my darling Redpoint Siamese cats is failing fast as he is struck down by a kidney problem that he had when younger which has been kept in abeyance up till now, but his age and the heat of summer and the sudden cold has made flare up again very badly. He has lost lots of weight and after tests today there is not much that can be done; we are trying to make him as comfortable as possible.He is nine years old now and he and his brother have been such a wonderful part of our lives - siamese twins who rule the house.

Twittering on -the tipping point is reached!

Holidays have been rolling along here and for the first time in nearly twenty years we haven't had a holiday away; but instead of it being dull and boring, I have had a fabulous time! While not posting has been on my mind, I have almost been attached by an invisible cord to my computer and that cord has been Twitter. If you have been living under a rock you may not know about twitter, but for me a tipping point has been reached and long passed as I have gone from being a somewhat sceptical observer to a committed addict.

I use snitter which allows me to continually get updates as I read blogs,fill up my del.icio.us pages with great information and generally zip around the blogosphere.My network has nearly reached a hundred followers and I am convinced for me it is the most powerful app around.The reason I haven't done any posts despite having more 'time' is that I am too busy doing things to stop and reflect on my doings! As I pondered my lack of posts I decided to write about the huge explosion of things that I have suddenly become involved in over the last six week and the power of jumping in to a social network which is so welcoming.As I composed my draft- ie tried to remember the things which had been so earth shifting in my new committment to the power of web 2.0 -I was not at all surprised to see others write on a similar theme. Chris Betch, Murcha and Jo McLeay have all posted recently on how significant Twitter has become in their network and I agree with their thoughts.

I have also worked out how to actually connect to World Bridges presentations and have been participating live in chat rooms and even contributed online in a skype call to one presentation which was a first for me. The effect of this participation is powerful and how to make sure my students have the chance to engage as personally as this not just on Myspace, will be something to work on this year.

Following my meeting with Jo Mcleay I have also signed up to class 2.4 of the webcast academy and even have been given an intern badge!!Hopefully I will be able to get up a 6am for the classes on monday mornings - committment eh?
The time difference problem has not been such a problem while on holiday and I have been much more able to participate in webcasts and chats because i have been home. How I will go once back at work will be a challenge as I have relished the immediacy of the live broadcasts. Hopefully once I have done the training Jo and I and others will be able to do something to help with the problems of time difference.

As part of my new twitterness habit, I have also been using skype more effectively. Previously it was for talking to my daughter when she was on exchange in France for a year and the webcam plus the audio helped me survive the year. In the last few weeks however, I have been involved in conference calls and chats with the real people whose writing I have enjoyed so much. The first way to 'flatten out' this world is by simply talking and when teachers can start these conversations, we are on a good road.
A really concrete example of this has also been the FLNW08 - a virtual un-conference which was an example of how technology could be used across countries to present. We were watching -we being a very large chat room as a result of Kim Corfino and others sending out tweets- the ustream of the meeting in Thailand and also the slideshare presentation was posted, as were the photos in flickr that were being discussed. All this plus a very active and entertaining chat room covering several continents made it a fabulous experience and NZChrissy has blogged about it in detail and included some screen capture as well.
My last but not least or only point is how last Sunday I was playing around with Picasa to explore it for photo editing. I just mentioned it in twitter for fun and then Sue Waters and Chris Betch took over having a long conversation of tweets discussing the pros and cons of picasa and flickr as photo editing tools. This went thick and fast for quite a while with others adding in and finally I said that a blog post might be the best way to preserve their combined knowledge... and so they did!! They used Google docs and from both sides of this continent they wrote a blog post about the suject and then individually posted it- preserving the moment in the blogosphere.What an awesome example of knowledge sharing, and of the immediacy of the tools available to us to share and comment!
So apart from doing lots of bottling of the fruits of summer and having time to enjoy my garden, my holidays have been about Twitter and networks and a path forward - I am hoping to go to NECC in Texas in June. I have definitely dived in and am swimming as fast as I can.My 'tweeties' are are a great bunch and we are all swimming together. They say that the first part of dealing with an addiction is admitting to it. Now what is step two?

I meet my guru f2f

Holidays are Great! Jo McLeay - my mentor, guru and much admired fellow teacher and I met f2f yesterday and we had a great time and made plans for some fascinating things - life is grand! Thanks Jo. There is more to write about but I need a longer post for that!

And then it all happens at once..

Perhaps I should rename this a blog about gardening and education as so many entries are about my garden and how it occupies so much of my time and thought.I live on the top of Mount Dandenong in a very special environment that is semi rainforest with (generally )high rainfall and extreme fire danger in summer, so keeping the growth under control becomes critical at this time of the year as well as trying to remove huge infestations of weed species- holly, ivy,sycamore etc that have taken over this landscape. We have lyrebirds, wallabies and wombats on the block and are at the head of a stream that becomes a creek. Four acres of ex-rhododendron/camellia/ foliage plant nursery that has grown flat out for twenty years untended! So I spend autumn ,winter and spring trying to clear and replant and summer worrying about bushfires and drought.
Well I have finished my burning off before the fire bans - essential to clear the amount of weeds and planted some fruit trees and reclaimed the forest floor for the lyrebirds of another quarter acre. It is slow work but things are slowly becoming more established and this year has been an absolute joy with the most amazing display from plants that were nearly dead when we arrived here.There is finally starting to be a sense of real achievement after so much backbreaking work as it is all on a hillside.I have been racing home from work to do some gardening as it is now daylight saving and then on the computer when it is dark.Busy busy but sooo beautiful...
Ok enough gardening chat! I have to thank Jo Mcleay who is such an inspiration to me for the amount she does and the breadth of her knowledge, for the lovely review she gave me on her blog. She is so generous in her spreading of the links of new bloggers and a real connector in every sense of the word Thanks Jo !!
As well as Jo's great blog , the most amazing post for me as a newby lately has been the one by Vicki Davis where she describes her most useful blog tools . It is such a comprehensive list and I shall be working through it with care as I am gradually understanding how to make use of these tools. The Victorian Knowledge bank conference (see my previous post) was quite a success and it is all online and used Elluminate very successfully. Great for Australian teachers/bloggers to have a look at the recordings- some very timely resources there.
In class ,thanks to the persistence of a very talented colleague of mine - Debbie-we have started literature circles across six year 8 classes and as we move into second and third sessions it is fantastic to watch the levels of participation and engagement among students of all ability levels.This all relates to the Leading Schools project and our new building starts being construted soon.Year 9s are making their poetry anthologies and getting ready for the big Night Of The Notables on the 20th. First they killed my father is really engaging my boys year 10 class and we are doing reflective diary writing as assessment -next year I hope this will be blogging when we have an economical option to use, but this is definitely a great success. Exams for seniors and report writing, WRAP training and then I might fall over the line to get to Xmas!Next year is looking interesting as I might finally get to use my qualification in Horticulture as a teaching subject in a year 10 small business unit- I'll get to wear overalls at school yay!!!
So that plus a Masters in IT Education sounds like a busy year- and a daughter doing Year 12!

Its Raining !!

The rain is falling again and suddenly I have some energy!Jo McLeay has posted about using Myspace as an assessment tool when asking students to write on character and it is a really brave and (when you think about it it)incredibly obvious way of engaging the kids where their heads are already at and applying their skills more broadly. Great idea Jo and I will be applying it myself, probably with year 9.
At the moment the work which is catching my interest the most is something I found on a website which asked students to nominate six items which would be put in a museum display to represent these times. I raised the idea with year 11s as they finished their work on Freedom of the City by Brian Friel, and we had some really great discussions where students who rarely speak in class actually were really engaged and contributed.
After starting with the obvious of mobile phones and ipods we moved to fibre optics,and then the digital divide. I spoke about my blogging and how Web 2.0 has changed the control of information flow and how we are now increasingly producers of our own content. We discussed climate issues, terrorism, fear, poverty, body image, obesity, drugs -wow all in one lesson! The kids left the room -eventually- buzzing and still coming up with more ideas. They then came to the next class after their assessment on the play, ready to produce an argument for six objects or symbols and are now making powerpoints to present an argument to the class. Hopefully I will include some when they are done as examples.
This has been quite galvanising after the issues raised by the play and they have been making connections back to work done in first semester on the Bruce Dawe poetry in Sometimes Gladness by themselves- yippee -and pointing them out to me. For example sport as a religion - Life Cycle. I have included some of the really excellent images about global warming that some of them have found. I await the presentations with excitement- they are talking about their own worlds and their own understanding of what is happening.
The second thing I am excited about is that I am getting the Year 9s to write about their week in the city by creating a Zine. They will do a paper one this time till I can find some appropriate non blocked software for us to do E-zines.The students had a fantastic time and I am getting them to work in pairs to produce their own reflection on the week with the audience of other students as their target. Should be quite a challenge for some of them and I hope to include one here when they are done. I have been to Sticky a small alternative shop in the laneway under Flinders Street between the station and Degraves St and bought some examples from them. These are alternative independently produced short run magazines with really interesting layouts and articles. The shop is the centre for the group which does art in the arcade there and performances. The whole area is a hive of interesting shops and young designers and artists trying to make a statement in a very individual and independent way.
I am still deciding which sites I want to write about for my last two reviews as I have found some terrific ones lately, but it is also reporting time and I have lots of marking so that might have to wait till the holidays!