The initial blogs I encountered seemed to be mostly diaries of people’s holidays or child’s development and I wasn’t sure whether a blog would be useful for integration into my teaching. As I was browsing the DEET website I discovered Global Teacher and decided I wanted a blog. I wasn’t sure what I would use it for but I knew if our parents were talking about them and using them, then it was something that was likely to become part of our student’s world in the not too distant future if they weren’t already.

After putting out a call for help through the Global Classrooms Project I found help from Heather Blakey. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Heather and another Murrumbeena P.S. staff member (Debby Wall) to get up and blogging. I now see blogging as an integral part of the teaching and learning within my IRC (Information Resource Centre) program. The IRC comprises our school library a multimedia computer lab and interactive whiteboard facilities. All students have a 45 minute lesson in the IRC each week. I have been the IRC teacher just over 6 months, after being a teaching Reading Recovery for the previous 4 years.

My first blog is an information blog. It doesn’t vary much from a standard web page, but it was a starting point. Through it’s creation I acquired the basic blogging skills, and became familiar with navigating around a blogging environment. This blog has now become my contents page for all of my teaching and learning blogs.

I was looking for some inspiration for my second blog and I found it in Heather Blakey’s Magic Garden Project. Through this blog I found my ICT knowledge and skills soared. The students responded to an amazing story telling session by Cora Zon through a range of multimedia projects including digital pictures, animations and podcasts. It also lead to an improvement in our ICT resources as I had to ensure software and hardware were available and operational for students to complete their tasks.

I felt I had been focusing a lot of my energy on the ICT aspect of my program at the expense of the library component. With this in mind and Book Week approaching I decided my third blog would have a library focus. I wanted an environment in which students could communicate with each other about literature with a focus on our library resources. This blog has heightened my awareness of copyright, I found myself removing pictures of book covers I had copied from the internet. I have planned to replace them with student illustrations.

As I look back at my blogs I see growth from one blog to the next. Each blog’s purpose becomes more meaningful as I grow in my understanding of blogging and how I think about blogging changes. Blogs can be designed to suit the purpose of your teaching and learning. The main purpose of my IRC blog was information, the Magic Garden blog publishes and celebrates student work and the Book Club blog encourages responses to and communication about literature. All of my blogs will continue to be works in progress. My goal and challenge for future blogs is to provide a platform for student inquiry and for global communications.

Our students are highly motivated to see their work published on blogs so they can share their work with wider communities. They also enjoy the connection between home and school. It gives purpose to discussions of appropriate and inappropriate sharing of personal details, use of copyright material, permissions for use of photos and many more www issues.

I am excited to about where blogging will take my teaching and learning in the future, and where teaching and learning will take my blogging.

Happy blogging, Angela Houghton

The Hawkesdale P-12 home base is a perfect example of how a blog can be used to contain links to all the staff and student activities that are happening within one school. It also doubles and provides a great place to showcase and celebrate some staff and student work.

Murrumbeena Primary School , Doncaster Secondary Collage and Horsham West Primary School are currently, under the guidance of Heather Blakey, building home bases. Burners Blog is another good example of the benefit of making good use of the linking capacity of blogs. A collective like this is easy to access and enables all members of the school community to engage and comment on the work that is being done.

Make sure to comment here and share ideas about this imaginative publishing forum and how something like this would be of benefit to your school.

Consumer Warning - from Gareth at Doncaster who sat through a workshop today.

If you do not comment on this post your name will be added to the Telstra mailing list and you will receive a life time supply of intrusive phone calls from call centres in far distant lands, at eleven minute intervals, until you die.

I created this symbolic shield at Scion crest generator after blog-surfing and stumbling onto Tom Woodward and Jim Coe’s site, Bionic teaching. Last year, the year 9’s drew their own symbolic crests using symbols from books and the internet. You could try to create your own at Scion - although you should be over 18 to download the images (I’m not sure why yet? - the site is owned by Toyota, and may have unsavoury undertones?) My shield represents my passion for sustainability - biodiversity, energy, water and waste. You could even use the image as your avatar.

I have discovered a vibrant, safe online learning environment for school children called Superclubsplus. This supervised utility is huge in the UK and Europe and is now gaining recognition in Australia. Currently it is free for schools to sign up their students for two years. The aim of Superclubsplus is “to enable children to communicate safely, work together creatively, learn from each other, have a voice…and a purposeful audience..” It allows students to create web pages, articles, join clubs, participate in forums, discuss current issues, create projects for school, earn rewards an the list goes on. This is all done in an environment that is consistently mediated by highly trained and dedicated staff. It is well worth while visiting Superclubsplus and taking the tour to see how it all works. Please check it out, comment and let us know what you think, or if your school is already registered tell us how it’s going.

SIGN UP FOR THE CONFERENCE NOW!

The Knowledge Bank online conference this year is focused on Web 2.0 in education: what it is, how it’s being used today and its potential to radically change education.

Topic: Learning in a changing world - Web 2.0 and beyond
When: Six sessions held over July 22 and 23 2008
Where:  Online in Elluminate
Sign Up:  The conference is free but you need to Sign Up.

Highlights
Web 2.0 is not new - many of us have used social networking sites like YouTube, TeacherTube and FaceBook. We know about Wikipedia, Skype and podcasting. We read, even write, and comment on blogs. But what might happen to education as Web 2.0 becomes mainstream?

• Introducing Web 2.0. Who are you? Where have I met you before?
• How can reading and writing a blog change your way of learning?
• How does a direct connection with an expert shift your relationship to knowledge?
• Who are the content experts?
• What skills should we be teaching to young people, and what can we learn from them?

FULL PROGRAM DETAILS WILL BE AVAILABLE SHORTLY.

This two-day conference includes six sessions and a great line-up of speakers to talk about theory and practice.  We challenge you to actively contribute to this debate - read, ask questions, comment on the conference blog and add to our own body of knowledge on the issue.

“I believe that the Web 2.0 will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press. We cannot even begin to imagine the changes that are going to take place as the two-way nature of the Internet begins to flower, and even those of us who have spent time imagining this future will be astounded by what happens.”
Keynote speaker Steve Hargadon in Web 2.0 is the future of the education.

The Powerhouse Museum is the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs for access on Flickr, one of the largest online photo communities in the world. There may be some location and activity shots relevant to your work. For example, there are some interesting land clearing shots, histroical buildings, farming and agricultural images. Also with all these images there is a Creative Commons licence. This license means that you can republish this material for any non-commercial purpose as long as you give attribution back to the Powerhouse Museum as the creator and that you do not modify the work in any way.
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/powerhouse_museum/2469701212/>
This is a great resource and easily accessible for students and teachers.

Skype allowed us to videoconference with exceptional clarity. The audio did not falter on our end and the video was quite clear and had few time delays. A web cam and desktop mic were our means of communication. After 8 weeks or so of connections via shared blog posts and live blogging, our finale was this videoconference of ’show and tell’. A live bird, a New Guinea eclectus parrot, and three baby birds started the show off, followed by vegemite, a meat pie with sauce, a footy, Essendon footy jumper, a netball, webkinz, toy koala, banksia flowers etc. Collaborationnation showed us their dunkin’donuts/drink, baseball cap, basketball top, district flag, Disneyworld souveneir. They explained the origins of their national anthem and sang it to us with gusto. The girls demonstrated cheer leading and jazz ballet steps and chanted mugzy to taste test vegemite from a teaspoon to prove it was a food. We responded with a demonstration of netball and the singing of our national anthem. The responses from students has been resoundingly positive  and they wish to continue on with this style of learning and both countries’ students have begged their teachers for more. However, the US students finish their school year next week and we change semesters. It is certainly to be hoped that we can continue to collaborate next semester with a new group. Read these student posts to see what students feel about our current schooling and the online collaboration in comparison:- Flurogreen, Tawney, Leecie, Lauren, Mugzy The fabulous part about all this collaboration, is that it triggers further research from the initiative of students. Paul Bogush has forwarded on this finding on our infamous vegemite from his students after yesterday’s videoconference. We had promised to send them a tube of vegemite, but now we will have to abstain. However, I have been since informed it was a hoax!!!!

Read this article 

to this:

Of course she looks nothing like me (I have blonde hair and wear red glasses!) but that’s part of the fun of it. You can change all sorts of details of your avatar - the size and shape of any body part, how far or narrow set the eyes are, skin colour, freckles, height, weight etc. I must prefer Mazarine’s new look! I hadn’t spent much time playing around with appearance until now. Now I’m ready to party!

A few weeks ago I went into Second Life with a few other teachers from the OZ/NZ Educators network. It was a session for newbies like me. We spent the time on the island of Jokaydia. I took a quick video so you can see a very little bit of what Second Life looks like - in an art gallery! I recorded this with SMART Recorder and the quality isn’t great, but it will give you a bit of an idea if you are interested!

I never thought I’d be really interested in this sort of thing. I’m not into computer games at all, and so I didn’t think I’d like it. But, it’s great fun, and there is heaps of potential for education and business! People are making real money in Second Life doing all sorts of things. Lots of conferences on all themes are held in Second Life. Just search ’second life conferences’ in Google and there will be a whole bunch listed.

I am hoping to spend some more time in SL and start thinking about using virtual worlds for language learning. I’m a member of the Second Classroom Ning, a social network for educators interested in students using virtual worlds. I’ll keep you updated…

Technorati Tags: secondlife,virtualworlds,avatar,jokaydia

At the start of the term, when I proposed the idea of a “project” and brainstormed methods of presenting them, the preferred option for students were posters or books! I was horrified.
That’s when I made the decision to hop onto the blogging wave which was swamping our school. The students all had their own blogs, and they had in place some of the tools that became pivotal to our progress. Once my home internet was reconnected and I could access the technology from home again, it was all go, go, go.

The students helped design our presentation rubric, where we explicitly pin pointed the things that made a presentation a “good one”. Then we brainstormed a number of ways in which we could use these tools of technology, to help us enhance our projects. The results have been amazing.
The students have used:
• Powerpoint – and then slideshare to embed their presentations in their own blogs
• Smartboards and wireless mouse (does anybody else have their tongue out the side of their mouths, or feel like they have had a stroke while using this? )
• Photostory
• Podcasts
• Video interviews and role play
• Voicethread interviews
• Quizzes using “mystudiyo”
• Voting – using “polldaddy “ and “zoho”
• And of course, the faithful old wordfind and crossword puzzles
Below is a quiz created by one of our students, who did a brilliant presentation on Albert Einstein. Tzigane created this quiz using polldaddy and it was a huge success. It was the finale of her presentation. She chose the same number of children as she had questions and as each child got the answer correct, she issued them with a lollypop.