I started this blog on 14th March 2009 and initially I was motivated by the benefits that self-reflection bring. It wasn’t long before I discovered the joys of reaching out to people and developing an interactive audience.
Thank you to everyone who reads my blog and I hope we can continue to learn together!
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Every week or two Darrel Branson (The ICT Guy) and Tony Richards from itmadesimple.com discuss all things to do with technology in education.
I am often blown anyway by the amount I can learn by listening to an episode of the Ed Tech crew so I would recommend it to all teachers. There are always great sites and teaching ideas mentioned.
The great thing I find about podcasts is that you can listen while doing something else. I love to listen while running or cooking!
On Monday I was interviewed on the Ed Tech Crew about how I use technology in my classroom and how I promote technology to other teachers. You can listen to it here or on iTunes (you can search for Ed Tech Crew in the iTunes store).
Last week I was contacted by Jewel Topfield, a reporter from The Age newspaper, who wanted to visit my classroom to watch me teach and talk to me about how I use technology in the classroom.
Jewel and a photographer visited one of our daily reading rotations in my grade two class and had the opportunity to see how we were using our interactive whiteboard (IWB), blogs, iPod Touches, Google Docs, VoiceThread etc.
This article appeared in The Age and the national Fairfax newspapers on Saturday 21st August.
The article is entitled “Digital Natives Restless”. While I wasn’t aware that this was going to be the theme of the article, I thought the article painted a positive picture of how technology can in integrated in the classroom. I know my class will enjoy their five minutes of fame!
There were also some really important issues raised in the article about the need for digital classrooms to become to norm and the issues that surround this.
I did however try to make it clear when being interviewed that the digital native/immigrant debate is really not black and white. While students may have less reservations about “having a go” when it comes to technology you cannot assume that students are born with (or intuitively “pick up”) the skills they need.
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about teaching technology “post noughties” and alluded to the importance of being explicit when teaching technology. Click here to read it.
While the newspaper article suggested that each of my students are a “digital native, someone who has never lived in a world without MP3s, mobile phones and a global information network at her fingertips.” We cannot assume that just because children are growing up with these technologies that they use them or use them well, creatively and safely. The role of the teacher in guiding technology use is more important now than ever. Teachers who cannot or will not take on this role are doing their students a disservice.
I think it is also important to mention that I was quoted in the article as saying
“McGeady says international adviser on education Sir Ken Robinson warns that switched-on, tech-savvy children switch off in a classroom dominated by teacher-led ”chalk and talk”.”
While, I still believe this is an important point to make, I was thinking aloud when trying to remember who said that in my interview and shouldn’t have mentioned the name Sir Ken Robinson as I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him. I think it was Stephen Heppell but if anyone can confirm that I’d be grateful!
Apologies to Sir Ken and Prof Heppell!
Are “digital natives” restless? What do you think?
Since the beginning of 2010, I have been collaborating with a fellow teacher, Simon Collier on a free weekly e-mail for teachers.
With our 20th newsletter milestone approaching, this post is a reminder if you or someone you know has not yet signed up for the newsletters.
Each week our email newsletter features a useful online tool or website for teachers to use in their classroom.
The purpose of the email is to publicise and promote the use of ICT tools and web links to teachers who are not regularly sourcing the available information on the net. This in turn, hopefully increasing the use of the wonderful education tools available online.
The newsletter is suitable for both primary and secondary teachers and provides practical examples of how the tool or website could be integrated into the classroom curriculum.
Last week I posted about Denis Masseni’s report “Why Schools are Spooked by Social Media.”
An interesting component of this report was onsocial media monitoring.That is, monitoring the internet for mentions of a particular keyword (such as your school). This is a good way to take defensive action if negative mentions occur and to keep tab of positive mentions.
In his report, Denis described two free online applications that allow you to search the internet for any reference of your keyword.
Social Mention can scan a range of social media outlets such as blogs, comments, images, videos, audio etc.
When you search a keyword, along with your results of mentions on the internet, you get a display of sentiment. That is, what percentage of occurrences are positive and what percentage are negative. It uses a linguistics processing tool to analyse the words and phrases for positive and negative language.
Social mention also provides information on who the top users are of your keyword search. Interestingly, for my school (Leopold Primary School) that was me!
This tool is popular with businesses and also members of the wider community who want to keep track of a certain topic. Give it a try.
The second social media monitoring tool that Denis mentioned in his report was,
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. You simply type in your keyword, select what you want to search and when you want to be emailed.
Whether or not schools are using social medias themselves, it seems that it would be a good idea for schools to have these social media monitoring tools in place. They are a good way to nip any problems that occur in the bud and monitor what your students are doing in cyberspace.
Do you use social monitoring?
How do you think social monitoring should be used?
Here you will find information about setting up your class blog, establishing rules and guidelines, educating parents about blogging, teaching commenting skills and more.
What sort of advice would you like about educational blogging?
Do you have any advice about blogging with students?
While I braced myself for a flood of ill informed callers harping on the negatives of Facebook and the like I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome.
Denis Masseni, a Monash university lecturer and a director of Sponsor-Ed was the guest on the topic. Denis has written a report called “Why Schools are spooked by social media”, which presents findings from a survey of 140 principals on the subject of social media.
Throughout the radio segment, Denis addressed many issues related to social media in schools and callers also provided interesting insights. The most compelling statement for me was when a caller said something like “hospitals and banks can no longer operate without computers but classrooms can.” This is so sad but true and really says it all to me about the change that is needed in schools.
I enjoyed the conversation that ensued and subsequently sought out Denis’s report.
This 34 page paper is well worth reading. It is a powerful document that illustrates how the commercial sector uses social media in many ways which could be imitated by schools. It also addresses the “blockers” that stop schools from utilising social media.
Denis defines the term social media as accessing, sharing, commenting and collaborating online, and for the sake of the paper, as blogging, Twitter and email newsletters.
In summary, the premise of the report is “With over 9 million people in Australia accessing social media (46% of the population), including 43% of small businesses and over 70% of not for profits, why are schools under-represented in their use of this new communications device in connecting with their parent community?”
The following statement from the report rang very true with me, (evident by the fact that a large amount of parents at my recent parent-teacher interviews commented how much they enjoy our class blog and regular class e-newsletters).
“Simply delivering information in more contemporary mechanisms and allowing for two-way communications will lift parental involvement and promote engagement. Parents don’t connect in the school yard in the numbers they once did – the pace and pressure of modern life has seen to that”
Denis sums up the future of social media with this statement:
“The way forward is to find schools that are enthusiastic about extending social media to parents and support their activities technologically, strategically, tactically and philosophically. These schools will provide the benchmarking for those waiting for someone to go first. We need the early adopters.”
I am a Lead User at my school, Leopold Primary School and we came online in Cycle One in May.
While I remain somewhat sceptical that the Ultranet will actually work on August 9th, we have come up with a detailed plan for training the staff on this day.
Catering for our integration aides was a consideration in our planning.
While our integration aides will be participating in the basic Ultranet and Web 2.0 workshops, we are also allowing them time to explore useful websites that they could use with their students on classroom computers.
I have prepared the following handout for our integration aides, which may also be useful for primary school teachers.
What do you have planned for August 9th?
Do you have any sites that you think would be particularly useful for integration aides?
StoryIt is a website that doesn’t look amazing with its simple layout and advertisements but has some great resources for the junior primary classroom.
While there are stories to read and print, seasonal resources, printable shapes and more – the resources I’ve found most useful are the word games.
There are about fifteen word games available to play online that involve making sentences, making words, spelling, changing words etc.
In the Wiz Game, the goal is to make as many words as you can from the letter tiles. Get the question mark tile to the bottom and a vocabulary question appears. Select the best meaning of the word and earn extra points.
There are games on the StoryIt site that would be suitable for students in at all levels of primary school.
These games could be used as a lesson introduction or closure on the IWB, with a small focus group or individual students could use the games on classroom computers.
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