Month: April 2009

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School’s out Friday

 

Now this is clever.

It’s an interactive Easter Egg hunt on YouTube uploaded by naders07. What you do is watch the video that has been annotated by Nadine. You can tell it’s annotated because square boxes appear on the screen. When you click on one of these it takes you to another YouTube  video from Nadine where she reveals whether or not you have discovered an Easter treat. All told, Nadine has uploaded fourteen videos to YouTube for our Easter Egg hunting pleasure. I, for one, am pretty impressed by this feat. My 10 yr old son and I have had a lot of fun seeing if our guesses our correct.

 

Thanks go to Jarrod Robinson (MrRobbo on Twitter) for tweeting about this. Just what I needed today Jarrod. Thanks.  

I hope all of you (whoever you may be!)  have a lovely Easter break.  Enjoy the time spent with family and good friends.

 

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Stephen Downes – learning is distributed

I saw Stephen Downes present on Monday afternoon at Wesley College here in Melbourne. As I anticipated, it was an interesting and informative presentation focused on the importance of recognising that learning has become distributed. The message was that learning consists of interacting in communities of practice; we want students to engage with learning communities from an early age so they know how to navigate them, giving them the ability to take charge of their learning. 

You’ll get no argument from me in regards to that message. My engagement in these networks has led to enormous personal and professional growth. The challenge that exists is how to convince other teachers to join the show and then how we transfer this to the students we teach. I feel like I’m working towards the realisation of this for my students in as much as I’m testing out the formation of an internal learning community with our Yr 9 Ning. The sheer fact that I recognise that I need to find ways to extend the reach of my students by having them write in a hypertext environment puts me one step ahead of most I’d think.  I still have to work towards the realisation of that.

 I asked Stephen, “How do we scale teacher involvement”. His reply was model and demonstrate. I’m not entirely sure that the audience on Monday night were ready for the message. Stephen spoke about the formation of learning networks from an intellectual standpoint and I’m not sure that the audience came away realising that he was talking about the formation of human connections and not computer hardware connections. Perhaps modelling and demonstrating what one of these networks looks like would have been a wise move to get the audience understanding where he was coming from.

It was Stephen’s birthday and thanks to a Twitter connection I managed to go the dinner after the talk. At the end of the evening one of the people there asked me if I’d managed to get my work done during the presentation as I’d had my laptop out. When I explained that I’d been sending out tweets via Twitter about the presentation she was amazed. It brought home to me how many people really have little idea of these means of communication and just how much work needs to be done to help people gain an understanding of learning communities and the power of sharing ideas and insights.

Model and demonstrate. Let’s all remember that message and keep at it!

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Wicked Decent Learning podcast

I was lucky enough on Sunday morning to be able to participate in a podast with Jeff from Wicked Decent Learning. It was a really pleasant  hour and a half conversation about connections, learning, and how we implement change in our schools.  Mark Spahr joined us and it was great to be able to share with Jeff how Mark has helped my profile grow in Maine, USA.  He has been a stalwart follower and supporter ever since I started blogging in January last year. It was Saturday night their time; nice to know I was interesting enough for them to pass the time with instead of hitting the nightlife!!   

The podcast is up on their site. You can listen to it here or go to iTunes and download it. Just search podcasts for Wicked Decent Learning and look for episode 63.

Thanks Jeff and Mark for giving me the opportunity to share my experiences with you.      

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School’s out Friday

Today is end of term here in Melbourne; school holidays now for two glorious weeks. It’s been a hectic last few weeks so these holidays are a much needed break.

This is a great video so make sure you watch it. It was uploaded to our Yr 9 ning this week, recommended for inclusion by one of our students who saw the parallels between it and the attitudes to women in 1960’s Australia. This, all a result of our text study of ‘Bye, Beautiful’, which was set in country Western Australia 1966.  Nothing better than a student making connections between something they’re watching and what’s been discussed in class. Makes it all worth it.

Enjoy the weekend. I’m looking forward to sleeping in and no correction!

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Death to Encarta – Wikipedia 2.7m vs Encarta 42,000

Microsoft Encarta
Image via Wikipedia

Microsoft have announced the demise of Encarta which will be effective from 31st October 2009. The company  has said this on a FAQ page they have set up explaining the decision;

“Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.”

Yes they do.

 I only have to look at the bibliographies produced by students at my school to see that Wikipedia has taken over as the encyclopedia reference source our students go to first. With 2.7 million entries vs 42,000 in Encarta it’s not hard to see why. We try and impress upon our students the need to cross check information but we certainly don’t dissuade them from using it. 

I saw the power of Wikipedia unfold when the American airbus crash landed in the Hudson River. As the incident unfolded the Wikipedia page started taking shape. At that point in time, this method of participatory media was the best source of information about what was happening.  

We have recently made the decision at my school to unsubscribe from Encyclopedia Brittanica. We are retaining our subscription to World Book, but despite our best efforts, find it difficult to get our students to use it as their first port of call. Subscription databases are expensive and from an economic standpoint you have to look at usage vs cost. I’m waiting for the day when these subscription database services wake up and realise that they would be better served offering their services for free. They could move to accepting advertising on their sites to generate income to sustain their costs.    

Thanks to Phil Bradley and Stephen Abrams for alerting me to this in their posts. 

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Top 100 Librarian Tweeters

BestCollegesonline.com has posted a list of the Top 100 Librarian Tweeters and I’m honoured to say I appear on the list. In fact, there are five Australian Librarians who made it on the list. The other four were heyjudeonline, neerav, bookjewel, gonty.

Unfortunately, they didn’t include Kathryn Greenhill, an amazing librarian who is currently in the US and putting out some very helpful tweets from conferences she is attending while there. She is sirexkathryn on Twitter.

 Other great Teacher-Librarians to follow include Tania Sheko (taniasheko on Twitter), Rhonda Powling (bibliokat),  Jodie Heath (librarycanape) and  Carolyn Foote from Texas (technolibrary on Twitter).

Check out the list and see who else is there you might like to follow. I know that my professional learning has benefited from the generous nature of Librarians who are active on Twitter.