At my current school we have a regular assembly for the senior school once a fortnight.  Fortunately, I had a few Web 2.0 tools to help my home group complete the half hour presentation.  Thank you Animoto and Google maps for making this job a little easier.  We used the idea of Harmony Day as the impetus for a Google map showing the class’s ancestral links.  Animoto provided not one but three presentations!  The Harmony Day clip: ‘Living in Harmony‘ is below:

My Web 2.0 journey began exactly a year ago, inspired by a few questions at a professional development activity and fuelled by my own desire to understand ‘what all the fuss was about.’

As a way of celebrating this milestone I thought I’d revisit the key discoveries of the past year.  My journey was an informal one, with many paths and many lingering visits along the way.  This blog was my starting point.

Blogging:
One of the first things I did after starting this blog was to explore the amazing array of quality blogs out there.  Many inspired me to develop and maintain the best quality blog I could with my limited talent and experience.

CogDogBlog by Alan Levine proved an excellent starting point.  From there I found the wiki and a list of story tools which fuelled my journey for weeks. I used many of them in my early blog entries and still love the simplicity of tools such as toondoo, slideshare and animoto.

Teacher-Librarian blogs:

As a qualified teacher-librarian I was keen to learn what I could from the online experts in the field.  One of the first gems I found was an Edublogs award winner, A Library by Any Other Name.  I learned about the 23Things Web 2.0 activitiy via this blog and followed it to learn more on my own.

This blog also led to another Edublogs winner, this time a fellow Australian, Judy O’Connell, who maintains the Hey Jude blog.  Judy seems to have an amazing capacity for ‘thinking outside the square’ and has steered me in the direction of many new online connections and blogs, including Dean Shareski’s blog and, one of my all time favourites: Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day.

The PLN:

The blogosphere is the sort of place where each new connection leads somewhere else: Twitter, Plurk, Ning, Diigo groups, Second Life etc.  It got to the point where I was signing up for something new each day.  It was several months before I realised I actually had a PLN of my own, a discovery which immediately led to a blog post…an event which in itself demonstrated how completely I had become immersed in the Web 2.0 world.  Something had happened…suddenly I needed to share my discoveries with other educators, suddenly I felt responsible for helping others learn.  More importantly, I began to see the real potential of the connections I’d made and began to change the way I approached my job and my teaching.

The Shape of Learning: One Size Does Not Fit All

The best part of my learning journey is the way I have been able to shape it with my own interests and needs.  Surely, this is the most effective type of learning?  The blogs I turn to have changed, the tools I race to sign up for are slightly different from last year’s offerings.  My new best tools include:

pageflakes, which I used to build an Earth 2.0 webquest;

wetpaint wikis which I use to host a wiki for my Year 11 English students called English @ 11. While they are still getting their heads around this new tool they are also learning a lot.

I’ve also rediscovered the potential of flickr, particularly photographs usable via creative commons licensing.  Other tools which complement flickr are available via Big Huge Labs

My new favourite blogs are

The English Blog: for its cutting edge articles and tools

The Best Article Every Day: for fun and great resources

Free Technology for Teachers: for its outstanding resources

Jane’s e-learning pick of the Day: excellent tools

A Geeky Mother’s Blog: excellent writing, great discussion

The Open Classroom: because I’ve met Jo and love to read her thoughts

and ICT in my Classroom: for ICT ideas and activities in a real classroom.

Thanks to Elizabeth Koh who tagged me for this meme which was started by TJ:

“List FIVE changes you would like to see in the educational system. Your responses should represent your perspective and your passion for learning and students…tag the following people…from a variety of perspectives. If you have been tagged, tag as many people as you choose, but try for a variety.”

Real life learning is about passionate engagement and lifelong curiosity. I would like to see the education system change to reflect this.  Students need to be provided with more opportunities to explore personal passions and learn about the things that are important to them.  They need to learn that learning itself is actually fun!

Avoid ‘Ivory tower’ type decision-making by ensuring decisions which impact on schools are based on what’s actually happening in schools.  It is too easy to make far-reaching decisions in an office far removed from an actual student, teacher or class.  Administrators and Principals need to understand what is happening out there.  Educational vision needs to be shared.

Increase funding to libraries and work to raise the status of libraries and teacher-librarians.  Libraries are central to learning and can have a huge impact on student learning outcomes in any school area.  The research to support this is overwhelming yet so many people still don’t get it…

Encourage teachers to work together, share resources and ideas, and give them time to talk to each other.  If we work together we will, ultimately, save time and energy to the benefit of our students and families.  We will also be working towards improving the status of teachers and teaching.   Education-based PLN’s are global and achieving wonderful things daily.

Measure real student achievement through authentic assessment and decrease the status of exams as an indicator of achievement.  Students are so much more than their exam grades!

I would like to tag the following people:

@jomcleay

@alihall

@Hershey Thorp

@LauraMaria

@tabor330

However, I would also encourage anyone with an opinion on this important issue to share their viewpoint

This meme represents my first official ‘tagging’ and I have to admit I’ve enjoyed every aspect of it, particularly reading about others in my PLN.  Thanks to Anne and Ali Hall for tagging me

My 7 things:
My life has been without major drama or loss and I appreciate that I am one of the lucky ones.  However, a story of loss from my mother’s childhood has always intrigued me … her father, Byron Gould, disappeared without a trace when she was 2.  He was on a business trip to Sydney.  My Grandmother looked for him for some time but there was never any trace of him anywhere.  Mum knows very little about him except that he received cheques from America regularly and he always wore a safari suit.  He was American and may have been Jewish.  She thinks his father was a surgeon.  According to an aunt he was devoted to my grandmother.  I must admit I’ve always wondered if he had ‘another life’ somewhere in the United States and perhaps my mother has several elderly siblings…(Mum’s 78 and still going strong)

I’ve never been able to click my fingers and every time I reveal this to anyone they say, “It’s easy, you just click them together like this,” and they proceed to show me…as though it had never occurred to me before to actually try it like that.   I repeat, “I can’t click my fingers!”

It always surprises people when I tell them my sister is a trained medium.  They invariably say, “You don’t look the type.”   I’m still not sure what ‘type’ you have to be to have a trained medium as a sister!

I’ve always suffered from insomnia.  I get some of my best ideas at 2:00am in the morning.  As a memory trigger for the next morning I throw things from my bedside table onto the floor.  I once wrote a short play in the middle of the night.

I am a visual person who is greatly influenced by colours.  I particularly love pink, blue and red.  I organise my files by colour.  (If it’s yellow you know I’m not that keen on the topic or contents!)  When people are wearing different colours I always notice.  It is so obvious that students have commented on it in the past.  When I was going through my ‘pink’ phase my students described me as the teacher who wears something pink every day!  (That’s when I tried to incorporate red…so now I’m in a red phase!)

I tend to be a very positive person although I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an optimist.  I also tend to be lucky and often wonder if there is a connection.  I have also suffered from depression so I understand both ends of the scale.

I am a middle child and believe this has made me a perpetual ‘peace maker’.  I never take sides and always see other people’s point of view.  I’ve come to realise that this can be both a good and a bad thing (What a surprise!).  It also annoys a lot of people.

I think almost everyone in my PLN has been tagged already for this meme.  However, I would like to tag Mari Hobkirk, Grace Kat, Heidi Pence and Inpi.  (If you have already been tagged please pass it on!)

Games are fun.  Learning is supposed to be fun at least some of the time. (If not all of the time…but that’s another blog post)  For me the combination of games and learning is a natural one; they are the perfect complement for each other and a ‘tool’ educators need to exploit more often.

Last year I used a lot of games to attract students to my library.  The plan was a huge hit (which also increased reading and borrowing) and I learned which games worked and which ones didn’t.  We had board games as well as online games which were accessible via our moodle site. Throughout my PLJ (Personal Learning Journey) I have also made a point of bookmarking games I thought might be of use and it occurred to me that others might find my list useful.  The most successful and popular games are listed below

Highlights

Bloxorz is a strategy game that involves manoeuvring a block through a hole with increasing degrees of difficulty.  It proved a huge hit with the boys in my library who spent many lunchtimes working together to solve the problem.  Of course, they were just having fun and unaware that they were also working collaboratively and developing communication and problem-solving skills.

A similar type of game is planarity.  I only just discovered planarity via a recent plurk but I believe it would sit nicely next to bloxorz and prove a similar hit…perhaps I will add it to the list when I return to work!

After the success of bloxorz Students began researching and suggesting other games they considered ‘worthy’ of our library moodle page and I added those I thought suitable:

Jelly Blocks involves similar thinking skills and was the next game adopted after students had mastered bloxorz.

3D Logic was another student recommendation.  It begins with something that looks a lot like a rubik’s cube and also involves strategy and problem-solving skills.

Mansion Impossible is quite different from the puzzle-type games that proved popular with students.  It requires participants to buy and sell houses to earn enough money to build a 10 million pound mansion.  The students loved it but seemed to find it too easy.

I also added a few keyboarding games such as  The Keyboard Game and Key Master.

Educational Games

The obvious ‘educational’ games proved less popular with students when they had ‘free time’ but were, nevertheless, useful additions to our list of games and would attract occasional interest.  Of course, students would love to be allowed to play these games during class time but they wanted a different type of challenge during their ‘free time’ in the library.

Questionaut One of the BBCs bitesize games An excellent model for educational games.  This one is designed for revision.

Purpose Games A wide selection of trivia and quiz games with purpose.

Gut Instinct Another BBC game.  Great for revision.

Puzzle Choice A good selection of puzzles including mazes, word games etc and some excellent links to other online games including Wordsense which is one of our family’s favourites.  My 16 year old son loves this one and he usually goes out of his way to avoid anything educational.

The Magic Factory attracted a lot of attention from the younger students, as did the games available via The Stacks at Scholastic.

My ‘Library Legends’ (aka library monitors) loved playing Immune Attack on my laptop, a great game that  “introduces basic concepts of human immunology“  However,  I believe the ’shoot ‘em up’ aspects of this game were the real attraction.

A group of games from the Nobel Prize organisation is also worth a look.  These games include are designed to teach us about the Nobel Prize award and include simulations and games based around the Nobel Prize in Physics, Literature, Chemistry, Peace, Medicine and Economics.

I hope you enjoy exploring these games.

Games are Learning Gems

“Not another wiki” was a comment I heard recently while listening to a group of inspiring educators on Plurk Radio.  It was delivered in a tone which suggested this person had ‘done’ wikis ‘to death’ and was ready to move on.  It brought home to me the diverse range of skill, understanding and experience ‘out there’ amongst educators.

My reality is quite different.  Most of my colleagues have never created a wiki.  I’m sure there are many other teachers out there who don’t really have an understanding of wikis beyond wikipedia and have never really thought about classroom applications because they don’t really ‘get it.’

The power of the wiki

I think wikis have huge potential in the classroom.  They are fantastic tools for sharing information and building knowledge.  They are also versatile presentation vehicles.  Indeed,  the list of things I have learned from my current wiki experiment grows daily and highlights the learning possibilities for students.

What I have learned…(so far)

• How to embed a webpage into a wiki:  Thanks to the Getting Tricky With Wikis wiki!  This makes web pages more accessible and user-friendly, both important considerations for students.
• How to access and use databases such as Press Display to facilitate students’ learning.  Many large local libraries probably subscribe to this database.  Mine does (CCLC) but you have to be a member to access it.  I used this to add a newspaper article, including tasks, to my wiki.
• How to use Glogster to build the Useful Online Resources page in my wiki.  This provided a vibrant, visually appealling vehicle to highlight learning tools available to students.  (I can’t draw so this sort of creativity is really important to me.)
• Read Write Think provides an excellent array of graphic organizers.
• Internet Archive is an excellent resource for educators.  I found some useful public domain audio books here and added them to my wiki so that students can access them for our theme study, ‘Future Worlds’
• The State Library of Victoria’s, Ergo site is an amazing resource that is going to prove very useful over the years.  A visit to the essay writing skills page is a must for teachers and students everywhere.
• How to embed an audio file into a wiki:  This proved to be the trickiest!  Thanks to a twitterer I discovered Divshare and worked out how to do the embedding myself (with a little help from an edublogger post, of course!).

Now, that’s a lot of learning for one little wiki!  Hopefully, my students will gain as much from their own wiki experience in the 2009 school year.

I would love to hear from others with positive wiki experiences.  Please share a link.

I am a definite fan of microblogging.  It has something to do with the quick, sharp repartee that is so like a real school staffroom it is kind of weird.  Teachers rarely get a chance to have long meaningful chats with their professional colleagues during school hours.  There is never enough time! Instead we have the corridor ‘catch up’, often while walking in opposite directions, or quick conversation snippets shared in between meetings, phone calls, classes, conferences etc.  When we need to talk to someone we almost always have to do it quickly and, consequently, by getting straight to the point.  Is it any wonder microblogging just seems like natural communication to me?

Plurk

Plurk has become one of the first places I check when I turn on my computer.  It feels like I’m catching up with colleagues.  The fact that many of them live in another hemisphere is not important.  We are all educators and we are all concerned for our students and eager to learn anything that might improve the way we teach and learn.  We share Important and irrelevant details, wish each other goodnight and good morning (sometimes), moan about day-to-day ‘teacher-type’ problems and learn together about things that are new and/or useful.

Plurkers

I look forward to hearing about the weather in Brattleboro VT USA, not because I care about weather particularly but because it means Skip Z is out and about and his morning ’shout out’ is a Plurkadian tradition.  He’s also a professional colleague whose opinion I value and many of the links he has shared on Plurk have become an important part of my teaching and learning.   Mindelei is another plurker guaranteed to challenge my thinking.  Her passion and enthusiasm are a plurk feature and she loves to ask questions to make ’seasoned’ educators think.  GingerTPLC is another plurker of note.  Her teaching day is a constant reminder of what we are all trying to achieve in our classrooms.   Kevinh has energy in abundance and is clearly a well respected educator.  I don’t really have a spatial understanding of North America but Kevinh seems to be presenting in most of it!

I could go on…

If I listed all the Plurkers I value it would take far too long and I simply don’t have the time.  Could I just leave you all with this one piece of advice:  If you’re an educator sign up for Plurk. The Plurk ‘eduverse’ is a wonderful place and you’re guaranteed a welcome!

Just a quick post to share my webquest project with you all…

Earth 2.0:  Is it possible to create a completely sustainable planet?

The best bits about my work on this project:

1. Pageflakes: Using pageflakes as the Webquest Headquarters was a stroke of genius (If I do say so myself!!!) Pageflakes is a great tool for educators: it is flexible, easy to use, vibrant in appearance and the range of widgets available is outstanding!

2. Teamwork: I worked with a colleague to produce this webquest and had far too much fun as a result, mainly because we were able to laugh at ourselves during several ‘manic’ Earth 2.0 moments.  We could have kept going but we had to stop to meet the competition deadline!  (Mark is already talking about our next project.)

An interesting note:  Neither of us had time to take on this project…if you’re an educator there is never enough time! How did it happen then?  We became passionate about the learning, the project and the notion of Earth 2.0.  Discussions led to action; engagement in the task led to refinement and development of ideas and activities. In short, the project became fun for us.  We reacted the way we want our students to react to a new learning task.  There’s a lesson in that for everyone.

3. Local and Global Feedback: We gained valuable insights into the project by asking our students to review it for us.  They thought it would be improved by games so we added games!  I used Classtools, one of my favourites, to put together some simple games based on the sustainability theme and also added the Planet Green Game.  I then asked my PLN via Plurk and Twitter for objective advice.  My  Plurk buddies provided me with some excellent feedback that I acted on straight away. The Plurk eduverse is really something else…I highly recommend you become part of it!

4. Web 2.0:  The possibilities are endless!  2.0 tools help make learning fun and provide teachers with ways to actively engage and challenge students.  In addition to the suite of tools available on Pageflakes we also found wetpaint wiki simple to use and loved our voki characters.  I used Big Huge Labs to create the Earth 2.0 trading cards and EduPic, graphical resources for educators, for the images.

I do get excited when I discover tools that are so nifty I just want to use them straight away!  I discovered this one via Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day.  Visitors are invited to add themselves to a map and include a message and photo if they choose.  They can also provide an email address.  What a great way to build a community!  My guest map is below.  Please join it and say Hi:

My exploration of blogging and other Web 2.0 tools began in earnest during April this year. At that point my enthusiasm saw me spending most of my spare time signing up for and experimenting with tool after tool, following lists compiled by Web 2.0 pioneers and reading every educational blog I could find. What a journey! Now that I have recovered from the ‘dizzy heights’ of discovery I finally feel ready to share a few of my Top 3 Learning Gems:

· The Google Tools: I’m talking Gmail, igoogle, Google Reader, Google Docs and Google Apps (for Education). I use each every day and believe they’ve helped me more than any other tools. An essential starting point for all educators.  To learn more try this excellent blog post from College@Home: ‘57Useful Google Tools You’ve Never Heard of’

· Edublogs: The blogging world is a vibrant place embedded with passion and enthusiasm that tends to be contagious. Starting a blog (or 5 in my case) is a great way to become immersed in the thinking and challenges of Web 2.0. Edublogs worked perfectly for me because it had simple, easy to follow, films I could watch and also The Edublogger, a fantastic resource for all bloggers.

· Microblogging Tools: At first it was Twitter and then Plurk. I love the sharing and camaraderie these tools allow. Plurk is ‘time-zone friendly’ because the timeline allows me to easily follow and contribute to discussions that happen while I’m asleep. Twitter is not quite as useful in this respect although it is still one of the best and I have made some of my best discoveries via tweets. Both are valuable tools for educators. I’m hoping Edmodo, microblogging for education, will work just as well with my students.

TOP 3 Blogs: The ones I read first are:

· Jane’s E-learning Pick of the Day

· Free Technology for Teachers

· Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day

All fantastic blogs to follow!  Great resources for educators.

TOP 3 Diigo Groups:

Educational discoveries abound:

· Web 2.0 tools for teachers

· Classroom 2.0

· OZ/NZ Educators

Top 5 Wow-factor tools: (Tools that impress with very little effort!)

· ClassTools: Impress students and teachers with your specially designed games

· Glogster: So many possibilities…higher-order thinking opportunities in abudnance.

· Pageflakes: a great tool for educators; the ‘anything flake’ opens up all sorts of possibilities. Great as the ‘front page’ for our Earth 2.0 webquest.

· Animoto: Very cool presentations. Impress the ‘too cool for school’ group with this nifty little tool

· Flickr: More than you think! Creative Commons makes this the best starting point for educators looking for great images.  Lots of tools worth exploring too!

However, it’s not really about the tools…

It’s about quality teaching and learning; it’s about being an agent of change and it’s about equipping students and teachers and being an agent of change so that, eventually, all teachers and students are equipped with the skills they need to function fully in the 21^st Century.