Inspired

Thank you, Em, for your presentation on Monday night. I am inspired to enter new territory. I am beginning a new unit of work with my Year 12 students next week on the film "Look Both Ways". I am looking to set up my own blog to encourage discussion and hopefully enhance their educational experience. Thus, the journey begins.

Online collaborative learning

As a follow up to a professional development day I attended in term 2 on web2.0 technologies I shared with my PLT group some of the online collaborative learning ideas for the classroom.
Here are the notes from our meeting.

PLT- Online collaborative learning
Monday 28th July

Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.[1] Social networking, wiki’s, blogs etc

For the classroom…

Blog- short for weblog. An online journal where your readers can respond and comment on the thoughts of the writer(s).
http://hawkesdale.globalstudent.org.au/
http://mrsmcsclass.blogspot.com/
http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/

There are many different places that you can use to create your blog. http://www.blogspot.com/ is a very easy one to use. edublogs.org would be a good one to use with your class.

Wiki- A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is one of the best-known wikis.[2]

http://maths9.wetpaint.com/?t=anon Year 9 Maths
http://middlej.pbwiki.com/ Middle J at Bellaire PS in Geelong
http://global-village.pbwiki.com/ Global village project by class 8F from Mansikkala School, Imatra, Finland

As with blogs there are a number of different places where you can set up a wiki. Try http://www.wikispaces.com/ or http://pbwiki.com/education.wiki

Other things you might like to investigate:

Google docs - Free web-based word processor and spreadsheet, which allow you share and collaborate online
http://voicethread.com/ or http://ed.voicethread.com/about/ - Students can collaborate around almost any type of media via voice, text, webcam and drawing commentary.
http://www.teachertube.com/ You Tube for teachers, a place for sharing instructional videos.
Go2web20 http://www.go2web20.net/ Directory to all things web2.0


Worried about security?

Most applications have quite good security options where you can control who can view and contribute to the blog/wiki etc. You can also usually set up options for a moderator to edit and control contributions if necessary.


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki


View this post as a Word document

First post

This is just Em testing the new blog. Hopefully all of the members of our group will be signed up shortly and will be able to contribute to our blog.