eteacher

I received the following email from the Edublogs:

We’ve got some pretty big news this week, something we’ve been working on for quite a while and something we think you will love.

It’s now simple to create blogs for all your students (or colleagues) without having to leave the comfort of your own blog!

http://edublogs.org/2008/03/11/simply-create-blogs-and-usernames-for-your-students/

All you have to do is visit the ‘Users’ tab in your admin area, pop in a username, email address and blog title and the system will automatically create a blog (you can create up to 15 at once) and email the login details to the new user.

If your students don’t have email addresses, no dramas, we link to a simple gmail hack that allows you to set up hundreds of different blogs with one email address.

And to top it all, you can decide to be a ‘co-administrator’ of every blog you create… so you can administer the site and even set the student as a ‘contributor’ or ‘author’ so that you can check their work before it’s published.

If you are not using Edublogs, why not give it a go. It’s FREE.

If you are looking for a easy-to-use website  creation program, then you have your answer at www.weebly.com. This WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) website building tool for non-techies offers a one-step process for adding content that’s already somewhere else on the Web, such as Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Google maps.

When you click-and-drag a YouTube video onto your page, a flash player appears with it, and you can adjust the viewing screen size. It allow easy creation of blogs.

You can change design on the fly and there is a very large number of templates to choose from. The drop and drop interface makes it a breeze to add images, Google maps etc. You can easily use this program with kids in the primary school and it is not ‘blocked’in schools as many other web 2.0 programs are.

Do you want to email some photos and wondering how to reduce the size of images befor posting it? No wants wants to receive photos that are a few MB’s each and takes ‘ages’ to download. Shrink Pictures is your savior.
You don’t need to have almost no grapics skills or knowledge to use this program.

To resize your images it is as simple as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!

1. Browse your computer and select your image/photo to resize
2. Select the new size for your picture – use a preset or choose a custom size
3. Optionally, add an effect to your image
4. Select output image/picture quality Lower quality means a smaller file
5. Click “Resize” and wait for the processed images to be displayed

Are you tired of typing long URL’s to send via email or use in Twitter, Facebook or blogs, the you should look at Tiny URL, which instantly converts it into an ‘tiny url’. You also have an option of creating links based on your desired keywords! This also allows you to hide the actual URLs.

BubbleShare is another free photo sharing program, which makes sharing of photos via blogs, netvibes, websites etc a breeze and it does an attractive job too. You can see some photos in the sidebar of this blog.

Vodpod to help you collect videos from 1000s of sites around the ‘Net. You can use Vodpod search to find videos on YouTube, Google, Myspace, Comedy Central and Daily Motion. Or, use our browser button to add videos from 1000s of sites around the web. When you see a video you like while surfing the web, just click the “Save to Vodpod” button and we’ll add it to your Pod (that’s what we call video collections).

Once you’ve collected a few videos, you can put them on your blog, Facebook, Myspace, Netvibes or your personal website with our widgets. It is sSimply the best way to collect, share and watch videos. Adnd it is FREE and easy to use it. Sign up today.

If you are interested in creating movies, digital stories etc and not sure what to do, then have a look at Jennifer’s Blog. You may get some ideas to use with your class.

If you have made a good movie with your class why not enter in the first ever TROP JR: The Worlds Largest Short Film Festival for Kids! By Kids! (By Australian Children’s Television Foundation).

Why Blog?

Blogging has quickly become one of the most effective learning tools in education today. It introduces students with new methods of communicating, improving their writing, and helps motivate them to find their voice.

Students tend to write about current events, personal beliefs, and topics related to their education.

In blogging, there are no set standards, no boundaries, no restrictions confining you to conform your thoughts to any given set of rules and regulations. You can write freely, and at your own pace.

Also, bloggers can gain an audience from their writing. Unlike a school paper, blog posts can recieve feedback from students, teachers, parents, and ultimately, anyone in the world.

Many teachers have noted that the students would publish to their school blogs even when not instructed to. Students really enjoy reaching out to the world and they are so motivated by it that they want to write even more. They would describe how their day was, what they learned in class, or even things they learned or read on the news that day. It’s amazing.

I also found that many students became so attached to their blogs that they made it a responsibility to keep consistent.

Where to Start

As a first stop, I highly recommend reading SupportBlogging. It will explain what educational blogging is all about, what it means for students and educators, and how you can setup a blog.

Blogs for Learning which is a new site containing in-depth articles on educational blogging and fantastic screencast tutorials showing the ins and outs of various blogging platforms (including Wordpress and Blogger).

Be sure to look over the article, “Student Blogging – What You Should Know”.

For teachers and students, I suggest using edublogs.org for blogging as they provide you with a free, hosted blog. They also provide you with a wiki powered by Wikispaces for free.

Web 2.0

• read/write or shared content
• an increased emphasis on user generated content
• data and content sharing and collaborative effort
• use of various kinds of social software
• new ways of interacting with web-based applications
• the use of the web as a platform for generating, re-purposing and consuming content

Why Web 2.0?

• greater efficiency
• changes in student population
• better learning and teaching methods
• allowing greater student independence and autonomy
• greater collaboration

Problems

• accessibility
• visibility and privacy
• data ownership
• control over content
• longevity of data
• data preservation
• staff and student training

The Future

• The broadcast media increasingly adopting Web 2.0 technologies, with greater audience participation and audience created content
• The increased bandwidth will encourage a move from the desktop to mobile devices and browsers
• Content will be created, shared and consumed on mobile devices.
• Computing that is always on, will change our everyday digital and media environments, mediating the world in new ways.

Web 2.0 Softwares

• Individual systems are hosted on servers and accessed across the web via a browser, they may be interchangeably be called Web 2.0 systems, Web 2.0 services or Web 2.0 applications.

Blogs

• A blog is a system that allows a single author (or a group of authors) to write and publicly display time-ordered articles (called posts)
• Readers can add comment to posts.
• In schools, students using their individual blogs can build up a corpus of interrelated knowledge via posts and comments, encouraged and facilitated by a teacher.

• Teachers can use a blog for course announcements, news and feedback to students.
• Syndication technologies (RSS feeds) enable groups of learners and teachers to easily keep track of new posts.

Wikis

• A wiki is a system that allows one or more people to build up a body of knowledge in a set of interlinked web pages, using a process of creating and editing pages. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.
• Wikis can be used in class projects, and are particularly suited to the production of collaboratively edited material.
• Wikis can be used by teachers to supply scaffolding for writing activities – thus in a group project a teacher can supply page structure, hints as to desirable content, and then provide feedback on student generated content.
• Students can provide feedback on each other’s writing.

Social Bookmarking

• A social bookmarking service provides users the ability to record (bookmark) web pages, and tag those records with significant words (tags) that describe the pages being recorded.
• A good examples is del.icio.us.
• Over time users build up collections of records with common tags, and users can search for bookmarked items by likely tags. Since items have been deemed worthy of being bookmarked and classified with one or more tags, social bookmarking services can sometimes be more effective than search engines for finding Internet resources.
• Users can find other users who use the same tag and who are likely to be interested in the same topic(s).
• In some social bookmarking systems, users with common interests can be added to an individual’s own network to enable easy monitoring of the other users’ tagging activity for interesting items.
• In schools, teachers and learners can build up collections of resources.

Podcasting

• Podcasting is a way in which a listener may conveniently keep up-to-date with recent audio or video content.
• Podcasting is a combination of audio or video content, RSS, and a program that deals with RSS notifications of new content, and playback or download of that new content to a personal audio/video player.
• Vidcasts are video versions of podcasts.
• Podcasts can be used to provide introductory material before lessons, or, more commonly, to record lectures/lessons and allow students to listen to the lectures again, either because they were unable to attend, or to reinforce their learning.
• Vidcasts can be used to supply to supply videos of laboratory experiments.
• Podcasts can be used to supply audio tutorial material and/or exemplar recordings of native speakers to foreign language learners.

Other Media Sharing

• Distribution and sharing of educational media and resources. For example, an art history class could have access to a set of art works via a photo sharing system, such as Flickr.
• The ability to comment on and critique each other’s work.
• Flickr allows for annotations to be associated with different areas of an image and for comments to be made on the image as a whole, thereby facilitating teacher explanations, class discussion, and collaborative comment.
• FlickrCC is a particularly useful ancillary service that allows users to find Creative Commons licensed images that are freely reusable as educational resources.
• Instructional videos and seminar records can be hosted on video sharing systems. Google Video, YouTube and TeacherTube.

Social Networking

• Systems that allow people to network together for various purposes. Examples include Facebook and MySpace, Second Life (virtual world), and Elgg.
• Social networking systems allow users to describe themselves and their interests, and they generally implement notions of friends and communities.
• There are a wide variety of educational experiments being carried out in Second Life. These vary from the mundane with a virtual world gloss to more adventurous experiments that take advantage of the virtual reality.

Collaborative Editing Tools

• These allow users in different locations to collaboratively edit the same document at the same time. Examples are Google Docs (Word processor, Spreadsheets & Presentation) and Gliffy (diagrams online).
• In schools, these can be used for collaborative work over the web, either edited simultaneously or simply to share work edited by different individuals at different times.
• Students from different classes or schools can work on the same document.

Syndication using RSS feeds

• In a world of newly added and updated shared content, it is useful to be able to easily keep up to date with new and changed content, particularly if one is interested in multiple sources of information on multiple web sites.
• A feed reader (sometimes called an aggregator) can be used to centralise all the recent changes in the sources of interest, and a user can easily use the reader/aggregator to view recent additions and changes.
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is used to list changes (these lists of changes are called feeds, giving rise to the name feed reader).
• A feed reader displays changes in summary form, and allows the user to see/download the complete changes.
• In a group project where a wiki is being developed collaboratively, RSS feeds can be used to keep all members of the group up to date with changes as they can be automatically notified of changes as they are made.
• Similarly one can be automatically notified of new blog posts made by class members.

Social constructivism

• Social constructivist approaches are particularly aided by Web 2.0 tools as mediating mechanisms between collaborating students and between students and teachers, particularly between students who might be sometimes be working in different places and at different times.
• A group of students might construct an artefact in a wiki, but also be guided by a teacher who provides scaffolding in the same wiki. This scaffolding could take the form of wiki page structure and titles for pages to be filled in by the students, guidance as to areas to discuss in the wiki, the kind of content that is desired, and feedback on existing student produced content. Possible issues and problems
• Much Web 2.0 based student work is about content sharing and repurposing. This is can easily be seen by students as part of a new teenage copy-and-paste culture that runs counter to traditional notions of plagiarism, and adjustments may need to be made, either to redefine plagiarism (unlikely to occur), or to help students transcend this culture.
• There may be a skills and/or culture crisis as ‘old world’ teachers are forced to use unfamiliar tools and work and in unfamiliar ways and alien environments.
• Not all students may be digitally connected with a computer and Internet connection at home. These students would be at a profound disadvantage in a new world of Web 2.0 enabled learning without specific care being taken to address their needs.

Conclusion

• Web 2.0 will have profound implications for learners and teachers in formal, informal, work-based and life­long education. Web 2.0 will affect how schools and universities go about the business of education, from learning, teaching and assessment, through contact with school communities, widening participation and interfacing with industry.
• However, it would be a mistake to consider Web 2.0 as the sole driver of these changes; instead Web 2.0 is just one part. Other drivers include, for example, pressures to greater efficiency, changes in student population, and ongoing emphasis on better learning and teaching methods.
• Nonetheless, Web 2.0 is a technology with profound potentiality for inducing change in the education sector. In this, the possible realms of learning to be opened up by the catalytic effects of Web 2.0 technologies are attractive, allowing greater student independence and autonomy, greater collaboration, and increased pedagogic efficiency.

Moodle is a free online learning management system used by thousands of teacher worldwide. Try it out for yourself by installing in your notebook, desktop or in your school web server.

Moodle can be used in schools for:

• Sharing Ideas and Resources
• Collaboration between teachers
• Collaboration between students
• Supporting learning
• Create a Learning Community
• Talk about personal experiences using blogs and wikis
• Online discussion using forums and chats
• RSS feeds

Some ideas for using Moodle:

• Simple public web site including news, calendar and resources. Could even have public classroom pages maintained by staff/student.
• Simple intranet with “course sites” allowing resource sharing between groups of teachers etc
• Use of the quiz tool multi-choice, short answer etc
• Older students creating content for teachers & younger students
• A simple publishing tool for audio files (podcasting), using forum or RSS feeds.
• Use wiki’s to enable students to create simple web pages or a group sites/projects.
• Link lists
• Use forums to give students a sense of audience in their writing.
• Glossary as a simple image gallery.
• Parental access to work.
• Glossaries where children can deliver/share book reviews.
• Use a Wiki as a group preparation/recording tool for a day trip.
• Online journals (blogs) for pupils to record achievements or concerns, for themselves and their teachers.
• Scheduled chat sessions for discussion with students from other schools.

This is only a very small list of what you can do with Moodle. Find out for yourself by exploring Moodle today.