A Purpose

What is the purpose of .......? (you fill in the blank) As educators this is something that we ask ourselves all the time in the classroom. What is the purpose of this lesson, this assignment, this reading, this test.

I believe that the same question, what is the purpose of ...? Needs to be asked of technology and the tools that we use in and out of the classroom.

My Criteria for Evaluation

• Makes a job more efficient
• It does at least one thing VERY well
• Works with other technologies to accomplish an even bigger job

Today we are going to learn about some new technologies that you can use both on your own and with your students to accomplish the three points above

UPDATE: A new wiki has been created for this class. It is contained in the section "more than words" Go check it out. The password is SAG2007.

Wikis are a wonderful tool that you can use in your classroom for collaborative projects. Get the students thinking and sharing together!

If you have any feedback, questions/suggestions etc please leave a comment either on the wiki, or as a comment to one of these posts. I will try to check this blog for the comments and answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you once again for giving me the chance to share with you many tools that you can hopefully use in your classroom, and with your students, to empower them and bring the world into your class. Remember that students when given the chance can surprise even the most veteran of teachers. All we need to do is give them the incentive to excel, and sharing their work with their peers and the world might just be the incentive that they need!

Why not more of the same?

Educators as a group are slow to evolve, to change to an ever changing world. Many teachers reluctantly change what they teach when a new curriculum is introduced, but is this enough. Here is a bit of information courtesy of Karl Fisch of the fisch bowl that I though all of you might like to know . You can also check out the Winnipeg version of the original, created by Darren Kuropatwa at Daniel Mac Collegiate

Social Bookmarking (Collaborating with others)

You've heard of social networking before right? We've all heard its not what you know, but who you know before. What if this applied to teaching; that its not how much knowledge and resources we have in our own head, but rather how much collective knowledge and resources that we have access to.

Welcome to social bookmarking

My two favorite social bookmarking sites
Del.icio.us Lets checkout my delicious account

• Easy to tag
• Broad network of users
• Great to use as feeds
• Habits of successful delicious bookmarkers
  

Furl

• Personal feeds
• Personal web
• Today's popular RSS feeds
• How to use Furl
  

Now we are going to create a del.icio.us account as a group, trust me its easy. (You will want to create an account as most of the useful tools of delicious and furl aren't available until you've created an account and started to bookmark some pages.)
(10 mins)

Some Other Useful Tools
Ben Bishop's Introduction to delicious
Del.icio.us plug in for firefox
Del.icio.us plug in for Internet Explorer
Absolutely Delicious (Tons of other del.icio.us plug ins)

BLOGS (Web logs)

So What is a blog?

A blog can be defined as a personal or group online journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.

So how does this relate to education? Well since 2001/02 some educators have started to blog about what they are doing in the classroom, sharing their struggles and successes and receiving comments from others.

A couple of popular blogs written by educators are:

• Bud The Teacher
  
• Will Richardson and his take on what is a weblog
• Darren Kuropatwa a Winnipeg educator who opened my eyes to how you can use blogs in the classroom

Educators can choose to use blogs in some many different ways in the classroom. It allows students to work collaboratively not only with the members of their own classroom, but with members of the world at large.

How I choose to use blogs in the classroom:

• Student reflection on what they have learned
• Scribe Posts. One student reteaches the lesson to his or her fellow classmates
• Providing class notes and lessons to my students to use at home
• Giving feedback and answering individual questions from my students
• Giving my students valuable resources that they can use
  
• Most importantly it enables learning outside of the classroom walls. Students gain more control over how they learn

Why don't you now take a few minutes to explore
Classroom Blogs:
Grade 10 Computer Science Slot E
Grade 10 Computer Science Slot I
Grade 7 Math at Sargent Park (Dormant)
Grade 8 Math at Sargent Park
Grade 10 Consumer Math at Daniel Mac
Grade 12 Pre-Calc at Daniel Mac
Grade 7/8 classroom blog

(10 mins)

Educator Blogs
Making it Interesting by Chris Harbeck
Remote Access by Clarence Fisher
A Difference by Darren Kuropatwa
Southwest Horizon by Janis Williams
Ideas and Thoughts by Dean Shareski

Almost everyone of the educators and classroom blogs are people who live in Winnipeg. There are hundreds if not thousands of educators opening their doors and taking down the walls to their classrooms all over the world. Could your classroom be next?

More than words

While being able to insert text, images and videos into our blogs is great, many more rich experiences await our students through the use of external applets and widgets.

1) Slideshare
Do you create powerpoint presentations for your students? Ever work with a smartboard or another program that allows you to save documents as a presentation? Slideshare might be just the ticket for you.
Example 1, Example #2, Example #3
Check out these two blogs and their use of slideshare. Trust me after you've created an account with slide share its super easy to use.

Lets check out uploading a presentation to slideshare (5 mins)

Flickr
You really want to add an image on a topic, the problem is either A, you don't have any images of your own that relate to the subject, or B, you have the image somewhere, you just aren't sure where.

Flickr allows you to:

• Store photos online
• Share photos with friends and colleagues/students
• View and use other people's photo libraries
• add notes to your photos
• set privacy levels on your photos (restrict who can and can't see your pictures)
• upload your pictures from just about anywhere (cellphone, computer, blog itself)
• Create RSS feeds to your photos.

Lets take a very quick tour of flickr to see what is available to be found
(3 mins)

3) Google Documents. Do students lose their assignment or complain that they couldn't view their assignments at home? Ever wish that you could add comments and give feedback to a student as they work on their assignment. Don't have microsoft office at home, or just want to move away from having to cart your documents to and from work all of the time. Enter Google
docs. I use to post assignments onto the classroom blogs, check it out here. Students can find their assignments at home, print off their assignments and even work online if necessary.

The creative ways in which you can use google docs is limited only by your imagination. Google has created their own version of word, excel and powerpoint. The best part is that online collaboration can occur between multiple users. You can limit who can and can't edit or view a file, and all revisions/additions to a document leave an electronic fingerprint, the original composer is aware of who made the changes.

View some more ideas of how educators can use google docs.

While this might not be an online tool Open Office is a free application that you or your students can download and use as an Microsoft office substitute.

4) Voicethread. Imagine a tool that allows people to give meaning and personalization to pictures, text and documents. What if multiple users could leave voice and text comments on the same item. What if you had a tool that allows students to upload and share their images, their work with the world on your blog; welcome to voicethread. Check out this demo and this example.

5) Wikis. Wikis could very well be the ultimate online collaboration tool. Think of a wiki as a blank whiteboard that anyone who has a marker (has permission) can contribute to. The largest wiki of them all, wikipedia, has revolutionized the way that we gather and share information.

Through something much simpler as a classroom wiki students can share and contribute their ideas together in safe collaborative environment, and trust me given the chance students can create absolutely amazing work. Check this out, and this one too.

IMPORTANT OUR WIKI HAS BEEN UPDATED!!!!

THE PASSWORD FOR THE WIKI IS SAG2007 check it out and if possible try editing the wiki on your own!! Thanks

Now lets go and check out our SAG Workshop Wiki and as place to create your own wiki

6) Podcasting. Once again a topic that as an educator I'm only starting to play with and have yet to really incorporate into my classroom. For those of you who might have heard about a podcast before, but really don't know what it is, lets give you a quick description "a podcast is a digital recording of an audio or video file, made available on the Internet for downloading to a computer for current or future consumption. Popular places to download podcasts include the itunes store, learn out loud and people's own blogs.

Now do you need an ipod to listen to a podcast? NO, you need a digital media player (which could be your computer) but you don't need a ipod.

How could you use a podcast in your classroom? Check out this example from a consumer math class

7) Video Streams Ever heard of Youtube before? I guarantee your students have. How about using youtube to teach? With millions of videos posted on Youtube I guarantee that you can find content that is relevant and educational for your students. How about learning how to create a podcast by watching youtube.

Youtube is not the only answer for hosting video. Another option that I just learned about attending a conference yesterday is ustream.tv Here you can stream a conference live and save it as episodes in a library of your work.

8) Skype. Ever had a video conference with someone before? Use Skype and you can call anyone anywhere in the world for free and have either a voice or video conference with them. All you need is a mic and the skype program (and a web camera for the video part)

RSS

Many educators are viewing RSS as the next KILLER APP. What is a killer APP you might ask? The short version is that a killer app is a new program or technology that changes how we use information. Check out a much more detailed description here.

While there are many definitions of what RSS is, here is a short rundown

• RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Rich Site Syndication
• Feeds and Aggregators
• NewsReaders (Netvibes, Newsgator and bloglines)
  
• Newspaper RSS Feeds
• Recognizing feeds and how to use them
• An educator's guide to RSS by Will Richardson

Lets sign up for our own RSS account and get some RSS news feeds
(10 mins)

iGoogle

So we've covered RSS and the concept of the killer app and how RSS is changing the way in which people access information.

Now what if we could integrate a tool that allows us to incorporate RSS feeds, widgets, gadgets the most popular internet search engine and more

Welcome to iGoogle

Lets spend 15mins exploring what we can do with iGoogle, add in some RSS feeds and a couple of cool gadgets.

In case you forgot what we did, here are some take home notes
Using iGoogle video
How to do anything instructions on iGoogle