Google Sites - Where to next?

Sunday 22nd August.
I have had some tuition from Tracey on how to add buttons (with links) to my Google Sites pages. I am still playing with my Google Site because I am not sure that I actually need an alternative to my Igoogle page. Google Sites is easy enough to set up (now I sort of know what I am doing) but is more time consuming than just adding URLs to an Igoogle page.

I am still mulling over how I will create pages for my students to use, that is what medium would be the best to use.

I have created a page on our cluster wiki that details this blog and also has some information about Ewan McIntosh's workshops at the NEALs Day.

My students are now using Spelling City as part of their homework and are getting the hang of emailing their certificates to our class email address instead of printing them out - Saving Trees has got to be a good thing!

What will be the next ICT initiative in Room 17?

Fantastic maths lesson with Google Earth

Thursday 19th August.

Today I decided to do my maths lesson a little differently.

The children worked in 4 groups to create an estimate of the distance they ran on their cross-country practice course - which we recorded on the board.

They then went out with metre measuring wheels to measure the distance.

We then used Google Earth to measure the distance

We then calculated how far we run in total (we do 3 laps)

Finally we compared this with the distance of the actual course

Amazing results - 2 groups measured 320m and 2 groups measured 340m. Google Earth gave a measurement of 332m. One of the children actually estimated the distance to be 332m (Freaky!). The actual course was 874m

Amazing thoughts - On Tuesday we had measured the Harbour Bridge on Google Earth and the children remembered the distance and made comparisons to our cross country course.

Literacy in the 21st Century

I have found this description of what literacy in the 21st century means - it was on the NCTE website. http://www.ncte.org/governance/literacies

I think it is very relevant for what we are trying to achieve on our ICT journey.

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities, and social trajectories of individuals and groups.

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:
• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

Tuesday
Our ICT facilitator visited school today. He didn't actually get the chance to visit my room because of time constraints. However, he did stop by for a chat later on. I shared some of the ideas I had picked up at the NEALS seminar on Saturday. The use of video games for literacy, and that there is a lot of panic about the internet (I think because of its global availability) when a lot of the information can be accessed at the school gate or in the local newspaper.

I spoke to him about my quest for an environment that the children could modify themselves as well as using to share their school work. Hopefully this will bear fruit at some point.

Got my first comment today - somebody's watching.
Penny

WebSite Wonderings

Monday 16th August.
I have now created blogs, wikis, igoogle pages and google sites website in order to experiment with online content.

I can see how google sites will work for students to access our learning at home, but I am not sure how I can set up an environment for my students to share their own work. I would ideally like students to be able to set up this environment themselves - any ideas would be gratefully received and examples would be even better.

I have also investigated posterous which I like better than delicious at the moment because it is easy and visual. http://pelson-pgor.posterous.com/

Ok Well here goes!!

Saturday 14th August - Today I have been to a NEALs group PD day at Albany Senior High (a fantastic new building) with Ewan McIntosh. The day was inspirational in so many ways and has challenged my thinking on so many levels. Ewan stressed the need to share, share and share when it comes to Education. He says we need to blog about what we are doing, what works, what doesn't and invite others to comment with ideas and suggestions.

Ewan emphasised the need to share resources and invite others to use them and bounce back their amendments. I will begin my mission to share with my school face to face and with the world via this blog.

My next challenge is to investigate the potential use of Social Media in an educational context. OMG (I learnt this from my 13 year old!!) - Techno Teacher (I wish!!)