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The ePlanks Podcast – on a cyberwave near you!

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The ePlanks podcast is up and running! We have 4 episodes all ready to go for your listening pleasure. ePlanks is a project that I am working on with Anne Mirtschin. We are trying to lay the ePlanks of the virtual classroom and a Web 2.0 school. We’ve been a bit busy lately with my little iPod and it’s voice recorder -which has become my favourite piece of technology lately!

Episode 1 – We talk to Virginia as she begins her journey as a blogger. We ask her what she thinks of the whole Web 2.0 thing. She’s feeling a bit left behind, but that’s ok – never fear, Jess and Anne are here!

Episode 2 – We found Sandy Phillips from the Victorian Department of Education’s Education Channel and so we sat her down and asked her how Global Teacher got started, which is the blogging campus we have set up many of our students and teachers with for their blogs.

Episode 3 – We (myself, Anne and our greatly treasured librarian, Faye) had a little chat amongst ourselves in the car about blogging as we drove back to Hawkesdale from Melbourne. melbtohdalemap2

We chatted about how we started, some fears and just jumping in and trying it.

Episode 4 – As part of our ePlanks project, Anne and I decided to go and visit Coburg Senior High School, who are not just talking the talk of a 21st century school, but also walking the walk. You will have to listen in for more details of this pretty amazing school.

We are planning many more episodes for ePlanks, so keep an ear open – we are on the cyberwaves!

Click on the player here to listen to our episodes, go straight to our podomatic site, or you can subscribe through iTunes.

Ideas for Using the SMART Board from Grade 6

I asked my Grade 6 class to write down some ideas they had about how to use the SMART Board more effectively. Here is what they wrote:

SMART Board Ideas:

What We Like About the SMART Board

Laying the ePlanks of a Web 2.0 School

eplankssmall Anne Mirtschin and I were lucky enough to this year be granted Teacher Professional Leave to develop a project we have called ‘ePlanks – Laying the Foundations of a Web 2.0 School.’ Our aim with this project is to get as many staff using various Web 2.0 tools (such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks and social bookmarking sites) as possible to extend their teaching in a way that suits them.

We have outlined several stages that we think would be important when encouraging staff to jump into the Web 2.0 world. Our eplanks are:

Plank 1 – Understanding what the Web 2.0 World is / means and why you would use it
Plank 2 – CyberSafety
Plank 3 – Digital Media and Copyright
Plank 4 – Creating Your Own Online Space / Creating Online Student Spaces – Blogs and Wikis
Plank 5 – Adding Your Voice / Adding Student Voices- Podcasting
Plank 6 – Joining Networks and Making Connections
Plank 7 – No Walls on this Classroom – mLearning

Plank 8 – Keeping the Learning Going – Web 2.0 PD for Busy Teachers

You can find more details about these steps on the ePlanks wiki.

As part of this project we went to see Will Richardson speak at the SLAV conference on Monday 12th May. Will is a world-renowned leader in the field of Web 2.0 in schools and it was great to hear him speak. The main message I took away from his session was that Web 2.0 is not about the tools, it is about the powerful connections that can be made with those tools. These connections then lead to really powerful learning experiences for our students. These connections can make it possible for you to bring someone into your classroom who knows more about what you are trying to teach than you do – whoever they are and whatever age they are. Comments left on a blog can lead to further conversation and the discovery of more information about what you are trying to teach for example.

Here are the points Anne noted from what Will Richardson said:

  • Students have so many different ways of connecting and learning outside school
  • The more we block (online websites), the less safe we leave our kids
  • We can be so ’scared’ that we do not allow them to do anything.
  • Schools need to prepare students to be ‘googled’ and ‘googled well’
  • Social networking is not all bad. It can be extremely positive. Meg Cabot is a good role model for a fine example of use of myspace.
  • Clarence Fisher does not moderate but teaches students what to do in particular contexts.
  • Students need to learn on demand – they will not be trained or retrained once out in the workforce but they will need to do it independently
  • It is important that we teach students how to use and create hypertexted environments.
  • Students need to build connections to links and need to be  ‘findable’ in order to collaborate
  • Connection is the real power – it gives an authentic audience. Students need to connect with people in many different ways.
  • Need to change personal learning practise and prepare them for the future.
  • Teachers are more important than ever before –
  • Students need teachers as
  • role models
  • for guidance
  • support
  • wisdom
  • their personal experience

    • These are all really important points for us to remember as we progress with our project. I especially like that it has been pointed out that teachers are more important than ever before. Hopefully this will motivate some teachers to take a few more risks and at least get up to their knees in the river/ocean that is the world of Web 2.0.

    Look out for plenty more posts about laying the ePlanks – and the ePlanks podcast!

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    Weekly Whiteboard Workout – 4 and 5!

    I’m the one that set the challenge and haven’t been able to keep it up over the last few weeks! Well, that’s not entirely true. I have kept up with my challenge of using my SMART Board in different ways each week, I just haven’t had the chance to site down and write about it. So, here is a bit about what has been happening in Room 14 with the SMART Board (in no specific order):

    1. Video Player and Screen Capture

    With my 4 Year 11s, I used the SMART Video. We watched a documentary in .avi format and using the Video player we were able to annotate different parts of the file. When using SMART Video player, just lifting the pen from the try stops the video and you can write on the frozen image. We did that and then, in order to save our annotations, we pressed the screen capture button and the image we had annotated were automatically put into a Notebook file. I exported the file with the screen captures into a PowerPoint and have uploaded it to Slideshare. My students can then access it online and review the questions they wrote on the files. Here is the PowerPoint, embedded from Slideshare:

    2. Finding gallery items and using the timer

    To make a seemingly ordinary activity a bit more fun, pull out the timer that’s in the Gallery and get the kids to beat the clock. I got some of my Grade 3 students to simply choose some pictures of food they eat from the gallery, but they had to beat the clock. I gave 4 students 3 minutes to each put up 2 pictures each. Just having that timer tick over added a competitive dimension to the activity.

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    3. Sharing websites

    The SMART Board provides a great screen for showing websites and enabling the whole class to see (except in my room they need to be fairly close, as it’s a really long room!). Showing websites is not really ‘using’ the SMART Board (more on that in a later post) but it certainly makes it easy to immediately answer a question that someone asks. We were talking about the Great Wall keeping the ‘barbarians’ out in class one afternoon. One of the kids asked what a barbarian was and so I asked Google for the definition and was able to show it to the whole class. To take looking at websites on step further with the SMART Board, I’m going to use the highlight function.

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    4. Using SMART Recorder to immediately playback how to draw a character

    I put the Recorder on as I was explaining to Grade 3 how to draw the characters for ‘you’ and ‘eat.’ Using the Recorder meant that I could play the video of how the characters are drawn a few times over as the kids were practicing them on their small whiteboards – the non-interactive kind!

    One afternoon I got Grade 6 to write down some ideas they had about how they think we could use the SMART Board more effectively. Stay tuned for their answers…

    Related posts:

    Weekly Whiteboard Workout

    Weekly Whiteboard Workout 2

    Weekly Whiteboard Workout 3

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