Blogging Again!

What a great session today - well I enjoyed it anyway! Our lead teachers all set up their own blogs - they all found it easy to do, with very professional looking results. The uses are varied:

• Janine and Julieanne set up class blogs for Room 5 at Mapua, and Room 9 at Motueka South. Within the hour the Motueka children had added comments with suggestions for their blog. Nathan wants to know if he can add his PowerPoint to the blog - sorry that's not possible, but what you can do is take a copy of one of the terrific drawings, paste it into 'Paint' and save it as a picture. This can then be uploaded to your blog (see drawing here teaching the Japanese word for 'rubber').
  
• A communication tool for Josh, our Outdoor Ed teacher to transmit information and photos to students and parents. With an option on the blog for parents to have an email sent when the site is updated, this will be very easy to manage. Of course the permanently archived entries will also be great - no more searching for old newsletters! Have a look at www.mhs-outdoored.blogspot.com
• St Peter Chanel - Jill created a team blog to replace the old email system of sharing photos and work with a teacher in Australia. I know this will be so much easier and far more exciting seeing your work on a webpage!
  
• Todd set up a department blog for the PE dept to communicate/discuss departmental issues - an easy way to have a discussion without being tied down to a meeting time.
  
• Kelvin created a blog for "A discussion of teaching and learning plus related issues surrounding Brooklyn School, Motueka". Really interesting first entry - why don't you have a look: www.brooklynmotueka.blogspot.com
• Sara's blog for the bi-lingual unit at Parklands, is "to comment on the mahi of our tamariki, keep in contact with the kaiako and enjoy the journey of learning with us".
  

This is just a beginning for us - I can't wait to share the journey you're embarking on!

Jill's ICT Experience

"I started off with a unit from TKI on using technology for a "Toys and Games" unit. The unit was written by another ICT cluster. It involved the epals* website to correspond with other cultures about their favourite toys and games, and comparing them to ours. I found the epal site a bit difficult to navigate. After sending off a dozen or so emails to various countries we finally received a reply from a very enthusiastic teacher in Melbourne. This wasn't the cultural difference I had been hoping for but it was a start. Anyway we (as teachers) emailed about what we wanted our kids to learn from each other and then we had a go at emailing photos which was a flop as we were trying to send too many at once. We corresponded through our own addresses rather than going through the epal site. We then reverted to the old-fashioned system of posting work samples and digital photos as well as Movies on CD. So although we used digital cameras and MovieMaker, the original idea of the epal website and emailing wasn't happening. Both classes were really excited to see each other on the Movies. We used the data projector to show the movie. The Melbourne teacher and I are going to continue to swap children's work and for this term's letter writing unit we are going to write letters on paper to send, as well as email. It's great fun having an epal class and my kids just love receiving work from their epals. Rob (the Melbourne teacher) and I email quite frequently. So although the original unit didn't quite work out as planned we made good use of ICT and are continuing to learn about it as a class."

*www.epals.com

Jill Harrison, St Peter Chanel

Top of the South Facilitators Meeting

At the Top of the South facilitators meeting on Friday 23 June, the facilitators, Directors and management teams from discover IT Tasman, Waimea and Waimea South clusters, and National facilitator Greg Carroll, enjoyed a practical day of sharing knowledge and ideas.

We discussed the 'how-to' and 'why' of various social software applications, in particular Del.icio.us - social bookmarking.

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. Use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.

You can start your del.icio.us account at http://del.icio.us/

Kay's favourite for the day: I love the way Brightwater School is using Blogs to build relationships with their parent community. The class blogs they started are not only an excellent writing exercise, but have had an unexpected spin-off. The children are enjoying getting feedback on their blog from parents, including parents who don't live with the children! What a great way for parents to keep in touch with what their children are doing, and offer encouragement and support. How easy it is to allocate the writing task to one or two students once a week - add a photo or two and Hey Presto! You can view the blogs from the Brightwater School home page: www.brightwater.school.nz

NetSafe

Today our Principals were invited to attend a session taken by Robert Minahan – School Education Manager for Netsafe: The Internet Safety Group, the Ministry of Education’s agent for cybersafety and online security for NZ schools. 'Stand-outs' for me were:

As teachers/parents we should look out for:

- Instant messaging – MSN, Googlechat etc

- Chatrooms – MSN Groups eg Rate Girls – girls are including a lot of personal information, including photos.

- WARNING: If you see these on your child’s MSN screen: POS (parent over shoulder); TOS (teacher on scene) then you’d better have a look at the conversation that was going on before you got there!

- Growing interest of teenagers in: myspace.com / bebo.com: bebo includes all schools in New Zealand (and the rest of the world). Teens are adding their schools, mobile phone numbers, photos (some very provocative). Death threats have been added against teachers – currently with police.

- COMING SOON: (currently beta) imbee.com – blogging and social networking for kids ages 8 - 14!

- Grand Theft Auto: R18 but many kids using it. Can download many ‘extras’ like ‘Hot Coffee’ – uncensored dating. Includes rape scenes.

- Beyond normal curiosity: Pro ana websites: anorexia and self-harm – support and encouragement for our teens to continue with this lifestyle choice.

- Christchurch website “Perfection” one of largest sites of its type in the world.

- Cybertechnologies which can interact with cypberspace: PDA’s, iPods – show movies etc as well; cameras; data storage – easy to upload/download information eg programs / viruses – size makes it easy; memory card from camera will also store text etc; cell phones with pictures.

You should have:

- Policies and procedures

- Use agreements – signed usage agreements are essential for students, ALL staff, student teachers – you can develop your own or use those available from NetSafe (recommended)

- Electronic security (filtering software)

- Community education (staff, parents, students)

NetSafe Kit for Schools (2003) should be in your school. If you have mislaid yours, you can download from www.netsafe.org.nz . While you’re there check out the section for primary school children Hectors World – see the wicked wee educational movies they have developed for little people at http://www.hectorsworld.com/

Google Tools and Services

At our Lead Teachers meeting on Friday, we spent some time looking at a few of the multitude of Tools and Services available from Google.

Please take some time to have a look at the Google Tools and Services that are available, as I'm sure you will find it's a great time saver in the long run! In particular we looked at:

Google Images: remember that not only can you search for images only, but you can also choose the size of images displayed. This is particularly useful if you want a larger image, as this will help prevent the distortion you get when enlarging small images.

Google News: Google News gathers stories from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, and automatically arranges them to present the most relevant news first. Topics are updated every 15 minutes, so you are likely to see new stories each time you check the page. Pick the item that interests you and you'll go directly to the site which published that story. You can choose to display the Top Stories from New Zealand, or quickly and easily set up a News Alert. A ‘News alert’ is an email that lets you know if new articles make it into the top ten results of your Google News search. This is a very efficient way of tracking current events, or special events that your class are following.

Google Services: Click on ‘more’ to go to Google Services. A Directory Search can be useful if you’re just looking for ideas for your classes, with no specific topic in mind. Try Special Searches to find things specifically for Apple Macintosh.

Search Tips: Click on About Google on Google homepage to find links to Help and How to Search and some interesting search tips in Google Web Search Features.

Did you know: Type a word in the Google search box. If it has a dictionary definition, the word will appear in the right-hand side of the blue bar that stretches across the top of your search results.

For one-word terms, "[definition]" appears next to the word. Clicking on that link will display the word's dictionary definition.

If a query contains more than one word, each word will appear underlined. Simply click on a word to view its dictionary definition.

www.googleguide.com - Interactive online tutorial on using the search engine.

Wiki vs Blog

Today I launched the discoverittasman Wiki. Initially this will be used to share information about the IT Heroes in all our schools - those brave souls who dare to go where they have never been before!

By seeing both a BLOG and WIKI in action, and hopefully taking part, you will soon understand the difference between the two. In brief:

These are both internet-based but differ from other websites in that:

BLOGS (web-logs) are kept by one person, and others may add comments.

WIKIS are websites which can be authored collaboratively by many people. The most commonly known example of this is Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/) - a free encyclopedia which anyone can edit. They currently have 1,163,999 articles, and 1,530,075 registered user accounts!

What a great way to communicate with other students in our cluster:

• What about a shared book review wiki? Do you have people who maybe aren't so keen on reading, but would rush to finish a book so they can put their book review on the internet?

• How about learning vocabulary - work with students from other schools to perfect those tricky definitions.
  

Lead Teacher Meeting

Yesterday we had a look at "Hot Potatoes" - a free, easy to use program which enables you to create interactive Web-based teaching exercises which can be delivered to any Internet-connected computer equipped with a browser. All you need to do is enter the data for your exercises (questions, answers, responses etc.), and press a button. The program will create the Web pages for you, and you can then save them to your server. You can get your own copy from: http://hotpot.uvic.ca/

As most of us only have one or two computers in our classrooms, why not try using these as extension exercises, or tests before students move up a level etc... Give it a go - and have fun!

First Round of Workshops

There has been a lot of interest in our Word Processing workshops, and lots of 'Oh ... so that's how you do it!' Great to see so many there and a huge thanks to Don at Tasman School for hosting us today, and demonstrating his new SmartBoard.

If anyone has any ideas or special requests for things you would like to create in future workshops, please let me know. Also, if you didn't quite finish today's task, or would simply like to repeat it, please come along to Parklands next week where we will repeat today's session, with more of a focus on using Macs.

Let's get blogging!!

There has been a lot of interest from our teachers in blogging so ... what better way to learn about it than try it out for ourselves!

I will use this blog to keep a record of happenings in our cluster, and hope you will all have a go at adding a comment at some stage. This blog was created at www.blogger.com, is free (is there any other sort?!) and easy to use. Let me know if you get stuck.