Edutopia the story of movies

A wonderful site with some great project ideas and learning tools

Suzie's web 2.0 tools page

Great selection of tools for educators here - thanks Suzie Vesper for this one.

Design a kiwiana surfboard

Go to this link for the template and guidelines on how to win a JDUB surfboard.

Smirk

If I had this much fun I'm pretty sure my students will too - going to try it out on them tomorrow!

Kathy Schrock's useful web2.0 tools list

This list for educators is pretty comprehensive and makes a useful starting point for educators wanting to work with web 2.0 tools for a range of teaching and learning situations.

Wikiversity

Today I discovered Wikiversity and this cool film making resource - I am going to explore further and see what else I can find - why invent something else when it is already here!

Also here's a link to our TEK (the educated kiwi) moodle site which I am hoping to add some more resources and activities too - SOON!!!

digitaledventures

Onion Maps Offer 3D Tourist Maps of World’s Most Popular Cities from Digital Inspiration

Two great articles from EdWeekly

There are two blogs here that are both worthy of reading
“MUST read EdWeek article by Alfie Kohn - It not about the teaching-it about the learning! http://tinyurl.com/596osp”2:16 pm - Comment“Teachers helping teachers integrate technology into their classrooms - http://tinyurl.com/6hk3ns”

Creating a product

Today I am working on a flowgram of step by step instructions for learners to create their own multi-media product. I have decided to go with flowgram because I realise that I enjoy having the audio aspect to instructions for anything I am doing, so this must be the case for lots of my students as well. It involves time, and quite a bit of nervousness so I am hopeful there will be a payoff in student engagement - fingers crossed that they all get into it like the 11 year old student here!
I am convinced that because they will be creating something rather than being expected to soak up more fabricated 'learning' there will be a bit of a buzz. Speaking of buzz, it was great today to collaborate with Allanah King on a buzzword document I had created as part of these instructions.

The joy of creation

Confined to the house with bad bugs for the best part of a week hasn't been all bad. It has given me the opportunity now that I am beginning to get some energy back - to play with some great new toys. One of these is 8tracks where I have spent the day alternating with Flowgrams to make my own music mixes. It's the best fun I've had home alone in a long time home and is a great lesson in how awesome it is to be the creator of your own product. This takes me to the point I was going to make - educators need to focus more on our students as creators to make their learning satisfying and authentic - and now my wireless keyboard is running out of battery, that proves how much I've been doing here today...

digitaledventures

Google Chrome Features That Are Missing in your Favorite Web Browser from Digital Inspiration

Lisa's notes

I enjoyed reading these - Lisa Huff's eduplan wiki notes on what 21st Century Learning 'is not'.  I would like to add to this too - I am absolutely 100% positive that it is also NOT about what is in student's exercise books. This brings me to thinking about the definition of an exercise book - all suggestions and contributions to this discussion are welcome (particularly in light of the fact that my competence as a teacher it now seems could be judged on what is in my students' exercise books - I would have thought it was what was going in their brains that mattered)!

Let's start with this one as an example - any thoughts?

"A booklet for students, containing either problems and exercises or blank pages for writing answers"