Alannah at Tauranga

Here's Allanah in her workshop at Bethlehem campus in Tauranga. Allanah talked about her journey into ICT and demonstrated some wonderful examples of podcasting. One of the exciting features of Allanah's work are the national and international connections and discoveries she, her students and fellow teachers are making through their use of ICT.

Allanah also talked about how she uses other great Web 2.0 tools to enhance her own and her students' learning experiences. She has found, like many of us that twitter has been an awesome tool for making contacts and learning about ICT in education. Andrew Churches and I were both pleased to be still on Allanah's twitter list after hearing about her regular ruthless culls to keep followers (and followees I guess) to a minimum.

For my part I was lucky to have a great group of people attend our small but useful workshop on Marvin. Bellevue, Pongakawa, Matamata Intermediate, Otumoetai Primary, St Joseph's and Bethlehem schools were all represented so I will be hoping to hear from them about the great ways their students are using Marvin in the near future. Big thanks to Richard van Dijk for his support with the technical and teaching side of things for our group too - Matamata and Katikati are fortunate to have him as their ICT facilitator.

Marvin blogs and ideas

Thanks Allanah for sharing these with me on skype this morning - Sandra Roll's blog has some great ideas her class came up with for using Marvin
Having fun showing the kids the new MARVIN programme. They have come up with all sorts of great ideas of how we can use it.

1. Could be put on kids blogs to introduce them. e.g. Hi, my name is John!
2. Could do short 'film' about ourselves using the avatars.
3. Could have avatars read our stories to the little kids at assembly
4. If you lost your voice you could type and your avatar could do the talking.
5. Instead of having published work on paper, we could publish using our avatar or avatars as the narrator.
6. We could use the avatars to do our speeches. Would save getting nervous and embarrassed.
7. We could put our presentations on youTube.
8. The avatars could be 'tour guides' on our blogs.
9. Mrs Rolls could set up the MARVIN avatars to teach the whole day. No more relievers!
10. We could use avatars to do plays.
11. We can use them to teach the younger kids about topics such as science, writing, bike safety or computer use.
12. Could set up avatar to call out spelling words.
13. Can make our own 'movies' to show that we understand a topic, e.g. statistics or Spanish!

Don't kids have brilliant ideas!