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"  

From the LibraryTechNZ website

12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs

From Stephen Abram's blog

A list devised while discussing how the "information behaviours" of Generation Millennium differs from those of previous generations, and what that means for the tools they (and the rest of us -- they outnumber even the boomers) will and won't be using in the future. Out of the research on this has come a list of tools, technologies and other artifacts that will probably disappear within the next generation, just as Fax essentially disappeared less than 20 years after it first became popular, and just as CDs, which are disappearing even faster.
1. Hard Drives
2. "Wall of Text" Reports & Documents
3. "Best Practices"
4. Email and Groupware
5. Corporate Websites
6. Corporate Intranets
7. Corporate Libraries and Purchased Content
8. Cell Phones
9. Classrooms
10. Meetings
11. Job Titles
12. Offices

Posted by Maria Nagelkerke at 10:00 AM 0 comments

And here's a link to a great wiki with lots of thought provoking ideas for 21st Century educators

Text the mob

Thanks to Allanah for this suggestion - Text the mob - as a tool for our upcoming unconference at uLearn, text the mob looks like a great way to include mlearning tools as a way of engaging an audience, making a presentation more interactive. I am hoping some of my students will give it a try in their presentations.

Articles about NZ Identity

Kevin Robert's Black Beauty article from the NZ Listener
Tim Watkin's 'Forever Young' - also from the NZ Listener - these articles are for research for the Year 13 Media class but also of interest as a background to understanding our 'New Zealand identity'

Best Olympic Site

Today I found what (I think so far) is the best collection of Olympic activities and links for teachers
Here it is - at Shambles, loving it!

Web 2.0 Ideas for Olympic Games lessons and activities

Photo of Omanu Beach taken with my Nokia 6121 in panorama mode yesterday - 7 Aug, 2008

Thanks to @murcha for this great set of Olympic activities and lessons using web 2.0 tools. I plan to put some in to action this week and post some of the results from my students here when time allows. Meanwhile it has been great seeing our rowers in action, and a special highlight for me was seeing 'our' yachtsman (who is still a schoolboy) walking into the stadium during the opening ceremony. Go Peter Burling!!!
Really happy to have found this site too which offers some free, alternative ways to view the Olympics - enjoy!

Circle of the wise

Just reread Vicki Davis' Cool cat teacher blog post about 'Circle of the wise' and am thinking in some ways this is a good way to approach teaching in a classroom environment. Several things that have occurred or evolved this week within the range of students I am involved with are worth discussing here. Firstly I have very limited access to ICT so am trying to be increasingly inventive in ways of using mobile devices. Losing my cellphone early in the week and having to then find a reasonably priced replacement was another challenge - not having the means or inclination to spend a small fortune on 3G iphone was also part of the consideration so in the end I stuck with Nokia as I have had no problems with reliability or of Vodafone's service. So I got this (see left) and am about to embark on learning the foibles of the phone, my students have enjoyed taking pics of themselves and putting themselves and their friends as wallpaper for that class time so now it's my turn! The small phone is the one my friend Toni Twiss is using as her test phones for her efellows research.  Thanks to Toni reading this blog yesterday I now have the correct photo, and a whole lot more info about the good things my phone can do - panorama photos ROCK!
Some other noteworthy events this week were:
1. A group of students completed a submission for the FairGo Ad Awards - focus was to create their own political party. 30 seconds is not long in which to get your message across and creating a 30 second advertisement can be more demanding than creating a 30 minute media product so I was very impressed with their approach and their tenacity in completing and submitting this product on time!
2. Another group of students were not engaging with the novel - S.E. Hinton's 'The Outsiders' so they have been assigned the task of creating audio recordings for the rest of the class to listen to. Ah ha, they are now READING the novel in a group. Challenge here was that we had nothing we could record digitally on to so a voice recorder has been ordered and thanks to PB Tech should arrive at school this week. If it is successful we intend to purchase a few more. Meanwhile, the cassette tape they have recorded on to date seems positively clunky!
3. The third thing I want to reflect on from this week at school is the enthusiasm of senior students to be involved in activities that engage with the real word but that can still gain recognition in terms of the dreaded 'credit system.' Two opportunities for this have been our possible involvement with Seeka in Te Puke, where the students will meet to plan and produce a Health and Safety Induction video - and a student who will liaise with our Principal's secretary to produce material for the school magazine.

Was great to finish the week on such a high with these students who now see their opportunities for the rest of this semester as being a lot more exciting, and all helps to enthuse others - our circle of the wise widens.