WordPress

Overhaul, Terry Freedman and the return of Yacapaca…

Well it seems it is the season, of beginning to think about how your weblog is functioning and yes this one is very tired. After updating all of my students weblogs for the new school, which all look reasonably snappy at this moment in time I have neglected this weblogs look. This was my very first experiment in weblogging and yes the text is way to small, and the styling all adds up to too much style over content. So over the next few weeks expect a change as I update what is happening, and the overall theme of this WordPress weblog

Hopefully it will be a little more user friendly and easy to read, and should hopefully kick start my new year and my Masters critical study. Terry Freedman over as his weblog seems to thinking along the same lines, and fingers crossed if I manage to finish my article related to Social Networking you should be able to read it over as his blog.

The year is ending up with me remembering how many useful tools and applications there are out there. It often seems that if you are a teacher who loves the use of Technology and all things new, that suddenly you look back and remember you have forgotten in your haste to use some of the better tools out there. As a informal chat with a MFL teacher led to suggest, sometimes you get snowed under with the latest modern technologies within education and forget those that work – it must be noted that she was wanting to throw out the iPOD and is annoying habits and bring back the dependable tape recorder. In many ways I sympathise especially as such a supposed superior mp3 player does not allow you to delete songs from itself but insists that you connect to a computer to delete the songs – how archaic shall I say. Although that is an Apple gripe I must say that Leopard with VMware is turning into quite a joy to use – is it true once you have turned to a Mac you never go back…lol.

Of the tools that I have remembered the wonderful Yacapaca quiz and survey tool, I have realised is an excellent and easy to use tool ready for action in a few minutes. There are no users on the site with IB related courses, so I will be making my own up over the next few months. BUT it is one to recheck if you have not used it before.

New Webtool Development and Finally That Assignment

Things have been very busy recently, moving schools has led me to havign to revamp my web-tools for learning, and its actually been quite fun. Now there exists the following web-tools which will hopefully expand on the successes and failures I had at my last school in Cairo:-

  • Techbribe – A weblog for MYP technology, to act as a portal and publishing site for students project work in design and technology as well as IT.SplashPic
  • ITGSonline– A weblog for Information Technology in a Global Society students, who will also have permission to post their work and relevant stories related to it.
  • hURL– A trial site based on Pligg, which acts as kind of a mini DIGG site – not sure about this one as whether we can get a critical mass of students posting and voting on sites?
  • IB Egham – Moodle– Aaahhh yes a revamped Moodle, which will need a variety of new courses, when I get organised but will mostly be used for ITGS students in the first instance.
  • Wiki and Eghs– Finally managed to install MediaWiki rather than TikiWiki to my server, and although Tiki was very flexible it seems that MediaWiki is much more stable and so should be able to be used for a collaborative project in the near future, although still like Pligg thinking that maybe a Web 2.0 version would be better.

Very busy indeed, and there is still a bit of skinning and quite a few courses ot iron out in Moodle to keep me busy but hopefully all will be up and running for the 23rd of August.

As promised last post here is a link to a very large .pdf –Social Networks in Language Learning – of the final assignment document. Still waiting on the result from Leeds University, but I cannot grumble after havign a two week extension.

Brainstorm outline shows the complexity of Weblog Studies within education.

Well in between playing with animation at PICTAPS below I have finally finished brainstorming and categorising the literature review for my assignment into using blogs as a particular example of how difficult ICT change and adoption management is within schools.

The amount of literature that is available both from academic research and ‘grey’ (web) research is phenomenal. Interestingly thought there is very little based on secondary school education and how blogs are implemented and used. This maybe due to the inherent difficulties of security and control that figure ,much more highly within school establishments than say university establishments. Beyond that the TIME factor seems very prevalent, and leads to such technological tools often used by highly motivated early innovators and then little uptake by others due to pressures or lack of a belief it will have any positive affect.
The areas of literature I rounded into 5 broad areas:-

  • Comments and Conversations
  • Blogging Motivations
  • Social Vs Technological
  • Educational Blogging
  • Blogs and Virtual Communities

Interestingly their was a great deal of enthusiasm and research into weblog communities, and ideas of connected networks that build virtually online. But often authors seem not to think that building a blended community of learners around one blog as of any validity or worth. I will undoubtedly disagree with this, and suggest that even within a teacher led weblog that is fully under control (as it has to be with secondary school students) levels of trust and freedom can be given to students to improve learning and motivation and lead to digitally literate students ready for the connectivist world they are entering.

Hopefully from this review I will then draw out my own motivations and rationales for starting to blog in an educational context introducing the variety of ways I have used blogs within school communities including:-

  • Sevens Vs Nines Blog – To publish work for KS3 groups of students and promote cross-curricular work
  • CreativICTism Blog- A Human portal for GCSE ICT students, which has grown with two student authors and acts as a virtual extension to the classroom. And beyond that a support mechanism.
  • AS Student Blogs – Created for their AS Applied ICT e-portfolios
  • Year 7 – Individual blogs, for a promote Egypt project
  • INSET for staff at my school, to introduce the idea of blogs and see if any teachers would take up the ideas and adopt the methods

This will hopefully lead into some of the wider issues of adopting such a technological tool within a classroom setting from an individual point of view (apart from the INSET) and how this has changed my ideas and styles of teaching and beyond….I will reflect on the successes and failures and how I have evaluated these. Mostly the review will be qualitative, with comments used from students and maybe questionnaires from teachers and students.

Click here to find my overall mind-map/brainstorm and yes it is as massive as before – but as usuals has helped me to bring connections between my research and my practice (Warning the mind-map will take a while to load and you will need to scroll around a great deal…sorry.)

  • Stunning Fabulous and quite fun too. While Plugging away on Dreamweaver have a look at this site, in which you can quickly draw a character and then animate them to dance to a soundtrack. Clever – huh…..post your examples as links in your comments…

Delicious links for 2006-12-10 – Blimey there is loads……

    Well busy times, and I seem to be back to my Del.icio.us bookmarking best……most of the links below relate to blogs and their use as communication tools with students. I have been trying to look for academic papers related to weblog use and communication – which in the end is kind of difficult as most discussion about weblogs is on weblogs which as such is part of the so called ‘grey’ research and discussion. Hopefully my assignment can focus on the fact that  weblogs can be used in a number of communicative ways including use of chatbox, comments, many authors, as portal….and how these different ways facilitate or in fact are poor at helping with communication.

    Beyond this I came across this weblog called Purselipsquarejaw which has some great papers on such things as ‘Collective Remembering and the importance of forgetting….’ This weblog came to me via the edublog awards which you can vote on at this moment in time – definitely worth a look….Edublog Awards.

    Finally related to ICT adoption and development within secondary schools there is a very good alternative perspective on looking at schools as ecosystems and how this can then effect and allow a framework to be organised on how to implement change and obviously ICT change being one of those in a far more effective way. Yong Zhao is the man, and his video even though not very invigorating is worth a long leisurely look.

    Weblogs, Critical Studies and Cynical Thoughts…

    Well I this is my second year of using weblogs within teaching and I can safely say this year is appearing to be much more successful. I am using weblogs in three ways really:-

    1. Information Portal – I have a weblog for Year 10 and Year 11 ICt students – www.constructict.com/studentblog . This has been a reasonable success as it becomes part of students lives to check and use the information, links and resources placed upon the blog. The students can also link up to recieve each post as an email. BUT it has been a struggle with Egyptian students to get them to use electronic resources, which I was initally surprised at. The crucial point to the site is that it must have resources and information that makes those students who use it, better able to think and succeed in the course.
    2. Student Work Folio – I have just set this up this year – www.constructict.com/year7. The blog is almost a kind of competition, where students from two KS3 classes one a year 7 and one a year 9 place work whether it is a podcast, file, text or graphic each week. Over the months there are pages setup for Best Student and for allowing the addition of other student work. Problems so far are time….as I only see KS3 classes for a double lesson a week. A solution is maybe to link with there other class teachers – to add work from a variety of classes that uses ICT within other subjects. It will also be interesting the parents responses as this week bloggin letters and policies will be given out.
    3. Student blogs to show progress – On the AS Applied ICT course, where they have to produce an eportfolio, students are asked to upload their research and plannign each week. And this will be included as a link within their eportfolio to show evidence of planning and testing. They are then linked in a blogroll of my GCSE blog. So far this year it is working much better – with students seemign to have a much better idea of using the web and its tools (they are also using del.icio.us and bloglines to less success.)

    Interestingly last week I presented my first INSET in this school on the use of weblogs within schools to enhance teaching and learning. The actual INSEt which was completely practical went well, although I found it interesting and slightly bewildered the level of computing practical knowledge within the group. The initial success and interest though has not led to anybody takign up the use of blogs so far – is this due to time pressures, lack of interest or lack of facilities within an egyptian establishment? I don’t know.

    Beyond the INSET, it has made me think of how difficult it will be to do research within my schools environment with such a natural resistance to ICT as a teaching tool, or with students so academically focused that anything that does not receive a grade towards their GCSE is not of interest?

    Am I being cynical? I don’t know……

    The Wonders of CSS Styling and the Browser Wars

    Well miraculously managed to solve the latest problems within the CSS stylesheet that came up when I realised that both blogs I am running were not rendering at all well in the new Microsoft Beta Browser IE7. I was a little dismayed as I happen to actually quite like the browser and it is a vast improvement over IE6. It will not replace my avid appreciation of Firefox but is now definitely an alternative that I will use on occasion. The use of tabbed browsing and the very similar Google search bar located in the top right hand corner all make it a browser I can now start to recommend again, especially to students who seem to love the world of Microsoft?

    The biggest problem is how IE7 renders CSS stylesheets (for those unsure of what a stylesheet is check this simple site for an explanation) differently so causing the problems that I have now rectified simply by changing the “height: 100%” declaration in the “body” selector of the CSS file to “height: auto”. Go figure …huh! It makes little sense, but I can only see the problem actually getting even worse.

    Anyways students..download IE7 and you can still see my blogs now …you are so lucky…

    Calling all MA ICT in Education Blogs…

    Well I thought that I had better call out to anyone who has created a blog to show the progress of their design for their WIBBLY. Especially as Karen seemed to place the honour(cough!) of some kind of organisation on myself. If you post it into the conference in firstclass, or add it as a comment to this post then I can post them as links in the rss feeds section of my blog, and can put them all into a bloglines account that I can share with you so you can see everytime someone updates their blog from one place. You can see my Bloglines account by going to http://www.bloglines.com/public/drtech

    Just click on the MA Group and you can see mine and Wills Blogs and postings there….

    EFF, bloggers rights…

    Well before I get onto some real work, I want to mention the Electronic Frontier Foundation that defends bloggers rights. At the moment, in various parts of the Middle East and beyond, many public blogs are being blocked for just one story check here at BoingBoing. And these blogs can some time mean much more than just writing up my progress on my Masters course as I’m doing now. So make sure your blog supports and shows the EFF badge…